Sidetracked Charley

So many improvements and memories. So many losses. This the deck I built and standing on it is Magique who I lost. The lost pets are many. Google and Facebook remind me constantly. Some memories are good. Some so sad. I was just beginning this gardening year when the fire began on Kermit Peak. It was to be my second vrbo year and but beginning slowly. I was happy to have ample time to work on the gardens when Mora was evacuated. I invited homeless friends to stay in the empty rental. A frolic. Soon they would be able to go back home. Two weeks later I was ordered to evacuate. Kate had asked how long before she could go home and I didn't know. I did not know how long before I got to go home. I had a place to go. To stay with a friend in a near by town. It would be a lark. Soon I would be back here in my home of 30 years of memories. Today it hit me it would be more than a weekend when I had to fill out a temporary change of address. Suddenly I was discussing all the truly difficult ...

Black Lake, NM   This view welcomed me home in my traveling days with art fairs. This was my view as I emerged from Guadalupita canyon, home of Coyote Creek, and I am sorry to say I do not know this mile marker. I always know mile markers. I was the navigator when my family traveled. I had a notebook and kept important notes. Maybe not always for my family but important for me. Other kids had to memorize their address and telephone number incase they got lost but in the beginning for me, living in the Missouri countryside or the a New Mexico air base it was the turns I would have to make to get home or my father's name, rank and serial number. I discovered when accidently abandoned outside of Liberal, Kansas during a trip at Christmas the license plate number was important. The highway patrol officer was impressed. Also important for me when we traveled about the country was how long. How long would we be at this base, this camp, this trip, this school. When I moved to Black Lake I...

  Remember when you used to be able to tell what county a person in New Mexico lived in by the first digit on the license plate. Bernalillo was two. Santa Fe one. They stopped that. Needed all possible six digits to have enough number combinations. And the area code of your telephone number also gave you a location. New Mexico was 505 and Colorado 303. Then Albuquerque and Denver got too big. Albuquerque kept 505 and the rest of our state became 575. West Denver kept 303 but east Denver was assigned 720. Northwest Colorado is now 970and Southeast is 719. Now they are considering another number for Denver.   Then came cell phones. And their promise of being able to keep your number forever. Stopped the need to reprint checks just about the time we stopped using checks. My sister, to prevent me from never getting another cell phone EVER after I lost my flip phone put me on her family plan. She lived in Victoria, Texas so my area code on my cell was 361. Texas is a mess. And the ...

  This was the photo of the day. She had the pose just right. So did Mother nature. Even the fog which softened the light worked to my advantage. But I did not set out to take this photo. I set out with my trusty Nikon to find something worthy to record. And was once again thrilled we are no longer in the era of film and each photo I take will cost me money. This was when I first saw her deep in the rain blessed grass and multiplicity of New Mexico wildflowers. It was the wildflowers I had come to record. Or maybe the camera was just an excuse to forest bathe. My justification for wasting time not attending to that list of to do's back home. And why was she out alone? If it was June I would saw to find a quiet place to have her fawn. But it is August. Lately, however, it seems they are getting it wrong. But so have I. I have been lured away from why I take photos. Too many friends recording and reporting their travels or taking selfies of them on their travels. Stuck at home I have...

  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...

Yes, this photograph was taken in Utah. I could live in Utah. Looks like a nice little fixer upper with room for expansion. And Trump seems to be in favor of selling parts of our public lands off. Alaska, my sister and I agreed this morning, has entirely too much winter but climate change could alter that. The perma frost is melting. But it brings up why people choose to live in Alaska with all that winter. It has wonderful scenery and you can raise huge cabbages in just 45 days of "summer." And a traffic jam is a moose on your major route to work. I visited Alaska with a USO tour in August in some year in the 1970's. Could have been '76? Admittedly it was hard to get me out of the parka the government provided, but locals said you adapted. So why Alaska? Or Utah? The people. Or the lack of people. And the people that are there are different than you find in big cities. And both have better tourists. What is a better tourist? One that doesn't tell you how ...

Sunset in Black Lake I read an article this morning written by Sarah Kendzior for a Dutch publication and posted by my Canadian friend. We're Heading into dark Times as chilling. She called on readers to write down who we are, what we have experienced, and what we had endured before illegitimate president D. Trump takes office because an authoritarian state can change who we are. I have decided to accept my assignment. This is just day one. I like who I am. I am a photographer and I see it as a calling. I am ready to record the beauty and awe others are too busy to notice. I have always been a recorder. When we traveled in my childhood I kept the records of miles and cities we passed through; took pictures with my little Brownie camera, drew sketches in a sequence of notebooks. We traveled. My relatives did not. They were the solid mid-westerners in Kansas City, Missouri. We were the nomads who settled on New Mexico. My Aunt Louise didn't even believe New Mexico was pa...

