Sidetracked Charley

Blizzard It has been a good winter thus far - meaning not many storms and dumping very little snow. I have gotten to gloat over weather on the east coast. They seem so unprepared for it. But it hit me this morning as I was reading the Winter Storm Watch for the East Slope of the Sangre de Cristos this might just be serious THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN ALBUQUERQUE HAS ISSUED A WINTER STORM WATCH... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM MONDAY MORNING THROUGH WEDNESDAY MORNING. * SNOW ACCUMULATIONS... AS MUCH AS 15 TO 20 INCHES OF SNOW IS POSSIBLE IN THE HIGHER MOUNTAIN TERRAIN FROM THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE TO THE CENTRAL MOUNTAIN CHAIN. LOWER AMOUNTS CAN BE EXPECTED ELSEWHERE. * TIMING... WHILE THE HEAVIEST SNOW IS MOST LIKELY LATE MONDAY NIGHT INTO EARLY WEDNESDAY... SOME LIGHTER SNOW ACCUMULATION MAY WELL BEGIN DURING THE DAY MONDAY ACROSS WEST CENTRAL AND NORTHWEST NEW MEXICO  And am I prepared? Usually by this time of year buckling down for another storm is routine. Not so this...

I sometimes do not listen to myself. I have this group of friends that think I give good advise and whether it is a telephone call, cornering me in the coffee shop, windshield time, or on line chat I often do not listen to myself. It has been a down year for me in so many ways and that does not seem to have changed the number of people seeking advice or calling me a beacon of hope and positive attitude it seems but it has made me feel more like an actor on the stage, an evangelist in a tent, a multiple personality. And definitely more alone. The problem with being an artist is that we are too often our only source of company. That goes triple for January when it seems sometimes even the muse does not visit enough, and the voices in my head seem to all be feeding the fires of impending doom. But I was making a comment on a friend's blog about homeopathic medicine and testing to see if it is real when I stopped to re-read my comment. My self-talk of late seems to run counter to ...

Last week in response to the Magpie Tales prompt above I wrote a couple paragraphs as a lead into what may become a short story - maybe a novella. I do have difficulty writing short but that is my goal here. So in the coming weeks I will add to my beginning. The Skating Party Clarice Anna Hobbes found the photograph where it should not have been. Her mother, the family story went, had snapped the picture of that ill-fated skating party with her Kodak box camera when MaMa was but seven. The camera was a gift that Christmas day from her name sake in the center. By the end of the day her great Aunt Clarice would be dead, the camera and film confiscated by the police, and the skating party relegated to whispered memory at family reunions. How did the sepia print, in an envelope with ten others, come to be taped under her late Uncle Jacob's dresser drawer? The tape was yellowed and cracked, the wood under the envelope a totally different color ringed by the stain of the old Scotch ...

This is the blog where I usually recap the week that has just passed. And usually I can come up with some clever little title that sums it all up. But this has been a rather odd week which eludes a handle. There has been the problem of the downstairs loo, and the snippy people on the social networks, and of course the continuing involvement in the new desktop computer (does take a while to get them like you want), and another week of no significant snow. January is typically that time for artists when we do a lot of looking ahead to shows and exhibits, and I have four paintings begun I was thinking of using as entry images but I cannot seem to finish them. Return of phantom sounds and smells, and wakening with a sense of impending doom has warned me I am overly stressed. I think that is all hang over from 2010 and its issues but this seemed like a good week to just not make myself do anything beyond the necessary. I have been playing with my new Corel Paintshop Pro photo editing p...

B&O Round House They cannot corner you there, the saying goes. Dad was fond of this particular bit of Americana. I admit to not really understanding it much. In my youth, toward the end of the great age of rail, there were switching yards and two-headed diesel engines and so not much use for a turn table to reverse the direction of the engine. The steam engine with coal car went in one side, drove on to the turn table which rotated to put its load heading the right direction on the correct track or just back out the way it had come heading the other way. Confused? It does, however, make a lot of sense that a round house, built for any purpose, would free you from being cornered so to speak. So figuratively if not literally I often head to the round house when I am feeling stalked. Life should have less corners and more round houses don't you think? The contractor from hell tried to corner me this last three day weekend. While drinking in his favorite bar in Red River he ...

I have been in a rather left brain mood this last week. That's good for everything that had to be done on the new computer. I had to wait and make sure it was going to work but I could not wait the 90 days that is the general fail period for electronics. And I had to wait for that left brain mood to strike. Only in my left brain can I sit in front of two computers and transfer files and not lose my place. My goal was to take major photo files off my laptop and move them to the 1 terabyte desktop where I would organize them so they could be readily accessed. I still have to do this with some of my document files too but I did get poetry copied from my blogs up through August 2009. But I digress (clearly back in that right brain today). After moving over the major photo files I went through the lessor ones (in my haphazard scheme of things those are the ones still bearing the computer assigned file names) and moved over the photos of note to other folders I had created - best phot...

