Occupation of Independence

What's that brown stuff behind this meadowlark? Oh that's right, it's snowless dirt, just after Christmas. How I wish the white stuff left by the recent storm would disappear. Snow might be marvelous when it is falling or recently fallen, but soon it turns ugly. Most of all I resent any restriction to my walking and cycling lifestyles. The recent four inches of white powder is taking a while to melt off and I was getting cabin fever, so Coffee Girl and I walked to town. It was not fun. Nobody in this town bothers to scoop off their sidewalk. So we struggled with ice or packed snow the whole way. Every time a raven flew overhead, Coffee Girl would lunge at it and nearly pull me over onto the hard surface. The hatred of the Easterner for old snow (read, ice) came back with every step. Finally we made it to the coffee shop, where we sat outside and watched drops melt off the awning and fall onto the sidewalk with a loud splash. They were backlit by a bright Southwestern sun

When I first saw this photo of Coffee Girl (black) launching an attack on Gabby (neighborhood friend) I was disappointed that it was out of focus. But notice how focused the carabiner is, on the end of the red leash. Later I started to like it because it captures the frantic earnestness of dog play. You'd think that Gabby was screaming in agony, in her very death-cry, instead of enjoying play with her best friend. Coffee Girl is biting Gabby in the shoulder, the same location that the coyote bit my little poodle about a month ago, except that the bite left a two inch long gash.

  (Photo looks better after clicking to enlarge.) The blizzard hit a couple days ago and here we sit, a hundred miles from the Mexico border, with four inches of powdery snow to frolic in. Which is happier: my dog or my camera? Never before has the water in the dog bowl frozen at night -- inside the RV, I'm talking about!  

As long as I'm ranting against smartphones and tablets, I wonder if they are responsible for the poor quality comments on some of the blogs I follow. By 'poor quality' I don't mean that I disagree with their point. I just can't read their comment; my eyes and brain hurt too much. Perhaps the comment was pecked out by thumbs when the guy was waiting in his mega-saurus, king-cab, dualie pickup truck in the fast food drive-through; and the commenter hasn't gotten around to buying an app for spell checking. Then again, maybe he did get an app, except that it changes ordinary English prose to thumb-English: "R U L8?", "wut 4?," and the like. The rules of lower and upper case have gone out the window. An entire vocabulary of sub-English abbreviations flourishes. What the hell does LOL or IMHO mean anyway?! There is no more inexcusable form of sub-English than one made of abbreviations. Maybe I'm wrong to blame smartphones and their postage-

You don't have to run to the gasoline pump every few days to be a traveler. Somebody whose brain has been independent of television for most of his life visits a strange and exotic land every time he watches a TV commercial. I only watch football on TV, so I'm shocked and amazed by what I see: every other commercial during football games is for a smartphone. Why? Perhaps the advantage of a smartphone is that it allows the average American, who spends half his day stuck in traffic in his pickup truck, to hold the phone in one hand, with his $4 cup of Joe in the other hand, while steering with his left leg, while his eyes look over at the CD player with 64 tiny buttons on it. I don't see what body parts are left to operate the buttons on the remote control of the overhead DVD player, let alone the GPS. It seems obvious that a netbook provides a cheaper and more complete internet experience than a smartphone. Why would a smart consumer want to download, install, and pay for

Starting in October I go nuts over the texture of the grassy fields nearby. As winter wears on, these grasslands lose their spirit and become trampled down. With no birds in the vicinity this autumn and winter, I'm lucky to have this obsession with grassy fields. Normally my camera would switch its obsessions over to hoarfrost by Christmas, but it has been dry and snowless this winter. Ahh how nice it is to have a dry winter! Perhaps the oncoming storm is going to put an abrupt end to that. So let me put up these last photos to celebrate the end of the fall texture season and the beginning of snow and hoarfrost. As usual, click to enlarge.  

I'm pleased to report finding a new financial blog to follow, mybudget360 dotcom. Recently it has featured a post-mortem on the late Las Vegas boom and bust.  If we can't agree on anything else, let's agree that schadenfreude -- the joy felt over other people's suffering -- is not the fairest flower of human nature. But the shameful truth is that I exult over the demise of Las Vegas. Blame that on an ugly, vestigial streak of Puritanism, if you will. Actually it's a little more personal than that. During my years of RV travel, Las Vegas was pretty hard to avoid. Since I hung out in St. George UT during the shoulder seasons, and since the Grand Canyon lacked a bridge, it was necessary to go through Vegas. It was actually a practical and beneficial stop, where a traveler could stock up on supplies, get work done on his rig, and enjoy the last Barnes and Noble for awhile. I also enjoyed free camping at the casinos (where I never gambled) and early-morning, loss-lea

Apparently this hawk has learned from the ravens how to taunt my dog. It flew overhead, no more than thirty feet off the ground, which made focusing difficult. Then it was off to the races, as Coffee Girl chased it across the field.

One of the biggest news stories of the past year has been the financial crisis in Europe. If European unification fizzles, it wouldn't be the first time. But what does the current unifying force consist of? Bureaucrats and technocrats? A utilitarian ethic built around material comfort. Taxes, regulations, uniformity codes, and coercion. How inspiring! But "inspiration" of some kind has been a big part of Europe, beginning in the Dark Ages. From Toynbee's Study of History (abridged), vol. I, page 13: In fact the Empire fell and the Church survived just because the Church gave leadership and enlisted loyalty whereas the Empire had long failed to do either... Thus the Church, a survival from the dying society, became the womb from which in due course the new one was born. Some of that "leadership" was pure bureaucracy. The Catholic Church is almost an alien thing to people who grew up in the Protestant Midwest. As a young man I was on a airplane flight with

A couple Christmases ago, the dogs and I explored volcanic Saddle Mountain, near Tonopah, AZ. It worked out well to approach from the north, the green side. The rains have produced a lot of green "grass." It's not really grass, but looks like it from a distance. The spiny, stalky ocotillos are leafed out with dense, small, green leaves. They'd be perfect Christmas trees if they had their red blooms. Actually I didn't expect to see any green today. It takes effort to give up this notion that lichen belongs in alpine settings being licked by a mountain goat, rather than in the desert. It is surprising how lush and thick it can be here, on the desert floor at 1000 foot altitude. You really could do some rough orienteering on a cloudy day just by noticing the green (or yellow or orange) fuzz on the north side. As easy as it is to enjoy the Sonoran Desert in the winter, I sometimes wonder what I'm missing by not experiencing it at other times of the yea