Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

Enjoy it! Next year is our last according to some politicians, celebrities, journalists, documentarians, ghost hunters, occupiers, and Kardashians. If the Aztec Calendar fails to predict the end of the world, then we will pass the real and final tipping point of atmospheric concentrations of Al Gore’s death gas. If the economy does not completely collapse, then the concentration of religious nitwits willing to self-detonate will reach critical mass. If Obama is not re-elected, then a deadly assortment of doomsday scenarios will converge in an apocalyptic nightmare resulting in total anarchy. Of course, alien invasion is also a very real possibility. It is time for polar bears to duck-and-cover.

What is definately going to happen next year is that Steve will celebrate his 60th birthday. Given the Job market, the shrinking workload of big corportations and their associated layoffs, it all adds up to one unavoidable, inescapable, inexorable, enevitable, unstoppable, conlcusion - Early retirement!     

 Some of this might happen, but mainly Steve and Mary have finally found an actual place to retire to,Kootenai Creek Village in Stevensville Montana. Last July a follow-up reconnaissance mission to Montana bore fruit. They found the elusive niche they had not quite been able to visualize during all of their previous travels – their own little slice of heaven on earth as it were

Stevensville is a small town of 1,800 with Missoula 30 miles to the north, a college town of 67,000 hosting the University of Montana. Stevensville lies on the west side of the Bitterroot Valley near the Bitterroot River up against the Bitterroot Mountain Range and next to the Bitterroot National Forest. Everything named for Montana’s state flower. The closest trail head from what will be your garage when your home is built is a whopping four miles. Your home will be a five-hour drive from Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park and a three-hour drive from Glacier National Park. It is also a single day (nine-hour) drive to Banff, Alberta and lake Louise.

Now, the mad dash to retirement for Steve and Mary  and the comedy it provides Mary, will be completing the unfinished tasks, sending furniture to the Salvation Army, renting a small storage locker to hold the excess household goods, all for stageing their California condo, for Sale.

  Steve and Mary intend to be safely ensconced in Montana when California slips into the Pacific and the west-slope of the Appalachian becomes the Atlantic's hight-tide drainage. We sincerely hope you enjoy the time you have left and have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! 

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with

an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. – H.L. Mencken