The view out the front is of the carport, a small portion of the street and an arbor vitae, an evergreen shrub. Not very exciting.
The view out the back offers a little more. It is, after all, an urban environ. You don't get much.
The view as you pass by...
Remnants of the last bouquet from Trader Joe's. It's an urban benefit: cut flowers; and cheap too.
At the bottom are boxes that rode atop Phoebe. Someday I'll empty them.
Pausing, leaves from the elm and two cottonwoods. They're a nuisance to the neighbors to the west; he suffers. In the summer it's 10 degrees cooler back here.
I really like the grasses. Michelle said there are seven or eight different kinds. We mow in the spring and then just leave it. It's a little bit of "the wild."
Leaning against the wall is a memento from my days in the Yukon with Jozien. It was buried under years of woods detritus. I think it's from a late 30s or early 40s truck.
Stewart, the elm
The large mesquite tree in front of the neighbors house is like a thermometer of the seasons. Its changes signal their passing.
I'm not inclined to do food or product reviews, but this is phenomenal!
After gimping around for the last couple of years, I remembered that Sophie (my cat) had benefited from glucosamine and chondroitin. As luck would have it, Michelle had recently bought a bottle of OsteoMove from Sprouts. She doesn't notice how much things cost so I've no idea, but as they say at the Ferrari dealership "if you have to ask, you can't afford it."
Regardless, when I woke up this morning instead of moaning and groaning and taking 20 minutes to get into position, I swung my legs over the side and stood up; cavorting into the hall, I did a pirouette, mimed shooting several baskets just to see what I could do on one leg, and, in general, made a fool of myself. It was great! I'm rejuvenated!! If only St. John's Wort worked so well!
While discussing it with Michelle and surmisaling it might've been $25, I glibly remarked that I'd've paid $50. That'll teach me; she got the 240 tablet bottle and though she doesn't remember how much she paid, she doesn't think it was $50. But I'm here to tell you, even if it is, this is astounding and definitely worth it (note price in lower left of image above). I'm thinking of heading up to the gym.
But first a nap. I mean, this is just the first day.
It was around 3:30. A young couple were napping under the big pine. When I offered money they laughed and said they lived nearby but enjoyed sleeping under the tree. The homes are in the $375k range.
Once known as the Technical Vocational Institute or TVI, after partnering with the University of New Mexico they changed the name to Central New Mexico Community College, or CNM.
The upper parking area overlooks El Oso Grande Park.
If you goto my website you'll get a message saying it isn't secure. That's cuz it doesn't have http:// in front of the URL. If you know someone who can help with that, please have them get in touch. My email is at the bottom of my profile.
Vince lived downwind of Intel. He, like many others in his neighborhood, died of a rare cancer. He died angry as he'd worked hard to stay in shape. To spite the oil companies, he rode his bicycle everywhere including the 30 miles roundtrip 3x a week to clean the pool at the Officer's Club at Kirtland Air Force Base. He worked out at the gym two hours a day, played basketball as often as possible and ran for an hour (every day!) around the park near his house despite having been told he'd ruin his knee (both) replacements. Look at him in this video taken a year or so before he died.
This is how we (we guys) could look if we exercised like Vince. His 93-year-old cousin in Connecticut, in perfect health, had recently contacted him about helping him divest himself of some of his art collection; he was thinking he might should be thinking ahead a few years.
nCorporate interests keep world's poor hungry Sunday, June 29, 2003 By Alexander Cockburn They're savingthe world from hunger again.This time the bold crusaders have been mustered in Sacramento, California, to proclaim the glories of chemicalindustrial agriculture, biotechnology, genetically-modified crops and livestock, and kindred expressions of the modern age.
The forum has been a federally-sponsored Ministerial Confe re n c e a nd E x p o of Agricultural Science and Technology. Under the approving eyes of bigwigs from biotech firms such as Monsanto, US officials such as agriculture secretary AnnVeneman pounded the drum for high-tech agriculture.
"This conference is for those most in need," Veneman said last Monday. "It [hunger] has to become a global agenda . . . new approaches are needed."
Was there ever a moment, in the long tradition of such overblown rhetoric, that "new approaches" weren't needed? Scour all the old speeches across the past century about starving billions around the planet or starving millions in the US, and it's always the same professions of noble purpose.
