Sidetracked Charley

How does your garden grow? It has been a interesting year weather and garden wise and life in general. I find it hard to believe this is the last day of June. And not so long ago I was wishing winter would be over. Well, in all honesty it was over very late. A friend of mine said winter was bi-polar. So was spring. And June has been too. We had a killing frost on June 23rd. The temperature dropped to 23 and stayed there more than three hours. Even the hoses were frozen. It is the latest freeze I can remember. So naturally I was happy to have my poly tunnel but I had stopped double tunneling a couple weeks before. So I lost eggplant and peppers and even freeze burned some of the outer branches of the tomatoes which were under a double layer of plastic and with a light on to keep them warm. And the dry winter combined with a dry spring and we are now in a very serious drought. One which forecasters seem to think will persist even after the monsoon season. We are just beginning t...

I have gone a couple weeks without writing one of my regular that-was-the-week-that-was blogs. It has not been an ordinary couple of weeks. Or couple months for that matter. And this blog is not about the events of the last couple months because they are not my events to tell. But it is about some of the questions raised over that time. My father used to tell this joke about there were only two things to worry about: Whether you lived or died. And if you lived there was nothing to worry about. And if you died there were only two things . . . Simpler times. Lately everything seems much more complex. Living is very difficult and expensive especially for those with chronic illnesses or in a relationship or friends of someone with a chronic illness. The American way of dying (or not dying) is very hard and stressful on everyone. And dying is very, very, very expensive and also very complex. Especially if you want to die at home. I once believed hospice was the answer. NOT. Nor is...

Mount Taylor by Dave Arnold I lived and went to school in Albuquerque during the 1960's when the power brokers were beginning their destruction of the west with the building of the Glen Canyon Dam. They argued that very few people went there and ergo who would miss it. And the greater good was to provide energy for the area and prevent the flooding of the Colorado River and build a great recreational reservoir. The fight to stop the Glen Canyon Dam and a proposed other three dams along the Grand Canyon was spear headed by Ansel Adams andand the newly formed Sierra Club. We did not stop Lake Powell, we personally get no power from it, and the Colorado never flooded below that point because the Grand Canyon did that naturally. But the environmental movement did stop the other dams proposed. Though I have heard rumblings on the net that the proposal is getting active again. This is so wrong and so is the proposed largest US Uranium mine on Mt. Taylor. Thousands of people d...

Gateway by J. Binford-Bell Creating a painting, I realized today when I at last finished my latest, is exhausting. And exhilarating. You want to shout, "I did that?" when a plan comes together and a painting achieves a marriage with the image you have carried around in your head. And then there is this huge let down not unlike drug withdrawal. Specifically withdrawal from speed. Photography does not do this. It is so immediate in comparison and is not the manifestation of an internalized image but an image you internalize. Nor does painting in a formula manner. Yes, you may sit down to do your 14th church painting for a fair or a retail order and something surprising happens. But to conceive of an idea for a painting. Refine it in your head over a number of days or weeks. Then finally commit the idea to paper and pencil, and at last to canvas. Only to go over the colors again and again in your mind before putting paint to canvas. That is a horse of a very differe...

Bristle Cone Pine with open cone The drought has sort of killed spring. Greening up of grass and the blooming of wild flowers is WAY behind schedule. But yesterday in the Val Vidal I saw signs of hope. Or a desperate attempt to reproduce before the plant expires to the drought. Standing Brave While the flowers were a sign of hope they were also sad because of their reduced numbers and what if there is no rain will be a failed attempt to reproduce. There were flowers but also an alarming absence of bees and butterflies. Nor were the flower sin lush green meadows but surrounded by dry and brittle grass that crunched when you walked on it. There is a trout pond behind these flowers but the water is so low that when I got down to photograph the flowers the water did not show. I got this one photo with just a hint of water by going up a hill and then lying in a depression, like my friend Jessica below. So both photographers and flowers are going to extreme leng...

Reflections on Life by J. Binford-Bell Last year was not an easy one. There were the usual struggles in life which lately seem to be economic and physical. Getting older on a fixed income isn't for sissies. But the big hurtle last year ways my age. A very small number of people in my family have made it past 67. Okay, I am just one day past that number but still it is past. Mother and Dad both died when they were 67 (three years apart) from health issues. Somehow you get to overlook tornadoes that took my paternal grandmother at an early age. I was somewhat gratified to find out I am not the only person to obsess over getting through the age in which a parent died. But I figured I had a double whammy since both parents died at my age. And there were times I really was not trying that hard to make it to 68. It was a tough year financially. Couldn't get or keep or get rid of tenants depending on where I was in that cycle of advertise, rent, evict and repair. My preoccupa...