RV Fultiming "Winter Camping" Questions

I’m not new to “winter camping” or 24/7 year round boondocking. I live in an area that gets 5 to 7 months of snow (more on a “cold” year), and usually spends 2 of those months at temps of -20F to -48F before wind chill factors (and living on the coast, we get a lot of high winds all year long). I lived fulltime in a tent since 2006 (no electricity, no running water, etc), during that time we had 3 blizzards (one which buried my tent under 9 feet of snow), 2 ice storms, and 5 hurricanes. So, extreme winter camping is a lifestyle for me. I love the cold and snow, I avoid the heat and hot climates.

I’m upgrading. I’m moving out of the tent and into a motorhome. I have not bought it yet, but the one I’m planning to buy is a 1988 Class A 31′ Georgie Boy TravelMaster. (Which has already been customized for fulltime boondocking, thus why I’m trying for this one first.) If they sell it before I come up with the cash to pay for it, I’ve got a few “back-up RVs” on my list, all are 1980s Class As. (After spending 2 years going in and out of every new and used RV, MH, TT, 5Th in the state I came to the conclusion I prefer the Class As of the ’80s.)

So, here’s the thing. I’ve never lived in a motorhome before. This is going to be a totally new thing for me (as well as being the LARGEST living space I’ve had in 36 years – I lived in a 16′x9′ beach cabin before the tent.). And me, living in the types of places I like to live I’m going to have to make sure it gets winterized for some heavy duty super cold regions. (Once in the motorhome I plan to spend a lot of time boondocking between Maine, Quebec, Yukon, Alaska, Colorado, etc, exploring the coldest iciest parts of North America – it’ll likely never see a warm day again once I own it!).

So my question is: what the heck do I need to do to my motorhome to winterize it? Does anyone have any advice on “RV Boondocking” in extreme cold regions

————————————————————————————————————

This post was written by Wendy C Allen aka EelKat, is copyrighted by The Twighlight Manor Press and was posted on Houseless Living @ http://houselessliving.blogspot.com and reposted at EK’s Star Log @ http://eelkat.wordpress.com and parts of it may also be seen on http://www.squidoo.com/EelKat and http://laughinggnomehollow.proboards.com  If you are reading this from a different location than those listed above, please contact me Wendy C. Allen aka EelKat @ http://laughinggnomehollow.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=viewprofile and let me know where it is you found this post. Plagiarism is illegal and I DO actively pursue offenders. Unless copying a Blog Meme, you do not have permission to copy anything appearing on this blog, including words, art, or photos. This will be your only warning. Thank you and have a glorious day! ~ EelKat

Script Frenzy RE: Helpful Info on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

Posted March 1, 2010 – 20:08	Helpful Info on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?
	One of the major plot points of my show revolves around one of the characters having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Here’s the problem, I don’t know much about it. I’m going to make this short and sweet as opposed to droning on and on over the issue: Does anyone have some helpful information on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

