Cloudy and rainy today, and my batteries hit the half way mark, half discharged. Tomorrow should be sunny, but it will take a long time to get them charged up. One day won't do it. I'm having a hard time understanding what the guys at Malheur are doing. The original beef, the Hammonds case, sounded like a pretty good issue to me, but now it sounds like unintelligible babble about the Constitution. I'm open to hear them, but let's not make this a...

Oregon imposes a 25% sales tax on cannabis retail products today after three months of no taxes at all. retailers had kept the prices high so as not have a price-shock today. Washington taxes are 37%. This matters a lot in the Vancouver-Portland area. Oregon began accepting applications for licenses for growing, processing, and selling pot today. And, what I'm most interested in, wholesale licenses which I don't know what is meant by them and...

Last week it was the cold, but I got the hang of keeping the place warm using both my cat heater and the furnace. This week it will be rain, but quite a bit warmer. Like today. Enough fell to make the trails muddy, but there wasn't any flowing water. The Big Tent went up yesterday. I'll need to watch my battery usage all week long as the clouds steal my power source. That's an odd story out of Eastern Oregon (aka Western Idaho) at Malheur....

I'm still dry-camping in Quartzsite, where things will be picking up fast now. It's been cold, down to freezing every morning, and I'm tiring of being indoors so much. Have a good holiday weekend!

The Denver Post has been aggressive in covering the marijuana legalization scene since the beginning of legal sales and consumption in January of 2014. I recommend looking at denverpost.com/marijuana to read a week-long series of articles as a look back over the progress and issues Colorado has experienced over the last two years. The gist of the articles coming up this week are that while the bulk of the "experiment" with legal growing and...

The rig is rockin and rollin in winds gusting to 50 mph, but I think more. There haven't been any brown-outs, but visibility is low. As the wind dies down this evening, it will get cold, into the mid-twenties. I discovered something about my new catalytic heater. It's the same model as my old one, but it felt like it wasn't putting out the heat at maximum setting as the old one. That was interesting, but I got more interested that I wasn't...

I'm in Quartzsite now for a while. This time I'm at La Posa North checking it out. I've got a view of the highway, the interstate, and the town itself. Just a mile or so from town. I'm expecting a season of rain, and the El Nino storms can be brutal. Last year I spotted a high spot in La Posa North, a spot that is above the water course, yet with a good trail to pavement without going through a wash. Good spot so far, but there isn't any rain....

The Somerton Tamale Festival has been growing, and it's getting to be somewhat of a hassle. Every year the crowds get bigger and more vendors are set up. And parking becomes more bizarre. But it's still a good festival to see. It didn't occur to me until I got there that I needed to search for a "heart-healthy" tamale, if such a thing even exists. I decided that the closest I could get was chicken and peppers, and spinach and cheese. The cheese...

When Washington passed Initiative 502 in 2012 there were not any numbers that described the current or future size of the cannabis market in the state. Some effort was made at estimating, and these guesses concluded there would be 1.3 billion dollars annually in cannabis sales, and a cap on retail stores was set at 334 stores state-wide. There are currently 220 stores licensed and open in the state. In 2015 the legislature passed laws that would...

Mornings have been very chilly lately, though not freezing. I guess I'd rather have cold than rain. The Somerton Tamale Festival is this Saturday, something I manage to make quite frequently. Last year I bought extras and froze them. Unfortunately, tamales loose a LOT of themselves when frozen. It's with regret, but I won't try that again. For the next few weeks I'll be chasing the sun with my panels as the sun is low in the sky and I don't get...

I went to get gas and encountered a traffic jam of trucks. These were unusual in that the trailers were stark white with no markings of any kind. The Love's parking areas were filled with about a hundred, there were maybe fifty gumming up the roads, and there was a convoy going by on I-8. All with blank white trailers. Some of the tractors had markings indicating they might carry cars, but most were from all over the US. It was obviously a...

Here I am next to the highway and the tracks again. The weather is good, breezy and dusty, but I'm going to look for an alternate parking place on higher, drier, ground. Maybe not for the immediate future, but for later when El Nino becomes a factor. For now, I'm planning on bouncing back and forth between Yuma and Quartzsite for a couple of months. Always with an eye on the weather....;