A year ago today I woke up here in my desert cabin for the first time, and I have no idea how much has changed or was supposed to.

In some ways, of course, my entire life is different but it's also very much the same because, well, I'm still the one living it. The things I do are very much the same, but not what I look at when I can pull my eyes from the computer screen. That's nothing at all like what I saw for the first sixty years of my life and I like the new scenery.

I think the biggest change in me is one of degree, not of kind: I'm just more of what I was. I have less confidence than ever, more insecurity, and an increased sense of not fitting in with the rest of the world. Up here, alone, there's no one to contradict those feelings, so maybe that's why they're growing.

I've done far less to make this place my home than I'd planned to, and I have no idea if that's a good or bad thing. One thing I've noticed is that this first year was spent pretty much putting off doing anything with the excuse being that I wanted to see what the weather was like and to make it through the first year discovering what it would be like to live here. That was an excellent way to procrastinate, and I just about wore that excuse to the bone.

Maybe it was there all along and I'm just using it as an excuse, but I've really taken a hands off approach to life and living. I love it up here and do want to make it my home, but I don't want to be responsible for changing any of it. The bushes, plants, and wildlife were all here before me and I don't want to get in their way. I'm not planning on making any of this the way I want it to be, I want to let it all be and mostly watch and respect it.

I've taken a lot of this, of course, to extremes, but I think that's because one of the things I brought with me from the civilized world was me.

I haven't met very many people up here and haven't yet met anyone I want to spend a great deal of time with. I'm frankly scared of many of them, not of what they might do but that I won't fit in and that they won't like me, anyway. That sort of fear has pretty much ruled my life and, once again, I brought it with me.

Living in the desert isn't very close at all to what I expected, but I came up here with very few ideas about what to expect or what it would be like. It was a place I knew about, had visited and could afford, and that's really the only reason I came up here. I think I'd only seen this area at night before being driven around to look at properties by my real estate agent, so the whole scenery thing was a total surprise. It's not a view of much, I admit, but it's a great place to view the desert and what people have done to it.

The desert, like the world and everything else, is what it is (to be profound), and I don't feel comfortable judging it. It's harsh, except for those of us who live in homes, and I like that. It's patient and minimal, and I like that, too. It's very much different from the city, and I like that best of all.

Although they could have named it anything, the owners of the racetrack outside Austin, Texas, chose to call theirs the Circuit of the Americas. I don't know what the other choices were, how they came up with that one, or why they decided that was the best, but there you have it.

The name doesn't make me mad, but it is embarrassing, and I wince a tiny bit in shame whenever I hear it.

For decades Formula 1 has determined its champions by having races at a series of races at different tracks, mostly one in a country and primarily in Europe. Over the years there've been a number of attempts at having one in the US, but for one reason or another, none of them have lasted very long. Last year marked another return to having a grand prix in the United States and this time it was held at a racetrack specially built for the task outside of Austin, Texas.

It's a decent enough racetrack, don't get me wrong, designed by the only guy in the world who seems capable of doing such a thing, Hermann Tilke. It has ups and downs and lefts and rights and all the things I like in race courses. But it also has an unnecessary letter S at the end of its name.

I'm used to the United States calling itself America, and had they called it the Circuit of America, I'd probably have been pretty happy. But, no, they had to go all out and call it the Circuit of the Americas, which I can't see as anything but an implication that it's the only one in the Americas.

It isn't, and isn't even the only grand prix circuit in the Americas.

For quite a number of years now they've held races in Brazil and Canada. Canada, of course, is in North America and Brazil in South America, so I kinda figure those are races held in the Americas. Soon there may even be a race in Mexico, another nation in North America, which would mean there'd be four races in the Americas, all at different race tracks.

It's not only dumb to call ours the Circuit of the Americas, it's factually wrong.

Since I wasn't privy to the selection process, I have no explanation for why Circuit of the Americas was chosen as the best name. If they'd called it the Best Circuit of the Americas, okay, we could argue that, or Hilliest Circuit of the Americas, or Ideal Circuit of the Americas, all of those might be boastful, but they wouldn't be necessarily incorrect. The Circuit of the Americas, however, is.

If we wanted to go all out and insult everyone, we could have called it the Circuit of the World, but presumably that may have been seen as a step too far. So, instead, we just insult Canada and Brazil by pretending their tracks don't exist or count, and call ours the only one in the Americas.

