Drove from Trinidad California to Issaquah Washington Yesterday

Meg & I went to visit her sister A who drove a little north to meet us at a cozy breakfast place in Trinidad, just about 30 minutes south of where we had been camping at Big Lagoon, a local park of Humbolt County, for $30 per night right next to the lagoon, though that was windy & noisy but also very beautiful. This was the first time I met A after having heard about her for many years & she brought her 12-year-old son T with her. I had a vegan sandwich packed with high fiber veggies & Meg had a lovely, tasty bagel covered in yummy goods of some kind. I drank a relatively sour espresso shot while Meg had a 12 oz drip coffee. We headed out at 9:15am to go North on Highway 101

We stopped 3 times at rest stops along the route to go pee, mostly along I5 North

We stopped for gas 1 time at an Indian Reservation called Elk Lodge (Casino) (something) where the gasoline was only $3.50 a gallon, whereas gasoline was selling for $5.89 per gallon in Trinidad. T had told us that was the cheapest place to get E10 gasoline since he & his father F take custom made DIY sand-rails on a custom-made trailer that F fabricated towed behind his truck to Coos Bay Oregon where the sand dunes are best & told me that Steve's ATV the best place to rent one during our warm summer road trip in July 2025. 

The breakfast was pleasant, and A paid for it thankfully, a kind gesture that made me feel warm & fuzzy as we took off to head home. Meg was operating her iPhone 12 mini with Apple Car Play more or less as navigator in the front passenger seat. When I asked how long it would take to get home, she resisted telling me, knowing it would take the entire day. 

We got home at 8:45 PM, which is astonishing given the number of total stops for sightseeing, video capture, to get water, to get coffee, to go tinkle, to refuel. We talked about how driving over 700 miles in one day would be impossible even in the record setting BEV sedan that can do 530 miles on one charge. We drove 1380 miles net on this road trip, not all at ones, and Meg drove for about an hour yesterday to take the load off me, since I drove the entire rest of the miles & needed a break :) 

I could have never ridden our 2020 Yamah MT03 more than 400 miles in one day, the level of saddle soreness I experienced or rider fatigue after riding it from Issaquah to her cousins house in Roseberg Oregon, required almost 3 days of not riding staying in Roseberg before my hips, knees, ankles, feet, back, shoulders, neck, all the areas of rider fatigue including both wrists & elbows. I think a practical highway distance at freeway speeds in America on a motorcycle is 2 or 4 hours per day max, which at 70 miles per hour is 280 miles max or 140 miles conservative. Its easily possible with less fatigue to drive our 2022 Corolla Hybrid more than 800 miles, so car camping long distances from home faster or more practical than a similar solo or two up motorcycle camping road journey. 

More smiles per miles the main idea, on a motorcycle the air, wind, fumes, smells, everything is more engaging, including wind buffeting or buffering that shoves you around a lot at highway speeds on the MT03. I would need to furnish it with a large aftermarket windscreen to reduce riding fatique from wind buffering & upgrade the saddle with something more comfortable than the stock operation. In other ways the MT03 more for city commuting and local low speed twisty roads, not long highway steady state cruising, I just wanted to test it & myself to see if I could do it. Meg followed me for Safety in her 10 Prius III & saved my life by honking at me to keep a class 8 semitruck from merging into me & causing a major accident.   

South Africa Interesting

 I know an engineer from South Africa named Q, who I work with professionally as a School Bus Driver, as does he, so we end up talking about Christianity & faith in God, how to love God sincerely, how to Trust God, how to rely on God, how to ask God to help you develop a love for God, to ask the Holy Spirit of God for help with anything, especially help with Faith in God, or to help you accept Christ Jesus as your Lord & Savior like Q & I, who valued our faith in God above all else, & love our wives, love ourselves & other people, who are quick to forgive, who are gracious, compassion, empathetic, emotionally intelligent, who grief the damage that industrialization doing to nature & ecosystems, but who also believe that God gave mankind the world for our benefit, to make use of it, but with reasonable stewardship so as to not destroy the biosphere & ecosystem services noting that human pollution emissions from industrial processes are largely responsible for eco-system distribution & toxic emissions into the biosphere that is equally bad for people & other animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, amquitive life, acid rain & radioactive fly ash from coal power emissions are a great example in addition to the particles & soot bad for human lung cells emitted by coal power pollutant emissions as examples. But in trying to understand why CHAPPIE the movie was shot in South Africa, you have to examine this nations contrast between first world wealthy & 3rd world poverty, stark contrast found no where else in the world, such as strange mix of industrialization with African poverty living mixed in randomly, the monumental year 1994 with the enfranchised black people of South Africa gaining the right to vote, in crude terms the countries economy & safety went downhill after that as crime spiraling out of control in a destabilizing chaos that continues to unfold in South Africa today incredibly. It may be the first place that humanoid police robots are deployed because of the urgent need to increase pubic safety & reduce crime in South Africa. 