I began going back to Las Vegas after my head injury because it has the Social Security office. And I hated going to Taos so much I even went to Santa Fe medical appointments via Las Vegas. I came in from the Mora direction and then had to find myself to I 25, which is not clearly marked. And Social Security is hidden behind Walmart. So I came to use the term lost again in Las Vegas. Given my wanderings around it would seem I could have found everything by now. But when you are being led by a camera and interesting old buildings I am just thankful I am not hopelessly lost. I have found the important places like the Castaneda Hotel by the railroad. The train station looks new and not what I saw from the train. Need to google that. Glad they are renovating the hotel. And I found Highlands University because they were filming Longmire just across the street. I found Luna University because I was looking for a background casting call for Longmire.  ...

Red Tail Hawk on the Sentinel Tree  The last week of November begins. It brings with it the Full Beaver Moon. I am not sure why the Indians of the Southwest named it that, but for me it seems it may be the last month when beavers can be seen before they go to ground below the ice in their dens. November is the 'tween month. Between Indian Summer and winter. It is the month where we do not take snow seriously because warm days which follow will no doubt melt it. Ski areas are seriously blowing snow to be ready for a ski season which used to begin now. It is the month were ice appears on the ponds and lakes but it also disappears on the ponds and lakes almost as fast. It is the month of preparation for winter, whether you a beaver stashing twigs under the water, or a bear putting on hibernation fat, or a human stocking up on firewood and pantry essentials. The snow does not get serious until middle of December. It is then you best have a plowman lined up for the driveway...

My Cat Thicke Because I am an artist, and a blogger, and on several social media sites I Google well. But Thicke leads me in likes. Paws down. And my photographs of Thicke do very well on several photographic pages I participate in. He certainly has fan appeal. Wondering if he should be my logo. Should I take advantage of him being my unofficial studio cat and make it formal. Yesterday I attended a workshop on how to put my business on the map. Yes, I Google well, even Google image well, but Google maps has trouble locating me. Evidently it also has a great deal of trouble locating a lot of others in my neck of the woods. Literally. But would they zero in on my location if I listed it as the home of Thicke? Tag words or labels help your posts, be they photos or blogs, score high in Google ratings. I use New Mexico a lot. But I am wondering as I am trying to put Binford-Bell Studio on Google and the map should I be using Thicke as a tag word? You got my spots right? In t...

Old Friends I have long known that photographers are only truly happy with a camera in their hands. And paradise may be having a photographer buddy to share fstops with. I say maybe because there are photographers and there are photographers. We don't all want to capture the same subjects. Or talk about the same things while scouring the landscape outside the car looking for the next object of attraction. And there is nothing more awful than being in a vehicle driven by a non-photographer unless you forced yourself to leave your camera at home. Better to travel with just your camera. But the last three days have been awesome with my photographer friend from the east coast visiting. Since her last visit I have been cataloging old trucks to share. And yesterday we hit the truck trail. Some were old friends of mine. And some I had saved for her visit. International at Eagle Nest And some were eureka moments while looking for buffalo and antelope or discussing the nex...

Round Up Like many people who live in rural areas or on the outskirts of small villages I am an introvert, who on demand can pretend to be in an extrovert for short periods of time. I have had to do so to be in art fairs and give lessons at my studio. Tourist season stretches my performance ability because they seem to travel in packs or even herds. I first noticed this tendency when I was still teaching skiing. Frequently a class of ten would all be from the same group or family. And it wasn't just in class but on the slopes. They moved like a herd down the ski hill. I liked the first run of the day when there was only me and maybe one or two others on a hill. My family camped to get away from it all - and that included people. We didn't attend Parrot Head conventions at campground tent cities with generators. Being a photographer fits me. I and my camera and my dogs out in a lonely place. Painting probably suits me even more because I can stay in my studio and zone o...

Eagle Nest Lodge Blindly we move toward 2015, poised on the edge of another economic cliff, and being shoved over by a greedy tea party members.  I say blindly because corporate capitalistic America gets us involved in a feeding frenzy of materialism at this time of year when we should be paying attention to the thieves in DC. But being as I am unconcerned with materialism (well, there is a new laptop I am looking at), I was lured by a spring like day so I set forth with camera to record my neighborhood. Yes, escapism, but one can stand just so much of Scrooge (or Scrooges as in GOP Congress), besides I voted and it did no good, but my conscious is clear. So cameras in Big Blue I motored to the thrift store in Eagle Nest, New Mexico and arrived too early for the favorite to be open but just in time for a great series of photos with awesome lighting. There are three major landmarks which I have photographed as a marker of my time this side of the mountain: Eagle Nest Lodge, Ea...

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...