It strikes me as either the owners of the track ignoring or dismissing the rest of the world or not being concerned enough to do some simple research and understand what words mean. I know there are jokes about Texan's arrogance and America's stupidity about geography, but I don't know that we need to work so hard at living up to those stereotypes.

No one would seriously think of calling their restaurant “The Restaurant of Idaho” or any other state, much less “The Restaurant of the United States,” with the definite article implying that your restaurant was, in fact, the only one. It's great that we have our own racetrack for the Formula 1 series and I hope it's successful for quite some time and hosts lots of great races, but, really, we could come up with a better name.

One that doesn't insult other parts of the world would be a good start.

I know it's unpopular with some people to listen (or pay any attention) to smart people, but I get a lot of it. While those who choose to ignore people whom they consider elite (usually after calling them that name and others and otherwise dismissing what they have to say even before considering it) yell pretty loudly, I don't pay much attention to their shouts and, instead, often end up thinking about things in a new way.

The last couple weeks I've heard things about Facebook that make sense to me and let me look at it differently than I had.

Instead of seeing it just as way of being insulted by people who sought me out for friendship, trading "likes" with others I have no hope or chance of meeting, or letting others know what's caught my eye on the Internet or what I'm thinking about at the moment, Facebook also serves the valuable service of letting people know that I'm still alive and have survived whatever latest calamity the desert has decided to throw my way.

It's also, first and foremost, a business.

And that's where it's sorta the opposite of most of the things I think of as businesses, by which I mean stores. When I go shopping, I buy something that someone has made and while I lose money in the process, lots of other people get some. The people who actually made it get some, the people who employ them get some, the people who advertise it get some, the people who deliver it to the store get some, the people who employ the ones doing the delivering get some, the people who work in the store I bought it in get some, the people who own that store get some, and probably others I'm not thinking about.

I buy a shirt, a whisk broom, a chair, or some groceries or whatever, and other people make money on the deal. I'm a consumer in this case, and the product I buy is the product.

But capitalism works in other ways, too. Sometimes, such as when I'm watching TV, it gets a little more complicated. For one thing, I'm paying someone to provide me those channels, a service, but the channels I watch get most of their money from advertisers. The channels spend some money producing the shows and then sell to advertisers some time to try to convince the people watching the show to buy whatever is being advertised. So, yes, channel or network makes its money by selling my eyeballs to advertisers and, well, that makes me the product being sold.

With a few exceptions such as HBO, that's the business model. The networks sorta let you watch for free, but make their money by selling the audience for their programming to someone who's interested in selling you gold or car insurance.

And that, increasingly, is how Facebook is working. While I think of it as way of showing people what my dog looks like lying in the sand, Facebook could care less about that. What they've decided to do is to make me a product, not a consumer, and to make their money by selling my eyeballs to those who think I might want to buy a matchmaking service.

When I use or visit Facebook, I'm not a consumer, I'm a product. And, yeah, I have very mixed feelings about that.

In addition to the usual privacy concerns and distracting ads, I have some other problems with Facebook.

One of them, or maybe two, is of my own doing. Since I don't want the handful of people who follow me on Twitter to be left out, nearly every of my Facebook postings is a tweet that is also sent to Facebook, which means they're invariably very short and heavily edited to fit into the 140 character limit. Being me, I have much more to say than comfortably fits in that limit, but I try.

Also, I don't want to be one of those people with several dozen updates a day so I spend more time biting my tongue (and fingers) than is probably good for me. And, although I tell myself that I don't need to say it just this minute but can save it for later, I rarely do. This means much of my wisdom is known only to me, which is a tragedy.

Then there's the point of this entry: pictures.

I guess it's the nature of Facebook that what most people share are pictures, pictures of all sorts of things, nearly all of which are better than any pictures I take. A lot of those pictures are in fact cartoons, many are videos, and nearly all of them are fun to look at.

But I have little confidence in my ability to take photos and it's also sort of a pain for me to upload them. Just about everyone now has a smartphone or some such device that makes sharing photos easy, but not me. It's not that I'm necessarily cheap, but last time I checked, there's little to no coverage where I live. My old flip phone works okay, but 3G or 4G coverage is iffy, at best.

Also, I'm cheap and am saving myself some stress by my decision not to keep up with things. It's kind of refreshing, for a change, to be able to ignore a whole bunch of business and tech developments, just to look at them dispassionately and not feel bound to keep up or ashamed for not doing so.

