Sidetracked Charley

Cattails in the Snow I live in Black Lake, New Mexico. It is five miles south of Angel Fire, 2 1/2 hours from Santa Fe, 45 minutes from Taos, and two hours from our county seat of Raton. And, most importantly at the moment, a 40 minute drive from my post office of record. Ocate Post Office is on the other side of the mountain, and in another county. It has no grocery store, no court house, no feed store, no WalMart, and no UPS store. In short the only reason to go to Ocate is to go to the post office. When I first moved here,14 years ago, we had no mail service. Most of us of Twix, Tween and Beyond Black Lake rented a box at the Angel Fire Post Office. It did not come free because our post office of record (your US government at its best) was in Ocate. The Angel Fire Post Office then was not a government run post office but contract, and fees for boxes got expensive. After some lobby efforts we managed to get rural route delivery three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday....

Frozen Falls Number one pet peeve! Asking me what I am going to do for Thanksgiving (number two would be Christmas). Nobody ever wants to know the answer. It is just a way to lead into a discussion of their grand plans. So I guess we are on number three: Calling from Florida so express your sorrow (always sounds more like gloating) that it is snowing again where I live. BTW I like the snow. And I am allergic to Florida. My ideal vacation is Utah in May or September. And you will note I do not call you in the middle of a hurricane and gloat. Number four: This may be down on the list but it is huge. Yelling to someone else when on the telephone with me. We used to put our hands over the mouth piece if we were going to cuss out the dog while on a phone conversation. We always knew what was said but we still had ear drums. Worse is whispering on the call to me because someone else is in the room on your end. Only excuse for this is "the place is being robbed, please call the ...

Country Lane with Snow Living in the mountains I always watch the weather sites. I say sites because nobody ever gets it right so I monitor three or more and draw my own conclusions. For weeks now it has been sliding snowflakes . This is that weather forecast where a slight chance for snow  drifts across the week always beginning tomorrow but never quite showing up. Friday they dared drop the slight and go with chance for snow - up to 1" over night.  Pardon me NOAA but living in the mountains of New Mexico let me say one inch is not snow. It is flurries . We did get the one inch, perhaps a bit more so I paid a bit more attention to the forecast for Saturday day. Three to five which we didn't get but overnight Saturday into Sunday the prediction went up to five or eight. Yeah, we'll see, I thought as I checked outside before heading to bed Saturday night with just a hint of a flake here and there in the dark skies. The Corolla Entombed  Sometime in the middle...

I am past due on the usually weekly blog here on Sidetracked. I am behind on a lot of things. I spent the fall working for others to get their houses and property up to snuff. Helped my budget but got me way behind on everything at my house. The polar event that plunged my area down to 7 degrees at least a month early work me up. I quickly rounded up straw and covered my beloved hollyhocks of this summer. And got the supplies to "winterize" the apartment. Did the actual draining of water lines a day after the first bone chilling temps saying thank you's about escaping any frozen pipes. Scheduled in the oil change for the truck though because everyone else was doing the same thing, it does not get done until next week. I sill have a long list of stuff I need to do, inside and out, but the weather was horrid and so I did the inside things first. Number one has been setting up my photography site at Fine Arts America . Been meaning to do that for several months. No ...

Stop Already This goes out to the Democratic National Committee and all Democratic candidates who felt they had the right to abuse my email addresses and my telephones just because I am a registered Democrat. I read you messages and replied to some. I even listened to a few of the robo calls in hopes a human would come on and we could dialog. Now you get to listen to me. I plan to change my party registration before the 2016 election cycle begins tomorrow. Green party sounds good. Independent sounds better. I know you wanted money. Because of the economy I did not have it to give. And until the repeal or an amendment to nullify Citizens United SCOTUS decision I do not intend to donate money again. I stand fully behind any effort to reform our campaign system. In fact I demand it NOW. Giving you money just seems to encourage this democracy for sale concept. Besides it is ridiculous to pay a politician to merely run for office. Let's be realistic representatives will have to b...

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. Abraham Lincoln - The Gettysburg Address I say this every election. Nobody cares. But I feel compelled to say it again because the DNC has taken possession of my inbox on two email accounts. And in spite of promises they have made in the last couple of days I doubt I will get them back for my use because the 2016 presidential race will formally kick off. BTW when does any politician actually govern instead of run for office?  Election laws have to change. And not the way they recently were changed by Citizens United and the SCOTUS. We as a nation began this dubious experiment when it took two years o...

Cap Stones The Pope just said he believes in evolution and the big bang. Who would have thought such things would happen in my life time. And yet I am surrounded by people I personally know who believe the earth to be only 6000 years old. The cap stones in the opening photograph are older than that. And once they were on top of pillars of sandstone - the heads of goblins. And before that they were the top layer under a huge inland sea. All that we see is slip sliding away. It is true of people too. Friends come and go talking of Michelangelo. I once told a friend, who was upset I was moving on, that it would not matter if I was staying because friendships come and go even if you live next door. She didn't get it. In fact she chose to never speak to me again. Instead she became fast friends with another friend I left behind at the same time. And that ended. Neither of us know what became of her. The shared friend currently lives next door. She is moving soon. But our friend...