Sidetracked Charley

I live in an unincorporated area of Colfax County. Black Lake is a recognized area of that county and the farthest from the county seat of Raton. In fact I am closer to Taos and Mora. I routinely get summoned for jury duty in Mora and have to deline. I do my grocery shopping in Taos. I have been assigned the Angel Fire Zip Code. And get my mail on my rural route through Ocate which is in Mora. My legal address is Black Lake, NM 87710 and because of that Angel Fire Zip code designation everyone from my short term rental agency to UPS and Google tags me with Angel Fire. That actually works in my favor when it comes to short term rental occupancy because nobody books vacations in Raton. Since the coal mines closed they have been slowly dying. The current population of Raton is now 5734, down from 9000 and still declining. Its current source of income is county offices. We drive two hours to respond to jury duty of apply for licenses. Which is what they want me to do. The whole county ...

  As frequent readers will know it has not been an easy 2022. First there was the incident of black dog one followed quickly by tripping over black dog two. Followed by the snow at last. Fortunately I discovered Bob and Brad on YouTube. And I have learned to sleep on my back. At least for half the night. But they are not as good with thumbs as they are with backs. I decided to redo the decor in the upstairs of the vrbo, went positively manic about decorating beds with pillows, and stupidly did not count how many screws had to be removed to be over the bunk beds. This aserbated my skier's thumb big time. I do not remember it took 30 days to recover before but it did this time even if they called it Mommies' thumb. But that long not using your fingers, thumb and wrist take a toll. So when I went to lift my battery out of my Corolla I had to ask for help. Bought a new battery and guess what? They are as heavy as the old ones. And you cannot drive a batteryless Corolla to the mecha...

  Winter really never came, but also seems to not want to go away. We got all the ugly parts of winter: high winds, snow squalls, subzero nights. And very little or none of the pretty parts: the angel soft snows, the fairy frost on the trees, the silence of a gentle blanket of powder. We got the spring breakers who would rather be at the beach, and the families who found the snow not nice enough, and the prices too high. My vacation rental, on its first winter, had good attendance but most seemed happy to not ski, but thrilled with the hawks soaring over the fields and hills, and the birth of two new calves behind my property. But not a good March for me. I developed a horrible case of inn keeper's thumb (skiers' thumb with a vengeance) which had my left hand and wrist not merely totally useless but terribly painful. Not only could I not use that hand but could not sleep and barely dress myself. As if sensing my disconnect my Microsoft Windows 10 computer failed. That was...

Heading Out   My last Microsoft ten computer crashed. I still have my laptop and I have been surviving with it while I made up my mind about trying an iMac. And figuring out whether I wanted to transfer all my old photo files once again from the cloud to McMac. Meanwhile I casually asked the local computer guy if he could just copy the hard drive to an external one and he did. It was then I remembered the trunk of photos in my mother's basement. Of all her age relatives she was the one with the space for storing the family's history. And it was there my sister and I discovered the trunk after Mom's death. It was too heavy to lift and locked. We managed to pick that and found it full to the brim of Kodak black and white prints of complete strangers. My mother once had photo books she had carefully arranged photos in. Attaching them with those cute corners you licked in exactly the right place to slip the image into. And she would use a white or silver ink to label under each...

Making a selection among many   Test day. Testing hand on repetitive motions like typing. Testing iMac on what of my routine computer things I can do without more software. All while considering how important is it to have all my cloud data downloaded to McMac or an external hard drive. Since 2010 when my computer, in the care of a recommended nerd, had its drive completely wiped, and the external hard drive failed. I have been obsessed about not losing photos or documents. Memories and also inventory as I am a photographer and a painter. Insecure about my backups I have subscribed to an cloud service. And when my beloved HP Windows 7 failed I transferred its brain to my Acer Windows 10. It took days. And since then I have taken important to me things and put them on jump drives. I knew I had 30 days from the crash of MS10 on the Acer to transfer files to a replacement computer. I discovered there are a lot of them on my HP Laptop. And with the increased capacity of scan discs none...

Thicke in the Sun My automatic coffee maker failed. And without even a moment of silence I began looking for a replacement to my Ninja. The conversation on Facebook became which is the best value. Everyone these days has such an investment in their preferred products. All we have done the last two years is shop. It is who we are. I was reminded I had a French Press on the kitchen counter. It was too tall to fit in a cabinet so it had to stand outside. No way could I get rid of it because when the power goes out that is how I make coffee with the help of the wood burning stove. So a decision about the replacement coffee maker did not have to be done that very morning. I opted to go low tech for a while. Discovered I liked it. Loved the ritual. Remembered I had a hand bean grinder also for when the power was out. It was easy to adjust the grind on it. Course is best for French Press. Easy to brew just what you want to drink. Not wedded to half pot or full pot or just one mug full. After ...

It all began with walls and rug   When I began the project of the short term rental I was not even sure it would work. I just knew that for the last ten years of being a land lady it wasn't working for me. Tenants had changed in the years since I bought the duplex. First couple which rented the attached apartment stayed for nine years. They treated the places as theirs and even planted flowers and a couple trees and painted walls. I expected the next tenants to be not as wonderful as Jeff and Susan. But some did not come close. I wound up having to file eviction papers, even defend myself in court. But worst part was spending all my money to put the rental right so it could be rented again. It was not helping with my mortgage payments. I could not even get tenants to contribute to clearing the driveway of snow. In the end it seemed wiser to drain all the pipes and shut of the electricity and keep it empty. Covid-19 pandemic happened and the studio was shut down by the governor. To ...