But I'm not sure that's the point.

I'd be more than happy to share pictures of where I live and the places I visit except for a couple difficulties. One, I don't go out and visit very many places and even fewer of those could be considered interesting. I'm fairly certain just about everyone has seen what stores and supermarkets look like and the ones up here aren't any different than the ones everybody else goes to.

And, I live in the desert.

What that means, among other things, is not only is the landscape bleak and, to most people, uninteresting, but it only very rarely changes and even when it does, it almost always does so very slowly. Pictures of nature are always popular, but mostly if they're of something neat to see.

There may or may not be wildlife up here. Other than birds in the morning and evening, just about every creature that calls this place home has learned a valuable lesson: if you're exposed or can be seen, you die. If the desert sun doesn't get you, something else will.

So, while there may be many interesting creatures up here, I only very rarely see them. No flocks of rabbits, no epic migrations of turtles, not even any armies of snakes, rats, or other rodents. When I have managed to see something larger than my fist, it's an individual something and, most likely, soon to regret being so visible.

This area just doesn't support great or even noteworthy numbers of anything. Maybe it's a veritable hive of activity during the night, but that's when I'm usually inside with my dog, Minardi, whom I try to shield from scorpions and rattlesnakes.

I could conceivably take pictures of the birds I see every day, but not any good ones. For some reason, they flee as soon as I show up with my camera as well as not being anywhere I can see during most of the day. Besides, everyone has a pretty good idea of what crows look like and the Internet has much better pictures than I could dream of taking of mourning doves or roadrunners.

I do see plenty of ants, but again, they're not much different than the ones you see. I think sometimes a dragon fly buzzes around in the evening, but it may just be something that looks enough like one (a flying insect about as long as a finger) that I call it that.

So, everyone on Facebook wants pictures, not words, and not only do I feel more comfortable writing, but there's not all that much for me to take pictures of.

So, in the end, I don't have much worth sharing.

You'd think I'd be better about such things.

I wouldn't say it's a lot, but the amount of time I spend worrying about rats, mice, and snakes is certainly … noticeable. While it's true that things like that live up here in the desert, I honestly don't know if they're a problem in my little piece of it.

The land around here is littered with holes, which I take to be burrows, but one thing about the desert that's becoming increasingly obvious is that it doesn't change much. In fact, without someone or something doing something to it, it hardly ever changes at all.

It has no reason to, for one thing, but more importantly, I think, is what makes it the desert in the first place: no water.

Back in Junior High I heard the joke that science had discovered the universal solvent but had no place to put it (you see, being a universal solvent, it would eat through everything). Not particularly funny, I admit, but it laid the way for later on when I learned that water, of all things, comes as close to being a universal solvent as anything nature has given us.

Trees, rocks, dirt, mountains, you name it, water wears it down. Think of the Grand Canyon. It also, I believe, does its job at tearing apart vegetation and probably even dead animals.

There is no water in the desert, which I guess explains its name. This is taking me some getting used to. The guide book for the local Joshua Tree National Forest mentions in passing when talking about litter that many things like egg shells or orange peels that can be more or less safely discarded everywhere else have to be properly disposed of in the desert. Instead of rotting away and enriching the soil or whatever, they just lay out in the sun and dehydrate.

And, stick around forever.

Which brings me back to my burrows. Yep, they're out there. I'd guess there are a couple of hundred on my property alone but I have no idea how old they are or if they're “active.” With no rains to change the land, to crumble their edges, fill them in, or do any of that stuff, they just sit there.

A few days before I legally owned this place I was up here giving it a visit, looking at it and marveling that it would soon be mine. I was checking it out, seeing more closely what I was getting myself into, when a rabbit ran across what I now call the back yard (the area of my property that's outside the chain link fence).

Yes, I smiled.

In the four months or so since then, I've seen nary a thing on the surface. No lizards, no snakes, no varmints of any description. Nothing, really, except that one fuzzybug and ants both red and black.

I'm not entirely surprised by that, given as it's winter and I think this is when any self-respecting creature would be hibernating far underground instead of freezing it's ass off on the surface. When spring comes and encourages the plants to do more than just hunker down and put up with the winds, I suspect there may be more activity, maybe even more rabbits.

And then, I fear, more rats, mice, and snakes, but I honestly have no idea.

