Great Heavy Hauler!

[bobstad]

In moving myself from Eureka, CA to Bellingham, WA(675 miles) using my Festiva(seven loads between February and June) I'd used a dual cross-bar type roof-rack I got for $20 I'd bolted a tubular black metal futon frame to.(kieped from beside a large semi trailer Saint Vincent de Paul's stored donations in behind the Sebastapol, CA VFW hall one evening during the 2004 California Herdeljezi Festival; <http://www.voiceofroma.com>)

With the Festiva Motor Sports "lowering/racing springs" this was a really good set-up for moving an amazing amount of possessions and my mileage was about 30 mpg, traveling pretty close to the posted speed limits along interstate five through Washington and Oregon, and the winding two-lane highways south of there.*(I get close to 40 mpg on the same route normally loaded, keeping quick and light on the two-lane stuff and about 70 on the freeway)

With the futon frame on the roof I was able to lash quite a lot above the rear bumper too, running rope between the futon frame and the metal brackets below the car I've been told are common on Asian built cars used to hold them onto ocean-going ship decks.

The two photos are all I had, which are from my move, but not with the futon frame bolted to the roof racks.(hide-a-bed & armchair; rest area south of Olympia, WA on I-5)

*The front FMS springs give a too stiff ride to my taste and not enough clearance for snow chains with 13" rims, so next time the front end is torn apart I may put the stock ones back that felt good driving about 10,000 miles with the FMS rear springs-but those are essential to feel safe even driving normally!(I wonder why they built the car with such a flimsy set of rear springs the owner before me had put those solid metal spacers in I'd thought had been out of favor since the '60s reputed to break springs, to try to stiffen the handling a little which wallowed badly at freeway speeds and the stock 12" wheels even with the spacers installed)

[Dave G]

No pictures?

[bobstad]

I'm working on that; but need to do the upload at the library since my "vintage"(aka obsolete) Mac G-4 is on its last legs and losing function almost day by day; or else jimmied by the people servicing the thing at $100/hr. in order to make life more difficult.(I also have the bad habit of failure to label rolls of exposed film; so have about 30 rolls of 24 exposure 35mm needing processing at about $12 a pop for double prints and a cd, to gamble on seeing what I get doing them as af-FORD-able)

[bobstad]

Ford has a better idea, dept.

I could just mount the futon-frame roof rack and shot what remains of the roll of film in the camera and get the film back before the weekend probably. Next time the weather breaks!(politics permitting...looks like Obama's got it; so I'm going to try to start distribution of the PEOPLES WEEKLY WORLD here, that in 2003-2004 I distributed 10,000 copies of in Eureka, Arcata and Mckinleyville in Humboldt county CA-100 copies a week then a nickel each which are 30 cents now in bulk; the paper Woody Guthrie wrote eloquently for in the 30s as the DAILY WORKER, published in association with the party of Paul Robeson, W. E. B. du Bois, Pete Seeger, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka and many, many others as the public consumption newspaper of the COMMUNIST PARTY USA...perhaps even if sacrificing my recent career here at FF.com?)

[hytekredneck]

Bobstad that's a interesting collection of bumper stickers on the back of your festy any pics of the all?

[bobstad]

what got me evicted in Eureka!

Here is the collection as of '07

There is a newer one now I like someone gave me; who has mentioned not reading all of every email I send...

"WOULDN'T YOU RATHER BE BEHIND A BOOK?"(from a book store called PEGASUS in Berkeley and Oakland)

Two I had made are:

"YOGI W/HAREM"(Male Shivanist Pig) because my girlfriend Cynde' Gehman("as in German") got annoyed once because I took so much interest in her pals.("you're a yogi with a harem!" who always is one for pithy statements, such as "mutual dump" as we were breaking up-or else she was trying to encourage me to find us a better place to live?)("serial monogamy" is another one of hers I'd never heard before, though maybe I'm spelling this incorrectly since I'm into macrobiotics and she may've been trying to ridicule me; who got herself a tubal ligation when she was twenty-nine seventeen years before our paths crossed, and is a local performance artist I met at the low-income legal aide office there where she has her day gig and got to know facing an eviction from Eureka's biggest slum lord-who'd had a place with a "for rent $300" sign in a window of an apartment my van coasted to a stop across the street from after the motor had suddenly suffered a terminal affliction)

