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The Newbie
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

There's a photo I took of The Newbie as she reclined in her car seat atop the table at the cafe where her mama and I went to eat sweets and fill out our absentee ballots. The Newbie wasn't paying the least bit of attention to me. She was busy working up a little hissy fit about the car seat straps that wouldn't let her turn over in her car seat.

So: This morning I'm off to Moab with Kelly Workout. Moab, I guess, is in Utah. I don't know anything about Utah beyond Mormons and polygamy. So I am not the person to ask about Utah. We're going because Kelly Workout has to go there to pick up her kayaks from some friends who have been storing them. I'm really just along for the ride, to keep Kelly from falling asleep or something. We're heading up today, staying the night, and then turning right around and coming back tomorrow.

Though I really am supposed to be the long-drive companion, I'm not really sure how I'm going to hold up as I stayed up very, very late last night to read a book by Michael Kodas called High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed. Kodas is not a terrific writer, but he's adequate (like, he works for a newspaper and has to write everything at an eighth-grade level kind of adequate), but the story he tells about Everest is kind of interesting. He is probably the first to write very candidly about what's going on during the climbing season on Everest, everything from criminally negligent expedition leaders to thefts committed by Sherpas and other climbers to the fraudulent claims of charity work being done on so-called environmental expeditions. Kodas not very skillfully weaves in a story about a sixty-nine year old doctor whose ambition to climb Everest was undone by a huckster of a guide who left him to die on the mountain and then tried to steal the cash he was carrying and all of his equipment. It's a sad story, but not an unexpected one.

Anyway--YAWN!--I'm tired this morning and trying to find the delicate balance between the amount of coffee that's going to keep me awake and the amount of coffee that's going to make me sick to my stomach.