Tag: cats and New Mexico weather

Credit Where It Isn’t Due

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We haven’t had a (serious) New Mexico wildlife shot in a while.

But now that the weather is warming up, the critters are starting to emerge again. This is a coachwhip snake. The photo doesn’t quite capture his lovely reds and pinks.

I got credit for first live snake spotting, much to David’s chagrin because he’s the king of snakes. (Isn’t there something biblical about that?)
No, seriously, in his misspent youth, David used to collect rattlesnakes for Reptile Gardens in South Dakota. For those who’ve never had the pleasure, Reptile Gardens is part zoo, part sideshow, part tourist trap. Kind of the biggest ball of twine of snakes.

And they paid by the pound. Not a bad gig for a nice kid from northern Wyoming with a knack for wildlife.

At any rate, David’s been revved to see the snakes of our new home, but so far had seen only one dead snake. I don’t get a bunch of credit for this one, though – when I rolled out the garbage can to stuff it full yard detritus, he was under there. Turns out they’re nocturnal snakes and not terribly fond of sunlight. He just laid there, all sleepy while I called David and the snake was duly identified and photographed.

It works that way sometimes – you get credit for luck, for happenstance, for stumbling upon something cool. And sometimes the things you labor over, hunt for, craft lovingly with care, no one ever cares about but you. The universe’s way of putting us in our place, I suppose.

One way to interpret the Tao Te Ching says that only those things achieved without effort are one with the Tao. The implication is also that only those things that are one with the Tao are valuable.

I think both points are debatable.

Really it all depends on what value you assign to the thing. Both what kind and how much. There’s something to be said for both the stories that drop into your lap and the ones you wrestle out of the ground. Other people may read them and assign their own values, but only the writer knows what the story means to her.

The wise writer would be thankful for both the gifts and the stories bought with blood.

In Progress

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And they said it wouldn’t get done…

(For the “before” picture, see here.)

Special bonus points if you can spot the New Mexican wildlife in the background. (And no, I didn’t notice she was there when I snapped the photo.)

I always liked the idea of Sundays as a day of rest. Or, rather, I like that concept, as in Orthodox Juadism of setting aside an entire 24-hour period away from the work and busyness of life. To contemplate the nature of God or the universe. To study. To rest and reflect.

I also like the idea of being cloistered for religious contemplation and I’m not about to do that either.

Sunday is almost always catch-up day for me. It certainly was yesterday. I cleaned both the house and the front and back gardens. Fortunately this also counts as exercise. But I did begin the day with writing. Writing only on my novel. I typically don’t post to the blog on Sundays. That’s one little rest I give myself as a matter of ritual.

Sundays are also different writing days, because my Progress Count spreadsheet resets itself. I begin by wordcounts anew for the following week. There’s this pristine quality to it because Sunday is the only day that progress for the day matches progress for the week. It would make more sense if I showed it to you and I’m not going to do that because people tend to freak out when I show them my spreadsheets.

My own little way of being anal.

On Saturday I went to a meeting of the Land of Enchantment Romance Authors (LERA) and this multi-published gal gave a presentation on her method of pre-plotting a novel. She does sticky notes. She does 3X5 cards. Then she types it all into a massive flow chart, scene by scene, prints out the pages and glue-sticks them together to make an accordion-fold map. It’s her process and it works for her.

I thought about what I would do, if someone asks me to present on my process. Since a lot of that process involves staring into space, I don’t think it would make for an interesting presentation. (Gardening, incidentally, is excellent for this kind of process.) I could, however, show people my spreadsheets.

This gal tartly noted that she gets checks in the mailbox for her work, as an argument to the folks who thought her technique seemed over the top. She feels this organization is key to her success. The pre-plotters have a knack for making those of us who dream our way through our books feel, well, like slackers.

That’s why I have my spreadsheets, I realized. I track my target finish date – yes, I use functions in Excel to calculate my projected wordcount and current rate of progress against today’s date. And I have the cells conditionally formatted to be yellow and say “not yet” or green for “yes!” depending on whether I’ve met the goal that cell represents.

Say what you will about rats pulling levers to get cheese cubes: I love to watch my cells turn green.

Is this a little bit nutty? Well sure, or people wouldn’t freak out to see it. Does it work for me?

I sure think so.

I mean, I’m not getting checks in the mailbox. Not yet. But someday that will be a Yes!

Besides, I prefer direct deposit.

