Burning Man 2007

Quick rundown of thoughts/observations/babblings:

• We never saw any of the friends we planned to see unless it was by accident, or for specific appointments. Not especially surprising in a city of 47,000.
• Only in Black Rock City: you're awakened to the sound of an enormous explosion and hundreds of people screaming, and your first thought is "oh, cool, they blew up the oil rig."
• I'm still not convinced the monkey installation was anything more than a mass hoax. I went out there three times and it never did anything but gather dust.
• LED technology has really become dirt-cheap and common in the five years since I attended Burning Man. At night, it was weird to see a person not wearing at least three blinking lights.
• I estimate the number of kids at Burning Man to have increased about 90% since 2002. Of course, my awareness of kids has also increased about 90% since having two of my own.
• Didn't miss TV or computers. Did miss the internet as a news/research tool (queries would have been [burning man arson] [ultralight trike] [burning man suicide] [crude awakening] [adds] [canopy shade]).
• The movie theater project worked out great. We had about a dozen kids visiting each night, with deep expressions of gratitude from about a dozen sets of parents the next morning.
• I blew up my charge controller when I first hooked up the whole circuit. On the inverter the terminals had come loose and shorted. The charge controller bore the brunt of the amperage and died a few seconds later. It still charged the batteries but couldn't regulate the output load at 12 volts anymore. So I had to charge one battery during the day and then run the inverter directly off the other battery at night. No big deal, especially since my maximum power consumption turned out to be little more than 60 watts, meaning I pretty much could have run the whole project all week from a single battery charge and skipped the solar part entirely.
• Emily and Thomas each learned how to ride a tricycle. Thomas also proved adept at skateboarding!
• Yes, the weather sucked, just as everyone said it would. It was humid most of the week and we had three dust storms. Two were routine but one was severe, turning the sky dark orange for about 10 minutes. The playa surface fragmented very easily, so that it was like walking on the beach after a few days. It's hard to bike through those kinds of conditions.
• I was a UNICOM operator for two days at the spaceport. That was a lot of fun, and I met many cool folks. For various reasons the work meant I woke up before dawn every morning, and it was very nice to get such an early start on the day.
• My shade structure was adequate for adults but no good for the kids. They didn't look at it as part of our home (it had no walls and just camouflage netting for a ceiling) so they didn't see the point of spending time there. If I could do that over I'd have just bought one of those structures that they advertise as portable garages for cars.
• Real-world food didn't taste as good as I'd expected upon our return to civilization. Nor did showering feel as good. This is undoubtedly because we were able to shower in our RV, and because Mary made all sorts of good food when we were on the Playa.
• My favorite art car was gigantic and made out of a segmented bus. Great music.
• I was neutral about the early burn. Though I was sure that the guy who did it was an ass, I was also sure that I'd basically agree with his reasons (which I more or less correctly speculated were that the event had lost its spontaneity). That said, there are other less illegal ways to express yourself (but probably none as effective).
• I never saw a single one of the 1,000 donated community bikes. I did hear they were being stolen (to the extent it's possible to steal anything in BRC without leaving).
• Coffee quality varied wildly day by day.
• I saw nothing that shocked me.
• Emily was scared by a group of people who had painted themselves entirely red. But if seeing Mickey Mouse in person was a 10 on the kid fright scale, this was only about a 6.
• I'm undecided about the RV. Great to have the storage space, but I think the rest of it (shower, refrigerator, stove, comfy bed, maybe even air conditioning) could be reproduced in an appropriate temporary living structure. True, you probably don't want to spend the time and effort to do so, but depending on your attitude about what "radical self-reliance" means, you might consider it a worthy and interesting challenge.
• Likewise, undecided about camping in Kidsville. It felt like a monoculture (bad) with a marginally safer environment for kids (good). I don't consider BRC to be an unsafe environment for kids to begin with, so I'm not convinced it was a fair trade.
• I heard lots and lots of good music, and I recognized almost none of it. The closest was remixes of songs I knew. I wish I had some way to get everyone's playlists.