Posted March 31, 2010 – 06:55 RE: Helpful Info on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? I have PSTD to the point that I also have agoraphobia and have not been able to leave my house or have face to face contact with humans. Oddly in the past 20+ years the only time I’ve been able to either leave my house or have contact with humans is for the local Write-In meetings for NaNo and SF. When I was 14years old, my best friend was murdered along with 4 other friends. (five in all) I was the only survivor of a violent bloody attack, which left my friends with their arms and legs cut off their bodies, their intestines ripped out, and 2 of them living on for a few days before actually dieing. The court trials went on for 6 months. Because the murderer was caught in the act of slaughtering my friends, and because their was one survivor/witness of the attack (me), the trail went fast and she was executed that same year. I spent 6 months being questioned and interrogated by police and judges and lawyers, who didn’t give a damn about what I was going through, all they wanted was the facts so they could take another life (I was against her execution). This event left me without a single friend – every one of them was killed during this event. In the 20 years since I have not been able to make a single new friend. The event was made worse by the fact that when I went to church, I was meet with adults who didn’t give a damn. Several of them shook hands with me and said “How are you doing”… I responded with “My best friend was murdered this week” to which they responded “Oh that’s nice, I had a great week too” and walked off to shake hands with the next person. There were 375 adults in our church, dozens of them repeated this same thing that Sunday. Not one of them heard what I said. I went into a major stress overload during the court trials. By the time it was over I had stopped talking. I’ve barely spoken a full sentence since than. I took up writing full-time after that. I would get up in the morning, go out to my garden and start writing until night time. Every day, for the next 20+ years, without ever saying a word. Over the years, local rumors have spread, saying that I was a demon possessed witch who puts curses on people. It appeared that I was getting better by 2001, when I was about to be married, but than I had a miscarriage, he called off the wedding, and than in 2003 the demon possession rumors took a violent turn when one hysterical local started saying I had used witchcraft to kill someone. This rumor got out of hand in during the infamous and well documented NaNoWriMo 2006, the year I dropped out due to vandals burning my house to the ground, resulting in my becoming homeless and very famous at the same time. Many news reports, paparazzi hounding’s, and 2 published books later, the stress proved to be too much for me and I suffered a stress induced stroke in October 2009. There is also some debate as to wither I have PTSD or Autism or both. And because it might help your research, I’m going to copy part of an article I wrote, you can read the entire thing here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2807682/living_with_aspergers_s… the entire article is 25 pages long and may take a couple of hours to read, and it is itself and excerpt from a 557 page book which can be found here: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/for-fear-of-little-men/6508479 if you are really into the research and want to know all the details of everything that happened throughout this entire event, you’ll want to read the book itself. Any ways, one of the noted aspects of PTSD is the panic attacks and meltdowns that are triggered by the person coming in contact with anything that reminds them of the stressful event. 14 years, almost to the day, after the murder trail that stopped me talking, I found myself in court once again, and the result was a massive meltdown that got me sent, by the judge, to a psychologist, where it was discovered that what people had been calling PTSD, may have actually been in fact, Autism instead. Here is the part I’m copying (I was 30 years old at the time of this event): Don’t you know it’s rude to stare? Not a question asked to me, but a question I ask in response to people demanding I look at them when they talk. Eye contact. Why do I need to be looking at you to hear what you are saying? I hear with my ears not my eyes. Why do I need to look at you to talk to you? I talk with my mouth not my eyes. My lack of eye contact, my inability to speak around strangers, and my cloths, resulted in leading to my finding out I had Asperger’s, when in 2005 I was summoned into court as a witness to some case which I had no idea why they were saying I was a witness too. I’ll recap: A year before the fire or the flood which left my homeless, a man walked up to me, handed me a paper, told me I had been served and I had to show up in court to testify. I found this to be very confusing and puzzling because I didn’t know anything about this so call case that I was supposedly a witness too. I tried to explain this to the man, but I’m not good with verbal explanations. He told me that it didn’t matter wither I thought I was a witness or not, it was a court order and if I didn’t show up at court later that week, I would go to jail. Very puzzled, and very reluctant, I went to court on the date in question and found it to be one of the most nerve wracking frustrating days of my entire life. First off I had to be searched by a guard, who took my tote bag and dumped it out. (I carry my writing paper, my art supplies, and comic books with me every where . . . it’s a really big tote bag. Next I was questioned about my cloths; this being one of my very first confrontations with the world outside of church, I was completely lost as to understand why I was being asked about my cloths. What was wrong with the way I was dressed? My things were stuffed untidily and messed up back into my tote bag and I was told to sit on the right side of the court room. I sat in the very last pew and spent about an hour, resorting my crayons, comics and papers back into their proper order. I was interrupted while doing this, by my name being yelled out. Apparently the judge had called my name several times, but I had not heard her because I was busy fixing the mess the guard had made of my writing materials. I stood up, but had no idea what to do next. She called my name several more times, before finally telling me that I was supposed to come up front and sit in a chair in front of all of those people. Up front, I was asked to repeat a bunch of words, but now came my first really big problem . . . I was being asked to open my mouth and speak, something I had not done in years, and I was being asked to do it in a room filled with 40 or 50 people. This was not my first time in court. When I was 14 I was the only living witness to the murder trail of my 5 friends killed on August 21, 1991. It was court that had stopped me talking before. I spent day after day after day of interigation, back at my friend’s murder trail. When the murder trail ended, I went home and was never able to speak to a stranger again. Now, here I was again 14 years later in court. The judge asked me again and again to repeat the words of the police officer who was standing in front of me. I did. I tried, I said the words, again and again, but though my mouth moved not a sound came from my lips. It was like me throat was strangling them and refusing to let the words escape. The judge finally accepted a nod of yes and told me to sit down. Than came the questions from the 2 men sitting at the tables in front of the judge. They had to ask and re-ask their questions several times, but I could not hear their words, all I could do was stare out at all of those faces, rows and rows of them sitting in the seats below. I think I answered some of their questions because the judge kept telling me I had to speak loud enough for the tape recorder to hear me, and finally she said she had had “enough of this circus”. She than turned to me and told me to look at her. I looked at her hands. She repeatly demanded I look at her. Than she started yelling and saying that I was a grown woman acting like a child, she started yelling at me about my inappropriate cloths, my refusal to answer questions, my refusal to comply with orders, and my arrogance at not making eye contact. My cloths again. What was wrong with my cloths? She dismissed me as a witness, but told me not to leave the court, but to go wait at the front window. While I was sitting on the bench waiting, several men and women, I assume to be lawyers based on the fact that they were wearing suits and carrying brief cases and were in a court house, stopped to talk to me about my cloths. Most asked if I had been on my way to a party or a Ren faire when I had come to court. A few elderly women hobbled over to me and started talking about how nice it was to see people dressing up again like when they were young. Someone asked if I was a “dead head”. Dozens of people walked past me ever few minutes going in or out of one of the three court rooms, and nearly every one of them, made a point to stop and ask me about my cloths. With each question, I was growing ever more puzzled about this obsession every one seemed to have with walking up to me and talking about my cloths. About three hours later the woman at the front window called my name and handed me a paper. It was a court order to see a psychologist, with a slip of paper saying that the State of Maine was going to pay for one 3 hour appointment. As I turned to leave, the woman commented that she liked my costume. I was wearing a Josephine Empire gown of wedge wood blue, with a 3 foot long train. Over which I wore a 7 yard blue velvet burnoose (a type of hooded cape). A few weeks later at the psychologist’s office, I was greeted with: “So you are Wendy. Why are you dressed like that?”. (I was wearing a full kimono — many layers of kimono). He told me he had been reading my case (What case? I have a case? Since when?) sent to him by the judge. He commented several more times about my cloths. Asked if he could see the contents of my tote bag, and than spent the rest of the time asking me about my drawings and writings and how I lived my life. During the course of the meeting he commented several times on my “bizarre accent” and use of old style language, which he said was seen only in rare cases of twins left to be raised by themselves. He called it “twin-language”. He said he had read cases of it, but that he had never witnessed it himself before. He found my childhood and 27 year isolation at the hands of people he called “cultists” fascinating, and believed my total lack of prior Human contact was the cause of my “inability to function”. He thought it may be possible that I could be “trained like a dog” so that I could learn how to “be normal”, as he believed it was possible that I did not actually have a disorder at all, but rather I simply was living just the same as I was as a 4 year old child simply because no adult had ever taught me to be otherwise. By the end of the meeting he had become very excited and was acting like he had just discovered the Lost City of Eldorado or something. He ended by writing up a paper which he said was a request to the State for funding to do a research study on me, saying that I was an “anomaly” which he could not properly diagnose, because I was displaying so many symptoms of so many disorders. Officially I have “Schizotypal Asperger’s Syndrome with OCD Tendancies”, however, he thinks I have something that he calls “an anomolly yet to be named”, as he says there is no deffinate text book disorder to describe me properly. I left his office that day very confused, and for the first time in my life, noticing what people around me were wearing and noticing that it was very different from what I was wearing. I was also, now realizing for the first time, that people look into your eyes when they talk to each other. I was also realizing that people on the street around his office seemed to be doing a lot of standing around (wasting their time) and talking to each other. It has only been 4 years since that meeting, and I still am having a very hard time processing the fact that people talk a lot, people look at each other a lot, and people . . . well, you people just plain dress really weird as far as I can see. I have not again heard back from the psychologist, however, both my mother and my father have gotten letters from him, and each of them, and my mom’s current husband, and my three brothers were called in to be “evaluated” by him to see if the whole family was like me, or if I was the only one in the family who was like this. I don’t know who else he contacted, but I suspect he was the one who sent the social worker to “the tent” a year later, after the flood and the fire left me homeless and living under a tarp. All this, because I wouldn’t look a judge in the eye? I remain confused over why the judge responded the way she did to me, and I remain equally confused as to why the psychologist responded the way he did to me. It was my first real contact with any one outside of the Mormon church and I found it very strange. But, as a result of the judge and the psychologist, I also found out that outside of the Mormon church, people do not believe in demon possession, and unlike the Mormon leaders who always said I acted the way I did because I was possessed by a demon, an evil spirit, or a poltergeist, I had now learned from the psychologist that what they had called evil spirits was really some sort of birth defect in my brain, which causes me to see the world on a different brain wave pattern than every one else, resulting in me acting, dressing, and otherwise responding differently to things than does every one else. Well, I must say his medical diagnosis certainly made much more logical sense to me than the religious leaders’ accusation of demon possession. And now that I know the church leaders were wrong when they called me demon possessed, I no longer feel quite so much like an outcast, unloved, and alone. I’ve since looked into this whole Asperger’s thing, and I must say, it’s kind of a sigh of relief, because now I know what is “wrong” with me, and now, I can figure out how to work my life around it. Copyright Info: The contents of this post, are taken from the second draft of the book “For Fear of Little Men” by Wendy C. Allen, and reprinted here with permission. This article was originally published in October 2008 under the title Living With Asperger’s Syndrome is copyright to Wendy C. Allen and The Twighlight Manor Press, and is reprinted here with permission. __________________________ ========== My Advice for Writers My Books

