Occupation of Independence

Many full time RVers start off with a Livingston TX address since that's where the Escapees organization is. The first year I got a jury duty notice from Livingston when I was in Washington state in the summer. I called a clerk in Livingston, where a human being actually answered the phone. She understood the situation -- they have many RVers on the voting list there apparently -- and I was excused from jury duty.

'Why' is a better question than 'How' when it comes to starting a travel blog. But let's say you have your reasons, and you aren't particularly interested in competing with the postcard industry. Must you get a camera despite your inclinations? That was the question I went off to ponder at a coffee shop in Las Cruces some years ago. Could a travel blogger really be so uncompromising as to expect readers to live without any eye candy? It was a pleasant coffee shop with the usual paintings and photographs on the wall, which I seldom pay much attention to. But I did today. There was something unusual about the photographs. The photographer was a professor at a local college and was a member of a sub-culture that was trying to revive the pinhole camera. (aka camera obscura .)

A couple years ago somebody was talking me into starting an RV travel blog. I had one last objection: buying a digital Brownie camera. I didn't believe in them, and had enjoyed a long career as a full time RVer out West without one.

Can you read the label on the little white poodle's "uniform?" I'm on a streak with small service animals: I love how seriously these little guys take themselves.

Markets are croaking right now in anticipation of the Federal Reserve pulling its hypodermic syringe out of the arm of the American economy; that is, the end of QE II. If I were in the Obama administration or the Federal Reserve I would recommend that the Fed not break out its new syringe, QE III, until a solid consensus of support has built up. In fact the more screaming and bleeding there is in the markets this summer, the better, because it will help to form a "coalition of the willing" across the political and economic spectrum: Chamber of Commerce Republicans on Main Street, Wall Street bankers, narco-Keynesian Democrats -- all could be smacking at the vein in their arms, for another needle of fed-fizz (sugar and caffeine). It's the only idea that economists can come up with.

 

There seems to be a connection between animals hunting in the field and combat in the business world; a person who enjoys watching one should be expected to watch the other. Over Memorial Day weekend the world's most noble and handsome labrador retriever visited me, along with his mommy, who is the best cook in Patagonia AZ. (The fact that I helped to name him, Chaco, has nothing to do with my praise.)

At the moment I am awe-struck by some clouds despite them being completely un-pretty, visually. Clouds are the most under-rated gifts of Nature, at least to a gringo in the Southwest in late May or June, before the monsoons bring salvation. What can clouds be compared to? All I know is that my eyes and skin are overwhelmed by a feeling of gentleness and kindness. As I finished my bicycle ride this morning, I passed a female cyclist who didn't seem like she did much riding. But she sure looked happy. Later she told me that she hadn't been on the bike for a long time, and that she loved the clouds. I had to agree.

We've all heard people tell their "lucky" stories: they were in the right spot at the right time, and got some unbelievable deal on a used car, or met some gorgeous girl who had broken up recently, or got hired to some really cool job. In general, such stories are disgusting; they never happen to you or me. The other day I reached the top of our highest "XYZ Foothills" type subdivision, on my bicycle. Many times I've felt lust and frustration for a connection between the high-altitude dead-end of that subdivision and nearby dirt roads over mountains in the national forest. But I never found access. Lust? Well yes, lust, covetousness, growling-desire. A mountain biker must not be the only savant who experiences these feelings over topography: horsemen must, as well; perhaps even jeepers and ATVers do,

The month of May has found me as a professional tour guide, by my usual standards. Currently I am hosting the fourth RV-blogger visitor to the Little Pueblo. Quite early in the process I realized how difficult it is to be a good tour guide. My own interest in anything is primarily based on its experiential context, not on its purely visual appeal, and never on its appeal when looked at through a windshield. And say what they will, travelers tend to exist on a visual level more so than a resident. Take, for example, a big hole in the ground. Its chances of being put on a calendar sold by the Sierra Club are not so good. But the terror I feel around old mine shafts makes it one of the most powerful experiences that I ever have in the great Outdoors. I knew of a local legend, a steel net, that masked off a vertical mine shaft. It had taken two years to find it in the old mining area that stands over the Little Pueblo. During that two years, the idea of a bottomless mine shaft became