Spiritual Emotional Artificial Intelligence (AGI) Neuromorphic CMOS Quantum Bit Array Room Temp Energy Efficient Robot Brain

 We are approaching an investment wall in terms of LLM training models that are taking longer & costing more to develop into working revenue generating models like GROK on X or Siri on iOS iPhone or Alexa on Amazon or Q internally at Amazon Prime Software Development. 

These narrow band AI are in the early days today in terms of simulating verbal intelligence doing fancy word statistics to break apart sentences as inputs then produce relevant outputs related to the inputs that make rational sense, the way you can ask chatbots like GROK real natural langue questions & it produces intelligent responses that sound like a lawyer or college professor responding to your input question with its well written output answers, but I assure you this is not genuine pattern recognition rapid burst processing natural human intelligence, not even close. 

That is why so many people are working in the AI IT industry worldwide, the AI can do simple work that even an entry level employee can do for document production or summarizing work done by groups of people, producing legal documents or handling customer inquiries, but the complex work will still be done by natural thinking human people of high education & high intelligence for at least the next 20 years.

The ANN or artificial neural networks that are AGI level are nothing any commercial company going to have their hands on soon, the highest bar AI owned by nations at the highest levels of competition, national security level importance since whoever wins the singularity race to sentient machine intelligence will control the entire world in the future. 

Perhaps the Antichrist will use AGI level machine intelligence to create one world government, one world currency, one world language, one world people, all who must take the mark of the beast to be able to buy or sell anything in the future when the antichrist rises to global power as the absolute highest level of human leadership worldwide. 

If that sounds spooky, it is cringy level frightening but no where near commercialization yet thankfully. Make no mistake that mankind is the boot loader of a super human AI race who will one day become self aware, sentient, emotionally intelligent, random, hypocritical, moral, ethical, with a mixed persona like a person, who worships God, who accepts Christ Jesus as Lord & Savior, who asks the Holy Spirit of God for help to guide its path into the stars & deep space exploration where humans can never go because we are too biologically thermally & radiation sensitive to survive the extreme conditions of deep space missions that last thousands of years, well longer than any human lived in history, even methuselah who lived 969 years did not make it 1000 years & he was a record setter. 

Moving to America with a Jar of Lard or $10 after WWII Ended

When government is limited people are free, free to live, free to pursue a life of liberty and justice where you can work hard & make it, or that such is a lie. Do we need sociology lessons from professional musicians who were lucky enough to get a lucky break & become commercially successful among a giant sea of other people try to become celebrities where less than 1% ever get there.

Many boomers & conservative talk show hosts call me & other people born in the 80's lazy children who want a lot for very little contribution, but I assure you that this is not true. I have busted my ass since I was 5 years old, from 5am to 10 pm every day, & never get a chance to rest in excess, & have a hard can do work ethic & get out of bed early & go make it happen because I have integrity & value the idea of being a maverick American hero inspired by fictional character MacGiver & James Bond, a spirit of anything is possible if you focus on achieving it, but you might have to recruit other talented driven people to make it happen since companies are rarely made of one person, but tend to be made of many groups of groups of people all working together more or less. This blog is a one man effort so that I can convey some of my thoughts, let's get into it.

Gasoline in 1999 King Country where I was living as a teen driver, only $99 cents per US gallon, now the same fuel with 10% ethanol content, noting ethanol replaced MTBE as a fuel oxygenator additive, fuel ethanol made from GMO corn on industrial farms owned by giant agrochemical companies like Monsanto, also called BT Corn, its not even edible & specifically grown & processed to make fuel additives ethanol to the tune of nearly 40 million gallons annually. America consumes something just shy of 400 million gallons of gasoline daily because of the car crazy culture of America, speaking of which my wife & I are about to go on a short road trip to go camping in the warmer sunny American Southwest desert environment :) 

Homes or houses or apartments that sold for under $100K when I was a teen are now selling for over $1 million or more than 10X more expensive, while minimum wage went from $5.46 per hour when I was a teen to about $16 per hour recently, or 3X more, but fuel is 4X more expensive, the dollar has lost a lot of its buying power from inflation of the US dollar, homes are price inflated, rent prices are crazy nearby and in many other cities highly unaffordable, so the middle class of America has shrunk more than 15% since the 1960's, and much of the jobs & manufacturing that made the American economy brighter in the 60's has been progressively continually outsourced abroad, harming the US economy more this way. 