I'm worried about them being a problem without even knowing if they'll be a problem at all. Until I've lived here a year, I really have no way of knowing how “active” the land will be.

I remember feeling the same way about coyotes.

They're obviously up here and I've seen a couple, or the same one twice, on the road a few miles from my home. Once during the night when I was watching the sky fall in little chunks of meteors I heard them, far away, howling at something or other. I assembled a small pile of handy rocks near the door to throw at them only to learn from Jim across the street that he used to raise chickens and never had any problem with coyotes.

Which laid to rest my worries about Minardi fending off roving herds.

But, back to the rats. I've never seen any sign of them on the ground, but they're also very sneaky. A few weeks ago when I finally got around to cleaning out a shed that had been erected right next to the rear of the house I did (for me), a pretty thorough cleaning and in all my brushing and sweeping found a total of one of what my mom referred to as “calling cards.”

And that single, solitary tiny turd may have just as easily come from a mouse. And that, like everything else up here, may have been left any time since the day the shed was built.

When I tore down the bush by the corner of the house to get rid of the hiding place it offered to snakes and rats, the one living thing I disturbed in the process was a moth.

One moth.

So, yeah, I'm worried. All those burrows I found inside the fence have had their openings stepped on to more easily see if something comes out. But until I live through all four seasons up here, I have no idea if I have anything to worry about or not.

As they're wont to do, the Marines are flexing their muscles.

They've been exploding things willy-nilly the last week or so, but I'm thinking that instead of trying to show nature that they, too, can make you think of thunder that they have an ulterior purpose behind all these booms.

The explosions, frequent as they are, don't bother me or Minardi, maybe because they're far enough way to be neither sharp nor particularly loud. I sometimes feel them as much as hear them, which is pretty impressive, but they've got about as much land as Rhode Island for blowing things up and I guess they want to show that they need and use it.

Which brings me to my point. There's a real dilemma for the testosterone-driven, one that's been going for several years. On the one hand, the Marines want more land and back in 2008 asked for another 250 square miles or so to better practice blowing things up.

This, I'd imagine, would naturally be just fine with the pro-military types who are based or lived in the area and whom I'd imagine find very little reason to ever deny our armed forces anything they want.

On the other hand … King of the Hammers.

The “Hammers,” as they're called, is an annual off-road race that takes place in the area the Marines want for blowing up. This past week there's been increased traffic in the area as off-road racers have been hauling all manner of vehicles and, of course, RVs, trailers, and whatnot into the nearby Off Road Recreation Center that also serves as the home of King Clone.

I don't think the Marines particularly dislike off-road racing, but I'd have to admit anything they have for moving over the desert would make pretty short work of the professional's buggies and, being Marines, might even welcome the fight.

In any case, the expansion has been delayed or postponed or something and, as is the American way, is probably sitting around in some court or other. The Hammers people, in pressing their case, cite how important their event is to the community, talking about how much money local businesses get, how hundreds of thousands of people will lose their way of life by the loss of public land, and even that thousands of desert tortoises might get blown up. Their thinking, it must be assumed, is that that is a fate somewhat worse than being run over.

It's gotta be hard to choose between tearing up the desert and supporting the military, and even I'm of two minds about it. Without a strong, overwhelming military, we'd have hundreds of thousands more adolescents running around our cities maybe painting everything in sight or trying to get on YouTube by attempting some feat after asking a friend to hold their drink a moment.

So, I'm thinking the Marines are just showing off right now. Also, that the King of the Hammers race will be a success and might be worth a visit.

The desert is trying to kill me.

A couple days ago I woke up just fine, but while drinking some coffee I noticed that my foot hurt, that I was hobbling around, and that it really hurt to stand or to put any weight on my left foot.

This made me mad.

My body, it seemed, was falling apart, quicker and sooner than I expected, and no matter how frighteningly old and sad that guy who looks back at me in the mirror looks, I like to think I've still got a few good years left. But, no, it looked as if I'd be forever lame and immediately envisioned all sorts of drastic events.

When I took a shower, I felt refreshed and better, and not just because of my squeaky clean skin. I couldn't help but notice that my left foot, the one that was painful, was swollen, all pink and puffed up. Later, I looked more carefully at it and wasn't too surprised to see that on the ball of that foot there was a small circle, about the size of a pea, that was dark and in its center was what looked like a tiny bite mark.