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Script Frenzy RE: Helpful Info on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

Posted March 1, 2010 – 20:08	Helpful Info on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?
	One of the major plot points of my show revolves around one of the characters having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Here’s the problem, I don’t know much about it. I’m going to make this short and sweet as opposed to droning on and on over the issue: Does anyone have some helpful information on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

EelKat Municipal Liaison Posted March 31, 2010 – 06:55

RE: Helpful Info on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

I have PSTD to the point that I also have agoraphobia and have not been able to leave my house or have face to face contact with humans. Oddly in the past 20+ years the only time I’ve been able to either leave my house or have contact with humans is for the local Write-In meetings for NaNo and SF. When I was 14years old, my best friend was murdered along with 4 other friends. (five in all) I was the only survivor of a violent bloody attack, which left my friends with their arms and legs cut off their bodies, their intestines ripped out, and 2 of them living on for a few days before actually dieing. The court trials went on for 6 months. Because the murderer was caught in the act of slaughtering my friends, and because their was one survivor/witness of the attack (me), the trail went fast and she was executed that same year. I spent 6 months being questioned and interrogated by police and judges and lawyers, who didn’t give a damn about what I was going through, all they wanted was the facts so they could take another life (I was against her execution). This event left me without a single friend – every one of them was killed during this event. In the 20 years since I have not been able to make a single new friend. The event was made worse by the fact that when I went to church, I was meet with adults who didn’t give a damn. Several of them shook hands with me and said “How are you doing”… I responded with “My best friend was murdered this week” to which they responded “Oh that’s nice, I had a great week too” and walked off to shake hands with the next person. There were 375 adults in our church, dozens of them repeated this same thing that Sunday. Not one of them heard what I said. I went into a major stress overload during the court trials. By the time it was over I had stopped talking. I’ve barely spoken a full sentence since than. I took up writing full-time after that. I would get up in the morning, go out to my garden and start writing until night time. Every day, for the next 20+ years, without ever saying a word. Over the years, local rumors have spread, saying that I was a demon possessed witch who puts curses on people. It appeared that I was getting better by 2001, when I was about to be married, but than I had a miscarriage, he called off the wedding, and than in 2003 the demon possession rumors took a violent turn when one hysterical local started saying I had used witchcraft to kill someone. This rumor got out of hand in during the infamous and well documented NaNoWriMo 2006, the year I dropped out due to vandals burning my house to the ground, resulting in my becoming homeless and very famous at the same time. Many news reports, paparazzi hounding’s, and 2 published books later, the stress proved to be too much for me and I suffered a stress induced stroke in October 2009. There is also some debate as to wither I have PTSD or Autism or both. And because it might help your research, I’m going to copy part of an article I wrote, you can read the entire thing here:http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2807682/living_with_aspergers_s… the entire article is 25 pages long and may take a couple of hours to read, and it is itself and excerpt from a 557 page book which can be found here: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/for-fear-of-little-men/6508479 if you are really into the research and want to know all the details of everything that happened throughout this entire event, you’ll want to read the book itself. Any ways, one of the noted aspects of PTSD is the panic attacks and meltdowns that are triggered by the person coming in contact with anything that reminds them of the stressful event. 14 years, almost to the day, after the murder trail that stopped me talking, I found myself in court once again, and the result was a massive meltdown that got me sent, by the judge, to a psychologist, where it was discovered that what people had been calling PTSD, may have actually been in fact, Autism instead. Here is the part I’m copying (I was 30 years old at the time of this event): Don’t you know it’s rude to stare? Not a question asked to me, but a question I ask in response to people demanding I look at them when they talk.Eye contact. Why do I need to be looking at you to hear what you are saying? I hear with my ears not my eyes. Why do I need to look at you to talk to you? I talk with my mouth not my eyes.My lack of eye contact, my inability to speak around strangers, and my cloths, resulted in leading to my finding out I had Asperger’s, when in 2005 I was summoned into court as a witness to some case which I had no idea why they were saying I was a witness too. I’ll recap:A year before the fire or the flood which left my homeless, a man walked up to me, handed me a paper, told me I had been served and I had to show up in court to testify. I found this to be very confusing and puzzling because I didn’t know anything about this so call case that I was supposedly a witness too. I tried to explain this to the man, but I’m not good with verbal explanations. He told me that it didn’t matter wither I thought I was a witness or not, it was a court order and if I didn’t show up at court later that week, I would go to jail.Very puzzled, and very reluctant, I went to court on the date in question and found it to be one of the most nerve wracking frustrating days of my entire life. First off I had to be searched by a guard, who took my tote bag and dumped it out. (I carry my writing paper, my art supplies, and comic books with me every where . . . it’s a really big tote bag. Next I was questioned about my cloths; this being one of my very first confrontations with the world outside of church, I was completely lost as to understand why I was being asked about my cloths. What was wrong with the way I was dressed?My things were stuffed untidily and messed up back into my tote bag and I was told to sit on the right side of the court room. I sat in the very last pew and spent about an hour, resorting my crayons, comics and papers back into their proper order. I was interrupted while doing this, by my name being yelled out. Apparently the judge had called my name several times, but I had not heard her because I was busy fixing the mess the guard had made of my writing materials. I stood up, but had no idea what to do next. She called my name several more times, before finally telling me that I was supposed to come up front and sit in a chair in front of all of those people.Up front, I was asked to repeat a bunch of words, but now came my first really big problem . . . I was being asked to open my mouth and speak, something I had not done in years, and I was being asked to do it in a room filled with 40 or 50 people. This was not my first time in court. When I was 14 I was the only living witness to the murder trail of my 5 friends killed on August 21, 1991. It was court that had stopped me talking before. I spent day after day after day of interigation, back at my friend’s murder trail. When the murder trail ended, I went home and was never able to speak to a stranger again. Now, here I was again 14 years later in court. The