i am

I'm actually about to pull the trigger on a 100 watt portable solar set up for my little camper. Panel on a stand, wiring, 3-stage charge controller and jumper cable style wiring to the battery. Should allow me to sit for weeks at a time without needing to use the alternator to charge the battery. And better, for me, than installing panels in the roof and hard wiring it all.

Good timing! I was just thinking about some of this stuff today as I was driving around getting groceries and dog food... It's the holidays and that means a bit more drinking than I'd really like to do, over-eating, and less sleep...That's what I was recovering from this morning. And I had the feeling I get now and then, of not judging people, not getting annoyed by people, not feeling the need to show people by my example how they're doing things in such a stupid way and if they'd look at how I do them everything would flow much smoother... I don't think I was just so worn out that I no longer had the energy to get annoyed at people...I feel like my energy is ok today. I think I was just in a mellow mood, had a lot of good interactions with friends last night, and was feeling good about humanity. But it's so hard to stay in the mindset I found myself in this morning. I don't even really realize I've slipped out of it until it comes back suddenly and I realize what an asshole I've been lately. Oh well At least it's there sometimes.

Yes it's amazing how MPG manages to turn every thread he posts in into a TTBs vs MPG thread, and who the admirers are. There is something very telling in all this.

He does, in a very self-congratulatory and smug way, make a few good points. It's always nice to hear a view of the US and the world from an outside perspective. We have to be aware of how skewed a version of ourselves and the rest of the world we get from way over here in America.

There isn't much Drew has said which resonates with me, and something about his delivery makes me actually recoil from everything he says. ^ My experience. ^ When my legs are jittery, it is usually because I'm tired, or I have excess energy to burn off and it's coming out that way because I've been stuck at my desk or in meetings all day. I'm one of the least perverted people I know. IMO

If nothing else, I've learned that it only gets so bad, for most of us...if things seem really bad and you feel really lost, you've got something coming your way, subtle and slow or otherwise. Overly critical, biased? Yeah...welcome to the human race. There seem to be some people who are just naturally not this way. For the rest of us...identifying it and making any attempt to avoid it is more than half the battle.

This kind of stuff is intersting. Anyone watch the Discovery Channel (or was it History Channel?) series Ancient Aliens? Some of it was very, very interesting. Quite a bit of it was total BS. Or at least total huge leaps in logic somehow allowed to be presented as fact, which unfortunately detracted from the validity of some of the serious theories presented. I won't believe something just because someone shows it to me with a song and dance about the conspiracy to cover up the truth. But there ARE some very interesting things out there which will gain more acceptance when someone other than the same people presenting total BS as fact are the ones talking about it. When real mysteries are out there, why ruin your credibility with stuff which obviously ignores important facts in trying too hard to persuade others? This is not against the OP...just this kind of stuff in general. Like...I'm watching something great and a true mystery and very very cool, then out of nowhere they make some statement and go down a path and I'm thinking "no!! You were doing so well. Why did you have turn it into this BS, clearly not supported by any fact, leap of logic crap??" Ancient Aliens is full of that sort of thing.

I'm a little confused on how my settings work. Could be a fluke, but I just modified something today and it worked opposite how I expected. I wanted to stop getting email notifications of when someone sends me, or replies to a PM. I did this successfully with "likes". I didn't see the need to get an email every time someone liked a post of mine. But when I unclicked email notifications for PMs, what happend instead was that I got an email notification of a PM, but the PM never showed up in my mailbox here on TTBs. I turned email notifications back on...no big deal. But I would guess it shouldn't work that way. Or did I do something wrong?

His accounts are certainly full of something...

A lot of the mountains in China have stairs. Stairs everywhere over there! Stairs stairs and more stairs... Just be happy there isn't a gondola going up to the top of Hua Shan or Huang Shan...yet. Nice photos! I had planned on hiking it, but couldn't find people to do it with, got a sinus infection, and got intimidated by the guide book telling me I'd need to take a bus part way, get out on the highway and hitchhike the rest of the way! If I had some other people to boost my courage, maybe. But I wimped out.

Thank you

I spent a lot of my life trying to "get along", and so the tendency to meld with other people is pretty natural for me. But I'm getting better at avoiding it.

Gotcha. Thanks

Once I get more sensitive to feeling my own energy and others energy, working on maintaining my center and not getting pulled to other peoples centers is definitely part of what I want to work on.

