Organ Pipe Cactus NM, Arizona - December 16, 2006

Hi, everyone. Things are mostly going well here. I had food poisoning this week (or possibly a flu - I'm not really sure). Two new SCA's for Interp moved in next door, one of whom had pink-eye, and the other a bad cold; meanwhile, a couple of other guys moved into my house temporarily while they were doing soil studies here, and one of them had strep throat. And yet somehow, in the midst of all of these contagious diseases, I managed to pick up something completely different. Sigh... Anyway, it wasn't too bad. I didn't get any sleep Wednesday night, and I spent a good part of Thursday morning crawling around on the floor, since standing up made me nauseous, but then I had some chicken noodle soup and watched 'The Princess Bride' in Spanish, and by the next day I was fine.

At work, I spent the first couple weeks doing training, the next week driving around doing road surveys, and since then it's been a mix of office work (finalizing a report, analyzing data, making maps, etc), trail surveying, and more training. I've picked up four bikes from the desert so far, none of which (regrettably) were rideable. My previous worry, that I wasn't going to be able to find enough work to keep me busy, looks like it's not going to materialize in the foreseeable future. A bunch of new people have been arriving, now that the season has officially begun, and I've been sitting in on some of their training sessions. Most of them are retirees, who spend four to six months out of the year working 40-hour weeks in the park, in return for parking spots for their RV's. They all seem nice, although it's rather odd being surrounded by so many people so much older than I am - Jackie, one of my fellow SCA's here, after going on a driving tour of the park with a bunch of the volunteers, compared it to being held hostage by senior citizens. Today we're going to go to the beach in Mexico, which should be a bit of a change.

Wednesday night, when driving to Mexico to get some dinner, we stopped to pick up some hitchhikers. There were already seven of us piled into Charles' VW bus, but we figured we could take three more, so we let them in and gave them a ride to and from the gas station. Apparently they'd been driving back from the beach in Mexico, and had run out of gas. All three were scantily clad, heavily made-up, and very drunk. "We've basically been drinking since last night. We had some beers, mixed drinks, then some bloody marys for breakfast, plus some shots - oh, except for Tanya, she didn't have the shots - she's our designated driver. Anyway, so we gave our credit card to two of our friends - they hitched a ride north to try getting gas up there - so we don't have any money - we spent it all on drinks - do you think, maybe, you could lend us a couple bucks for gas - oh, no, you don't have to bother driving us back to the car, we'll just walk - no, really, well, okay, thanks - and, it's kind of a problem, none of us have any ID's - which way, do you know, which way's Phoenix?" I hope they make it back okay...

Things here are very busy. I'll probably spend some more time this weekend doing office work, to try to finish up some of the main projects before I leave for Christmas. I'll talk to you all later.

- Nathan