judge asked me again and again to repeat the words of the police officer who was standing in front of me. I did. I tried, I said the words, again and again, but though my mouth moved not a sound came from my lips. It was like me throat was strangling them and refusing to let the words escape. The judge finally accepted a nod of yes and told me to sit down.Than came the questions from the 2 men sitting at the tables in front of the judge. They had to ask and re-ask their questions several times, but I could not hear their words, all I could do was stare out at all of those faces, rows and rows of them sitting in the seats below. I think I answered some of their questions because the judge kept telling me I had to speak loud enough for the tape recorder to hear me, and finally she said she had had “enough of this circus”. She than turned to me and told me to look at her. I looked at her hands. She repeatly demanded I look at her. Than she started yelling and saying that I was a grown woman acting like a child, she started yelling at me about my inappropriate cloths, my refusal to answer questions, my refusal to comply with orders, and my arrogance at not making eye contact. My cloths again. What was wrong with my cloths? She dismissed me as a witness, but told me not to leave the court, but to go wait at the front window.While I was sitting on the bench waiting, several men and women, I assume to be lawyers based on the fact that they were wearing suits and carrying brief cases and were in a court house, stopped to talk to me about my cloths. Most asked if I had been on my way to a party or a Ren faire when I had come to court. A few elderly women hobbled over to me and started talking about how nice it was to see people dressing up again like when they were young. Someone asked if I was a “dead head”. Dozens of people walked past me ever few minutes going in or out of one of the three court rooms, and nearly every one of them, made a point to stop and ask me about my cloths. With each question, I was growing ever more puzzled about this obsession every one seemed to have with walking up to me and talking about my cloths.About three hours later the woman at the front window called my name and handed me a paper. It was a court order to see a psychologist, with a slip of paper saying that the State of Maine was going to pay for one 3 hour appointment. As I turned to leave, the woman commented that she liked my costume.I was wearing a Josephine Empire gown of wedge wood blue, with a 3 foot long train. Over which I wore a 7 yard blue velvet burnoose (a type of hooded cape).A few weeks later at the psychologist’s office, I was greeted with: “So you are Wendy. Why are you dressed like that?”. (I was wearing a full kimono — many layers of kimono). He told me he had been reading my case (What case? I have a case? Since when?) sent to him by the judge. He commented several more times about my cloths. Asked if he could see the contents of my tote bag, and than spent the rest of the time asking me about my drawings and writings and how I lived my life. During the course of the meeting he commented several times on my “bizarre accent” and use of old style language, which he said was seen only in rare cases of twins left to be raised by themselves. He called it “twin-language”. He said he had read cases of it, but that he had never witnessed it himself before. He found my childhood and 27 year isolation at the hands of people he called “cultists” fascinating, and believed my total lack of prior Human contact was the cause of my “inability to function”. He thought it may be possible that I could be “trained like a dog” so that I could learn how to “be normal”, as he believed it was possible that I did not actually have a disorder at all, but rather I simply was living just the same as I was as a 4 year old child simply because no adult had ever taught me to be otherwise. By the end of the meeting he had become very excited and was acting like he had just discovered the Lost City of Eldorado or something.He ended by writing up a paper which he said was a request to the State for funding to do a research study on me, saying that I was an “anomaly” which he could not properly diagnose, because I was displaying so many symptoms of so many disorders. Officially I have “Schizotypal Asperger’s Syndrome with OCD Tendancies”, however, he thinks I have something that he calls “an anomolly yet to be named”, as he says there is no deffinate text book disorder to describe me properly.I left his office that day very confused, and for the first time in my life, noticing what people around me were wearing and noticing that it was very different from what I was wearing. I was also, now realizing for the first time, that people look into your eyes when they talk to each other. I was also realizing that people on the street around his office seemed to be doing a lot of standing around (wasting their time) and talking to each other. It has only been 4 years since that meeting, and I still am having a very hard time processing the fact that people talk a lot, people look at each other a lot, and people . . . well, you people just plain dress really weird as far as I can see.I have not again heard back from the psychologist, however, both my mother and my father have gotten letters from him, and each of them, and my mom’s current husband, and my three brothers were called in to be “evaluated” by him to see if the whole family was like me, or if I was the only one in the family who was like this. I don’t know who else he contacted, but I suspect he was the one who sent the social worker to “the tent” a year later, after the flood and the fire left me homeless and living under a tarp.All this, because I wouldn’t look a judge in the eye? I remain confused over why the judge responded the way she did to me, and I remain equally confused as to why the psychologist responded the way he did to me. It was my first real contact with any one outside of the Mormon church and I found it very strange. But, as a result of the judge and the psychologist, I also found out that outside of the Mormon church, people do not believe in demon possession, and unlike the Mormon leaders who always said I acted the way I did because I was possessed by a demon, an evil spirit, or a poltergeist, I had now learned from the psychologist that what they had called evil spirits was really some sort of birth defect in my brain, which causes me to see the world on a different brain wave pattern than every one else, resulting in me acting, dressing, and otherwise responding differently to things than does every one else. Well, I must say his medical diagnosis certainly made much more logical sense to me than the religious leaders’ accusation of demon possession.And now that I know the church leaders were wrong when they called me demon possessed, I no longer feel quite so much like an outcast, unloved, and alone. I’ve since looked into this whole Asperger’s thing, and I must say, it’s kind of a sigh of relief, because now I know what is “wrong” with me, and now, I can figure out how to work my life around it.Copyright Info: The contents of this post, are taken from the second draft of the book “For Fear of Little Men” by Wendy C. Allen, and reprinted here with permission. This article was originally published in October 2008 under the title Living With Asperger’s Syndrome is copyright to Wendy C. Allen and The Twighlight Manor Press, and is reprinted here with permission. __________________________ ========== My Advice for Writers My Books

http://twitter.com/EelKat
http://www.facebook.com/EelKat
http://eknano.blogspot.com
http://eelkat.wordpress.com
http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/132659
http://www.scriptfrenzy.org/user/132659

>Script Frenzy RE: Helpful Info on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