Yes. Being around certain people calms me. Being around certain people brings my level of ability at things up a few notches. Being around certain people brings energy to my head in kind of a bad, jittery giddy way. So I'd assume that you're at least somewhat correct.

Already looked it up and put it on a wish list. Thanks.

In the winter I'm always up before sunrise. Summer....not quite as bad as Soaring Crane, but the sun is up pretty early! And yeah, camping I'm up with the sun. I love being up before the sun. Once I'm up, I'm happy. But getting out of bed is hard. I was in a fire lookout for a summer and it was light past 10pm, and the sun was in my windows again at 5am...

Only about an hour a day for me. When I was in China I was around a lot of people who are making it their life, though, at least for now. They did meditation, qigong and martial arts as though it was a 12 hour a day job. Live, eat and breathe it. There are definitely still people doing it.

My vote should only count for so much, since I'm not 100% yet, but if I can make it, a day or so change here and there won't bother me at all.

You're better at this than me...But you're older and wiser This probably explains why though I'm an extremely non-violent person, I've recently had to regularly stop myself from fight fantasies during the day. I was always a bit of a wuss. Didn't stand up for myself as a kid, and though I never really got in fights, the few scuffles I got in, I didn't walk away from with much dignity. Well since then my confidence is miles higher, and I can take care of myself in a conversation/argument, but now that we're all getting older and wiser, physical fights are all but non-existent. Then out of nowhere after I start practicing martial arts, I'm having these little daydreams of people giving me good excuses to kick their ass. Silly, childish...Having to say out loud "peace under heaven" to kick the daydream out of my head. Having to catch myself when in real life situations some younger punks are being douches and I'm making no attempt to get myself out of the situation because...it'd be kind of nice to teach them a lesson, right? But no...I may or may not do well in a fight (more likely not), but I don't want to hurt anyone, even a douche. Very silly that I'm needing to remind myself of this, though. I know from my own admittedly very mild experience, "don't mess with someone who has something to prove"...

I'll be at ground zero if the Yellowstone caldera goes off, so at least I won't suffer.

I started thinking maybe it was more the inner work part of your question you were most interested in...( makes me feel like a real genius, seeing as you made it the title of the thread ). Should have been obvious. Well...it's all inner work, what we're doing here. Or at least it should be, right? Back when I was in college and first found the Tao of Pooh and other things and started getting my first taste of Taoism, some of the things that really resonated with me were the "you have to learn yourself before you can do any good in the world" stuff. I'm a chronic self-analyzer. So it fit well with me. Get myself figured out first, then I can worry about the rest of the world. I see it more and more as I've matured and grown...so much misunderstanding and frustration comes from people not knowing themselves. They don't even understand their own motives, and are often deceiving themselves because of this, and then pretend to know the motives of others Right. You don't even know your own motives but you think you know theirs? I've spent many, many hours, going over what I've done and said and who I've been, and how I feel about it, and how other people likely saw it. Less, lately. And how can you possibly learn empathy, if you don't know yourself? What I can say with certainty, because I have EXPERIENCED IT, is that my empathy comes from knowing and loving myself. So when somebody does or says something stupid, I tend to cut them slack and look at their motives in the best possible light, rather than the worst. I make excuses for them. How often do I offend or shame someone because I WANTED to offend or shame them? Very, very rarely (wish I could say never). And so I project that to others. I like the idea of inner Rolfing I'm starting to think that for me anyways, having spent most of my life analyzing myself, it's maybe time to cut back a little. Less thinking, more being. My work on myself is not finished, but I think its time to take a more "hands off" approach, and let myself "be" for a while Sounds kinda Taoist, right? I know for a fact the biggest thing between me and the next levels is my own damn head. I'm not alone int that, I know...but I think I'm especially prone to getting in my own way.

It's certainly a different kind of beauty. I've finally hit an age where I feel I can appreciate beauties of all ages. But it used to be that older women just looked like older women to me...not attractive. I'd have to get a bit older to appreciate another age level up. But I think I'm finally to an age where I can see it in young and old. I definitely see more and more older women who were likely not considered "hot" in their youth, but because of who they are and how they've aged, they are hot now.

I just caught the end of this story on NPR on my lunch break but missed too much of it...it sounded like they interviewed the interpreter, and he has some story about angels appearing to him while he was on stage??..