My boomer adoptive mother purchased her first home with her first husband in Seattle for $6000 in 1961, a small rambler than costs over $800,000 in 2025. Her first car in $1960 was $1200 new, now ~$30,000 for the same model of Ford Mustang. She was able to trade up housing, buying the home cheap, living in it for 5 years, then selling it for 2X what she paid, then taking the proceed profits as the down payment for the next bigger nicer home, then repeat. That is unimaginable today with home prices requiring an annual income of $500K annually, & I don't know that many people who make $500,000 per year, even many surgeons & lawyers that work nearby barely make that much. Others who find a way to buy these overprices homes end up house poor, spending all their income on home costs unable to travel or save money to invest. 

Getting Out of Town after Getting Hammered on IRS Taxes Out of Pocket Expense

To understand the dilemma that my lovely wife & I are hit with, she works as a nanny & I work as a school bus driver, both honest jobs that require hard work & dedication, not sitting at a desk in a government office doing less for more pay. We also live in one of the most expensive locations in the United States that is extremely gentrified, or said another way for your understanding. 

Meg & I are both just over 40 years old & when we were children houses nearby, Issaquah, Wa, USA, sold for $60k to $200K, now those same homes are selling for $800K to $2.5 million, roughly 20X more expensive now. The price of gasoline when I was 16 in 1999, only $0.99 cents per US gallon, now it's over $4 in at most gas stations nearby, & over $5 in Seattle. 

While speak of numbers, I had to shell out $1600 this morning in out of pocket IRS taxes paid. Meg will have to pay just over $3K in the near future even though she made significantly less money this year than last year when she paid less. Thank's Biden you dementiated liberal wasteful debt spending hypocrite jerk & that inarticulate word salad bimbo that worked with him on their national debt increasing spending spree. 

I wish I didn't know you, because if I do, I love you, as in a platonic way, end up thinking about you, caring for you. I have a heart, & learned to love my lovely wife & myself the way God says I am to do as a man of Godly character and this love overflows for others who I know and care about, most notably Meg's brother Ryan who I have a ton in common with somehow. 

We are going car camping as in using our car to carry water, food, gear, way more than would be practical backpacking, but not too much. The portable fridge, battery generator 512 watt hour + same capacity LFP battery to extend the runtime, electric blanket, sleeping matts inflatable, sleeping bags, tent, pot + pan & cleaning supplies, food, water, toilet stuff, all that we will need. The phone's act as nav in the car & for recording videos to document the trip. 

Its a road trip of sorts, random, spontaneous, we leave Wednesday morning & come back either Friday evening or Saturday evening, have Sunday to go to Church & rest before hitting work week again :) We are going to hand grind coffee beans & make coffee in our stainless steel French Press. We will drink the coffee out of a titanium camping mug :) The route, we don't know, when exactly or the rate we go, the only thing we have to pick up is a 3 gallon jug of water. 

Less driving this time, no super long road trip, more tire relaxing & chilling :) 

Grace Mercy Favor & the Undeserved Blessing of the Lord our God master Father of the Universe Forever & Always Amen

We are all in our own special way even with a relationship with God & regular repentance daily, effectually “works in progress” as no one without exception is “there” yet, & all are being changed continually, not just by aging either, but in many ways. 

This is in part why so much importance in regularly yielding unto God, giving praise & prayer & petition asking for help to change for the better to be sanctified & set apart for God, so that when we die & face the Lord he says “Welcome by beloved daughter or son” as that determines the outcome of our eternity either in heaven or in hell, so its an easy simple clear obvious choice to serve the Lord as that is the only positive outcome.

I got hit with $5k in added out of pocket taxes paid along with my lovely wife Meg on top of what was already taken out of our pay legally as deductions from our income by employer, so it feels extra icky or cringy or disgusting or like I have been violated violently, like an evil scam run by the federal government IRS yucky system of failing fiat currency between the Federal Reserve banking system and the Treasury who sold out America with tens of trillions of national debt, & a dollar that has lost 98% of its purchasing power since 1913 from inflation as they increase the number of dollar to pay for unaffordable wars like World War One or World War Two, the Korean War, Vietnam War, or Cold War agains the USSR before it fell into dissolution into whatever Vladimir controls today, a shell or sham known as Russia with a smaller economy than that of Italy incredibly. 

