Twelve hours.

Twelve hours right here.

Right where I've been parked for the opening of antelope hunting seasons for over a quarter-century.

And I have notes. And noteworthy things to say.

And no time to say them. It's back out to the same spot first thing tomorrow morning.

But the dragonflies are migrating.

The couple of Continental Divide Trail hikers who spent five hours trying to sleep in the culvert at my station in the middle of the hot day say it wasn't really a good idea.

The Highway Patrolman was busy.

Less than a dozen harvested pronghorn, but two were by young first-time hunters, and another will certainly make the record books.

The young couple from Las Vegas and Boulder who thought I had the perfect lunch spot found out they also needed to borrow duct tape.

Etcetera, etcetera.

And I have photos. Over a hundred, from sitting in just one place.

No time for most of those, either.

Here's the important news from the day in the desert...

I may have mentioned when the new truck arrived that it was no longer a simple matter to turn off the damn dinger that goes off when you leave the key in the ignition, with the engine off.

Now, unless you're eager to waste a lot of gas idling an engine for 12 hours straight (the heelers would have loved having air conditioning all day long), but you need to have the electronic accessories, particularly the state radio and cell phone on at all times...

The damn dinger is a real pain in the you know what.

I foresaw this problem way back in spring when the truck showed up, but decided to wait and see how big of a pain it was.

It was big. As in, within the first half hour I knew I could not stand this.

So, I am here to tell you, for the new Ford F150s, how to solve that little problem.

Cut the wire.

'Course, you gotta know which wire, and therein lies the rub.

The "key is in the ignition" dinger is connected to the sensor in the door latch that tells the truck when the door is open.

If it never knows the door is open, no "ding".

There are four wires going into the driver's door, inside a protective rubber hose. Two for the stereo speaker in the door, two to the sensor. My problem since Spring has been, "Which are which?"

Well, when you're driven crazy by the heat and the constant "ding...ding...ding", and have nothing else to do with yourself, the solution becomes obvious.

Tear open the door, pull out the speaker, and see which wires service it.

It's the blue and red ones.

Ergo, cut one of the black wires. It'll either work and the truck will never again know when the driver's door "is ajar" or...

It'll think the door is always ajar, and the dinging will never stop.

(In which case you splice the two black wires together and it will probably shut up. But there's no guarantee.)

I cut the little black wire without the white stripe.

The dinger immediately shut up.

Ohhh, happy days.

The rest of the day was peaceful bliss, stepping in and out of the truck to visit and check hunters without a single "ding!".

Leaving the door open so heelers can jump back in when they're finished with their business.

Without ever hearing a "ding!"

You have no idea how important that was to my day.

That and the iced coffee the wife brought out at three o'clock. (And no, she didn't believe me when I told her there were two people sleeping in the culvert.)