Just like in the cities, Christmas in the desert is cold but warmed by brightly decorated houses.

Some people may be surprised to hear that, and I have to admit that I wasn't expecting it, either. It's not that I didn't decorate my place (I didn't), but I don't think I quite expected to be so many people up here and so many of them to be in such a festive mood.

First, a word about living a desert community (if I can call Landers that). In the cities I grew up in there were dense population in apartments and a little farther out, residential areas of homes sitting on modest lots right next to each other. There were many blocks of these, and even farther out, huge tracts of land that had been leveled, paved, and turned into blocks and streets of tract housing, a large collection of homes that all looked pretty much alike since they were all built by the same company.

Here, it's not quite like that.

Along the main highways there are occasional communities of ten to twenty thousand people, roughly, that have pretty much everything in the way of shops and services we've come to rely on. And just like the cities, they have apartment buildings and complexes and those single family houses sitting in rows on the street. But (obviously), there are far fewer of each because of the smaller number of people.

I live about ten miles away from the closest of these, but there are a few more within twenty miles or thirty-five kilometers or so. They're often just a few blocks deep from the highway and beyond them is … land (in this case, desert land).

Some time ago, all of this desert land was marked off into a square grid by the government, who owned the land, and then further divided into smaller parcels. Then, I heard, the land was given to anyone who built a home on it and, I guess, could prove they lived there.

As a result of this, over time, some of those parcels were further divided by the people who owned them and sold to others who were looking to live in the desert, surrounded by sand and who liked this sort of thing.

What we have now can be pictured like this:

Imagine a huge expanse of featureless desert as seen from a small plane. Then, draw a checkerboard of paved roads and, within the resulting squares, smaller checkerboards of dirt roads.

The squares inside the paved roads aren't all the same size, though. The average size, I'm guessing, is five acres, or about twenty thousand square meters, but some are twice that, some half that size, and a smaller number even smaller. Actually, it's not always easy to tell because some lots are empty and there was never any consistent placing of the houses on them, anyway. I mean, somebody looked at their five acre parcel, found the flattest spot, and put up a dwelling, which might be anywhere on the land.

We now have the expected variety of houses up here. About half (?) are “normal” homes, the kind just like you'd see anywhere in southern California, in any of our cities no matter how large or small they are. Regular houses with the only distinguishing feature being a propane tank somewhere close to the house. Some of these places are landscaped beautifully, some only right around the house, and some fill the extra land with horses or what have you.

And not all of the properties have fences around them. In fact, I'd say most don't, but nearly all of them have at least some fencing like mine does.

Anyway, here and there, sometimes in clusters, there are abandoned properties. These are often, but not always, tiny homes like the one I'm living in. Driving around it's easy to spot most of the empty places because vandals have broken windows, walls or roofs have collapsed, or it just looks like no one has been there in years.

Many of the homes up here I figured to be vacation or weekend places where people from “the city” would visit to drive around on the dirt, remember what the night sky looks like with stars in it, use to manufacture meth, or just hang out and drink. But, driving around here at night, it became clear that there were more people living or staying here for the holidays than I thought.

At first it was just a few, but many of the places have the same holiday lighting as I'd gotten used to in the city. With the greater distances between the houses, it was never like the block of lights I saw in Los Angeles, but one here, one there, each one separated by one or more football fields from their neighbors.

I especially liked seeing the inflatable snowmen sitting out front.

So, up here it's cheery, festive, and Christmas-y, just more spread out. Also, Santa made it up here last night and stuck some little treats in the pockets on the back of the Christmas gloves I got from my sister and opened last night.

Tomorrow the world may end, but today's not not looking to be any great shakes, either.

A few days ago I got a postcard from my electricity provider, SCE, letting me know about a Planned Power Outage for today (they, not me, planned the outage) that will go from eight in the morning until about three in the afternoon.

In addition to useful tips (keep refrigerator and freezer doors closed), they also included directions to a website where I could learn about its status (www.sce.com/outage) if I typed in the outage number, 540379.

Which told me less than the postcard did.

I have no idea how widespread this outage will be, but I have a hunch it involves more than just my property. That's what I thought at first, mostly because this little house looks to be the only one with a line running to it from the poles that line the main, paved road. Oboy!, I thought, they're going to bury that cable and get rid of the telephone pole on my lot that Minardi likes so much!

Then, a few days ago, I changed my mind.

Early the other morning I saw what can only be described as a convoy of vehicles heading down the main street (toward the post office, right to left down the road, headed east). Big trucks, long trucks, all lit up with more running lights than a Christmas tree normally has, but it was too dark for me to see what was on the trucks.