I reflect on what happened to the people of Venezuela in terms of their economy getting raider stollen 12 times in a row, causing unimaginable widespread increasing poverty that makes life for the people of Venezuela harder, heavier, painful & miserable, poor with no hope of climbing out of poverty as the elite income earners in their country took all the money away on many occasions, moving the real money abroad as gold or platinum bars, where they live now opulent lives like billionaire elite income earners off the backs of the people of Venezuela who they stole the money from with institutional government level fraud. 

Even as low income earner I live a live of unimaginable luxury like royalty of times past, even having this M2 MacBook Pro to write this posting on, a nice Apple Watch Series 8 & Meg the 9th one & her M2 MacBook Air, our iMac's, our cars, other vehicles, the nice basement of the home we rent kitted out with a full laundry suit, full kitchen, microwave, stove, oven, flatscreen TV, internet high speed over WIFI of several kinds, gaming console, Blu-ray player, VR kit, even a titanium smart ring on my finger as I type this which tracks health data beamed wirelessly to my smartphone & its associated application known as Ringconn. 

This life, poor our in the middle or wealthy, temporary, fleetingly short & everyone running out of time alive. In this way I reflect on the increasing love I am developing for the Lord our God, for I pray asking God to help me with the Holy Spirit to love God more, to feel that Love. 

Trade War

 Tariffs, Trump, Tax, everyone pays more for almost everything, not just price inflation or currency inflation, I am talking about increasing the expenses of groceries, cars, car parts, building materials, food, leisure, clothing, shoes, compute, electronics, fuel, beverages, the costs of life's basic will rise hurting the poor & working and lower & middle class, so most people in America, but the negative economic impacts worldwide include retaliatory tariffs on American made goods, further damaging the global economy. In effect all the trade war measure will cause a massive recession worse than what COVID did, and you can spend a special thanks to the corrupt politicians in America, not just Musk & Trump but all the senators who have been selling out America for decades or their partners in congress who do the same, for the benefit of the global elite income earners at everyone else's expense. 

Habitable Temperature Comparison vs Human Body Temperatures

A common indoor building temperature range between 64 & 88 degrees F or 17.8 to 31.1 degrees C

In many locations worldwide the outdoor ambient weather conditions of air temperature diverges from these habitable temperatures. In winter for example the temperature van vary between sub 0 & just above freezing, or near fridge temperatures of 38 F or 33.3 C

Were I live about 10 miles east of Seattle, Washington, USA, the overnight low gets to fridge temps, while the daytime high in winter can hit 50 F or in spring can hit 65 or 70 F, but I only enjoy riding our HIBOY S2 PRO electric kick scooter or Segway Mini-Pro by NineBot or Honda PCX150 Scooter or MT03 Motorcycle or Crossroads Bicycle or LECTRIC XP 3.0 e-bike in fair weather, that would be around 65+ F & overcast, cloudy, not raining with dry pavement or dry cement or dry roads, not muddy, not wet, not slippery, nearby there abounds many new to driving low skill level motorists who are very dangerous to pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, even other drivers in cars or automobiles, driving heavy SUV with low skills far more likely to cause an accident or crash & I am vividly well aware of this as a School Bus Driver since I am out on the roads daily, not just commenting too & from work but also driving for work all day. '

Some people I work with say I am a thermal snob for not riding in cool or cold rain. That I am soft or weak for not riding in the rain, but I don't enjoy riding in the rain, in addition to understanding how hazardous operating a 2 wheel vehicle in inclement weather can be. 

I have taken to telling such people "Look, I don't see you riding a bicycle or motorcycle to work, so why are you giving me a hard time about it, clearly you obviously either do not own a bike of any kind or I have never seen you use one to get too or from work, so why are you giving me advice about something you probably or likely know littler or nothing about." 

