First of all, I can’t believe that I’ve never blogged from Reno. Half the reason for writing this blog post is so that I can drop a little gray circle over the top of Reno, NV. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I run a sister site to the blog here where I map out all of my blog posts that have to do with travel - it’s at https://www.adamhunter.net/blog_posts.html, go check it out. Anyway, this weekend I went there as part of the Burning Man camp that I went to BM with last year, called Salon Soleil. It was our “gear cleaning” weekend which is called “Brocconalia”, because it’s a portmanteau of Bacchanlia and Broccoli - Bacchanalia both because there is a short party involved and also to convince people that this will be fun and they should come, and Broccoli because the shipping container we use to hold all our stuff is called the Broccoli Box, for reasons which predate my involvement in the group. Anyway, it was a fun weekend. This might sound weird, but I really enjoy feeling useful; I think it’s one of the reasons why I would make a good teacher. Other people might not enjoy spending a day cleaning gear and repairing a shipping container, but I really eat this kind of thing up, and it’s a shame because people hardly ever ask me to do anything. But if you need something done I’m your guy - I made 2 trips to Home Depot and spent a half an hour pumping water out of a barrel into buckets, among other things. The basic deal here is that every year at the end of Burning Man, we just load all the gear - in whatever state it’s in - into this big metal shipping container and have it delivered to a yard in Reno, where it sits until we recover from the burn and show up, one weekend in April, to clean and fix anything that needs cleaning and fixing - which, for those of you who know the playa, is everything. We shake out pillows and clean dishes and organize stuff and, this year, we replaced 2 doors on the box and also had someone weld in a metal plate to repair a hole in the top that was leaking. That kind of thing. I do really enjoy Reno and the Truckee/Tahoe area; we stayed in an AirBnB in Truckee and I drank a lot of decaf coffee. It’s really only 3 hours away, especially when you drive it at 4am like I did today on the way back (I had to teach my yoga class). I should get up there more often.