So, maybe, it's a real big deal, like they're putting in a new sub-station or something. All that I know is what they tell me on the postcard, which is that they're either doing ongoing maintenance or upgrading the grid “with power materials and technologies.”

I have to say that in all my life I've never gotten or experienced anything like this from any power company. I guess it's a desert thing.

Maybe the area is growing or maybe this is a pretty common thing out here. As a newcomer, I have no idea, but it isn't such a bad thing. I may take the opportunity of no power to putter around the property and sort some things out, will probably drive to town for awhile and do some last minute Christmas shopping, and may even stop at a local taco place and get something to eat. I might even take advantage of the only other working thing, my water heater, and take a nice long bath.

They mention on the postcard that power may (or may not) be going up and down throughout the day, also that they'll do whatever the hell it is they're going to do as “quickly as they can” while still doing it safely. Also, I shouldn't expect the times to be necessarily accurate, but I'm guessing they got the date right. They give themselves a lot of flexibility, I'll give them that.

They don't give any details about what it is they're up to, but that might just be because the postcard is pretty general. Or, they don't want to bother those of us who get the cards with a lot of confusing details that we wouldn't understand, anyway.

Maybe I'll see some people working if I drive to town and back and Minardi and I can watch and annoy them, or maybe they will be right here in my yard and we'll have no choice.

What I won't be doing is keeping up-to-date on budget or debt negotiations in Washington nor the latest hand wringing on either side of the gun talk, though it's always interesting to me to see how a “new” point is picked up and then used as if it's the final, definitive point.

Once someone comes up with something, everyone on that side of the argument repeats it like a trained seal clapping for a fish. I guess that's because it's much easier to hear and mimic than it is to think.

Except for me. I'm so accustom to thinking that it's second nature to me, and instead of actually doing anything, I just sit and think and watch the expansive desert view outside my little home.

It was never on my bucket list, but now I've visited a dump.

In this part of the world there's no trash collection, but us residents pay some tax or other that gives us access to the dump. The other day I received my “disposal use permit,” a wallet-sized bright pink card, along with a sheet of paper describing its use and restrictions.

Roughly, once a week I get to unload 500 pounds of trash at no charge, although to be precise, I get to do that four times a month plus four additional visits. The card has the each month of the year on it written four times, and each time I visit the dump, it gets punched.

My card, now, has one punch.

Yesterday I lowered the top on the Jeep, filled the back with some of the trash I'd accumulated since moving here, and Minardi and I followed the signs to the dump. It's only a few miles, a handful of kilometers, away, and we were there in no time.

At the entrance there's a small building with a woman inside, and every time I've visited it to ask questions, there's been a different one. They've all been really friendly and helpful, but this was the first time I actually waited in line for the green light, drove up next to the building, and waited on the scale.

It just took a minute and after some talk about whether those of us who live here are Landerites (her suggestion) or Landerians (mine), she told me to stop at the scale, again, on the way down after unloading my trash, so the weight of my empty Jeep could be entered into the system.

We made our way past the entrance point, followed the road up the hill (or mountain. I've never been sure about the difference), and once it was out of sight of the entrance shack, became a dirt road.

Minardi, I like to think, enjoys riding on dirt roads as much as I do. There's a lot of them out here, which I use to justify the purchase of the Jeep.

There were some signs directing traffic, separating commercial and septic dumpers from the rest of us, and we kept going up and up the hill. It was a bright, clear day and the view from the mountaintop was wonderful, and there was a sign telling me to wait until directed to move.

There were a handful of trucks stopped a little ahead of me and some guy in a bright, high visibility vest, chatting with their owners. He eventually waved me ahead, pointed to a spot where some trash was sitting, and then proceeded to ignore me.

I parked the Jeep, tossed the bags of trash out of the back and onto the pile, and drove back down the hill, back to the entrance shack. The trucks that were there when I showed up were still there, the huge machines used to move the trash around and crush it were still hanging around, waiting to move the day's additions to the fields of compressed trash that waded around the hilly peaks in the dump.

The place looked pretty much the way I'd imagined, but I was surprised at the number of tires. There were so many of them that they were using some to mark off roads, some to hold signs in place, others piled in cairns of unknown purpose.

I'm in good enough shape that dumping the trash myself wasn't an issue, but mentally noted that with no one watching, I could have gotten rid of anything without drawing any suspicion. I'm not sure I could get away with dumping a body, but maybe …

When I got back to the shack, the woman entered the Jeep's info (which must have included the weight of the dog in the passenger seat) into her computer, wrote the license number on my card, and handed it back.