The laughter and ridicule aimed at the latest religious doomsday prophet made me sick. It's not that he wasn't a knave and a fool. But at least he accomplished his knavery the old-fashioned way: by talking saps and suckers out of their own money. There is no accountability and ridicule for the doomsday prophets of the secular Left. Most of them have made lucrative careers based on the taxpayers' money. The most spectacular example is Al Gore and the Global Warming scam.

This is the last of the swallow homebuilder photos. I promise. With hindsight I really appreciate how lucky I was a couple weeks ago to see and photograph them during their maximum presence near my coffee shop. I haven't seen them since. I was surprised how contentious these birds were with each other. It wasn't exactly a replay of the harmonious, Amish, barn-raising scene in the Harrison Ford movie, Witness . Nor did it make me want to go out and buy Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village . If anything, these swallows were fans of Ayn Rand.

I was trying to extract some sympathy from my neighbor about jury duty, or rather, why I should be excused from it. I complied with the court order to fill out my questionnaire honestly and completely. But the court order does not prohibit one from also being candid as well as honest, since candidness is just the particular form of honesty in which you offer more information than they perhaps wanted to hear. For instance, when they ask whether I would consider evidence legitimate if it came from a convict who is bargaining with the State, I said in no uncertain terms that I consider such evidence dubious and probably contaminated.

Is that a petroglyph of a bicycle in the upper left corner? I love close-up photography. There are interesting details that you wouldn't take the time to notice otherwise. Seeing those serrations on the ends of the flower petals surprised me more than driving up the standard scenic viewpoint of the Grand Canyon.

Box Canyon Blogger reprimanded me for my amateurish and emotional accounting: he thought I should stop obsessing over $4 gasoline since it doesn't really amount to that much at the end of a year. Indeed, it's easy to overemphasize gasoline prices because of their high visibility. The beauty of being a full time RVer, in a traditional land yacht, is that a retiree can kiss off the burdens of being a stick-and-brick houseowner; not just the financial burdens, but the domination of your ever-dwindling time by repairs, maintenance, remodeling, and buying excessive crap that you don't need just because you have space to put it. (Not that you'll ever be able to actually find that crap when you need it.) There is something even worse about house-slavery if you believe that true Evil is a banal and insidious thing: in a house you settle into soul-numbing routines centered around comfort, cleaning, and other trivia. One day leads comfortably to the next and you

Anyone who has an inflated ego should just spend more time as an amateur prophet in the business world, politics, or any place actually. That said, Google's Chromebook seems more portentous than anything we've seen in the computer industry for years. I am willing to believe that, five to ten years from now, Washington state politicians will be frantically patching up a government bailout of Microsoft Corp., which will then be called Government Software. The future might be as dark for anti-virus firms like Symantec, or for regular PC manufacturers like Toshiba, Dell, and HP. In order for Google's Chromebook to supplant Microsoft Windows and Office as the desktop standard, there must be an enormous expansion in internet traffic. So the biggest beneficiary of the new paradigm might be the telecommunications industry.

For somebody who has experienced both sides of it, the short answer to the title question is 'yes'. But it's in the interest of some RVers to trick it into a 'no'. That is my current project. By 'camping' I mean short-term sleeping/hauling/sitting in a sub-RV, as opposed to 365 days per year of living/walking in a big RV. I might want to camp for as long as one month, a few hours drive from where I live permanently in an RV park in my no-longer-roadworthy travel trailer.

