All is quiet on the Arizona front

Slowly the sun is trying to claw it's way into the sky.  The coyotes went absolutely crazy last night right under our window.  In the middle of the night one coyote started howling withing a few feet of our bed. No way you can sleep with that racket.

The old soldiers are getting shot down.  As a younger person you don't have friends and people you know dropping dead, but every year you get older it seems more prevalent.  The second phase of aging are the cancer and diseases.  As one ages more and more of life focuses on illness of one sort or another. 

Slowly our job for the winter is starting to take shape.  Being the government there is a host of paper work and signatures that have to be in place before we can work.  We are working for free and it is hard to imagine what one has to go through to work for nothing.  The Forest Service has it't own drivers license that one must have to drive their vehicles. 

One of the campgrounds here caught fire while we were gone for the summer.  It is amazing how quickly and how much the fire burnt.  A DC10 was flown in to drop chemicals.  The fire fighting agent used has a red dye in it and leaves a stain.  Kadizzle remembers going Mesa Verde years ago and seeing the red stained rocks from fire fighting.

Yesterday Kadizzle got an email from Senator Heidi Hietkamp of North Dakota.  It was difficult to tell if the email was the typical boiler plate message or she actually had some input in it. Kadizzle fires countless stingers at Hietkamp in social media because she panders so much to the rednecks in North Dakota and refuses to have much of a voice about Republican abuse.  Kadizzle has particularly been hard on her about how quickly she sold out to the NRA.  In a response Kadizzle asked Hiedi how she would react if a member of her family was shot by a gun nut.

Last year the Forest Service gave us a very nice spot along the lake.  This year there has been some question if volunteers can use the super nice spots for their campers.  Supposedly it all comes down to some silly government accounting. Through some insane system The Forest Service rents the sites from the Office of Management and Budget.  The Forest Service pays three dollars a day for our campsite.  Since it is the government paying the goverment it creates a strange deal.  The Forest Service values our work at $20 per hour.  We work for free for 24 hours per week for each of us. This would be a total of 48 hours or $960 dollars a week.  The rent paid by The Forest Service would be $21, for a net gain of $929.  The silly part of all of this is that there are many ways The Forest Service could easily save $3 per day.  However, as in every organization common sense goes out the window when political infighting comes in.