Then, I was free to go. So, I did.

One thing I liked about the whole process was waiting in line in my tiny Jeep between large pickups filled to the brim, some with trailers holding even more trash, as well as a couple of the huge, commercial trash trucks that show up all over the world. I was dwarfed by them, and my little personal load seemed almost laughable in comparison, but this will be how I get rid of orange peels, used tissues, and coffee grounds for as long as I live here.

And also, of course, those bodies...

Yesterday I paid my water bill, which I admit isn't the most exciting or interesting of all possible activities. Still, there you have it.

A few days ago I got the bill in the mail and was at first a little surprised and shocked. Not by the amount, which was around $25, but by the bill coming on a postcard with the charge and amount of water used and all that visible to anyone.

Then, by the time Minardi found a spot or two on our way back from the mailbox to home, I laughed at myself. Why would I be offended at having this information out in the open? Sure, utility and other bills had always come all sealed up, protected from prying eyes and I'd grown used to that, but then I started wondering why.

I mean, really, why was I so worried or secretive about my water bill?

There are some things I'm not likely to talk about, but most of those are because of shame I feel. Somehow, though, that feeling of being my business and no one else's seeps into areas of my life where it's not really relevant.

I have no idea how much water or electricity or whatever anyone uses, but I think that's because I've never asked. I don't think anyone else considers that a secret, but it's not one of those things I see a lot of people sharing.

Anyway, for years I paid for water usage online through the Los Angeles Dept of Water & Power website. My current water provider, Bighorn-Desert View Water Agency, has a website where I can do that, but it's a pretty basic website and only takes payments through a third party who charges about $4 for the privilege.

That's not too bad in and of itself, but it also works out to nearly a week's worth of water. I don't necessarily object to paying for the convenience, but not when it's a substantial chunk of the bill.

So, Minardi and I climbed into the Jeep and went to their office, which is only a few miles away. I had a secret plan for doing that, anyway, since when I was there before they had a display of desert wildflower seed packages that you could buy for a dollar courtesy of some local something or other. When I was there to start my water service, I picked up a couple of those packages, gave one to my sister for her new home, and had used the other to seed a portion of my property.

I've been thinking I seeded a very small patch, too small to fully take advantage of the impending flowery beauty, so I thought I'd buy some more and try to do the whole thing all over again, this time maybe correctly.

Also, I needed to pay the bill without that service charge for using a debit card.

As luck would have it, the service charge applies both on the website and also at their office since the payment is processed by the same third party. So, I paid in cash.

Worse, they were evidently out of those wildflower seeds since I didn't see them anywhere. But, in what I may learn to be a constant feature, this month they were selling Bighorn-Desert View Water Agency calendars. I'd love it if each month there was some different one dollar thing I could pick up when I paid my bill.

Well, I sorta had been thinking about getting a paper calendar and this one, from what I saw while glancing at it, looks to have all the days on it. With calendars I like to save the surprise of what the next month will bring, so I didn't look at all the pictures, but I saw that January features a pleasant view of the “Ames/Reche Groundwater and Recovery project,” which, to my uneducated eye, looks like pretty much every other picture of this high desert. There's no buildings, no facilities or pipes or tanks, just some flat land bordered by mountains.

I also noticed that I have photos of a snake and, for some future month, a roadrunner to delight me later next year.

So, yeah, I have much to look forward to. Of course this may mean I'll end up with two or more calendars if I get one for a Christmas present, but it will have no effect if I'm lucky enough to get some warm slippers.

I don't watch American Idol or any of the other singing shows on TV for a lot of reasons but mostly because I've never been a big fan of pop music. That may either be a question of taste or it just might be that I'm a snob.

So, until moving to Landers, my little world did not include singing sensation Phillip Phillips. I'd never heard of him, never listened to his singing, and knew no more about him than anyone reading this knows which direction I'm facing or what I have on.

But, in my move up here, I was separated from the music I'm used to. The radio station I listened to pretty much since I was sixteen is too distant and its signal probably can't make it over the surrounding mountains. There are radio stations I was able to pick up in the truck that was hauling my stuff and in my Jeep when I drive from the real world to this desert outpost, and the local one when I was moving in broadcast a few times a song I've come to associate with my new life in Landers.

I first heard it when moving in, and latched onto it as my desert home anthem.