>

Posted March 1, 2010 – 20:08	Helpful Info on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?
	One of the major plot points of my show revolves around one of the characters having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Here’s the problem, I don’t know much about it. I’m going to make this short and sweet as opposed to droning on and on over the issue: Does anyone have some helpful information on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

EelKat Municipal Liaison Posted March 31, 2010 – 06:55

RE: Helpful Info on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

I have PSTD to the point that I also have agoraphobia and have not been able to leave my house or have face to face contact with humans. Oddly in the past 20+ years the only time I’ve been able to either leave my house or have contact with humans is for the local Write-In meetings for NaNo and SF. When I was 14years old, my best friend was murdered along with 4 other friends. (five in all) I was the only survivor of a violent bloody attack, which left my friends with their arms and legs cut off their bodies, their intestines ripped out, and 2 of them living on for a few days before actually dieing. The court trials went on for 6 months. Because the murderer was caught in the act of slaughtering my friends, and because their was one survivor/witness of the attack (me), the trail went fast and she was executed that same year. I spent 6 months being questioned and interrogated by police and judges and lawyers, who didn’t give a damn about what I was going through, all they wanted was the facts so they could take another life (I was against her execution). This event left me without a single friend – every one of them was killed during this event. In the 20 years since I have not been able to make a single new friend. The event was made worse by the fact that when I went to church, I was meet with adults who didn’t give a damn. Several of them shook hands with me and said “How are you doing”… I responded with “My best friend was murdered this week” to which they responded “Oh that’s nice, I had a great week too” and walked off to shake hands with the next person. There were 375 adults in our church, dozens of them repeated this same thing that Sunday. Not one of them heard what I said. I went into a major stress overload during the court trials. By the time it was over I had stopped talking. I’ve barely spoken a full sentence since than. I took up writing full-time after that. I would get up in the morning, go out to my garden and start writing until night time. Every day, for the next 20+ years, without ever saying a word. Over the years, local rumors have spread, saying that I was a demon possessed witch who puts curses on people. It appeared that I was getting better by 2001, when I was about to be married, but than I had a miscarriage, he called off the wedding, and than in 2003 the demon possession rumors took a violent turn when one hysterical local started saying I had used witchcraft to kill someone. This rumor got out of hand in during the infamous and well documented NaNoWriMo 2006, the year I dropped out due to vandals burning my house to the ground, resulting in my becoming homeless and very famous at the same time. Many news reports, paparazzi hounding’s, and 2 published books later, the stress proved to be too much for me and I suffered a stress induced stroke in October 2009. There is also some debate as to wither I have PTSD or Autism or both. And because it might help your research, I’m going to copy part of an article I wrote, you can read the entire thing here:http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2807682/living_with_aspergers_s… the entire article is 25 pages long and may take a couple of hours to read, and it is itself and excerpt from a 557 page book which can be found here: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/for-fear-of-little-men/6508479 if you are really into the research and want to know all the details of everything that happened throughout this entire event, you’ll want to read the book itself. Any ways, one of the noted aspects of PTSD is the panic attacks and meltdowns that are triggered by the person coming in contact with anything that reminds them of the stressful event. 14 years, almost to the day, after the murder trail that stopped me talking, I found myself in court once again, and the result was a massive meltdown that got me sent, by the judge, to a psychologist, where it was discovered that what people had been calling PTSD, may have actually been in fact, Autism instead. Here is the part I’m copying (I was 30 years old at the time of this event): Don’t you know it’s rude to stare? Not a question asked to me, but a question I ask in response to people demanding I look at them when they talk.Eye contact. Why do I need to be looking at you to hear what you are saying? I hear with my ears not my eyes. Why do I need to look at you to talk to you? I talk with my mouth not my eyes.My lack of eye contact, my inability to speak around strangers, and my cloths, resulted in leading to my finding out I had Asperger’s, when in 2005 I was summoned into court as a witness to some case which I had no idea why they were saying I was a witness too. I’ll recap:A year before the fire or the flood which left my homeless, a man walked up to me, handed me a paper, told me I had been served and I had to show up in court to testify. I found this to be very confusing and puzzling because I didn’t know anything about this so call case that I was supposedly a witness too. I tried to explain this to the man, but I’m not good with verbal explanations. He told me that it didn’t matter wither I thought I was a witness or not, it was a court order and if I didn’t show up at court later that week, I would go to jail.Very puzzled, and very reluctant, I went to court on the date in question and found it to be one of the most nerve wracking frustrating days of my entire life. First off I had to be searched by a guard, who took my tote bag and dumped it out. (I carry my writing paper, my art supplies, and comic books with me every where . . . it’s a really big tote bag. Next I was questioned about my cloths; this being one of my very first confrontations with the world outside of church, I was completely lost as to understand why I was being asked about my cloths. What was wrong with the way I was dressed?My things were stuffed untidily and messed up back into my tote bag and I was told to sit on the right side of the court room. I sat in the very last pew and spent about an hour, resorting my crayons, comics and papers back into their proper order. I was interrupted while doing this, by my name being yelled out. Apparently the judge had called my name several times, but I had not heard her because I was busy fixing the mess the guard had made of my writing materials. I stood up, but had no idea what to do next. She called my name several more times, before finally telling me that I was supposed to come up front and sit in a chair in front of all of those people.Up front, I was asked to repeat a bunch of words, but now came my first really big problem . . . I was being asked to open my mouth and speak, something I had not done in years, and I was being asked to do it in a room filled with 40 or 50 people. This was not my first time in court. When I was 14 I was the only living witness to the murder trail of my 5 friends killed on August 21, 1991. It was court that had stopped me talking before. I spent day after day after day of interigation, back at my friend’s murder trail. When the murder trail ended, I went home and was never able to speak to a stranger again. Now, here I was again 14 years later in court. The judge asked me again and again to repeat the words of the police officer who was standing in front of me. I did. I tried, I said the words, again and again, but though my mouth moved not a sound came from my lips. It was like me throat was strangling them and refusing to let the words escape. The judge finally accepted a nod of yes and told me to sit down.Than came the questions from the 2 men sitting at the tables in front of the judge. They had to ask and re-ask their questions several times, but I could not hear their words, all I could do was stare out at all of those faces, rows and rows of them sitting in the seats below. I think I answered some of their questions because the judge kept telling me I had to speak loud enough for the tape recorder to hear me, and finally she said she had had “enough of this circus”. She than turned to me and told me to look at her. I looked at her hands. She repeatly demanded I look at her. Than she started yelling and saying that I was a grown woman acting like a child, she started yelling at me about my inappropriate cloths, my refusal to answer questions, my refusal to comply with orders, and my arrogance at not making eye contact. My cloths again. What was wrong with my cloths? She dismissed me as a witness, but told me not to leave the court, but to go wait at the front window.While I was sitting on the bench waiting, several men and women, I assume to be lawyers based on the fact that they were wearing suits and carrying brief cases and were in a court house, stopped to talk to me about my cloths. Most asked if I had been on my way to a party or a Ren faire when I had come to court. A few elderly women hobbled over to me and started talking about how nice it was to see people dressing up again like when they were young. Someone asked if I was a “dead head”. Dozens of people walked past me ever few minutes going in or out of one of the three court rooms, and nearly every one of them, made a point to stop and ask me about my cloths. With each question, I was growing ever more puzzled about this obsession every one seemed to have with walking up to me and talking about my cloths.About three hours later the woman at the front window called my name and handed me a paper. It was a court order to see a psychologist, with a slip of paper saying that the State of Maine was going to pay for one 3 hour appointment. As I turned to leave, the woman commented that she liked my costume.I was wearing a Josephine Empire gown of wedge wood blue, with a 3 foot long train. Over which I wore a 7 yard blue velvet burnoose (a type of hooded cape).A few weeks later at the psychologist’s office, I was greeted with: “So you are Wendy. Why are you dressed like that?”. (I was wearing a full kimono — many layers of kimono). He told me he had been reading my case (What case? I have a case? Since when?) sent to him by the judge. He commented several more times about my cloths. Asked if he could see the contents of my tote bag, and than spent the rest of the time asking me about my drawings and writings and how I lived my life. During the course of the meeting he commented several times on my “bizarre accent” and use of old style language, which he said was seen only in rare cases of twins left to be raised by themselves. He called it “twin-language”. He said he had read cases of it, but that he had never witnessed it himself before. He found my childhood and 27 year isolation at the hands of people he called “cultists” fascinating, and believed my total lack of prior Human contact was the cause of my “inability to function”. He thought it may be possible that I could be “trained like a dog” so that I could learn how to “be normal”, as he believed it was possible that I did not actually have a disorder at all, but rather I simply was living just the same as I was as a 4 year old child simply because no adult had ever taught me to be otherwise. By the end of the meeting he had become very excited and was acting like he had just discovered the Lost City of Eldorado or something.He ended by writing up a paper which he said was a request to the State for funding to do a research study on me, saying that I was an “anomaly” which he could not properly diagnose, because I was displaying so many symptoms of so many disorders. Officially I have “Schizotypal Asperger’s Syndrome with OCD Tendancies”, however, he thinks I have something that he calls “an anomolly yet to be named”, as he says there is no deffinate text book disorder to describe me properly.I left his office that day very confused, and for the first time in my life, noticing what people around me were wearing and noticing that it was very different from what I was wearing. I was also, now realizing for the first time, that people look into your eyes when they talk to each other. I was also realizing that people on the street around his office seemed to be doing a lot of standing around (wasting their time) and talking to each other. It has only been 4 years since that meeting, and I still am having a very hard time processing the fact that people talk a lot, people look at each other a lot, and people . . . well, you people just plain dress really weird as far as I can see.I have not again heard back from the psychologist, however, both my mother and my father have gotten letters from him, and each of them, and my mom’s current husband, and my three brothers were called in to be “evaluated” by him to see if the whole family was like me, or if I was the only one in the family who was like this. I don’t know who else he contacted, but I suspect he was the one who sent the social worker to “the tent” a year later, after the flood and the fire left me homeless and living under a tarp.All this, because I wouldn’t look a judge in the eye? I remain confused over why the judge responded the way she did to me, and I remain equally confused as to why the psychologist responded the way he did to me. It was my first real contact with any one outside of the Mormon church and I found it very strange. But, as a result of the judge and the psychologist, I also found out that outside of the Mormon church, people do not believe in demon possession, and unlike the Mormon leaders who always said I acted the way I did because I was possessed by a demon, an evil spirit, or a poltergeist, I had now learned from the psychologist that what they had called evil spirits was really some sort of birth defect in my brain, which causes me to see the world on a different brain wave pattern than every one else, resulting in me acting, dressing, and otherwise responding differently to things than does every one else. Well, I must say his medical diagnosis certainly made much more logical sense to me than the religious leaders’ accusation of demon possession.And now that I know the church leaders were wrong when they called me demon possessed, I no longer feel quite so much like an outcast, unloved, and alone. I’ve since looked into this whole Asperger’s thing, and I must say, it’s kind of a sigh of relief, because now I know what is “wrong” with me, and now, I can figure out how to work my life around it.Copyright Info: The contents of this post, are taken from the second draft of the book “For Fear of Little Men” by Wendy C. Allen, and reprinted here with permission. This article was originally published in October 2008 under the title Living With Asperger’s Syndrome is copyright to Wendy C. Allen and The Twighlight Manor Press, and is reprinted here with permission. __________________________ ========== My Advice for Writers My Books

