well it isn't over yet, but so far i've been staying in my old stepvan, which is out in the middle of nowhere, near some woods in a field of tall grass and wildflowers... the weather has been very unusual and always changing, from the most dramatic thunder & lightning storms ever, to clear calm lazy days with everything quietly soaking up the hot sun.

it all started with a new moon trip to the co-op to stock the van: 15 pounds of long grain brown rice, 10 lbs unpearled barley, 10 lbs green lentils, 5 lbs raw sunflower seeds, 2 lbs raisins, some lemons and oranges, 2 lbs carrots, a bunch of collards, a jar of peanut butter, some yogurt and other misc stuff... all organic of course, total about $80, but way enough for a month...

had to overhaul the refrigerator's cooling fan - formerly a terrified flapping screeching creature on sunny mornings, it's feeling much better now (the frig is a solar power hog, so i've set it to turn on only if the batteries are overcharging - the hotter outside, the cooler inside!)... also cleaned the water pump and inline charcoal filter for drinking water, and checked the little inverter for running the ac-powered disk drives when needed.

cleared a nice chunk of workspace on the powerbook's hard drive, left the phone machine and e-mail to accumulate messages, told everyone who didn't know that i'm out-to-lunch, and here i go, 24 hours 7 days a week...

free at last - to work! ...no fixed schedule, eat when hungry, sleep when tired... every day or two, i grudgingly take time off from hypercard to cook up the next big pot of rice&lentils or barley soup, start another jar of sprouts growing, or go out and walk along the edge of the forest to collect wild greens & berries, and watch the dragonflies...

every night, a zillion lightning-bugs flash and streak across the fields and among the trees to the bright cool rhythms of their mating dance... some love the dance even more than the mating, and dance until dawn... so the hyper-database engine is coming along, probably ready to release around mid-august, then onward to new games, puzzles, gadgets, tools, all shapes and sizes...