Love and Sunsets

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I love it when the ridges look like this, all two-dimensional, like stage props to hint at landscape.

I remember coming down to Santa Fe with my folks when I was a kid — right around this time of year, too. We’d often come down for Spring Break, sometimes staying, sometimes continuing farther south. I loved this look then, too. I’m pretty sure I even wrote an abysmal poem at some point about cardboard mountains propped against the western sky. It undoubtedly included something about my state of angst and wretched loneliness, which was, naturally, nonexistent.

But if there’s angst to be found, an adolescent girl will dig it out.

Last evening I gazed at this view and thought how amazing that I get to see this every day now. Instead of wretched loneliness, I felt a rush of overwhelming gratitude. I took a moment to offer my thanks for all the blessings.

One of my favorite professors from college, David Hadas, who described himself as a non-practicing Orthodox Jew, had a favorite saying. It might have been from Martin Buber. He said that when terrible things happen to us, we raise our eyes to the sky and say why? Why me? But when wonderful things happen, we never ask “why me?”

Perhaps we are like favored children that way – we never question that we are loved, that we have a beautiful world to enjoy, that we have plenty. We might be just slightly spoilt that we throw tantrums when we don’t get what we want, exactly the way we want it. But we mature and grow wiser, realizing that the bad comes with the good. How we decide to handle that defines who we become.

It’s something for me to remember, that I’m incredibly lucky to have so many blessings in my life. Wanting more means that I’m alive and growing. In the meantime, I get to enjoy what I have.

Love and sunsets.

Why me?

Flyover

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LaTessa commented on my Spring Snow post that she’d recently flown over New Mexico — on her way from Memphis to Vegas.

(Of course, her main point was that she couldn’t figure out what all the white stuff on the ground was, but we won’t go there. The woman is stressed and suffers from various delusions. We all just look the other way.)

But I think a lot of people fly over northern New Mexico. The contrails at sunset are spectacular. This is a bit like noting that increased pollution makes sunsets more dramatic, and that a nuclear blast would REALLY liven up the skies. It makes for a happier life to just enjoy the pretty. Whether the condensation trails from airplanes have a serious impact on global climate change is just one more thing I can’t think about. I’m already scrutinizing all of my plastics to see if the (frequently illegible) number on the bottom makes it recyclable or not.

It makes sense, though that there are so many planes flying over our piece of the world — we are on a direct route to Las Vegas and most of southern California, as well as Mexico to all points northerly. There’s a phrase, even – “the flyover states” – coined by the people who fly from, say, New York City to Los Angeles. Oh yes, it’s a a term of contempt, lumping together all the people who don’t live in the major, urban coastal cities and who therefore develop unsophisticated ideas.

It doesn’t help that there are a lot of people in those states with poorly reasoned ideas. Not that there aren’t a few in those coastal, urban centers, too.

It’s easy to fly over and forget what the experience on the ground is like. We forget that other people’s lives aren’t exactly like our own. We might know it, in our heads, but our hearts forget. We get caught up in the tumult of our own lives, the daily concerns, sorting the plastic recyclables, admire the sunset and hope the contrails aren’t really such a bad thing.

Every once in a while, we notice that someone else has snow.

Spring Snow

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We left the palm trees and hot sunshine of Tucson and came home to a wet Spring snowstorm.

We didn’t hit snow until north of Albuquerque, but then it hit us with a vengeance, making us crawl home. Someone in Santa Fe tweeted that it had been tea on the patio sunny, then a rainstorm, then all the snow. The forecasters had said snow after midnight, but this hit well before sunset.

Springtime in the Rockies!

The Spring storms are hard on the wildlife, too. A little bird, who had clearly gotten far too wet, pressed up on our threshold, savoring the warmth from our glass door. David captured it and we put it in a box last night to warm up. Now that the sun is warming and the snow shriveling before it, I set it loose to join its brethren at the seed-fest out front.

It looks rumpled enough that I can tell it from the others, but it should be okay.

Yesterday, before we hit the road, we stopped at Starbucks for breakfast. In Tucson there are these roving packs of bikers. The bicycle kind, not the motorcycle kind. They wear matching outfits, with the tight shorts, windbreakers and helmets. They zoom about the city in fleet groups and stop at Starbucks to sit in the sun and treat themselves.