"We can end hunger now," declared the sales folk for the Green Revolution that peaked in expectation in 1971 when Dr Norman Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize for his invention of Mexican miracle wheat, heavily backed by the Rockefeller Foundation.
And indeed miracle wheat paid off handsomely for rich farmers on expensively irrigated land in Sonora but, as always, intensive monoculture drove marginal, subsistence farmers off the land and the Mexican poor people hated Borlaug's low-gluten wheat.The peasants and poor urban dwellers of south and southeast Asia also hated the first `miracle' rice, IR-8, because it cooked up mushy and tasted bad.
"History may well record that the Green Revolution was a greater disaster than ourVietnam intervention." So wrote John and Karen Hess in their funny, fiery book,TheTaste of America, published in 1977.
They were probably right, if you add up all the `greater-thanexpected deaths' (as the statisticians put it) inThird World countries savaged by techno-fixers from the First World trying to make world agricultural production safe for capitalism.
The techno-fixers moved in step with the counter-insurgency forces, who also acted to save world agricultural production, but more drastically. In the 1950s, when the peoples of Guatemala and Iran elected governments committed to land reform, the CIA paid for coups to kill the reformers and protect the old land barons.
This sanction - exercised by the CIA, advisers, technicians from USAID, death squads and allied agents - extended across Latin America for the next 30 years, crowned by the butchering, under CIA supervision, of 200,000 Mayan Indians in Guatemala in the 1980s.
On the other side of the world, when the land barons of Afghanistan were threatened by a revolution there in the late 1970s, supported by the Soviets, the CIA pumped in aid and fanatical Islamic advisers. The opiumgrowing land barons returned, and they flourish still, rich on opium harvests that are now the highest in the country's ghistory, amid the desperate hunger of most Afghans.
It wouldn't be hard to feed all the people on the planet. The Malthusian thesis about population growth outstripping means of subsistence has long since been disproved.The imperatives of capital are always searingly obvious in agriculture, as is obvious if you fly south down California's Central Valley from Sacramento,
ground zero for an agricultural system based on oil (oil-based pesticides, fertiliser, courtesy of natural gas), absentee ownership - mostly by banks - and water allocated by water boards controlled by the land barons via politicians in their pay.
The latest techno-revolution merely underlines the obvious. `Advances' in agricultural technology are mostly ways to tie the farmer into a cycle of debt peonage, to restrict production in favour of the big growers and to send the little guy to the wall. (Witness the fate of strains of corn or wheat perfected by peasants over centuries, as with Indians and hard wheat, later appropriated by Canadian farmers.)
All the major US food programmes suffer from the same vice of hypocrisy. Food for Peace in the 1950s, touted as the US's gift to the world's starving, was a sophisticated dumping scheme, and a way of supporting US military allies with food.
Franklin D Roosevelt's farm programmes in the New Deal favoured big agricultural concerns and pushed thousands of subsistence farmers off the land.
At least we can thank FDR and his agriculture secretary Henry Wallace for the Chicago bluesmen who wended their way north after New Deal subsidies - given to land barons to take their acres out of production - de-stroyed all prospects for the sharecroppers.
Thirty years ago in the US, politicians felt it necessary to make stirring speeches in support of the small family farmer. You don't hear much talk like that now, after the latest holocaust of corporate integration.
US agriculture is controlled by about five monstrous corporations, such as Tysons and Archer Daniels Midland, and this trend is spreading across the planet.
The way to ensure that there aren't hungry people in the world is to give peasants land, unencumbered by debt peonage. The US has spent the last 150 years ensuring that precisely the opposite conditions prevail, to which the corporate carnival in Sacramento attests.
Alexander Cockburn has worked in the US as a journalist for the past 30 years and is the author of two books. He is coeditor of the newsletter and website, Counterpunch, and writes for the Nation. His column appears fortnightly in Agenda
A few weeks after Mom died Sophie showed up at the door. She made herself comfortable but Sandy, Mom's dog, was still with me and after a few days Sophie disappeared.
Six weeks later I was summoned to the door; she was obviously pregnant and not all that happy about it.
Sandy had since gone to live with the young couple who shared the house with Mom and after attending to the immediate issue, Sophie settled in for the duration...19 years as it turned out.
