Sidetracked Charley

  It is easy in March and April in New Mexico to blame the weather. And since March 2020 it has been really easy to blame the pandemic. For four years we could blame Trump. And since January 6, 2021 we can still blame Trump and his trumpsters. But I was raised to not whine. And blaming someone or something is whining. But I am going to whine. I am going to blame perhaps all of the above, except for weather, on the failure to acquire a washer and dryer for my vacation rental. I had one ordered from Home Depot. I had one ordered for delivery March 24th. They delivered to Albuquerque. Would take two more weeks to get a refund. Drove to Lowe's in Espanola and bought a set double charging the credit card hoping for the stimulus check and/or Home Depot refund before payment was required. They could not deliver until this last Thursday. But because of Governor's way of opening or shutting down whole counties Lowe's could not install due to the 16 new cases in Raton two hours away ...

  When I was in college at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque there was an incident at the Tierra Amarilla court house in Rio Arriba County, NM. The court house raid by Alianza Federal de Mercedes  led by Reies Tijerina in 1967 attempted to make a citizen's arrest of the district attorney to "bring attention to the unscrupulous means by which government and Anglo settlers had usurped Hispanic land grant properties." For reasons which escape me it made national news. And my Aunt Louise wrote me from Kansas City, Missouri and asked if I might want to come back to the United States until the revolution was resolved. I remember being shocked Aunt Louise had my address, and that the envelope had international postage on it.   That is just one incident on the whole line of separation, which was military or location based. The Hildebrand and Binford families were Midwesterners. Dad came back from service in Guam during the Korean war and was based in Roswell, New...

  Charley was John Steinbeck's Standard Poodle. I first met Charley, and John Steinbeck for that matter, in Union Station in Los Angeles. It was the culmination of an escape from my college dorm with five friends and a Buick Special which threw a connecting rod just outside of Kingman, Arizona in the middle of the General Motors strike in Detroit. Over the years I have written many short stories about that adventure, toyed with making it a coming of age novel except only men seem to write those, named every computer, and half my journals or blogs Charley. I have also read all the John Steinbeck novels since that day I used some of the last of my travel money and bought the just out in paperback Travels with Charley.  If I had gone ahead with getting my masters I might have made my thesis about John Steinbeck's works.  I abandoned the masters when living with someone who was doing his masters on Moby Dick. That may be a portion of my life I need to examine more fully. It i...

  And bottom line does it matter? Found the camera cleaning kit behind my computer screen. I bought it months ago. And forgot about it until my camera did not want to focus on my trip to the short grass prairie. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it didn't. Finally figured it was the connection rings. Translation: it needs to be cleaned. But I have too much to do in too little time to take time to do something which requires more time. There are things you can do in a rush and things you really cannot without ruining them. Haste makes waste. When I drove down to Espanola to buy the washer and dryer for the vacation rental I spotted the two cheapest but of a good brand right off. I should have looked around for a better dryer for me. I knew the one I owned was on limited time. I got it used. It has been fixed once. But I had not wanted to spend the time to drive to Espanola and once there did not want to spend more time or more money. Now my dryer definitely needs replaced. The sound it ma...

US 64 Going West   I have done a lot of blogs about the road to Raton. It is a lonely stretch of straight road shadows parts of the Santa Fe Trail. Wagon trains passed this way using the volcanic peaks as landmarks. I find it haunted not necessarily by ghosts of those who must have died between St. Joseph, Missouri and Santa Fe but haunted by the spirit of determination it took to load all their worldly goods and head into the unknown where few had passed, and even less had sent post cards to say they made it. There is no rush hour on this highway across the short grass prairie. But traffic on this particular day in the midst of the pandemic felt less than normal. Colfax county residents are finding other ways to deal with official business than go to the county seat in Raton. Raton is not in the center of the county by a long shot. But because it was at one time when such decisions were made the biggest population center. That is rapidly being challenged with the demise of mining....

Thicke, prince of cats   I always considered my family from Kansas City. A town I was not born in (St Joseph hospital was closer) and only partly raised. My father was born in Iowa but Mother in Missouri somewhere. Her family was from Mexico, Missouri where as far as I have been able to ascertain her grandfather was the town drunk. From the second grade on we were military gypsies which saved us from dying of starvation on the plot of land now under the Kansas City Airport runways. In the era after WWII there was a return to the land movement and a belief with a couple acres of land and enough side businesses you could survive without working for The Man. Mom and Dad were obviously their generation's version of hippies. We had a truck farm on an acre, chickens to produce eggs we sold, and kennels where Dad raised hunting dogs. He also showed and trained them.  The Korean Conflict and my father being a pilot saved us from all of that. And in the second grade I was in Roswell, N...

Bedroom number one at Charley's Hideaway   When I first began this project of turning my attached apartment into a short term rental I figured it would be mostly about money. Covid-19 caused the Governor to close down art studios as non-essential businesses. And so I had time on my hands. In the first few weeks last year I cancelled all my private lessons, Art Up cancelled all the fairs. Even Dog Gone park suffered as people cancelled month and longer trips that left their dogs with me. I would have been looking into mortgage forgiveness rules if I had not just a few months before refinanced my house and taken some cash out. Cash which was suppose to be used to beautify the the outside and maybe even buy a green house. Instead it went into paying the mortgage when I fell short. I started thinking about short. I began a policy of taking dogs just for the day - Dog Bark Camp. That was a bonus idea because it seemed those trapped at home with their dogs all day were looking for r...