I have a much larger one on my saxophone case I'd intended for the FestivaL car, but she'd been crossing the street as I picked it up at the sticker store I'd not seen in a couple years and gave me such a woe be gone look I decided on mercy, then.(her beloved older sister, her only sibling a single parent with teen daughters, was killed in a car wreck as we'd been breaking up which ended up in my homelessness that winter of '98-'99 allowing me to save enough from my disability/SSI income to buy the Festiva-sleeping in my visqueen and tarp 6' x 10' three foot tall shelter I'd thrown up for $50, until another homeless man tried to extort money from me and assaulted me,(a speed freak & pot head into martial arts, who went by the name "Shadow" and suffered some grim enough back problems who spent his county relief money on drugs, ate at the rescue mission though he didn't sleep there, and scrounged for the necessaries of life from dumpsters who I'd tried to get along with several months) then on a dirt floor from mid February on in a $25/month garage in Eureka I'd rented to store the '75 Chevy van I'd been fixing up to live out of, which mysteriously threw a rod after a five minute stop at a convenience store coming up from the bay area to try to cross over to Weed, CA then up 97 to Wenatchee, WA which stranded me there nearly twelve years from April of '96)

The other one I had made is "JESUS WAS A MUSHROOM"(Moses was a prick) from John Trudell's song "Jesus Was a Mushroom" based upon the late biblical scholar John Allegro's scholarship who proves most of the old testament patriarchs never existed, but were evolved as phallic references from the syncretic nature worship religions of the region; who also says Jesus Christ never existed, but was a secret code word for the amanita muscaria mushroom an ultra violent cult of drug crazed Jews used the Romans reasonably enough exterminated; who like much of Jewry then were genocidal rascists.(the Nazis of their era!)

"The modern JudeoChristian Tradition is the most evil phenomena to assault humanity in the past two thousand years" is a quote of Allegro's I like to share I guess I should have made into a sticker; though I'd probably get shot. He'd once studied to become a Methodist minister who got into philology and lectured at the University of Manchester in England whose most controversial book THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS was serialized in the LONDON DAILY TIMES.

The new owner of my Eureka apartment who is a right-wing Schwartzenegger fan told me he'd let me stay in my place if I'd get rid of the stickers on my car, who is a sociopathic Harley rider(his middle name is even "Harley" I noticed on a document) who likes wearing "Jesus saves even bikers" tee-shirts and similar sweat-shirts; though I suspect he'd been lying to me and planned on getting rid of me anyway due to a renovation of the 1880s building(I'd lived in since October of '99 the previous owners who'd liked me had in their family since 1954 a daughter'd had to sell because of her divorce from a guy who looked like Ken Kesey probably in cahoots with the new owner) he'd kept me paying rent in until they were replacing the floors, and his carpenter had threatened to beat me up twice in one day,(the second time following me on his brand new Buell racing model $20,000 Harley-Davidson even though an indigent just out of prison) so that I'd called 911 both times and got my eviction notice at my front door from the owner's wife the next day.(she'd had me on the phone an hour or so the previous day stoned on medical marijuana telling me all her problems, who'd picked up as I was leaving a message about the roof leaking on sheet-rock they'd just installed; and then had gotten into the face of her husband and the carpenter when they'd gotten back after she'd gotten off the phone with me, who'd told me she considered her husband in violation of their wedding vow and that she'd feared getting raped by the carpenter who I'd seen around town a few times before they bought the place and had seemed a cheerful, happy healthy attractive woman, but at my front door that morning had really gone to "hell" who'd also mentioned being a Unitarian I guess must've been contemplating mine?)

Too bad that senile scum and lousy actor Ronald Reagan bailed out H-D out of bankruptcy, if you ask me.(when still into making bowling balls they dumped their Italian factory the same year['74] those bikes won the 250cc Formula racing championship)

I saw him once in a film with Errol Flynn(rumored to've been a Nazi) in which Reagan played George Custer; a buddy flick!(H-D cowered in front of Japan's dominance, I was told was why they got rid of their Aermacchi concern)

p. s. I took off the blue plastic Festiva grill insert and have the chrome Chevy bow-tie from my old van bolted in front of the radiator, is why I have the "genuine Chevrolet parts" sticker.(my first lover Tina Blade owns BLADE CHEVROLET just south of here in Mount Vernon, WA)