Sidetracked Charley

Trailing Lantana???? There is an intern in the older episodes of Bones who calms himself by sprouting - or spewing - irrelevant facts. I can relate. I have been at the very least diverting myself of the horror of the news by googling otherwise unnecessary information. Yesterday I began on identifying the plants in my container gardens of which I am very well pleased. Last year I joined the Angel Fire Garden Club  and discovered small white flower which droops was not an adequate identification of my photos. Google Images, already a friend for drawing inspiration, and identification of birds to my yard, is now a reliable source for identification of flowers I bought last spring and forgot to note in my garden journal. Not just the name but also what I put in what pot. I wander through garden centers and pick flowers on the basis of color and texture and height. They all have those little identification stakes which once planted I promptly toss. They just do not look good in...

My brother always told me I was dumb. Not daily but often enough I got that he considered it his mission in life to make me believe it. He was clearly in league with my mother, or she with him, who would say, "Men don't like smart women so being dumb is good." Those may not have been her exact words but there was a whole lexicon of of them she marched out. Her top priorities for me were dates, marriage and kids. I was a huge disappointment because in my first year of college I did not get my MRS degree. I constantly got lectures about not studying at the law library, majoring in Fine Arts because I wanted to curate a museum and not decorate the nursery, and not going to church to catch a man. I might have gotten her to drop that last one if I had not constantly broken into lectures about religion being the opiate of the masses and Zen was the way. It was my father who revealed to me the results of my IQ scores from routine school tests to talk me out of attempting...

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...

I once thought my absolutely perfect job would be research assistant except that I would have to research what my boss wanted to research. I admit to having issues with focus. And Wiki and Google do not help. I am one of those people that click on all the hot links for related topics. Before the internet I was probably the single most frequent noon time caller to reference librarians. I blame this annoying trait on World Book Encyclopedia. My father bought us kids a set of them when we were in grade school. It was touted as the easy to understand alternative to the Encyclopedia Britannica. But I digress. You are wondering, no doubt, about what the movie poster has to do with all of this. Well, I was looking up historic border disputes and found out my knowledge of the Comancheros comes from this rather poorly researched movie. Not unlike pirate movies of the same era. Wiki informs me: The Comancheros were primarily New Mexican hispanic traders in northern and central New Mexi...