stepping off the edge

Yikes! $2.57 a gallon! That is my California showing. No one here seems particularly taken by the price, but coming from $4 and $5 land it is a shock.

Now some might say it is due to the most excellent refinement of California gas, but it does make me wonder. Perhaps we keep paying so there’s no need to lower prices.

Let me jump back a few days. We were able to stop in Phoenix to visit a friend/relative by marriage. Dan Taylor and his wife Agnes are perhaps two of the most elegant, gracious humans I have ever had met. Despite being a high level executive at IBM for many years, he has always been gentle and humble. He’s been a source of inspiration to me over the years, and I am pleased to see him approaching his 90th birthday clear of mind and as eloquent as ever.

Back to Taos, once again god sent snow raining down on us. This time while we were out and about… triggering… flashbacks of sliding sideways on the Garden State Parkway. Ok, shaking it off now.

A strange quirk of the place we are staying in Taos is that there is no garbage, as in no cans outside, no pickup, well, no road to ever imagine a garbage truck navigating. The instructions from the home owner was to gather the garbage, take it into town, and deposit it in any available dumpster/trash can we could find.

Now I am not averse to midnight shenanigans. I won’t go into some of the things I have been party to. This is because they are too numerous to mention and fear of the statute of limitations might not have run out on some of the more egregious ones.

I do have a strange and warped sense of right and wrong for the silliest things. Such as not parking in areas that are designated to be for other institutions or retail establishments I am not going to frequent. It would seem dumping my garbage in someone’s trash can is one of them. But we were on a mission, so after driving through several shopping plazas and eyeballing various dumpsters, all of which were either locked or of the type you could not throw a bag into, we resorted to the municipal parking lot where there was a trash can that quickly became full of our household garbage… I feel dirty.

Tomorrow we are off to Santa Fe. Tonight we embark on a pastime we call “Shawshanking.” In other words getting ready to make good our escape from this home. This home exchange thing has the faint taste of squatting in a house we just happened to find unlocked and making it out before anyone comes home!

Finally, a look at the first 50 stall charging facility.

It gives an EV owner hope.