A few weeks after moving in (and hearing it several more times), I learned its name and found a video of the singer performing it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoRkntoHkIE) . I was unhappy that the song was by an American Idol winner since I try to avoid anything having to do with that phenomenon, but there you have it.

The singer is cute enough to be popular, I guess, it borders on being too country for my tastes, but there's enough flags in the video to satisfy most people. I can't honestly say I love the song. It's just that I consider it my welcome to Landers so it has an emotional appeal that I doubt anything else he does would.

Like most songs on the radio, I just heard it as background noise, never paid any attention to the lyrics, and only heard the “make this place your home” line. Only much later did I pay enough attention to hear it correctly with the preceding “I'm gonna..” part, but it stuck in my mind as “you're gonna make this place your home.”

Fortunately, this blog entry isn't about the song. I've already said too much.

I'm certainly no expert on buying homes or escrow practices, but in the three times I've purchased property I've always been struck by how anti-climatic it is when escrow closes and the property is finally, legally and officially mine. There's never any formal ceremony, no shaking of hands, no official paperwork, just a call from the realtor telling me that I can pick up the key.

Which, after all the stress, frustration, mysteries, and edginess that the escrow process creates in me, is almost a letdown. After all that, after spending or obligating myself to spend more money than I can imagine, I get a key or two that you can pick up in a store for no more than a couple dollars.

In this case, when I bought the desert place to make my home, I got three keys.

Two of the keys are for the door (I almost wrote “front door” just out of habit, but since this place only has one door, that descriptive, limiting adjective is unnecessary), one for the deadbolt and the other for the spring lock. That's fairly typical in the houses I've owned or lived in.

The other key is for the padlock that fastens one of the gates closed.

As I've mentioned before, while the property is 2.5 acres in size, the house is surrounded by a chain-link (hurricane) fence that encloses about half that. At the corner of the paved road and the dirt one is one gate and farther down the dirt road is the other. Both gates are made of two sections and each of them is held closed by a length of chain that is fastened by a padlock.

That's a very common thing, at least around here.

Some people, maybe the rich ones, have actual locks on the gates, some going even farther than that and having electric gates that can be opened from inside the car. Most of us, though, just have a length of chain wrapped around the gate tying it to the post or, like in this case, holding the two sections of gate together.

It was this farther gate that the third key fit, and that gate is the one I'd been using.

The realtor mentioned a third, mystery key that was inside the place and I found it just inside the door. After settling in, some time the next day, I walked up to the front gate, which looked as though it hadn't seen any use for years, and tried it. The key fit in the lock, but wouldn't turn. I sorta shrugged.

Since the lock on the farther, northern, gate was better (bigger, more manly) than the cheap one on the corner gate, I didn't think of it as much of a loss. Also, the entrance to the north gate, maybe because it had seen much more recent use, was smoother.

A few days later in a burst of optimism I tried that key in the corner lock and was just as rewarded as I had been the first time. The key, simply put, just didn't work, not even after the liberal application of graphite.

So, I shrugged, spit on my hands, and attacked the lock with my hacksaw.

After a few minutes of desperate sawing, I'd made no impression on the lock at all. I thought about prisoners and them getting hacksaw blades in cakes, about spending mindless hours working on the lock with hopes of freedom, but soon grew bored with the tiny results my sawing were creating on the lock.

So, I gave up.

Then, about a week ago, there was the envelope left on the north gate with a couple keys inside, the name and phone number of the guy who'd left it, and carrying the message “These might be the for the front gate.”

Well, despite my hopes and eagerness, they weren't.

They were, in fact, two more copies of the one useless key I already had. But, it got me busy and I went back to Home Depot, bought the type of hacksaw blade that actually works on padlocks, and in about ten to fifteen minutes had managed to cut the lock open.

I already had a couple padlocks that I'd used for securing my bike to replace the now cut one, so I could begin using the front gate (if it worked). The years of disuse had not been overly kind to the gate, and it took some work to move the rocks and blocks that had been placed at the foot of the two gates. One of the gates proved too deeply buried in sand and brush to move easily, but less work was needed to swing the other one open.

Next, Minardi and I got in the Jeep and tried out the “new” gate. There's a lot more vegetation around that front gate, even inside the chain-link fence, which I didn't feel like running over senselessly, but we were able to make it in and out of the gate a few times with success (but with much more jostling over the crevices in the sand that resulted from years of water. The beginnings of another grand canyon is up near that corner, but it's still several million years away from completion).

In the end, I swapped the chain and locks between the two gates (the hefty and newer lock doesn't fit in the smaller chain that had been used to hold the front gate closed) and exclusively used the front gate for the past few days.

