Beginning the New Year in the Valley of Death

A TWO, two ZEROES and a NINE. I do not care for these numbers. They feel unstable, not friendly—all in all, a most unsettled set of digits. And we will have to live with them for an entire year. Oh well—nine years ago when the number in the thousand’s column switched from ONE to TWO I knew I would be in for a lot of years of numerical uneasiness. It does not help matters any that Mr. T insists that the correct word is INTEGER. I assumed that “number” and “numeral” and “digit” were all interchangeable—but he informs me they are not. This is a conversation I am sorry was ever begun. I shall use “number” and let the reader infer the sense of the word from the context—the context of which will now be zero.

We left Tecopa and headed into Death Valley. The weather is holding at absolutely perfect. I realize that not everyone understands the beauty and tranquility that I find out here but Death Valley has to be one of the most spectacular places on the planet. It is surprisingly uncrowded right now.

We are in Stove Pipe Wells for tonight and enjoyed a trip up a canyon to Aguereberry Point. There was snow and ice on the road and a great vista encompassing Badwater to Furnace Creek. We could also see Charleston Mountain where we were yesterday—80 miles away!
If we hoof it over to the motel there is a small room equipped with wifi. It would be so easy to feel totally cut off from the world out here. Instead, I will try to contact my cyberfriends in the chat room as well as post to the blog. Isolation is a horse of a different color these days. And is it true that the governor of Oregon is considering using GPS coordinates on citizens’ cars so that the state can levy a tax on miles driven now that gasoline tax revenue is drying up with the use of hybrids and conservation? Perhaps the time has come for term limits on all our politicians who seem incapable of not succumbing to “stick-it-to-the-taxpayeritis.”