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PLEASE . . . . somebody, anybody. . . . PLEASE HELP ME!

They just now, just called again. Again demanding that I come into the the bishop’s office at the church tonight, again demanding that I meet with the Stake President. And again it has triggered a mass panic attack. It’s happening again. JUST LIKE BEFORE. I can’t stop shaking. My chest hurts and my lungs hurt. My hands are shaking so bad I can barely type this. It’s like before. Only, I’m shaking a lot worse, it’s so bad my glasses keep falling off. I can’t stop shaking. I can’t breath.

It’s like before, like a panic attack, only really, really, really bad. Why won’t they leave me alone. I need them to leave me alone. Please make them leave me alone. I don’t know if I can live through many more of these stroke like attacks. I have one every time they call. Please make them stop calling me. Tell them to leave me a lone. Please help me. I can’t stop shaking. My whole body is skaking all over I don’t know what to do.

Please call the church at 607-9517 or 207-666-3481 and tell them to leave me alone (I find the 666 in their # ironic) Ask for Robert Taylor. He is the counselor in charge of handling phone calls to the Stake Presadent of the Augusta Maine Stake.

You can read more about this 31 year on going harassment at the following links:

Excommunication for publishing my 2008 NaNoWriMo Book – Update

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HELP! Any doctors out there? Medical advice?

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Health UPDATE – Stroke caused by panic attack triggered by LDS Church excommunication threats :(

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Still Planning on Doing NaNoWriMo this year in spite of recent health issues

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Eleven Days Til NaNoWriMo and Stroke Update

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For Those interested- here is the Final (edited and spell checked) Draft of For Fear of Little Men, my 2008 NaNoWriMo book

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My Aliens vs Your Demons – Yep – If I’m Crazy, What Are You???????

