Notes From A Bear's Journey

     Most of you are too young to remember a television show (in black and white) called Hopalong Cassidy .  Heck, I don't even remember much of it, but it must have somehow impressed me as a young child because my mom spent a bit or her savings to have a studio picture taken of me (back in those days, stores such as Sears and Penney's all had small "portrait" studios where for some relatively inexpensive sum you could have your picture taken in a proper setting...on film, no less!)  T his was all in the days before higher-end stores arrived such as Nordstrom or Macys, stores which would later send those everyday stores out of business (Sears would always send out a phone-book sized catalog each year, a godsend for us 10-year old boys just starting to feel hormonal urges and ogling at the models posing in grandmotherly bras and Bridget Jones panties; in rural parts of the country, those catalogs landed in the outhouse and became several months worth of toilet p...

     Many of my friends, even those my age or older, call me old school because I write checks, those old fashioned slips of paper that as a form of monetary tranfers, are on the verge of fading into the sunset, perhaps taking me along with them into that great recycler.  And yes, I've heard all the cautionary tales or how those paper checks contain all of your banking info (routing and account numbers), and how ball point ink can be washed off and the amount rewritten by unscrupulous and nefarious individuals (gel ink dodges this problem, but really, who even uses a pen these days?), and how checks can get lost in the mail.  Heck, even the IRS no longer issues paper checks (which I discovered this year, sending even more of my info to DOGE and who knows who else).  Even my trash company --the county one that picks up your trash bins for waste and recycling each week-- said no more checks: electronic bank transfers only (we paid in advance to avoid this for...

      See if this makes sense to you.  You live in the desert --as in 118 degree heat-- and you farm water-intensive crops such as cabbage and other leafy produce, as well as corn and alfalfa.  Your water comes from a dam that diverts nearly 7 million gallons of water from the Colorado River, which doesn't sound like much except that the amount is 7 million gallons each   minute !  420 million gallons each hour, or nearly 11 billion  gallons per day.  And how is this all legal when other areas are drying up or struggling to get their own dams full enough to run their turbines? (Lake Powell and Lake Mead are pretty much only surviving because the federal government ordered other reservoirs to release some of their water to keep both Mead and Powell from reaching deadpool status ; however, many stopped once their own water levels dropped to a 60% level).  Welcome to the world of  "grandfathered" water rights, pacts generated from ove...