So, there was a reason after all for limping, which was much better than thinking that my body was just failing in general. I was also pretty happy to see that there were no lines, dark or otherwise, leading up from the bite since I'd been told that was a sign of poison heading toward my heart and would severely limit my remaining life to a matter of hours.

A dab of antiseptic and a band-aid later, and I was good to go.

And go I did, outside to look at the desert and more specifically, at my little bit of it. This is a fairly common pastime of mine and not only gives me time to reflect but also lets me check up on the crap that still surrounds my home. Between desert winds, light sprinkles of rain and whatnot, it never hurts to check how things are holding up out there.

While still messy, nothing was out of place, but it did make me a little sad when I saw how overwhelming my future would be if I ever got around to actually starting to do anything.

So I went back to my chair by the front door, sat, and stared. This was better.

Or, it was better until I looked at the Comet cleanser that I'd poured around the entrance to my home, just around the threshold. I was told that was good way to keep ants out and, since that's the sort of thing I want, I'd done it and had been pleased with the results. I'd even seen actual ants approach the blue field, draw back, and walk its length before throwing up their tiny ant arms in frustration and returning to explore the larger, Comet free, desert in search of food.

While it works okay on ants, I couldn't help but notice that something else during the night had pretty much disregarded the repellant properties of household cleanser and had left a series of tracks along its length and width.

I first lied to myself that it must be lizards, but if so, they were left by some rare breed of lizards that don't have any feet since there were no foot prints. Nope, just squiggly lines in the Comet, ones that I immediately assumed to be those of young rattlesnakes since they were only about the width of a pencil.

The Internet told me that rattlesnakes like to live in or under bushes, rocks, and bits of wood. Not surprisingly, I have all three on my property, but between the door and the corner of the house, there's a bush that I never particularly cared for.

Not only does it have stickers and small puffs like a dandelion, but much smaller, but it's growing right alongside the house and, no doubt, undermining the foundation. Also, at the corner of the house is a small pile of rocks whose presence I've not quite figured out. The way I see it, there's two obvious possibilities: they're decorative or they're functional.

Many, if not all, of the homes out here have decorative rocks on the property, perhaps because they're everywhere out here and, at the very least, people move them out of the way so there are smooth places to drive and walk. The bases of the larger bushes on my own property have partial or complete circles of a variety of stones, so it may have just looked pleasing to someone to have some piled up at the corner of the house.

Or, they could be serving some useful purpose and maintaining the integrity of the foundation against wind and rain. In either case, it would be easy enough to move them (carefully, taken care not to be bit if snakes are living there) and get rid of the ugly bush, but I was a little worried about exposing the foundation.

In driving around, most of the places have exposed foundations, so my thinking of learning of how to lay brick may be a tad premature. What I may do is something I learned from the experts who came to repair our computers back in my working days and remove the rocks and then “monitor the system.”

By monitoring the system, of course, the techs meant hanging around, joking and talking and occasionally taking me out for sushi. It was a professionally accepted term for doing nothing and perfectly describes sitting back and watching nothing happen.

So, in addition to keeping an eye on my foot, which is pink like a baby and of a nice size for women if they were as drawn to thickness as they are foot length, I'll move the rocks, cut down the bush, and monitor my house.

At least until I actually have to do something.

In visiting King Clone the other day, a few things came to mind.

First, since it's no longer the oldest living thing on the planet, Americans don't really care much about it. It used to be number one, back before some discoveries in the past few years, but it's now dropped to third or possibly fourth, with the result that most people may think of it as an oddity more than anything worth seeing.

Still, it's out there, and not too far from my desert home.

Plants have a tough time of it, and not just those trying to eke out an existence in the high desert where there's very little rain and they're forced to live in sand composed of deconstructed granite.

Worse, other than vegans, vegetarians, and some foodies and gardeners, no one cares very much about the half of life that isn't animals. Even the best of plants aren't anywhere near as cute as a kitty and, to be frank, they don't exactly do very much. Oh, sure, some of them are pretty, but other than suffering the ravages of neglect and dying inside the home, if they can't be eaten or used as building supplies or fuel, we pretty much leave them alone.

In the case of King Clone, it (or he), is very much left alone, which is probably a good thing.

It may be over an 11,000 year old plant, but being located on the outskirts of an Off Road Vehicle area didn't bode well for its seeing its 12,000 birthday. So, someone put a wire fence around the area it's living in, which is about the only thing that sets it apart from everywhere else in the desert.