What would my kelpie, Coffee Girl, do if she were free to bother a horseman? Would the horse rear up and kick off the rider? I used to worry about it. One day this fellow was walking this young horse on Gabbie's Ridge. It seemed like a good chance to test Coffee Girl. She ran up and sniffed at the horse a little, while the horse kicked slightly at the dog. No harm done. Both were rather calm about the whole thing. What a relief. I suppose horses grow up with ranch dogs around here. I'm glad to see a horse culture hanging on in the West, although just barely. For the most part, the economy seems based on retirement housing and healthcare.

It was a quiet and contented life here in the Little Pueblo of the New Mexican highlands. But several friends saw this former RV Boondocker and Explorer as living in a Fallen state, by degenerating into a sedentary lifestyle without the usual excuses of old age, bad health, or domestic servitude to a woman. One pair of RV-based interlopers brought some embarrassing news -- embarrassing because it shows how lazy I was about studying the rules of early IRA withdrawal. By invoking the SEPP option, an IRA owner can make penalty-free withdrawals before he's 59.5 years old, with a couple catches of course. But the catches aren't bad. Prior to this knowledge I was hunkering down to make it to age 59.5 without making any early withdrawals. Perhaps it was just a matter of pride. Early retirement is a serious game in beating the System, and eating a penalty for early withdrawal seemed like a defeat. There was something about it all that suggested a battle between Good and Evil,

It's a guy thing, I guess. Or maybe this Gambel quail is just trying to warm up instead of looking macho.

Whew! I just completed a 27-page questionnaire for serving on the jury of a Federal case in which a conviction could lead to the death penalty. Since I live 100 miles from the courtroom and have no way of getting there, I expect to be passed over. Still, I had to fill the questionnaire out completely and honestly. As a libertarian, more or less, it pains me to admit that the System did a fair and just job with the questions. In fact you could write a long essay in response to many of their rather philosophical questions. Typically they gave two lines for the response, but what else could they do? I have never served on a jury before; this trial is expected to take 6-8 weeks. Naturally I don't want to serve. Gee, would they let a juror carry a netbook into the jury box and write essays about the judicial system? Who knows what answers on the questionnaire the System is looking for. My guess is that they're looking for the lack of anything that either side objects to, rathe

Eric Peters is not my favorite pundit. He actually likes cars. One of the reasons why this blog is anonymous is that I don't see why readers would be that interested in me personally; in contrast, ideas and opinions are -- or at least can be -- more interesting. But in this case a brief autobiographical note might be called for: I grew up in a small town in the industrial Midwest, back in olden times when there actually was industry in America. Small town culture completely revolves around the automobile, right down to the conception of children. It often seemed that the bigger moron a person was, the more they worshiped cars. My parents, on the other hand, were indifferent to the contraptions, and spent as little as possible on them. Peters's editorial today was excellent. It brings some universal aspects of American government and society down to earth, by discussing car loans and the car shopper mentality. It is seditious. That's what we need a lot more of in th

I was mountain biking along a scenic ridge the other day when I was startled by some large and noisy animal on the ground, just a few feet in front of me. A deer would have been a good guess. There is nothing exciting about a deer , but I didn't want myself or the bike to get kicked by those snapping hoofs. It was no deer. It was a large owl that took off from ground level. Well, we've all seen an owl at one time in our lives, but I've never seen one that close. Its big head reminded me of a small football helmet. I didn't see the specific place where it landed, but it might have been at the tree where a half dozen small birds started screaming bloody murder. It certainly would have been a pleasure to photograph this owl, but it would have taken a helmet mounted video camera. I knew of a mountain biker who did that. Long-suffering readers know that I am always railing against the perverted aesthetic of nature that is common in our society. I know what made this ow

Actually there is no tale today. But it was good to get my first photograph of quails after being startled by them a thousand times. My dog has gotten quite fond of charging into bushes to flush them out; she looks like a bowling ball scattering the pins. There is a small dust storm after this, but I'm not sure if the cause is the dog or the furious beating of quail wings. The male half of the Gambel quail couple in on the right.