Ravens flying over Lake Coyote Last winter about this time I was blogging about Lake Coyote - the huge ice damn downstream had backed up the Little Coyote stream creating a huge ice lake in my back yard. This winter the Little Coyote is still within its banks and covered with a relatively thin coat of ice. Snow has actually been rare. So rare I got my camera out to record this 6 inch blanket in the last week. Yesterday the temperature was about 43F at my house and so much of this is gone like the 10 inch one we got in December. Today is going to be in the 40's again. In fact no significant weather for the next 10 days. It has thrown a spanner into my winter aerobics program of snow shoveling the driveway! And locals have already shifted from talking about the weather to worrying about the summer fire season in the forest. My sister and I are even contemplating taking a few days off and taking to the road to visit Chaco or Canyon de Chelle or the Grand Canyon or Monument Val...

First let me say the above picture has no relationship to the subject of this blog. It is in my Blogspot image library for Sidetracked Charley. I was scrolling through looking for an apt image and it dawned on me that all those blog images stored nicely before lost on my doomed computer are probably stored for me on the net! So is my poetry. I began the process of going back through poetic posts on Creative Journey today (through July 2010) and copying them to Wordperfect files. Yesterday I began downloading from my 2007 backup CD's other writing files. And I rebuilt my art vita and artist's statement from paper copies I found. And what, pray tell , I can here my reader's ask, does this have to do with the title of this post? Okay, most of you do not use the phrase pray tell . Blame it on my classics education. But again I digress. I have this tendency to award myself for doing onerous tasks. I blame it on my father who took me to the toy store (or for an ice cream ...

  In the muddle over computer issues I have not said much about my Vizio HDTV.  Maybe that is because the moment I took my saved up money to purchase it the computer failed and I began to regret the money spent. I do not use credit cards so I save for what I want. I had wanted the flat screen TV for more than a year as I put away cash for the eventual purchase. Everything had gotten in the way - like car repairs. With at last money in hand, product research completed, and friend along to keep me from going bonkers over the unconsidered options I got the flat screen of my dreams. Okay, due to prices I went 5" bigger (glad I did) and when my friend mentioned the HTML cable I also jumped in an got a new Samsung Blu Ray/DVD player capable of streaming Netflix video. That was a couple hundred I had not planned to spend. But it seemed to make sense until the computer failed. The failure of the computer had far reaching ramifications - beyond budget. The whole fight with HP over th...

For much of my college career my fitness workout was swimming on the B squad of the swim team. I remember it as the days before heated pools and women coaches. I also remember being so exhausted and cold I could only lean against the shower wall and throw up. Not exactly warm fuzzy images but I was in awesome shape. Needless to say it did not leave me with a overpowering desire to swim laps. Point of fact for years my swimming became really informal: Swimming to shore after the canoe tipped over, challenging my sister once a summer to across the lake and back, seeing how long I could back float without moving a muscle, and a scuba course. I also played around with other ways of staying fit: aerobics, bicycling, jogging, skiing and dance classes. All of which seem to be bad for the knees, back or feet. After my ski accident my physical therapist steered me back to the pool. Damn if I was going to swim laps! However, aqua fit was just getting rather seriously taken so I took it. It r...

I have always rather disliked the week between Christmas and New Years. It is such an abyss generally. Especially in the corporate world; everyone is on vacation or out. And socially all the Christmas parties have been given and attended and nobody wants to waste social chits on a pre-New Year's Eve bash. Besides the weather is generally dismal this time of year. But this year my sister arrived on Christmas Eve morning and stayed through the following Monday. Weather was in the 40's daytime and we 4-wheeled almost daily. She no sooner left than the good weather crashed and we got plunged into snow and sub-zero nights; Never Never Land. Huddled under lap robes in front of my new computer I sought escape from reality. Not easy when the indoor/outdoor weather gauge sits on the corner of the computer desk and reports the temperature. Burrr. Just as an aside the temperature outside as I type this predawn missive is already higher than many of the day time highs of the last week -...

The title of this blog and the original concept was to post about the misadventures and serendipity events of my life and lessons learned from diversions from my path. This year has been almost all diversions! Many not pleasant. And occurring so much I wonder if I even had time to comprehend the lessons.  It has been a rather Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole type of year.  Richard Bach in his book Illusions writes: "Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. "The current of the river swept silently over them all - young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self. "Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. "But one creature said at last, 'I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the cur...