December 23, 2009
The Lioness, Meghan Saar, gifted me with a rare Billy the Kid artifact:

She assures me this pistol-knife set is accurate and "authentic" to the tiniest detail. Notice the bullet hooks made of pure gold. Notice the image of Billy on the handle that's obviously lifted from the Noah Rose abomination which I worked for years to replace (with better images of the Kid), but no, they used the Rose version of the Kid which gave rise to the notion that Billy was a deranged goofus. I'd ask where she got it but that would be looking a gifted editor in the mouth.

Meanwhile, went home for lunch and grabbed an unfinished cloud painting out of my reject pile. Last summer when I drove to Lincoln, New Mexico I witnessed a series of storms east of San Antonio and the Trinity Site. One storm, sweeping over White Oaks, haunted me, and so, today I tried to capture that raking pattern I remembered as I drove through the Malpais towards Carizozo:

Hard to believe, but I nailed it.

Meanwhile, in my dust studies I read about a cavalry trooper who wrote about being caught out in an Arizona dust storm on patrol. He described it as being bombarded by an open pepper box:

"Approaching Pepper Box," is the title to this one.

Well, my quest to make it to 10,000 steps a day is going rather weakly. Logged in at 3,100 steps yesterday, 3,300 the day before. Today is much better at 4,676 steps (at 3:12 P.M.), but I'm still not even half-way there. Now, to contrast this, I read in the new issue of Time that General Stanley One-Meal-A-Day McChrystal, our commander in Afghanistan, when he was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1999 to 2000, rather than take public transportation he ran from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which is a 12-mile run, one way. If 9,000 steps is five miles, well, that is one fit Bastard. Gee, I wonder what the Old Vaqueros have to say about this:

"The longest journey begins with a single step."
—Old Vaquero Saying

"Yes, but a thousand ADD journeys begin with a single false step."
—BBB