Then the original lock began giving me problems. It would unlock, but not open, and was getting more reluctant with every use. Rather than being locked outside my own place, another visit to Home Depot ended up with my buying not one, but a set of two new padlocks that were the same model and design as that original, but now failing, one. Even better, both new locks took the same key, so I could fasten both gates and have one fewer key to carry around and confuse me.

I also ended up buying a new set of deadbolt / spring lock for the door, which also use the same key. Not the same one as the padlocks, but instead of carrying around four keys (one for each padlock, one for the deadbolt, and a fourth for the spring lock), I could lessen my load and have only two!

Yesterday I replaced the door locks, fastened the front gate with one of the new padlocks, and as soon as I get some larger chain, will be able to use the other new padlock on the north gate.

This, when you live in the desert, might be considered progress.

Meager Accomplishments

...some meager accomplishments you may have missed because I never mentioned them.

I'll have to haul out that to-do list to see if I've done any of the items it includes, but, while tiny, I've managed to get some things done. A couple official paperwork items have moved from do to done which means that San Bernardino County now contains another “no party affiliation” voter, the DMV knows where I live, the property taxes are paid up to date, and with the issuance of an updated Grant Deed in my name, I'll soon be able to take my trash to the nearby dump for free!

There are some rules for using the dump, some of which I've no doubt forgotten, but there's a weight limit (per visit? Per week? Per month?), a restriction on the number of tires I can annually discard, a prohibition on liquids and hazardous waste, but most challenging is the requirement that my trash be covered with a tarp.

The people who have pickup trucks, which looks to be just about everyone out here, have no problem with this since they just throw a tarp over the bed of the truck, usually one of those blue ones that were all over that Lost island. I have a few of those myself and, if I don't get that trailer, will have to use one to cover the trash I'll haul in the back of the Jeep.

The dump is only a couple miles past the post office, so its just a few minutes away from here.

As far as the area here goes, Minardi and I have done some sightseeing and have possibly visited three of the nearby Landers landmarks. I say possibly because one of them, the Landers airport, no longer exists and what we saw may have been evidence of its absence or simply more featureless desert. The other two we have seen, but not as smoothly as one would hope.

The first true Landers landmark we visited was the Integratron (http://www.integratron.com/). It was closed, so about the only feeling I got out of it was one of disappointment. Any energy, psychic or otherwise, generated or captured by the structure may have been blocked by the chain-link fence surrounding the property, though, but it did look just like it does in the pictures.

Following that, we drove off to find Giant Rock, which is (was?) claimed to be the world's largest freestanding boulder and also supposed to have something or other to do with psychic energy or UFOs or aliens or something. It's only a few miles up some dirt roads from the Integratron, which is only a few miles from my home, so it's not a very long trip.

At first, Minardi and I took the wrong fork on a dirt road and didn't see Giant Rock at all, just more awesome desert. So, we doubled back, took the other fork, and quickly found an outcropping of rocks that looked promising. One of the rocks was big, so we thought we'd found the place and parked the Jeep and began investigating.

It didn't take long to see all the graffiti that I'd read about (http://www.yelp.com/biz/giant-rock-landers) and also the remains of burned out campfires, spent bullet casings, and broken glass that seems to follow teens wherever they go, but it pretty much pissed me off. We went back a day or two later, took another route, and found the actual Giant Rock (http://www.lucernevalley.net/giantrock/) which, while still marked up with graffiti, wasn't nearly as bad as that other place. Minardi marked off a few places to capture for himself some of that vaunted energy, drawn to it, or perhaps just to contain it, and I thought about the guts it must have taken to excavate a home beneath it.

It really is a huge boulder and I can see why the native Americans were drawn to it. Out here in what's pretty much a featureless desert, something like that would be a natural reference point. We got back in the Jeep, Minardi tolerating being picked up a little bit better each time it's done, and began the drive back home.

The road turned a couple hundred yards farther on and took us to the spot I thought was Giant Rock on my first visit. So, yeah, I was wrong, but I was close!

And, in a final burst of optimism and energy, I planted some wild flower seeds. When I went to sign up for water there was a small box of them on the counter, the proceeds going to some organization or other, so I got some seeds for myself and my sister who's looking at properties that are in much more civilized areas, but still desert-y.

So, I followed the directions and put them in the ground, but perhaps over less of an area than I should have, and sat back to wait the four months or so until they show signs of life. Then, we drove to town to pick up a watering can to help them once they raise their little green arms into the air and begin waving for attention.