The warm weather continues and we are taking as much advantage of it as we can. Vidya is cutting, dyeing, and sealing gourds for next year’s shows. It is better to do the dusty and smelly jobs outside, so she is concentrating on those now. When the weather turns, she retreats indoors and does painting on the gourds and works on developing new things. When you go to the same shows year after year, you need to have at least one new thing at a show or your sales drop. Gourds are durable so once someone has bought a particular type of gourd, they don’t need another one except to give it as a gift. Loyal buyers come back year after year and the easiest way to make a sale is something new. Developing new ideas is time consuming, so she does it in the winter.

I have been working on the used Astro van we bought. It is mechanically sound and, unusual for West Virginia, rust free. It came out of New Mexico, where they don’t use salt on the roads to melt ice as they do here. Road salt rusts vehicles. It has some minor things that need attention.

The back door was locked shut. I was at Shyam’s and we opened up the interior part of the door to access the lock but still couldn’t get it to unlock. We loosened the bolts on the bracket so we could get some slack in the door so we could get a reciprocating in between the two sides and cut the rod that the lock was inextricably latched onto. It was now open, but one side was swinging in the breeze, so I put a 10” barrel bolt on it to hold it shut. I had to make some minor alteration on it so it doesn’t have any play in it so it holds the door shut enough that it is sealed.

It has an extra hole in it so a padlock can be used. It will be necessary to use a padlock when in town to prevent theft. I found this interesting quote that takes the concept of thief a little further than the usual indictable kind:

“In the broader sense, everyone who accumulates more than he needs is a thief. According to spiritual communism, one cannot possess more than he needs for his personal maintenance. That is the law of nature. Anyone who accumulates more money or more possessions than he needs is called a thief, and one who simply accumulates wealth without spending for sacrifice or for worship of the Personality of Godhead is a great thief.”

SB 3.28.4