the tent and Tucson weirdness

Here's a tent-related fact-a-palooza:

• Washing 40 yards (40 m) of canvas over and over again for eleven days adds $25 to $30 to your water bill.
• It takes me five and a half days to finish sewing together all the parts for a big canvas tent. That includes an entire day spent recovering from the first day, when I used the floor as a cutting table and developed a serious case of carpet-chemical inhalation.
• If you put a tent up overnight without its floor in my living room, it traps all the carpet chemicals that usually escape somehow, rendering the living room pretty much uninhabitable.

Now, I could get kind of impressed with myself for being able to make a tent, particularly since I'm sick, and it's kind of funny to pitch a tent in the living room because it's raining outside. But to have to open the tent in the morning to let the carpet chemicals out? That's just weird.

Speaking of weird, this morning I read a news article in the local paper about a casket found by paintballers that had been stolen from the landfill. It ended up in the landfill because the body it had held was exhumed so it could be cremated. So never mind all the details; the article wasn't overly specific. What's really important here is that the newspaper lets people comment on the stories, and comment #6 from Patrick M. is the quote of the day:

Wake up! The Sheriff has been dumping bodies out at the landfill for years.

In other news, tomorrow we're going to go for a very long drive with the tent. I expect I'll learn something, but you probably won't hear about it until Thursday. Just so you know.