It used to be said of Microsoft that their policy against computer viruses and whatnot was keeping all their software secret. Whoever is interested in, or maybe even responsible for, keeping King Clone around, is taking a page from that book. I'm not sure there were ever going to be crowds of people flocking to look at an old plant, but there are certainly no lines of visitors, no souvenir booths, nothing in the way of guides or even signs. It's there, and if you want to look at it, you've got to find it.

Which, maybe I did.

Being unmarked has the advantage of keeping away the merely curious, which is probably a good thing in this land of rugged individualists. It's unlikely that anyone would just shoot it for the hell of it, but I wouldn't put it past those who haven't yet learned to put up with being told what to do or whose desires are solely driven by what they want, might just want to kick it, pluck at it, run over it, or otherwise destroy or injure it just for the hell of it. People are like that.

Since I'm guessing most people don't even know it's there, it's very much left alone.

The only indication I found of its location was placed by what I can only imagine are hippies since they made a tiny cairn on the roadside and a small arrow of rocks pointing under the fence. I hoped a similar cairn would exist inside, indicating King Clone's location, but I didn't see any.

What I did see was, of course, thousands of those creosote bushes, some in rings. Whether or not I saw King Clone is up for debate, but even with knowing that it was it, I'm confident I saw it since my eye past over pretty much everything in the area.

If it's still out there, I must have seen it.

(This website – http://www.lucernevalley.net/creosote/photo_tour.htm – does a better job than I could ever hope to do) The signs he saw, I didn't.

The desert is changing me, or at least my behavior. Then again, it could be age.

This part of the world has a lot of rugged individualists, but in at least one sense I'm finding that I'm becoming the exact opposite. I've never been a fan of torture or cruelty, not that most people are, but I'm getting further and further away from acting in my own self-interest or justifying my actions because something is easier for me or simply because I want it.

To be specific, I'm talking about plants and animals.

To get an idea of what I mean, check out this Google satellite image of my immediate neighborhood – http://goo.gl/QVNzU

After being appalled by the ugliness and boring sameness of the desert, look again, maybe zooming in a notch or two and looking around the area. It's not as obvious from ground level, but it didn't take me very long at all living here to see that within just about every property's fenced in area, there's hardly any vegetation (mine included).

And, I've decided that hardly any of this clearing was done on purpose.

Years ago, when I had my first Jeep, I used to love driving around in the mountains and desert, climbing hills, tearing up the land, and working all four wheels for all they were worth. It was fun.

I'd heard some of the concerns, even back then, about off-road driving and riders ruining the fragile ecosystem, but the only part of that that I paid any attention to was driving only in authorized areas. I've always, usually, been pretty much a wuss when it comes to breaking the law.

In the past few weeks, however, after getting both of my gates to work, I've noticed a change in my attitude. In the mornings I usually stroll around my enclosed area, picking up trash, seeing if anything's been damaged or any of my outside possessions have moved, and just checking around to see which of the holes in the ground are active. Also, it must be said, basking in the knowledge that it's mine.

I also check for animal tracks to see if any coyotes or anything has been messing around, and for longer than it should have, puzzling over circular tracks that surrounded some of the plants (I even took some pictures of them, which would make this blog visually appealing, but you don't get to see them yet because they're still locked in the camera). After going outside on one of our particularly windy days, I saw a lower branch on one plant scraping the ground and figured them out.

See, the wind blows, moves the plant, and when it hits the ground it moves some of the sand and small rocks aside, leaving a mark. Since the plant is rooted and can't move much, the branch acts like a compass when the wind moves it about.

In my investigations, I've seen just about all the plants that live on my property. There are probably only, at most, a half-dozen different varieties, but a few of those have examples of them in different stages of growth. Some I've come to recognize as fully grown, others as their earliest arrival on the planet, just past a sprouting seed.

Yeah, I take the time to do that sort of thing when I should be doing something else, something worthwhile and productive.

Even though I've only been here a couple months now, and haven't even lived through one summer, it's pretty obvious to me that everyone who's called the desert a “harsh environment” knows what they're talking about. It's not too much of a stretch to say that what lives here ekes out an existence, and I'd be dead in no time without the nearby town and grocery stores.

For better or worse, it's given me a deep appreciation for what lives here and a sense of respect for all those things. They were here, obviously, before me and have managed to grow, reproduce, and survive for tens or hundreds or thousands of years. I think it's fair to say that something that's figured out how to live here over the past few hundred thousands of years deserves a little respect.

