Everything is copasetic; this may be boring, though. I’m waiting for my dinner to cool and I just got done with the battery shuffle. Writing about what I’m eating may be more interesting, because I know nothing about electricity, except I capture reddy kilowatts with my solar panel and it puts them into a deep cell marine battery that powers my laptop computer, so I can see my photos there. I’m skimming some morsels off the top of my one-pot meal and the flavor screams. If this was on a menu it would be a top seller, but this is about electrical power.
    I need the electricity for the laptop, which I could surely live without back here 25 miles deep in Big Cypress National Preserve (www.nps.gov/bicy/) in southwest Florida, but it’s very convenient to have even though I’m not close enough to civilization for the internet or email. I just shut off the rock station on the radio I was listening to in the background because I could hear barred owls. They must be having a debate. There were several voices and the sound was much more than “Who cooks for you,” their normal speech.  Now, there’s silence again, like is normal here. I’ll wait a while before I turn the radio back up. Plus my sweet corn has cooled. The owls are done speaking; the corn is as delicious as on a July day in Ocean City.
    It’s February 3 here. I can hear Lynyrd Skynyrd singing “I need a lover that won’t drive me crazy…”, not sure I’d notice here! I wouldn’t be writing about the battery shuffle, but it’s pretty time consuming and an intricate part of this life style. The little desk lamp with a tiny bulb killed a battery in four hours all by itself.  I’ll have to replace it with something much more efficient the next time I’m in MegaMart. The computer with my new speakers system killed a battery in less than two hours, while I was listening to the Beatles hour on 98 Rock Seacrets Radio with Batman. I now listen to my transistor radio that I bought in 1975 and still use because the speakers sound so good. I’ve stopped running those three off the battery and stuck to just the laptop and external screen. Why an additional screen? The laptop’s burnt out. I didn’t need something else to use reddy kilowatts, but such is life.  You need to do what you need to do.
    Another hook that can cause a serious problem is the nest’s (my slide-in camper) water pump and other stuff that draws electrical power from the pickem up truck’s battery whether the motor is running or not. The pump is the chief culprit, though, because as long as it is turned on it creates pressure, so water will flow out of the faucets when turned on. If I forget to turn the pump off at night, it will run the truck’s battery down by morning. Although I’ve put up signs to remind me to turn it off, when not in use, I forget, and the truck’s battery gets killed; then I have to use the solar panel to charge it back up. That screws up the cycle of using the deep cell marine battery for 2 or 3 hours of computer use then charging with the solar panel for 8 hours the next day.
    Yeah, I could not use the computer, but then I couldn’t download my photos, edit, and organize my photos of 3-400 lb. bears, cowry shells, and that stuff nature shows me every day that most people never see in a life time. That’s my life! Are you saying so what? I warned you it may be boring, but it passed the time while I ate my black beans & rice left over from El Sibone Cuban Restaurant, 900 Catherine St., Key West, that I added conch and shrimp to. Scrumptious! This really isn’t enough words for an article, and I have no photos of the panel capturing reddy kilowatts. They’d be more boring than these words, but that’ll give me a chance to use some of those photos I didn’t have an article for, because they all fit here, because they were all put in my laptop  powered by the solar panel captured reddy kilowatts.  By publication day I’ll figure out some more praddle to add, hopefully.  Remember praddle was one of WBAL’s Alan Powell’s (Uncle Alley) favorite words, and how about copasetic? There’s one I haven’t heard in a while, but when I keep all the batteries charged up that’s what it is, copasetic!
    And writing this kept me from using reddy kilowatts with my computer. It’s still off. I wrote this in my steno notebook with pen and ink. That can still be done! I never handwrite anything at home anymore. It’s all done on the computer. I think I wrote an article several years ago about the differences in my life style at home and on these migratory meanderings. It’s really good for the soul to get out of that twenty first century digi-compu rut; well, at least as much as we can. My next adventure will get the benefit of twice as many reddy kilowatts, because I’m buying another panel to capture them. bruthrauff@aol.com  more photos @
http://picasaweb.google.com/o.c.fotoguy2009