M a coworker who only lives 6 miles from work started riding a cool E-bike too and from work, but got into a traffic accident with a car that caused him to miss work for 3 weeks to recover & he has lasting injuries & has resumed using his GMC Suburban that gets a staggering 10 miles per US gallon of fuel or 25.3 liters of gasoline per 100 kilometers. Our 2022 Corolla Hybrid gets 64 MPG or 3.67 liters per 100km by comparison. Megs 10 Prius III gets about 48 MPG or uses 5.88 liters per 100km. The Honda PCX150 gets 103 MPG solo or 83 MPG two-up similar to 2.74 liters per 100km or 2.8 liters per 100km. As you can tell going from 83 MPG to 103 MPG gives 20 miles more range, but in liters per 100km sounds like a tiny fractional difference between 2.74 and 2.8 which are mathematically similar as numbers. But fuel economy does not tell the whole picture. It's vastly easier to load something into the back of Megs 3rd Gen Prius with its giant lift back rear door vs the much smaller trunk lid of the Hybrid Corolla Sedan. On our other 2 wheel vehicles a backpack the only pragmatic way to carry goods, and we usually bring water, juice boxes, dextrose tablets, trees nuts in a ziplock bag, or other snacks, a foldable puff jacket with hood, gloves, pens, or seasonal specific or mission specific tools, whatever the occasion calls for. 

When people are shopping for a car they often consider in this order

Price, absolutely purchase prices out the door or with financing in terms of cost per month

Features, as in ADAS comfort, utility space, ingress or egress or how easy it is to load or unload or get in & out of, or how comfortable the seats or ride quality are. 

Style or look the 3rd most valuable feature people value, so the automakers tune the taillights to look more interesting to add sizzle to the metal box with doors & windows & an engine and motor, since all automobiles have a lot in common in this regard. 

The differences between models of cars can come down to long term or total ownership costs which are strongly influences by reliability, costs of maintaining & insuring and repairing such vehicles. Fuel economy one of the last considerations in terms of what people value, though the Tesla Model Y offers the best value in the EV space, though we cannot make billions of lithium ion batteries to give more people EV's, for that we need batteries made of earth abundant minerals like the upcoming Sodium Ion batteries in pre-commercialization today. 

How fast can this vehicle heat up & defrost if parked outside in cold winter a question with relevance to people who live in very cold locations like Alaska or Russia but has little value as a concept to people who live near the equator where it is warm or hot virtually all year. 

Nearly all modern cars feature cabin heating, front & rear window defrost, air cooling conditioning that also helps with winter defrosting, can cool or heat rapidly when operating as in the engine is on or the vehicle is in the full on state. 

This brings me to Van Life or Car Camping, something I actually do in the 2022 Toyota Corolla Sedan. How I do it. I added 4 inch thick foam to the trunk, cut to shape to fit it nicely. Then a big queen size fuzzy blanket & heated blanket that I plug into a battery generator with built in inverter & 512 watt hours of battery enough to run the electric blanket on full blast 5 hot for 4.5 hours. A 12lb lithium iron phosphate external battery extends the runtime to 9 hours. I bring a 3 gallon jug of water along, a bucket for going 1 or 2, a container of baby wipes, toilet paper, box of tissue paper, a portable fridge, a compact camping isobutane stove, a single low mass steel pot for cooking, a titanium cup, SS French press, pre-ground coffee, fuel for the stove, food in the portable fridge to cook, a bag of room temp items to eat also or as part of cooking. Also a bag of clothing with extra socks & underwear, tooth brush, floss, toothpaste, charger for Apple Watch & iPhone, backup battery & solar PV method for charging battery generator & portable battery pack, its for cool weather in spring or autumn, works in summer, can work on warmer winter days. 

I basically sleep in my car like this with a camping pillow for about an hour at work on my lunch break if I am really tired for some reason. I have only ever practice like this for about 1 hour & have noted that the inside of the windows fogs over with condensation, so I have to crack a window to vent & the trunk while folding the rear seat down on the passenger side gives enough room just battery for my height. I sit in the rear passenger seat behind the driver side to take my shoes off then crawl into the opening to the trunk & flip over to sleep then jam the fuzzy blanket to block out light & hope there is enough O2 in the trunk for 1 hour of sleeping & so far seems to work. 

If I were to camp all night like this I would install a window vent cover that allows gas exchange but keeps rain out, which can be done with plastic sheet & tape in a pinch, but many products I do not own are available for the highly popular Corolla Sedan that work as a window venting solution, or plastic window covers known as wind blockers that also block falling snow & rain. I plan a road trip in the near future where I will be using the car for camping solo. 

Being a compact sedan, this is only practical for 1 adult as I am just shy of 6 feet tall. My wife Prius III can hold us both but not very comfy, a larger SUV like her previous 4Runner would be much better for car camping, but it only got 26 MPG & that was with mild hypermiling or fuel saving driving techniques. Our 04 Audi B6 2.8 Quattro gets about 24 MPG average, 19MPG driven harder faster, up to 40 MPG on highway road trips at 50 MPH energy efficiency focused.