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The Poison Pen Letters Return – AGAIN

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Excommunication – 2008 NaNoWriMo book banned – Update – My Inbox if overloading – a mass reply going here

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REPOST: For Fear of Little Men: First Draft of my autobiography book to be published in 2010+/-

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Note – I have not been to the LDS/Mormon church in 13 years, and yet, they continue to harass me on an almost daily basis.

In 2004 I started writing “Faith Not Religion”, my infamous 900 page rant on why I left the Mormon church. It was during the two years where I just sat there doing nothing but writing that book that I finally realized for the first time in my life that I WASN’T evil, like so many bishop kept telling me! I wasn’t demon possessed, like so many bishop kept telling me . What I was, was a victim of 27 years of mental and emotional abuse at the hands of a bunch of crazy tyrants. While writing “Faith Not Religion” I learned quite a bit about myself. Among them I learned:

I’m tired of being told I’m a witch.
I’m tired of being told I’m evil.
I’m tired of being told I do the things I do because I’m possessed by a demon.
I’m tired of being told I’m going to hell.
I’m tired of being told I’m inferior because I’m a lowly female.
I’m tired of being told not to talk because that’s reserved for men.
I’m just plain tired of BEING TOLD.
Every one talks to me, no one ever talks with me.
I want freedom from BEING TOLD.
I wish, that there was someone who would actually treat me like I was a person. Like I was important. Like I mattered.
I’m tired of being harassed by these people.
I’m tired of it.
Putting up with the abuse all those years was killing me.
Them killing my pets was an evil act.
Them paintballing my car was an evil act.
Them throwing rocks at and blinding my horse, was an evil act.
Them burning my drawings in the woodstove was and evil act.
Them burning my manuscripts in the wood stove was an evil act.
Them saying I was evil was an evil act.
They were the ones who were evil, not me.
Not being allowed to get a job because I was a female, was an evil thing for them to do to me.
Them smashing my Liberace` records was an evil act.
Them stealing parts off of my car and leaving it in ruins was an evil act.
Them setting fire to my home and leaving me homeless was an evil act.

Please put an end to this before they cause my death. I don’t think I can live through another stroke. PLEASE HELP ME!. Please call the church at 607-9517 or 207-666-3481 and tell them to leave me alone (I find the 666 in their # ironic) Ask for Robert Taylor. He is the counselor in charge of handling phone calls to the Stake Presadent of the Augusta Maine Stake. Please. call him. PLEASE! Why won’t they leave me alone. I need them to leave me alone. Please make them leave me alone. I don’t know if I can live through many more of these stroke like attacks. I have one every time they call. Please make them stop calling me. Tell them to leave me a lone. Please help me. I can’t stop shaking. My whole body is shaking all over I don’t know what to do. Please some one help me.

Waiting for Emmett to come.

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>On Being Homeless in Old Orchard Beach, Maine.

>

This blog was started for NaNo06 but as many of my StarLog readers know, NaNo06 was interupted by life in a town run by tyrants, and thus I was offline only days after starting this blog. As many of you know, our family became homeless that day.

Well, I signed up for NaNo07 and my first day back the question was asked of me: What was it like to be homeless?

I senced that this question was asked with great awe and a tone of excitment and joy at the “romance of being homeless”. Well, I am here to clear up any rumors there are about how being homeless can be either exciting or romantic, for it is neigther.

Last year, as many of you may remember, halfway through NaNo06 I disapeared off the contest and forums and was not heard of again for nearly 6 months later. Here’s why:

We suffered a flood/fire that destroied everything and left us homeless. It also left my dad in a coma, leaving our family of 7 without an income. We lost our house, our cloths, everything. All we had left was what we were wearing when it happened.

We turned to family who due to regilgious convictions said that “god was punishing us” and they than refused to help us because they “would not get in the way of god’s plan”; they continued by saying that “god intended man to be self-sufficiant”, meaning that we had to help ourselves. sheesh. our friends (of the same religon) said the same. We went to the bishop for help, and was given this same answer yet again.

In the end, we stuck out Maine’s 2006 record breaking sub-zero winter, by living for 8 months in a “tent” we built out of a tarp and some cinderblocks. We kept warm during the day by staying in the Main Mall from 9 AM to 10PM. We ate about 4 meals per week at the Salvation Army (they don’t serve food every day). The rest of the days were spent in search of wood, leaves, and paper that we could burn at night to keep warm.

Thankfully, 2 months in, I was able to get a job at the Mall, and was able to afford to buy enough food so we could eat every day again.

Our time was spent mostly trying to find scraps of food to eat and anything we could burn to keep warm. Never once did we “panhandle” or “beg for money”. Belive me, when you are starving and cold, money is the farthest thing from your mind. I know. All of your time is spent worrying how many days (not hours, but days) it’ll be before your next meal, or worrying that the snow will collapse your tent while you are asleep.

Being homeless is very, very scary, you worry about not living to see tommorow more than anything else.

You learn to pick trash for food, and to pick up bottles and cans to turn in for money to buy food.

Also, you have to deal with a lot of stuck up snobby people throwing things at you (rocks and tin cans mostly), tearing your tent apart while you are away so that you have to keep rebuilding it, and wild animals attacking you at night. (fishers, martans, bobcat, and bear, in our case)

Also, you lose lots of weight (I lost 30 lbs) and you get used to walking miles and miles a day.

You learn that asking to take a shower at a friends house is taboo, and so must go month after month without washing… best you can do is to wash your face in the restroom of a store, but don’t keep going to the same store or they’ll call the police on you.

You also learn that not taking a shower well cause people to tease you, throw things at you, and go around saying bad things about you to every one.

You well feel unloved, unwanted, hated, and become deeply depressed. There well be nights when you lay awake staring at the blackness of the tarp above you and wishing tonights snowstorm will collapse it on you and smother you in your sleep so that you won’t have to wake up and suffer another day in this world where humans you once called family and friend are now your worst enimeies and hate you, simplyy because you no longer have a house to live in.

It’s that time of year again. Have you signed up for NaNoWriMo 2007 yet? Sign up today and let the world’s #1 writing contest begin!



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On Being Homeless in Old Orchard Beach, Maine.

This blog was started for NaNo06 but as many of my StarLog readers know, NaNo06 was interupted by life in a town run by tyrants, and thus I was offline only days after starting this blog. As many of you know, our family became homeless that day.