She had a liking for deep blue. I had a sixties kitchen chair with steel legs and deep blue vinyl on the seat and back. Sophie plucked the hell out of the back and never touched anything else. Well, except my cap-toe J & Ms (Johnston & Murphy) which she gave just enough to keep me humble but not so as to embarrass.
The guy who wrote My Octopus Teacher has written a memoir. On p. 51 he mentions Johnny Clegg & Juluka. One of the things I enjoy now is having the time to look up everything. When Craig tells of buying a home nea False Bay, I look it up; the bay, that is.
I awoke to the sound of thunder! An unexpected and pleasant contrast to the loud mufflers and sirens.
I assess the day through the kitchen window. The large locust tree across the way is the barometer of Fall. The cantaloupe seeds drying by the window contain my hope I'll be here in the Spring. The box with its yellow lid (outside) contains an assortment of BDSM toys -- ropes and such. It rode up front on the roof so when we passed through checkpoints I could say, "Wellllll, this one's full of BDSM stuff "...and I'd offer to let 'em see. None ever took me up on it. 🥸 I hope to find a recipient one of these days.
At my behest, we stopped mowing. It invites mice for the cat and once a hawk settled for awhile to dine on a pigeon it had taken. For a while there was a squirrel. It's a small way of keeping a measure of wildness nearby. Michelle says there are over 8 species of grass.
I've started bringing in a few things. Kristen's *Seated Nude* has been a major help. The white lump at the end of the bed is the down quilt from Canada she gave me for Solstice in 2020. It has a large coffee stain that unequivocally declares it's mine.
In the bookcase are reminders to the otherwise fading memories. The green Rosenthal plate that I dropped earlier this year I glued together using thinned Elmer's -- as my karate instructor advised. When he first moved to Albuquerque he worked with a restorer of fine antiques. He used Elmer's.
Mom's fav color was green. Her china collection was in a buffet cabinet along with her Japanese doll and other treasures. When she died I sent the rest to my brother in Texas.
Next to the plate is a copy of The *Velveteen Rabbit.*
On the shelf above is Kristen's Valentine card, a couple of iconic carrots (prime motivators) and stuffed animals from Michelle. So much love!!!
The urban wasteland. I'm grateful for indoor plumbing and a place to keep the stuff.
We had a nice rain. The three houses to the east are owned by a slumlord. The one next door often seems to be a halfway house / brothel / drug dealers lair. Fortunately, the last few sets have been quiet...mostly.
The Sandia Mountains, increasingly obscured by multi-storied apartments, provide a marker to the passing of time as the sun crests their horizon from a different spot each day.
We've done what we could. The cholla, chamisa, apache plume, russian sage, spanish bayonet and big sage, provides safe haven and nesting for families of thrashers and roadrunners.
Out in the triangular area next to the sidewalk are some of the cantaloupe vines that did so well.
Neighbor Harvesting a cantaloupe. Ziggy, the dog, alerts everyone.
It may have been Barry Lopez's citations in his book Horizon of some of the other explorers that set me to reading the books by Wilfred Thesiger, Laurens van der Post, Gertrude Bell and others.
The six videos below are narrated by van der Post and were directed & shot by Paul Bellinger whose Youtube channel is where they're from.
Laurens van der Post's:
Testament to the Bushman Programme 1: In the Beginning
Testament to the Bushmen: Children of the Desert
Testament to the Bushmen: the beginning of the end
The black folder w turquoise is Michelle's "death pak" from French Mortuary.
The blue and white rectangular box holds a spanking new automotive part most likely for the 1961 Dodge Lancer Michelle's grandfather bought new. We sold it in 2015 for $1,000.00.
The pen holder is a souvenir from Japan. It did duty as a cigarette holder in its hey day. (The phrase hey day originated in the 16th century as "heyda," an expression of cheerfulness or surprise.)
It's a few miles north of Abiqui. Georgia O'keefe's house is there and a substantial amount of acreage that folks can wander without worrying about trespassing or encountering trespassers.
The month-long residency includes a casita; one side is a bedroom with a mini kitchen and the other is a studio.
Since she's not exclusively devoted to painting, doesn't affect the nuances of the plein aire folks, and even though she writes she hasn't had anything published and since she works in clay and patching compound (gypsum), and is known to be living an "examined" life, she's something of an iconoclast.
Pedernal
She was pretty nervous, but as she walked up to her casita, tears of happiness welled; she'd made it home...again.
