Sidetracked Charley

Not my desk I copied the above image off of Google. I was looking for images of cluttered computer work stations for this blog. This was posted on a blog about messy desks. If this is messy then mine is currently a disaster area. Mind you I am a creative mind and ergo not neat, but my computer desk and adjacent library table have reached new heights of not neat. It all began with the new computer. CD's used for backup had to be unearthed, the laptop had to be in easy reach for transfer of files via jump drive, etc. And stacks of hard copies of documents I had unearthed to retype or scan into the new computer. I was in the midst of this task when the season to submit for fairs came. Now there are stacks of prospectuses and call for entries about with CD's containing art images shuffled from the regular back up copies. I really was making some head way when it occurred to me that my self imposed deadline for getting taxes to my preparer. Since my left brain hid after 2001 sk...

President Abraham Lincoln And what, pray tell (or is that prey tell?) does a long dead former president of the United States have to do with my week? Well, I watched the PBS documentary by Ken Burns on the Civil War on Netflix streaming video. I am not sure war should be viewed on high definition television even if there is only black and white stills of its horrors. And Hollywood thinks I would go see a movie about 9/11? What are they thinking? I was thinking. This nine part series really got me thinking in so many directions. You think you know the history of something and then you read a book or see a documentary and know that you had only part of the truth. It was the bloodiest war America ever fought. 600,000 lives were lost. And the north was only partly invested in the activity. So the civil war was my background music, as it were, last week. I was, as I have said on Facebook, a social butterfly. I seem to shun invitations and then they cluster around an event in the ca...

An artist living in the wilderness doesn't spend much time chatting over coffee. But since last Thursday I have been positively a social butterfly. My neighbor and I had coffee three days in a row and discussed the fall of Egypt's president and Ken Burn's PBS series on the Civil War. I went to the spa and shopping in Taos with the same friend. And then to a community Valentine's dinner with another. This coming Friday is the opening reception for the MVAC Winter Invitational show. So yesterday and today I have just wanted to pull in my head and legs and turtle until at least Friday morning when I have to help hang the event. Today I am dying my hair, and adding hanging hardware to two finished paintings. And I plan to watch that last episode on the Civil War. I have been saving it. It is a wonderful series and I have learned so much. Much of it horrible to contemplate. Why must we be so divided war is the only way to settle things? And that was in interesting part ...

Valentine's Day is a feast day in honor of the martyred Saint Valentine . . . er 14 saints named Valentine. Oh, and not a feast day since 1969. Not a saint either? Of the Saint Valentine whose feast is on February 14, nothing is known except his name and that he was buried at the  Via Flaminia north of Rome on February 14. It is even uncertain whether the feast of that day celebrates only one saint or more saints of the same name. Rome? If he died in Rome how did he rid Ireland of snakes? And what does this have to do with love? Off to Wiki: The first representation of Saint Valentine appeared in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493); alongside the woodcut portrait of Valentine, the text states that he was a Roman priest martyred during the reign of Claudius II , known as Claudius Gothicus. He was arrested and imprisoned upon being caught marrying Christian couples and otherwise aiding Christians who were at the time being persecuted by Claudius in Rome. Helping Christians at thi...

I awoke yesterday to 18 inches of snow and a bright blue sky. And the stuck school bus at the top of the hill. School buses are a frequent sight on the highway running past my house. But they never, to my knowledge, venture down Osha road which this one would have had to be doing if it ran off the road into the ditch going up the road. How many vehicles there are stuck on this short steep road is a question all of us ask on such mornings after a snow storm. Originally their were five. I was pondering whether my plowman could get down this road when the county show plow passed the studio heading down my dead end road. He live above me off Osha road and so I enjoy getting my road plowed first. Then he goes up Osha road to the highway and off to handle the first swipe on the county roads. My sister had called earlier to check on the snow I got and we had begun discussing something that led to one of those "now just where is that" moments. I have these things I hide deliber...

It's Monday and we already have more snow even though the bigger storm is suppose to hit on Tuesday. After a warmer and drier than normal January I find myself arguing with the weather outside my windows - like anyone listens. All my neighbors have also been suffering from cabin fever. Rant and rave telephone calls are frequent. One of my neighbors claims to be making plans to move to Hawaii which she left six years ago because of island fever. She does this every winter. Another is so upset with the lack of immediate response, in the midst of a declared emergency, to her propane tank problem that she is planning to go totally solar. She doesn't want to hear what it will cost. A third friend is thrilled she is wintering in southern Arizona, but  is worried she won't be able to get to her house upon her return in March. I think I have just "caved." I have holed up in my warm house with a fire in the wood stove and worked on my new desktop computer, my new Corel ...

Clearly they were not thinking. Texas was not thinking when they shut down the compressors sending the natural gas here. Public Service of New Mexico was not thinking when they decided to sole source their natural gas. Our electrical coop was not thinking this ever would happen. Well, and frankly it hasn't. Weathermen have been scrambling to find a date when it got this cold for this long. But regardless of that answer it has been a big cluster fuck as the saying goes. There is still no natural gas in a large section of New Mexico (all made worse because evidently it was ours first and piped to Texas to be refined) nor does anyone have a date beyond early next week. Everyone is avoiding the question of whether the compressors were softly shut down or "slammed down".  But we do know the pipeline was not shut down to remain pressurized so they are talking days of flushing and re-pressurizing so I think the compressors were slammed down by a brown out. BTW you cannot find...

Front porch this week At broadcast time it is a minus 30.3 outside and I have just proven that warm coffee tossed into the air will become a brown mist instantly. Such things are important to know. For me this morning it means I am not going outside until the sun comes up. The temperature is forecast to rise to a positive 21 degrees, which after being in the single digits or below for the last three days, will be positively balmy. And no the snow has not melted off, but the 15 inches we received has compacted and/or evaporated because of the cold to about 7 inches. Chatting on line to friends in other parts of the country I have found a lot of misunderstandings about New Mexico. Even the national news was saying this huge storm went from Texas to Maine. We're the void to the west of Texas. And a whole group of people think New Mexico is desert. So I Googled up a satellite map this morning of my part of the state. There is an awful lot of errors. Google got the name of only on...