I am still grateful to the lady who explained to me that introverts are certainly capable of enjoying human companionship and conversation, but they feel drained afterwards. Then they need time alone in order to recharge. In contrast, extroverts actually feel stimulated and charged up by human interaction. At the time I was a bicycle tour leader and experienced proof of her theory on every tour. This anecdote ties in with my recent role as a host to other RVers who are traveling through the Little Pueblo. It wasn't totally accidental: it is spring after all, and the seasonal sybarites of Arizona are headed north and east. But my goodness, three visitors in one week! Life has become a social whirl and I'm exhausted. It was especially fun to meet a younger RVer, Glenn of toSimplify.net , who is even younger than I was when I got started in this racket. Of course, he is cheating: he is still working. Seriously, it is interesting to see the internet result in qualitative chan

It still feels strange to cycle in shorts instead of long pants. Could a transition from cold to hot really happen so quickly? Maybe you have to sense nature primarily through the skin to appreciate this. At any rate, after the ride over the Continental Divide -- practically in the city limits here -- I was relaxing with a coffee at my favorite shop downtown. Swallows were putting on quite an "air show". They are real hot shots; the original "Top Guns". About ten swallows were constructing nests at the interior corners of a concrete roof. This was the first time in my life that I've seen such a good example of this, and just think, it was Mother's Day! How do they cling to hard and vertical concrete surfaces? Do they have suction cups on that tail? While facing these little hot shots and photographing the crap out of them, my back faced an interesting sculpture and water fountain. ("Interesting" to a guy who usually doesn't appreci

After visiting the dilapidated old hospital the other day, my visitor and I wandered over to a geologic oddity in our area, where a codgerish RV friend was camped. (And a high quality campsite it was.) Due to the sybaritic sleeping habits of a couple members of our conversational quartet, we arrived too late to get really good photographs of this interesting pile of giant boulders. My first question at the visitor's center was: why here and not ten miles away? Well, cuz this is whar the rocks iz, the volunteer guide answered. (I rolled my eyes.) Let's try this again: what is so special about the local geology that spectacular rocks are found only here , and not over the entire local area? Actually I'm just having some fun at the volunteer guide's expense. After a slow start he cranked up to give good explanations of how a local volcano deposited a layer of volcanic tuff over the area. Then they vertically cracked and eroded until most have disappeared; only in th

My visitor and I wandered over to the old fort to check things out. It was so tinder-dry around that area, and that made for unpleasant walking through dry brush. We avoided most of it since my companion lacked the sort of clothing that would have been natural in that area. (He wears shorts in the Southwest! grin) It's probably a common thing to go somewhere to see something, and then finding the mind drift off to something quite different. I wondered how I got sucked into appreciating the beauty of dry texture. Do you select a retirement area because you carry a latent image in your head, and then the land develops the image? 'Beauty' is different than mere prettiness of course. Did other people who live in this area get sucked into the same thing?

After two and a half years of living in the Little Pueblo I finally made it to the local attraction, the Gila Cliff Dwellings. I was surprised by how interesting the scenery was on the way there: good viewpoints and deep canyons. In the background is one of the branches of the mighty Gila River, before Phoenix gets its paws on it. The "porches" faced to the south; very comfortable, all year around. Just when the photograph was framed the way I wanted it, an interloper wandered into it. At first I thought he was some kind of New Age/Native American shaman. I dunno. I didn't know that Hawaiian shirts and shorts were sacred to the Native Americans.

Why don't I know the name of these white flowers that show up in May every year? This is the first one for this year. They are probably no big deal to a generic viewer; you have to live somewhere to appreciate certain things; they can't be appreciated just as eye candy. I don't know why, but I like shadows of stamen and photographing flowers from the backside.

Marketwatch.com is not one of my favorite financial websites, and I don't read that many editorials by Brett Arends, one of their columnists. But he certainly did a good job of taking bin Laden's demise as a good opportunity for summing up the "War on Terror". Good work, Brett.

