Thrasher(s) vs Roadrunners

There's description on the video.

Kristafas - On instagram

Today was amazing! I think it was the best day I've had since I got here in October of 2023. The glucosamine/chondroitin - turmeric has, overnight, turned me into a whole diff person.

I was at the park before 11:00 a.m. (it's been rare that I get out of bed b4 10 a.m.) and though I used my walker to rest every 75 feet or so, I spent an hour and a half strolling about.

My encounters included a couple whose 1962 Mustang convertible caught my attention. The paint was perfect as was the interior. I asked who redid them. She said it was their wedding gift and it was all original. And they've been driving it. It's garaged, but I don't know how they kept those seats looking new.

For some reason, I was compelled to ask Krista how far she'd come. 11 miles she said, looking at her watch; she was going for 15. I was impressed & took her picture intending to send it to her somehow. She's on Instagram as Kristafas and is truly an amazing woman! Now I just have to figure out how to work Instagram to get the picture to her.

Fall

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 -- 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.

Stuart, the elm

The large mesquite tree in front of the neighbors house is like a thermometer of the seasons. Its changes signal their passing.

Tidbits

O-rings keep the shower curtain on the hooks.

Ascorbic acid is an antibacterial.

A lemon in the cooler...

...keeps the skank water at bay. 

Swab u'r underarms w a slice for an all-day, odorless deodorant.

Analgesic/Restorative

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. 

Hannah - ready for a naaaaaap. 

Inez Park

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.

From the CNM Parking Lot

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.

Tuesday's Walk

Greg & "The Wife's" Diorama

It's people like Greg & his spouse that give me hope. If they can keep on like this then so can I.

https://travelsofaramblingvan.blogspot.com/2025/11/another-silly-little-project.html?m=1

Screenshot from Greg's blog

Sunday at the Park

If you tap on a picture to make it larger (or accidentally), there's a TEENSIE  x in the upper right corner that'll get you back to the blog.

We're starting to recognize 'em. 

Cat In the Sun

We should all be so relaxed. 

That's Vince Distasio's painting Little Weasel above Trixie (formally known as Bonsai cuz she's small). 

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. 

The Runner

I went to the park by CNM. It's a long uphill from where I parked. I like to stop along the way and take in the mountains.

He was about my age, and as he went by I said, "Show off!" We both got a chuckle.

My mobile resting place.

Christy's Sculptures

Expressive countenances!

Norman Borlaug & Over-population

https://web.archive.org/web/20100112093059/http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2003/06/29/story909701237.asp

BOLDING AND LARGER TYPE MY DOING.

unday Business Post > 2003/06/29 > Corporate interests keep world's poor hungry
Archives Search Simple Advanced Date Search Help ThePost.ie News Features TCH Archives Keyword Search Date Search Contact		Corporate interests keep world's poor hungry  Sunday, June 29, 2003 By Alexander Cockburn They're saving the world from hunger again.This time the bold crusaders have been mustered in Sacramento, California, to proclaim the glories of chemical industrial agriculture, biotechnology, genetically-modified crops and livestock, and kindred expressions of the modern age.  The forum has been a federally-sponsored Ministerial Confere 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

Halloween at the Dr's

Notice my Sophie Blue roll-around. 

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.

Mr. Nose...in all his majesty.