Even bugs. Even stupid little, ugly plants.

When I first drove the Jeep from my house to the front gate, I drove around the large plants if for no other reason than “why mess with them?” By the second trip, I was avoiding driving anywhere that wasn't just sand. Part of that may have been because I saw the tiny shrubs as “mine” and not to be messed with, but a large and growing element of that decision came from a “live and let live” philosophy.

Yes, I'm a member of this planet's dominant species and can pretty much do whatever I want, but there's rarely any reason for me to do so. If they're not actively engaged in trying to kill me or ruin my stuff at the moment, why not just let them live? It's what I'd want them to do.

So, instead of flexing my muscles, doing what I want, and showing these struggling plants who's in charge here, I drive and walk around them. Yep, it only takes a couple seconds to kill them off, but it also only takes a couple seconds to go out of my way and let them live to see another day.

I'm sure that hardly anyone living up here clears the land around their houses. The satellite photos show what the land looks like when we leave it alone, and also how our walking around, driving around, and just generally mucking about strips away the plants. I'm convinced it isn't intentional, just something that happens over the days, weeks, and months of tromping about, carrying things or just moving around.

And, unlike the rest of the world, things just don't grow back the next season. What's learned to live here has, I think, learned to do so slowly. Although we're supposed to get a millimeter or two of rain today, there really isn't enough here for anything to sprout up a foot a day. Or even an inch. The plants up here, hardy as they are, know how to shepherd their time and resources, and it sounds silly, but I've come to respect them for that.

You can get a lot done without electricity, especially if you're me.

Normally when the power goes out I get upset, feel lost, and sooner or later get bored and unhappy. If it happens during the night I can amuse myself for a short time finding and lighting candles, lanterns, or flashlights and setting them up only to discover that no matter how well they're placed, they won't help me watch TV or play with my computer.

This time, however, it was different. Not only had Southern California Edison warned me that I'd be without power, but they'd given me an estimated time it would come back on. That's extraordinarily helpful.

It went out about fifteen minutes after they'd said it would and, for a moment, I thought maybe the scheduled outage was postponed again. But, true to their word, after I'd unplugged everything I cared about that wasn't a major appliance, my little clock radio turned off. Unplugging all my personal electronics, by the way, isn't as difficult here as it would be in any other place I've lived since I only have about three outlets that I use (but, through the miracle of extension cords and multiple outlet adapters, closer to ten things plugged in).

For the record, I wish this place had more outlets. Many more. And, that the few there are were more conveniently located. There are seven, total, inside my home but two of those (for some reason) are in the bathroom where I only have one thing to plug in. The living part of the house has one on the kitchen counter and another behind the refrigerator, rendering it useless.

The “cabin” part of the house has one on the south facing wall, the one with the two windows and it's supplying all my computer stuff and, on occasion, a space heater. The western wall has one behind my beautiful, but massive, armoire that is used for for both satellite dishes and my TV and another that's behind a large bookshelf and is effectively useless. At the foot of the bed there's one I use for my clock radio, and that's it.

So, in short, the one I can get to is overloaded and the rest are pretty much useless.

But that's not the point.

After discovering that the camp stove I bought when I moved here and wasn't sure if I'd have any electricity at all actually isn't a camp stove and doesn't work. So, instead of coffee, I quickly pulled an emergency energy drink from the refrigerator and set it outside in the sun to warm up to “downright chilly.” I considered building a fire to make the coffee, but didn't want to risk burning the handle of my Bialetti coffee maker, without which I'd sob uncontrollably.

Driving into town to see about getting the weatherstripping on the Jeep fixed was a bust with the auto glass place seemingly out of business and its nearby body repair place temporarily missing the one guy who could answer my question. Maybe, when I drive to another, larger town, I can find an open and working auto glass business and get it done there.

After stopping at another store or two with Minardi patiently waiting in the Jeep, I stopped off at my realtor's office to give her my tardy thanks for setting me up in the place. She, her husband, and I chatted because here in the desert no one ever is too busy to talk, and I was pleased to see that someone else shared my belief that the obsession with UFOs in Landers can be chalked up to people not realizing that the adjacent Marine base does quite a bit of artillery practice.

