Sidetracked Charley

In my radical youth there were so many causes to be involved in from abortion to civil rights to the draft to the ERA to freedom of speech to Vietnam to the President's right to declare war. And it seemed at times so few of us fighting because we had college and new careers and marriages and babies. You could at the time avoid the draft if you were in college, then in college and married, and then in college, married, and a parent. Many a coed sacrificed herself. And then none of that worked. Vietnam just sucked all the young men away to become cannon fodder. Birth control at the time was condoms. All else was illegal unless you were married. And one of the biggest black market drugs around was birth control pills. And if a married college friend found herself pregnant to save her husband she gave you her script. They came without instructions. And so almost as many young women got pregnant on them as those not taking them. And abortion was illegal.  Mind you that did not...

Some days Are so heavy I want to hide Let  it all squeeze me into the earth.   This has been one of those weeks. What seems so very clear to me seems so absurd to others. And what they say seems to make sense to them but reaches no connection in my soul or heart. Clearly there is a disconnect. A total failure to communicate. So why is everyone continuing to talk? I want to ask them what they want for lunch. Pizza or hamburgers? That is where hostage negotiators begin. With the simple stuff. Coke or Pepsi. But in this day and age I fear even those simple questions are not simple. Asking them could lead to bigger verbal wars. I know people in the south which define friends on the basis of Coke or Pepsi. You are obviously a northerner and ergo an enemy if you like Coke. And where do I, who likes water or coffee, fit in that paradigm. It classifies me as a bleeding heart liberal an acquaintance recently pronounced and I felt absolutely no reason to continue the ...

Looking Beyond My Windows It is never wise to watch too much news or spend too much time on Facebook. Even have changed my streaming fiction choices. I don't like violence on documentaries about Hitler. Even Star Wars, once a favorite, now gives me the chills especially when the droids march in huge numbers. Just before I got off of Facebook today I watched a short link about Trump's rally last night. Mistake. And they interviewed a couple of his loyal following and they were in tears about how WE were treating HIM. And they seemed to believe the whole child separation thing was the fault of Obama.  Do they read? Do they watch anything but Fox News? Do they listen to anyone other than a Republican talk? But then because of the hateful things they say I have gotten rid of all my Trump voting friends. And about 2.5 minutes is the max I can listen to Trump without throwing up. I tried to watch Fox News just to see what the other side was saying. I was afraid I would be...

The Offending Fountain It all began with the fountain which stopped working well. The pump obviously needed cleaned. It is always a random arrangement of rocks and shells and broken pots. Nothing you could find at Jackalope. And taking it apart and beginning again always causes a mess. A mess which must be cleaned up. And that led to moving the plant bench. And then clean behind that. And at last it was possible to refinish the window sills. And then the windows needed cleaned. That is not the story but the excuse for getting entangled in Facebook again. High drama with the whole internment camps for kids on the border and where were the girls and babies. They seem to be gone. When I could not stand another horrid story I escaped to sanding sills, or staining them or applying polyurethane to them. High energy because I was so pissed. And so anxious because of all the unresolved memories and issues. But the friends on FB became group therapy for me. I spent more time than...

Ghost Orchids Facebook has this term they like to use in the statistics on a fan or business page. It is engagement. Posts I make on Binford-Bell Studio  are given information on how many peopled were reached as well as how many reacted to it. And then how many people were engaged with that post. Reached means they looked at the post. I have some trouble contemplating just how FB knows that but I have begun to pay attention to it because the variance between that number and those who reacted (took the time to press an icon of like or love, etc) seems critical. If I was to compare it to a booth at an art fair reached would be those who stopped to at least look and reacted would be those who nodded approval or just smiled. And engaged would be those who walked into the booth and asked about a specific piece hung on the booth wall. Clearly engagement is to be preferred. But basically Facebook members are drive by shooters or bombers. Bombers - people who share without comment an...

