Sidetracked Charley

   Again it seems a major storm has been sidetracked around Northern New Mexico. This one had looked as if it would give us significant snowfall because the warnings seemed to center on the east slopes of the northern Sangre de Cristo mountains. That's me. Snow was to continue through noon today. But I awoke this morning to the nearly full Wolf Moon glaring off the scant six inches of newly fallen snow. This is an El Nino year and it is suppose to mean heavier than normal snow for my section of the country. We have had this forecast before. Often enough that my first thought when told it was an El Nino year was that all the snow storms would miss us. They tend to go south of us in El Nino conditions. I have noticed that just from informal observations. But the meteorologists have not noticed it. And they are the ones that collect all that climate data they feed into the computers that crunch the numbers and come out with revised predictions.  I am reminded of that old ...

Some days I just wake up in a purple mood. My high school colors were purple and silver and I hated high school. Loathed it. Looking back I can say without fear of contradiction that it was the very worst time of my life for any number of reasons beyond my control. I sort of assigned that whole period to the color purple. Then came college and a roommate in my sophomore year that was a freshman cheerleader sort that wore nothing but lilac or purple. I almost got kicked out of college over that bitch. I avoided the color purple for ages. Skirted around anyone that even wore it. Times change. I have a best friend that loves teal and purple. I love the poem When I am an Old Woman I will Wear Purple . I even have a few purple clothes of my own. More on the mauve side of the color and I like it with black a lot. And the color definitely plays a major part in my paintings often in conjunction with Payne's Gray. However, I still detest lilac in anything but flowers. And find that wh...

After a very dry January we have gotten some snow. The skiers are, of course, thrilled. And with fire season looming so are many of the locals. But we have all rather forgotten how to cope it would seem. I would have preferred to not cope. Just stay in my snug little house and feed the wood stove and gaze out upon the white beyond the studio windows. But as fate would have it this was the one day of the new year I could not. I had promised to sit the gallery in Angel Fire and based on my fixed location for a set of hours had urged various people to stop by and chat or conduct business of one matter or another. I was thrilled that my vehicle which had gone through a moisture issue at the beginning of the year was behaving itself. It started like a pussy cat and we made it up the unplowed rural road and out to the main drag as it were. The state is responsible for Hwy 434 and it was immediately obvious they had become complacent with saving the road maintenance budget. The day prev...

Aspens in Winter The temperature got up into the high forties yesterday and the sun seemed so bright and the sky so blue and I just could not resist playing. The fur kids and I with camera went for a longer walk than usual. It felt go to totally release the "I should's" and waste the day. January has been all about getting ready for the court date which was suppose to be this coming Wednesday. That has been postponed for two months and I assume all the prep we did will make it unnecessary to march to the legal drum between now and then. As I have stated in Creative Journey I do need to get some paintings done for the summer fairs but I also need to reconnect with my spiritual center, as it were. And that was accomplished with the exhibition yesterday. As adults we don't take enough time for play, especially when our lives become entirely too serious through no fault of our own. The legal issue was the sidetrack I was forced onto. Yesterday, though I thought it...

I love the Internet. I was on line yesterday when the first news of Haiti's 7.3 earthquake hit the news sites. And if frankly amazed me how quickly photos were uploaded and posted. The quake hit in Port-au-Prince, the nation's capital and naturally crashed the electric grid and communication lines. I know people not on Haiti but on nearby islands and was of course anxious to know how they fared with the tsunami warnings out. So this morning I was quickly on messenger asking for an update. I am thrilled to report my friend Barbara and her family are fine. But the early news about the millions of residents of Port-au-Prince does not seem as good. There is nothing like a disaster some place else to put your own trivial problems in perspective. I can turn on my heat if I want but they have no roofs over their heads - those that survived that is. It seemed inappropriate to post a blog about my issues given theirs so I went Googling for a photo to honor their plight and found t...

I blogged on Travels with Charley about where the United States would be if there was no China suddenly. Or that at least something happened which severely limited the amount of exports it could provide. China would also be in a world of hurt if the United States could no longer provide the technology for the new products they want built for export. It brought to mind the Cargo Cults . A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth (the "cargo") of the advanced culture through magical thinking or ritual. These societies came to a head in the wake of WWII when tribes suddenly were exposed to downed aircraft or metal boats or automatic weapons. But I had one anthropology teacher that theorized that ancient Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec and Inca cultures may have been some of the original Cargo Cults as they seem t...

I must admit, if you have not figured this out already, that I am I can be a rather compulsive person. No, my house is not obsessively neat, rather the reverse. I think at times I am almost compulsively messy. Having the house too neat would be erasing me from it. And I am not compulsive all the time. I am rather manic compulsive if there is such a thing. I can swing along through life feeling the breeze in my hair and then suddenly slam into a tree and want to take control of everything including the vine and the breeze. I am in one of my compulsive phases. The tree I hit was the lawsuit. Obviously swinging was over for a while. Sitting at the base of huge trees in my path creates an urge to redesign the entire forest. Current re-design plans included, beyond the lawsuit, losing weight, keeping heating costs really low, turning all but one light off, not running out of firewood before April 1st, decluttering that mess I spoke of earlier, getting back to exercise daily, coming up...

This morning the trees and bushes are covered with a thick hoar frost. Better than feet of snow in my rather humble opinion. The purr kids are not fond of the cold weather and are satisfied to merely do virtual bird hunting from their perches within the comfort of the studio. Cloud cover is, however, making it rather gloomy and the Canadian cold front is making it rather cold. Won't get above freezing today. Not a bad day to stay inside and do all the calling and searching of records I must do for my attorney. But I am determined to have a recess or two with DVD, exercise and some painting to brighten my day emotionally at least. Speaking of brightening my day - I have lost four pounds in two weeks and I am thrilled. All the more thrilled because it does not seem to have taken a major sacrifice on my part. Just balancing my blood sugar levels with herbal vitamins and minerals. And I took a peek on line at my electric bill for energy used in November and it is lower than las...

The past year was not one of my best. In fact on December 28th I was not all that sure I even wanted to see the final days of it. I felt like a victim of B.F. Skinner and Operant Conditioning . Skinner is famous for the Skinner box which tested learning levels with rats through positive and negative reinforcement. One of his most horrid modifications of this was two boxes which were wired to give an electric shock. A cat was placed in one and shocked. It jumped to the other. Where it again got shocked. After a few repetitions of this experiment the cat would just sit in the box and shiver as it got shocked. As a young college student and lover of cats my exposure to this shocking experiment sent me running from my Psych 101 class and back to the registrar to switch to Anthropology 101 instead. B.F. Skinner even developed a box for his infant daughter. And to this day I wonder where he buried all the bodies. What I learned personally from this experience is animals are trainable b...