I'm sitting on BLM land right now. The check-in station is closed, but the dump and water stations are open, though not monitored. So it's basically business-as-usual, very low impact. These functions are staffed by unpaid volunteers, but they cannot "work" anyway during the shutdown. No savings here. An observation: Over the last month I've seen BLM enforcement just once. Today I've seen them 5 times. This may be the usual gov't theater when...

Vermont is a legal state, but it does not have a regulated commercial market. They are considering state control of a marketplace, but requested a committee provide input to the decision makers. The committee recommended that the issue of detecting impaired driving be addressed first and foremost before proceeding. My note to Vermont: Over 30 states, hundreds of counties, thousands of communities, several nations, and all Canadian provinces have...

After so many years of successful legalization in the West, I'm baffled by the approaches seen in the East: New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo: "We will end the disproportionate criminalization of one race over another by regulating, legalizing and taxing the adult use of recreational marijuana." (December 17, 2018). New Hampshire, Governor Chris Sununu (from Weed News): "Gov. Chris Sununu came out swinging against the effort to legalize marijuana...

Hemp is cannabis, the same plant that we argue about called marijuana. Like all plants, in various degrees, cannabis has a rich enough genome to adapt to different environments. The Farm Bill legalizes hemp throughout the US, provided it contains less than .3% THC. That makes it a shitty smoke, but it's great for seed oil and fiber. When it was made illegal in the 70's along with it's cousin marijuana, the production and marketing facilities...

The people of Oklahoma passed an initiative enabling medical marijuana. The state immediately went to work to implement it, the law was a good one, and they're coming online with little fuss or muss. They are out of the gate with 742 medical marijuana dispensaries licensed. A dispensary is much like a store, but also grows cannabis. Retail stores in other states do not need to grow, and in Washington they cannot. Still, dispensaries have a sign...

Tilting my panels is a chore I don't like, but when the daylight hours are shortened, and the sun drops towards the horizon, I have no choice to keep my batteries charged up. They're tilted now, just in time for a couple of days of cloud cover. My panels are back to working like they should. Assuming I'm using propane for fridge, heat, and hot water, my laptop computer is the biggest draw on my batteries. But, this year I acquired a Nintendo...

Yuma was getting old, so I'm back at Hi Jolly in Q for a bit. Hi Jolly is a small area, free but limited to 14 days. It tends to get quite crowded in a few weeks, so then I'll move to the Long Term Visitor Area. More people are showing up, and the vendors are arriving quickly now. Everything should be operating by this weekend.

The CDC warning on Romaine lettuce came at a bad time. This year's first batch of Romaine in Yuma (and environs) is about 10 inches high and won't be harvested for two weeks. Obviously, the area is not responsible for the recent outbreak, nonetheless the damage has been done. I expect to see to see about a third of the fields nearby being plowed under tomorrow and this weekend. Once the Romaine is exterminated, other crops will go in. Don't...

I saw my first brand new, shiny, hot-pink shipping containers when I left Deming. They belong to the new Ocean Network Express. The color of the boxes is amazing, for now. Their website is interesting, too. Especially if you need a container. I've only seen scattered boxes on mixed trains. Pretty soon I'll see an entire hot pink train made up from one of their new (hot pink) container ships.

As usual, I'm at the VFW/BLM site so I can watch trains for a bit. I've got some shopping to do here, especially for a new door window which cracked in Colorado. Those come from Algodones just across the border and I'm anxious to see if anything has changed there vis-a-vis border protection. It's possible a parade of thousands of over-65s could be swarming the border, fueled by tequila and swinging purple bags weighted with medications and...

Next week will have 2 recreational weed stores opening in MA, the first on the East Coast. MA has spent 2 years talking about this since legalization, and they ended up with the model the other states have adopted. Apparently they like talking about things a lot. Things will go well. The media coverage (look at that market) will be huge, and naturally the stores will run out of product. Prices will be high. But, the important thing is the media,...

It's quiet, warm and sunny, and the sunrises and sunsets are amazing. Not a lot of people around, though some show up everyday. Vendors are just now starting to open up. I like it this way here. My plan is to go to Yuma early next week, where I'll do some train watching until the noise gets to me.