Magique watching from a safe distance I am in introvert. Always have been though my mother just said I was shy. Dad was the one who told me how to pretend to be the extrovert. And I was enough of an actress to carry it off. For short periods of time. It is exhausting. And quite frankly, contraindicated for artists. My short withdrawal from Facebook made that all very clear. Facebook can be like endless games of solitaire - time wasting and mind numbing. And for reasons discussed in a previous blog I will probably always be there, but like Magique in the opening photo I am going to try and watch from a safe distance. Not easy for an addictive personality. I am too in love with words to ever reduce my expressions to emoji. Get used to it because the blogs are back. And like a recovering alcoholic walking through a bar I am not going to touch the drinks. So don't expect me to click an icon to acknowledge that I have seen your post. I will either consider it worthy of a commen...

Heavy rain. Flash Flood warnings have been issued. Thunderstorms at times. Just when the poppies are beginning to bloom. So I busied myself this morning to putting out bamboo stakes and spreading light weight flannel sheets as a tent over them to protect the flowers and leaves. And I put down the sides on the hoop house so It would not take on too much water. Water! I checked my emergency water reserves because I have three dogs and a cat to keep hydrated if the power goes out. The rain barrel is always an option for other uses. But that about covers the possible impact of this storm for me, here on high ground. But I have friends who could well be in the way of deadly flash floods in the area of the Ute Park burn scar. I was talking on the phone just yesterday with a friend who lives outside of Albuquerque. There was recently several deaths because of flash flooding. In this time of drought the homeless had set up camps under over passes in flood control ditches. These ditches...

Sometimes we are so involved in an activity, habit, addiction we lose why. What purpose does this serve in my life. What do I miss most? Friends. No, not the 460 Facebook credits me with. Friends in that particular context are those I have granted permission to see my posts. There is at least three I know are deceased but they pop up on shared memories from time to time. Like the memories of pets long gone they can bring tears to my eyes. Like life not all friends are missed. My father, during one of those dad and daughter dinners when I was in college, explained that if I, in my lifetime, had more than five friends I could count on in times of trouble I should consider myself very lucky. As I recall this dinner at a fine restaurant followed a major issue in the dorms. To me, at the time, it was a huge thing. My best friend got kicked out of college, I got put on restrictions, and the person causing it all declared victory but moved to another dormitory.  My father had been t...

A prickly situation You often don't know you are addicted until you try to give it up. And not all additions are illegal or anti-social. Some seem beneficial and pleasant and are not even taken orally. A few years ago I became aware of some of the not revealed side effects of Zyrtec, an over the counter allergy medication, I had been taking daily, all year around, not just allergy season, because that is what the label recommended for the best relief of symptoms. Mind you, at no where, outside the gray web, do they tell you about side effects nor do they advise you to not go cold turkey. I will also never ever try to give up coffee again. I could go on at length about the bad effects of both but that is another blog. So when I declared I was going to step back from Facebook for an undefined period of time I had no idea of how addicted I was to the social platform. But yesterday I found myself, as I went through my day wanting to post a status message: I am going without ...

Patchwork In the beginning of my participation on Facebook there was a limit to the number of characters in a status message. We were all thrilled when they relaxed that limit of 120 characters. But at the same time they eliminated the Note or Journal option. Some of us went back to other platforms to do our journals and then link them to our FB pages. Others made longer and longer status messages with no break for paragraphs (note there is a way to do that) which were difficult to read. Obviously FB wanted us to stay short and sweet so they introduced the special backgrounds which only work with 120 characters or less. I fell for it hook, line and sinker. I even spent inordinate amounts of time editing my message so it would fit in their arbitrary frame. I even discovered that you could push the limit by when you picked your colorful background. In short, I am good at playing to the stage presented. Then there were those cute little icons. Not just the thumbs up. We asked for ...

Air Compressor I am not sure where I fell into the habit of calling power tools toys. Maybe it was on one of my many trips to the hardware store with my father. Or from my mother when we returned with some new tool Dad needed to do a chore. Working as an journeyman electrician with our electrical contracting firm I began seeing tools as the great equalizer. Women are the weaker sex only because they don't have the right toy. And they are not all power tools. Take for instance the all purpose, no home should be without it, high lift jack. Yes, you can jack up a pickup oh so much easier than with the toy jacks that come as standard equipment, but you can also get your four wheel drive jeep unstuck or pull t-posts which have been in the ground for a quarter of a century. I have one of those. But I also have a battery powered drill and a saws all and a circular saw and a table saw and compound 12" miter saw with laser guide. I won't bore you with the hand tools the the...

