Death Valley, fin.

If there’s one thing that fascinates me about living in Nevada it would have to be the skies.  Too often you can find me with my camera lens pointed straight up, soaking up the endless swirled blues and puffs of cloud.

Neither of us were ready to wake up on Saturday. The obnoxious people from the parking lot had transferred to our floor, right across from our room. I honestly believe that some people are just completely oblivious to the fact that there are people in this world other than them. I kept having fantasies of a gigantic remote with a mute button that would work on them, permanently. In my more frustrated moments I dreamed of boiling oil. Eventually they settled down and we slept fitfully under the loudest, ugliest hotel blanket ever. Imagine dogs, eagles and America-the-beautiful in bright primary shades with some neon oranges and green thrown in for good measure.

It was COLD on Saturday morning, cold enough that I immediately wrapped up in Jesse’s fleece and turned the heat all the way up in the car. As we drove back down into the park we were met with a beautiful sight:

The dust was rising from the valley floor, just hanging in the air like fog. The best part was that we had this view for the hour it took us to drive out to Scotty’s Castle.

We didn’t go inside Scotty’s Castle but we did follow the road to his grave. The light was too hard to get a good picture of the monument but he is buried at the top of this hill.

Our next stop in the park was Ubehebe crater.

Let’s just leave it at this. I am not afraid of heights. I was getting extremely dizzy looking down into the crater. Jesse kept trying to get me even further away from the edge. The really odd part to me? There were a lot of people down in the crater. Maybe next time we’ll have to try it.

We stopped by the side of the road so I could take a few pictures. I admit, I’m still fascinated by the concept of plants in the desert. It’s silly but in my head, deserts have cacti or they are nothing but sand and cracked earth. Seeing bits of greenery and flowers just tickles me. It’s actually making me very excited for desert-wildflower season.

I’m glad deserts are more than this but I must admit, this is pretty striking and it makes the life around it all the more amazing. I really can’t wait until we go back and explore further.

We spent this weekend running errands and doing little things that needed to be done. We have new tupperware! Lord, how sad is it that new tupperware makes me happy? I’ve already filled up a few of them as well. I reorganized the refrigerator so that each of us get our own shelf and one of the drawers. I’ve been going slowly insane over the state of our refrigerator — I could never find any of my things and was constantly knocking over large cans of Arizona tea. Hopefully this solution will work for us. I did a ton of laundry. Finally I got to relax with a Lush bath bomb and a book.

Jesse and I spent a good deal of Sunday cooking so we would have food for the week. My eating habits as of late finally got to me. I’ve been living on tuna or alfalfa sprout sandwiches, oatmeal, handfuls of baby spinach, these awesome tortilla chips from TJ’s with salsa, butternut squash soup from a box and Greek yogurt with honey. Not such a horrid diet really, but I haven’t cooked in ages. I made fusilli and cheese for Christmas and that was really it. I think I made up for that this weekend. I threw together a really wonderful (if I may say so myself) kidney bean and lentil curry, some Szechuan-style eggplant and a nice batch of garlicky hummus. That should keep me through part of next week!

Oh, right! We also went back to our favourite rescue and visited the kitties. The woman who runs it was a bit disappointed as we’d thought we could adopt in February and we had to tell her that plans have changed. But I gave them some money and spent some time playing with and scritching their charges. Oh, I fell in love with a few as always. There was Tangerine, a beautiful orange tabby, no white on her at all. She just wanted to be rubbed and loved and talked to. Then there was the kitten-pile! Three of them, sound asleep in a big pile, the little grey guy on the bottom, then an orange and white tabby, then the prettiest little cream girl who was slightly cross-eyed. Oh, if I could have, I would have brought all three home with me.

Now it’s time for yet another work week. I picked up a new region last week which is good as things were really slow for the last few. Hopefully the transition will go smoothly for me and my new agents, I’m not looking forward to calls demanding to know why things changed!