My little poodle, Pancho, celebrates his 16th birthday this week. He has no illness or pain that I know of. But he has the usual old-dog issues like deafness and maybe 50% of his eyesight left. After the coyote attack last autumn (click the Dancing with Wolves tab at the top of the screen) I restricted him to walking on the leash. When he started slowing down and losing interest in going on walks, I was a bit slow to see cause and effect. Another dog owner told me how her last old dog loved eating and going on car rides right to the end. I wondered if I should take Pancho out in the BOB trailer that fits behind a bicycle and let him go off-leash. So I did both. He started acting a whole year younger! What a little scamp. Seriously, his "hearing" has even improved, by which I mean his mental alertness has improved to react to what little hearing is left. But we saw the coyote close to camp a couple days ago. So his off-leash distance from me must be kept short!     I'

I don't know of anything that makes the menacing whrrr'ing sound of a peloton of cyclists in a criterium race, especially when they are descending one of the hills on the back side of the course. During my RV traveling years I always fantasized living downtown in an old mining town. There are only three or four real possibilities in each state. I have started to look for an apartment in downtown Little Pueblo, where unfortunately the second stories of most commercial buildings are empty or abandoned. I wonder how prevalent this sort of fantasy is for baby-boomers who grew up in standard suburban Dullsvilles, with 100% reliance on automobiles built into the lifestyle; there's not so much as a sidewalk in those places.

Seldom have I benefited more from a boob-toob-less lifestyle than recently, when I was spared the non-stop hype over the royal wedding. Why didn't they put it off a couple months so they could've hit the 30th anniversary of Princess Diana's wedding? (I guess there was a groom, but nobody remembers his name.) People who worship the false idol of Progress should ask themselves some brutal questions. For forty years women have been liberated, supposedly, and they've all wanted to become hard-boiled district attorneys Monday through Friday; but they still want to be fairy princesses on the weekend, or at least on one "magical" day of their lives. My gawd, did you see that ridiculous "train" or whatever you call it that Princess Kate dragged behind her with the help of an aide. (Lady-in-waiting?) Perhaps my whole problem is that I'm old enough to remember the world and the media making fools of themselves over Princess Diana. And yet the younger g

Dog owners know that one of their urchin's favorite tricks is falling behind on a walk, supposedly due to some worthy distraction. Then they suddenly look up and realize they're too far away. This brings on a mad dash back to their owner; their paws sound as loud as the hooves of a galloping horse. Coffee Girl, my Australian kelpie, pulled that trick this morning. But something was a little different this time. There was no wind to disperse her dusty contrail. It stayed intact a few feet off the ground and drifted away, ever so slowly. It seemed too solid for anything airborne, perhaps because the rising sun was illuminating the contrail, but not the field proper. It was cruise missile-like; in an earlier era we would have said that it belonged in a Loonie Toons cartoon. The contrail of dust, el camino del polvo , seemed like it was a part of her streaking body. Sigh, if only it had been possible to film a video of this, backlit by the morning sun. At first I wondered if it

I mountain biked up to a viewpoint on the Continental Divide and looked down at our annual bicycle race, once again using my 10 X zoom. When it comes time to buy a new camera, optical zoom will once again be the priority. These are the Men's Pro guys going by. Looks like a few are violating the rules of the road.

The annual bicycle race is back in town and today is the first day. Top) Men's Pro category starts off by heading through downtown. Bottom) I mountain biked to our public park built over old mining land, and photographed the boys leaving town, headed northwest for 94 miles. I needed the 10X zoom.