She had electricity at her office, but my next stop, much closer to home, at my water provider didn't. I'd gone there to see if they could tell me where my water box / meter / shut off was, and next week they'll give me a call or send someone out to point it out.

I hoped to get some coffee, stopped at a gas station who was also without power, and got a large cup of cold coffee for a buck.

With a few hours to kill before I could expect the power to come back on, I sat outside and sharpened a few knives, moved some of the crap outside around, and took care of some chores. About three o'clock, when the power was scheduled to come back on, I sighed and moved the stuff near the armoire so I could pull it out and retrieve the Internet satellite power cord that had fallen behind it when I carelessly unplugged it earlier in the day. When I re-arranged everything to put it back and put some things away, I was delighted to see that I'd managed to acquire a few square feet of empty floor space.

Now, normally, I don't think I'd even notice getting a couple square feet extra room, but in a home this small, it's tremendous. Yes, if I did a better job (read: any at all) of putting things away, I could conceivably reclaim two to three times that amount, but I was amazed at how much progress I could make with such little effort.

I'll get used to it quickly, but just uncovering a foot or two of floor space makes a huge difference when your place has so few to begin with.

A few minutes after the scheduled time, the power came back on and my cheery, relatively spacious, little home was filled with beeping clocks on all the appliances demanding attention.

Then, I got everything plugged back in, got it all working again, and here I am.

The power's supposed to be shut off again today, and this time I think they mean it.

Last time this was planned I got all ready for nothing, only to discover a postcard when I returned from heading down to town to find a postcard telling me the planned outage had been postponed to today. Whether I got that postcard the day before or that day, I can't say for sure. The thing is, try as I might, I've yet to figure out when my mail is delivered.

But this time around, I've even gotten a telephone call from my electricity provider, Southern California Edison, so I think they mean it. Actually, I got two, but one of them was another of those missed calls that I ignored. I tend to do that if I get a call from some 800-type number, the ones I just figure come from someone trying to scam me into something.

The good news, for me, is I'm not a family, not even if you include my dog, Minardi, in the counting. It's not hard for me to unplug the things that might suffer if the power spikes or keeps coming on and going off throughout the day and live without them because I won't have to listen to anyone complaining about not being able to watch TV or play with the computer. Better yet, I think, I won't be worrying very much about the refrigerator because I don't expect to be opening it until the power's back on for good.

Well, not more than once or twice, anyway.

I don't like to use the refrigerator very much any more, anyway, not since I screwed up its doors. By being careful and using a shim, in this case a large Sharpie, I can keep the doors sealed, and even though I've worked out a pretty efficient way of not wasting electricity by letting the doors leak, it's still a pain.

One thing I remind myself about is how much easier it is to live alone with no one nagging me about the refrigerator door, no one opening it a million times when there's no power, no one repeatedly asking me when the power's coming back on so they can heat up some trash in the microwave to eat. As much as I miss having someone close to share things with, this is the life I have and in some ways it's much easier.

But that's not the point.

For a couple more hours the electrons will flow and I plan to make the most of it. I don't know yet if I'll head into town and see about getting the Jeep's weatherstripping fixed or not. Minardi, of course, would like that, or at least the ride, but I'm a little unsure how well he'd handle hanging around for a couple hours while they did the work. He's a little too old to enjoy walking around for a long time, so maybe the best that can be done is to go to a car place and make an appointment to have the work done tomorrow or whenever.

And maybe that's just what I'll do, then come back here and pretend to put things away, clean up the place, and maybe even get something or other off that to-do list I keep ignoring (unless it's to add something).

I suppose it's that time of year again, when I need to make up some promises for myself. Since this is the first new year in my new home, the process will be either easier or harder, depending on if I decide to focus on bettering myself like in years past or just take the easy way out and make resolutions about my new environment.

This year I resolve to drive on every street in Landers that shows up on any map I have and/or every one in my zip code.

This year I resolve to stay away from each and every nationally advertised corporate eating place in Yucca Valley and try the food in four of the local places.

If the whole money thing works out, I resolve to build a carport / garage thing for the Jeep.

I resolve to learn the names of all the plants on my property.

If the skies are clear, I resolve to watch the International Space Station fly over my home this evening (http://iss.astroviewer.net/observation.php).

Although I have no idea how to do it or much in the way of hopes for success, I'd like to learn how to be less influenced by what I guess other people think of me. It's downright counter-productive and silly to worry about that all the time, especially since those other people don't even think about me all that much.