No, that is wrong. First there was the head injury. And my cognitive trainer had encouraged me to get back to my journal keeping. But books and pens and writing seemed so beyond me. But I knew that all that was very important for me. At the time I wrote two columns for a local newspaper. Typing on the computer seemed easier so I began what was at the time called an on-line journal. It at least had spell check. And the newspaper had an editor. Y!360 was the platform for my on line journal. That was in the early days of January 2002. Y!360 was a technical training ground for me as well as cognitive exercise. And it was the beginning of on line friendships. I made friends I still have today. Friends I did not have to dress up for and walk right to impress. And it was a support group. In the early days it seemed a lot of those on line were like me in being house bound or house limited. Getting dressed and going to doctors' appointments was the extent of outside adventures. My...

The Hondo Fire of 1996 burned the forest on this mountain. It has not regrown. Photo taken in 2018 Forest fires are complex issues. They harm things the flames don't actually touch. Like watersheds and streams and the life in the streams and the ponds and reservoirs downstream from the fire. And wild life. Even those which are fleet of foot and move away from a fire are impacted, and the established herds in the non-fire forests are unbalanced by extra numbers. There may have been no homes or structures burned but utility lines and poles and the things like fiber optics and telephone lines which are strung on those poles are harmed. Service can be disrupted both up-line and down-line. Serious repair work cannot be done until the fire is out and the area safe. Evacuation orders have been lifted but the roads to and from those homes have been damaged. Extreme heat buckles tarmac. Debris has to be cleared, pavement repaired, fallen rocks removed. Yes, the fire crews at t...

Over the top and into the valley Frequent readers of my blog may remember the Revealed Truth on the Road to Raton series. The road to Raton has a huge fire burning. The Ute Park Fire is the first time in my memory a fire was actually named for the place where it began. The Hondo Fire began in Lama, NM. I wanted to call it the Cinco de Mayo Fire because that was the day it began because a person burning their trash in a barrel went to get a beer with his buddies. May is a bad month for fires in New Mexico after a dry winter. The canyon walls   But because of the   Ute Park Fire  US64 is closed between Eagle Nest and Cimarron. And if you want to get to Raton or points east or north of Raton you have to go NM120 through Ocate to Wagon Mound. My first revealed truth about this route is I rather like it. My post office is in Ocate and if you turn south from the center of town you can get to La Cuerva and the raspberry ranch. I visit this area frequently but not to...

Yesterday was tightly scheduled. I was the first to appear at our precinct polling place. And the first to vote. And then it all went wrong. I was prepared to go from there direct to the local Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my driver's license. I did not do this before my birthday because our MVD was not manned. And then it was supposedly staffed but she was in training in Rio Rancho. May was not an easy month with the Trinidad showing, etc. And the wait gave me an opportunity to hear all the horror stories about renewing my license. Seems our state had for a decade been giving just anyone a driver's license. Including but not limited to illegal aliens. They even defended this practice based on the number of workers lacking green cards which were driving illegally unless they allowed them to get a license. And they would know where to find them. Nobody noticed they all had the same residence in Jal, New Mexico. There was a booming tourist trade in a town with n...

Dawn of Day Two The two bumps on the left side of the photo above are actual tops of the smoke column from the Ute Park Fire. I am on the safe side of that mountain. Though as a survivor of the Hondo Fire I know there is no safe side. That fire set a ground speed record (no crowning) of nine miles in a half hour. As the crow flies I am about 20 miles from the Ute Park Fire. Too close. But I set for 22 days within a mile of the Hondo Fire. Things I learned from the Hondo Fire 1) The longer you are given to evacuate, the less things you find important enough to take. Note that can include husbands.  2) Animals are important (maybe more important than husbands) and every evacuation plan should include them. 3) If you cannot take cows and horses cut your fences so they can flee. 4) Stay put until told when and how to leave. 5) You are never too tired to be totally (and instantly) awake the minute the wind shifts. 6) I will never forget the sound of an exploding Ponde...