Finally I found a big-picture article on the subject of oil and other resources. I am not terribly familiar with Jeremy Grantham but I do like this article , particularly the second graph, "Exhibit 2", on page 5. The article is flawed. It is contaminated with standard environmental gloom and doom theology: mankind has been Sinful for living it up, therefore Gaia must punish mankind. I am heartily sick of supposedly intelligent "free-thinkers" taking pride in outgrowing outdated religious traditions intellectually , but then clinging to the most puerile, Sunday-school-kindergarten notions, emotionally . They do everything but suck on their thumbs. Today let's consider some of the ideas in Grantham's article that seem profoundly true. One of them is that mankind needs to focus on growing qualitatively, rather than quantitatively. That's a big topic for another day. In opposition to Grantham's environmental gloom-and-doomism, you could choose the

Some in the financial commentariat say that Bernanke must stop printing money and weakening the dollar by 2012, or food and gasoline inflation will put Obama out of work. It does cause me to roll my eyes when I hear (fellow) Obama-bashers use opportunistic arguments like 'Americans need gasoline to get to work.' Well sure, but I wonder what fraction of our passenger-miles in motor vehicles is really about getting to work. I do a lot of bicycling after the morning "rush hour"; how many of those people who pass me are going to work, versus going on an unnecessary shopping trip, or just looking for an excuse to get out of the house? I could be attributing my own slouchy driving habits to other people. For the sake of argument, let's assume that half of driving is just entertainment, thinly disguised as transportation and phony necessity. Isn't there cheaper entertainment available in this modern age? If you walked up to the average gasoline pump, where a d

Today I was bicycling up a street where I usually get lucky at seeing dog walkers. A woman, with some kind of physical problem, was riding her electrical cart up the street. On her curb side, at a distance of three feet, ran her canine companion. His gait was happy, but steady. At first I went into mooning-and-swooning mode over a happy dog. But this was just habit. It wasn't accurate for this particular dog. He was happy certainly, but not ebullient, as I've come to expect. He was too earnest and professional. Did his owner think she was doing her little friend a favor by letting him run with her, or was he concentrating on doing her the favor? Maybe she realized that her physical problem could be turned to advantage with the electrical cart; most dogs just get tied up in the backyard. I don't think I really appreciated his special type of aura before today: one beyond mere fun, one of responsibility and purposeful effort. Later on the ride I ascended the draw separa

In moving to a retirement town someone who has read a lot over his lifetime might be influenced by good bookstores or university libraries. But that restricts retirees to a small number of cities. How fortunate we are that the internet and eBook gadgets liberate us from such geographical strictures.  My own town of choice, the Little Pueblo of the southern New Mexico highlands, has a small public university. The library's book collection is disappointing; I've learned to turn that to advantage. When walking through the stacks and not finding anything to read, it's easy to feel frustration develop into surliness; then I walk to the lower numbers in the book numbering scheme.  These are the books of general philosophy and historical overview. They are in the last, northernmost row. I pick out one of these books of the Big Picture, and carry it over to large, tinted windows facing north to the ponderosa covered mountains. The stacks are on the second story of a small campu

What I miss about my former lifestyle is taking a mountain bike, dog, and camera out onto a new trail everyday. And sleeping away from city noise. And walking up arroyos with a dog in the winter.  I was never much interested in what I saw through the windshield. There's still a couple years until I can start withdrawing my IRA penalty-free, but it's fun to fantasize about the next boonie-mobile. I no longer want to tow, and be 40 feet long in total. Short trips around the Southwest are all I want; no more full-timing. I want something that gets 20 mpg or more. Inside there needs to be a 3" Thermarest air mattress, water jugs, a solar shower bag, a cookstove, and porta-potty. I would not try to make a pickup cap look like a finished RV, with all the useless overhead of middle-class respectability or feminine decorativeness. It isn't supposed to be a cute witto house; it's supposed to be a sleepable vehicle. As much as I dislike pickups, I don't think tha

At one point during the recent turmoil in Egypt I saw a video of unarmed Muslim protestors kneeling on the street to pray right in front of a water cannon, which merrily blasted away at them. That had quite an effect on me. I wonder how many proud secularists in the West felt uncomfortable watching that video, and if so, did they know why? Was it because of the obvious cruelty or was it something else? There is a connection between this contemporary image and a point made by George Orwell in his review, written in the early days of World War II, of the unabridged edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf. [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all Western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his child

