God Bless Texas

We needed a memory card reader to access our data-logger, so my boss bought one. What this means to you is I can now upload my pictures (yay!)
When we bought the card-reader, my boss tried to stop the checkout gal from giving us a bag. He told her "we don't need one, we're trying to conserve plastic for future generations", in his raspy, matter of fact, cool as a cucumber tone. The checkout gal only cocked her head to the side the way a confused chicken does and her jaw fell open a few inches as she slowly continued to insert the 3-inch device into a plastic bag.

There are hundreds of miles of of oil pumps systematically sucking the stinky grease from the ground in all direction, so the entire community is fully assimilated into the maddness. The town of Odessa is nothing more than a collection of burrito shops and machine shops for fixing oil equipment. The local band "the roughnecks" is playing down at Dos Amigos tonight, and "the pump jacks" are at Rosa's.

There are no sidewalks or crosswalks and everybody drives gigantic trucks. Everywhere. Yesterday we needed some parts made at a machine shop. The first one we tried couldn't do what we needed, so the machinist told us to "git yerself on over to tripple J, Of course Marco's Steel could do it too but they're higher than all get-out." So we drove clear across the flat expanse of dollar stores, nail salons and used furnature stores to Tripple J and met the receptionist. She told us that we needed to take our part into the yard and talk to another one of the workers. She went on to provide us with very elaborate direcions to reach this man, something like "What you'll do is drive around the building and through the gate. It will be the first white trailer on your right side." so we got into our truck, fired it up and drove where she told us to go. Here we discovered that the distance from her front door to the front door of this white trailer was no more than fifteen feet! This same thing happened two more times afterward.It seems that nobody down here has any thoughts whatsoever about conservation. So far every visit to a restaurant has required me to toss out a pound of styrofoam,5 feet of aluminum foil, and a few bags. There doesn't seem to be any way around it, recycling isn't even in the vocabulary here.


Here's a picture of the trucks and oil refinery I see out my motel window.