Well, I signed up for NaNo07 and my first day back the question was asked of me: What was it like to be homeless?

I senced that this question was asked with great awe and a tone of excitment and joy at the “romance of being homeless”. Well, I am here to clear up any rumors there are about how being homeless can be either exciting or romantic, for it is neigther.

Last year, as many of you may remember, halfway through NaNo06 I disapeared off the contest and forums and was not heard of again for nearly 6 months later. Here’s why:

We suffered a flood/fire that destroied everything and left us homeless. It also left my dad in a coma, leaving our family of 7 without an income. We lost our house, our cloths, everything. All we had left was what we were wearing when it happened.

We turned to family who due to regilgious convictions said that “god was punishing us” and they than refused to help us because they “would not get in the way of god’s plan”; they continued by saying that “god intended man to be self-sufficiant”, meaning that we had to help ourselves. sheesh. our friends (of the same religon) said the same. We went to the bishop for help, and was given this same answer yet again.

In the end, we stuck out Maine’s 2006 record breaking sub-zero winter, by living for 8 months in a “tent” we built out of a tarp and some cinderblocks. We kept warm during the day by staying in the Main Mall from 9 AM to 10PM. We ate about 4 meals per week at the Salvation Army (they don’t serve food every day). The rest of the days were spent in search of wood, leaves, and paper that we could burn at night to keep warm.

Thankfully, 2 months in, I was able to get a job at the Mall, and was able to afford to buy enough food so we could eat every day again.

Our time was spent mostly trying to find scraps of food to eat and anything we could burn to keep warm. Never once did we “panhandle” or “beg for money”. Belive me, when you are starving and cold, money is the farthest thing from your mind. I know. All of your time is spent worrying how many days (not hours, but days) it’ll be before your next meal, or worrying that the snow will collapse your tent while you are asleep.

Being homeless is very, very scary, you worry about not living to see tommorow more than anything else.

You learn to pick trash for food, and to pick up bottles and cans to turn in for money to buy food.

Also, you have to deal with a lot of stuck up snobby people throwing things at you (rocks and tin cans mostly), tearing your tent apart while you are away so that you have to keep rebuilding it, and wild animals attacking you at night. (fishers, martans, bobcat, and bear, in our case)

Also, you lose lots of weight (I lost 30 lbs) and you get used to walking miles and miles a day.

You learn that asking to take a shower at a friends house is taboo, and so must go month after month without washing… best you can do is to wash your face in the restroom of a store, but don’t keep going to the same store or they’ll call the police on you.

You also learn that not taking a shower well cause people to tease you, throw things at you, and go around saying bad things about you to every one.

You well feel unloved, unwanted, hated, and become deeply depressed. There well be nights when you lay awake staring at the blackness of the tarp above you and wishing tonights snowstorm will collapse it on you and smother you in your sleep so that you won’t have to wake up and suffer another day in this world where humans you once called family and friend are now your worst enimeies and hate you, simplyy because you no longer have a house to live in.

It’s that time of year again. Have you signed up for NaNoWriMo 2007 yet? Sign up today and let the world’s #1 writing contest begin!



http://www.nanowrimo.org/

On Being Homeless in Old Orchard Beach, Maine.

This blog was started for NaNo06 but as many of my StarLog readers know, NaNo06 was interupted by life in a town run by tyrants, and thus I was offline only days after starting this blog. As many of you know, our family became homeless that day.

Well, I signed up for NaNo07 and my first day back the question was asked of me: What was it like to be homeless?

I senced that this question was asked with great awe and a tone of excitment and joy at the “romance of being homeless”. Well, I am here to clear up any rumors there are about how being homeless can be either exciting or romantic, for it is neigther.

Last year, as many of you may remember, halfway through NaNo06 I disapeared off the contest and forums and was not heard of again for nearly 6 months later. Here’s why:

We suffered a flood/fire that destroied everything and left us homeless. It also left my dad in a coma, leaving our family of 7 without an income. We lost our house, our cloths, everything. All we had left was what we were wearing when it happened.

We turned to family who due to regilgious convictions said that “god was punishing us” and they than refused to help us because they “would not get in the way of god’s plan”; they continued by saying that “god intended man to be self-sufficiant”, meaning that we had to help ourselves. sheesh. our friends (of the same religon) said the same. We went to the bishop for help, and was given this same answer yet again.

In the end, we stuck out Maine’s 2006 record breaking sub-zero winter, by living for 8 months in a “tent” we built out of a tarp and some cinderblocks. We kept warm during the day by staying in the Main Mall from 9 AM to 10PM. We ate about 4 meals per week at the Salvation Army (they don’t serve food every day). The rest of the days were spent in search of wood, leaves, and paper that we could burn at night to keep warm.

Thankfully, 2 months in, I was able to get a job at the Mall, and was able to afford to buy enough food so we could eat every day again.

Our time was spent mostly trying to find scraps of food to eat and anything we could burn to keep warm. Never once did we “panhandle” or “beg for money”. Belive me, when you are starving and cold, money is the farthest thing from your mind. I know. All of your time is spent worrying how many days (not hours, but days) it’ll be before your next meal, or worrying that the snow will collapse your tent while you are asleep.

Being homeless is very, very scary, you worry about not living to see tommorow more than anything else.

You learn to pick trash for food, and to pick up bottles and cans to turn in for money to buy food.

Also, you have to deal with a lot of stuck up snobby people throwing things at you (rocks and tin cans mostly), tearing your tent apart while you are away so that you have to keep rebuilding it, and wild animals attacking you at night. (fishers, martans, bobcat, and bear, in our case)

Also, you lose lots of weight (I lost 30 lbs) and you get used to walking miles and miles a day.

You learn that asking to take a shower at a friends house is taboo, and so must go month after month without washing… best you can do is to wash your face in the restroom of a store, but don’t keep going to the same store or they’ll call the police on you.

You also learn that not taking a shower well cause people to tease you, throw things at you, and go around saying bad things about you to every one.

You well feel unloved, unwanted, hated, and become deeply depressed. There well be nights when you lay awake staring at the blackness of the tarp above you and wishing tonights snowstorm will collapse it on you and smother you in your sleep so that you won’t have to wake up and suffer another day in this world where humans you once called family and friend are now your worst enimeies and hate you, simplyy because you no longer have a house to live in.

It’s that time of year again. Have you signed up for NaNoWriMo 2007 yet? Sign up today and let the world’s #1 writing contest begin!



http://www.nanowrimo.org/

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