Recently Obama got a question from an audience about the high price of gasoline. Obama, half-jokingly, suggested that if the questioner was driving a vehicle that got 8 miles per gallon, he should trade it in for something better. This outraged the blogosphere, since it was interpreted as a "let them eat cake" wise-crack. But I thought his response was sensible and candid. At this point the reader's eyes are starting to narrow because he suspects that a foot-and-pedal partisan such as me is rolling in schadenfreude over gasoline approaching $4 per gallon. Very well then, I admit that it is 70% of the reason why I agree with Obama's statement, above. But let's discuss the remaining 30%. I'm old enough to remember when the average American drove an automobile, rather than a monster pickup truck or truck-based SUV. Is the nostalgia of old age playing tricks with my mind? I remember passenger cars doing pretty well; many drivers loved their cars. Only farme

Another Protest Friday has come and gone in the Middle East, with Syria becoming a big headline grabber. I have appreciated the commentariat comparing current goings-on with the aborted revolutions in Europe in 1848. This is a subject that doesn't get enough attention in the history books. My first year RVing in the Southwest I was surprised to learn of the unsuccessful German revolutionaries of 1848 who moved to the Texas Hill Country, and left their names on many of the towns. But rather than choose 1848, why not choose the more recent 1968? Those of us who were a bit too young to be a part of the "Big Chill" generation have probably always held a grudge against those who were; and we learned to mock those whose brains froze in that year. But let's play nice and say that there were some serious reasons for 1968 being a year of riots, such as the Vietnam War, racial problems, etc. I still can't help believing that 1968 was put on the map primarily because of

It's so rare to have a success in the gadget world that I want to brag up LG, the cellphone manufacturer, and Verizon, the service provider. I managed to lose my old LG cellphone, after a run of six years. It had even survived one trip through a washing machine. I'll probably find it under a heap of something someday. But I couldn't call the lost cellphone with somebody else's phone, because the prepaid minutes had expired. It was a pleasant surprise to learn that I could keep the old service plan (which no longer exists for new people) and the old phone number. And all of this was explained by a nice young man who spoke English as his first language. I had another cellphone success, of a different type. Unaccustomed as I am to finishing a nice mountain bike ride with a coffee and cookie at a local coffee shop, I did so today. It was so pleasant just sitting there, thinking about the perfect ride and weather. Just then a woman had the effrontery to intrude on this

A camper friend and I were walking our dogs in the "south 40" when we spotted a herd of six deer trying to jump a chain link fence, 5-6 feet high. They didn't use a perpendicular approach as I might have guessed, but approached it at a glancing angle. I was surprised at how interesting it was to watch them try and fail, several times. Their bodies ricocheted off the fence ungracefully, yet they still managed to land gracefully. 'The deer as problem-solver' certainly doesn't fit the sentimental postcard of Bambi munching on a pretty flower, next to a cute witto stream. Perhaps it's an under-rated pleasure to watch animals solving problems, rather than standing around like dumbshits, trying to look pretty. But not everybody sees it like that. Bicycling up near the Continental Divide the other day, I saw a couple deer crossing the road. Yawn. A top-end SUV slowed down and then stopped, right out in the lane of traffic. At first I thought that the SUV had h

It was time for an uneventful hike in an Arizona sky island, a couple winters ago. We went up a canyon or draw, up to a saddle that I recognized from an earlier hike. Although I favored backtracking, since that is the safest thing to do, the little poodle made the decision for me. He headed up to the saddle, which would suck us into making a loop. It was good to see him exonerate himself from his unmanly behavior on a recent hike.   I stopped in my tracks when I saw a dead teddy bear cholla . Since my photograph didn't do it justice, I deleted it. It was as startling as seeing Norman Bates' mother at the end of "Psycho". The dead cholla was more anima-morphic in three dimensions than in the photograph. You could see its two eyes and maw. It was standing up with curved forearms. Its face seemed frozen in a death-agony.    Since villains are seldom that scary when you actually see them, Hollywood has learned to give the viewer indirect views of the vil