There were several ladies of this ilk waiting for their lattes as we were, of that indistinguishable badly preserved 50s/well preserved 60s age. A very young girl also waited. She was maybe 18. I would have guessed younger, but she wore a short black satin skirt, a black satin top with big rhinestones and very high heels. Heading to a job at a nearby casino perhaps. Not your usual Sunday-morning garb. She looked gorgeous, with the long slim legs only teenage girls seem to have. Her pretty face smiled sweet and open.

The women glared at her and I saw her physically flinch and look away, some of her happiness dimmed. I wondered if she even understood what their problem was. She didn’t seem to notice the weathered columns of their thighs, pressed into wrinkles by the tight Lycra. I wanted to tell the ladies to stuff their nasty looks, to give the girl a break.

Let her enjoy her Spring, I wanted to say. There’s plenty of Winter to go around. We should celebrate the sunshine wherever we find it.

Frogs in My Driveway

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It’s been a funny weather year for everyone.

Certainly a wet one. It’s hard to say, after all the spectacular drought if all the snow and rain is unusual, or just not drought.

One of my Facebook friends, a distinguished Southern gentleman I work with, commented yesterday that they’ve had so much rain that he had frogs in his driveway. I said that sounded like a metaphor for something. He replied that he’d be proud for me to put it in my blog.

Someone else pointed out that it’s a toad, not a frog. He said he could live with that, too.

Yesterday ended up being a sad day. I wrote about Karol, as I really wanted to do, and then people replied. It was wonderful and gratifying, to see the various comments and read the emails. But it made each new contact freshened the grief. I suppose that’s good, the catharsis of it. At times, though, I felt like I was drowning.

I find deaths and funerals to elicit strange reactions from people. In the first place, people in general don’t know how to deal with grief. No one knows what to say to the ones grieving most. Largely because there’s nothing to say. And then there’s a level of competition, of who knew the person best, who loved her most, who’s the most affected.

For me, Karol was far from being a central part of my life. There was a time we were in almost daily contact, but that had long-since changed. And yet, her disappearance from the world feels pivotal to me. I’m sure my issues play in, my own mortality, facing the ways in which that very fun and fertile era is over.

That’s how it is for all of us. A death is rarely about the person who died; it becomes about the people left behind. After all, the person who died doesn’t care about any of it.

Not so far as we know, anyway.

Perhaps that’s why elegies always become autobiographies. People stand up at memorials and funerals to speak about the dead and almost always spend the whole time talking about themselves. They don’t intend it that way, but the thoughts always wend towards how that person made them feel.

Nothing wrong with that, really.

Rain is just rain. It falls without reason, without emotion. We are the ones who assign meaning to it.

We’re the ones who notice there are now frogs in the driveway.

Death and Taxes

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Quite the thunderstorm rolled through here yesterday.

After quiet snowfall since December, the fury of the storm startled us. Lighting whipped out booming thunder. Rain and hail pounded on the roof and skylights with equal fury. In the way of Spring, the squalls passed through, ominous dark giving way to sunshine, until the next row of boomers passed over.

Yesterday a well-known, and generally regarded as successful, literary agent was tweeting that she needs a second job. She said that people don’t understand how literary agents do and don’t make money because the association rules forbid that transparency. But she asserted that agents in their first five years don’t make any money.

I wouldn’t know.

But I do know she works for a large literary firm that theoretically should pay her some kind of salary or wage. I suspect they also work for commission and that, over time, those commissions are where agents really start bringing in the bigger dollars. I suppose it’s possible that her agency doesn’t pay her a living wage. New York City is certainly massively expensive to live in, so a “living wage” means something totally different there.

The thing is, when people start talking about how much money they need to live, that could mean anything at all.

I follow this one blog from time to time, called Debt Kid. It used to be all about the one guy, who tanked himself financially doing day-trading and how he turned his life around and climbed out of truly enormous debt ($300K+).

(As a total aside, I don’t like the blog nearly as much now. He brought in other people to blog about their out-of-debt journeys. I don’t “like” all of them. Their voices and stories don’t speak to me. I only bring this up because I notice this with group blogs — I don’t really like it when the blog I visit isn’t the person I like to “hear.” Something to keep in mind, anyway.)

At any rate, sometimes there’s still interesting stuff and he recently posted about how where you live affects your spending habits more than anything else. Not the city, but the neighborhood. There was an article out at about the same time on tax breaks and discussing how people making upwards of $500K/year can complain that they can’t possibly afford to take a greater tax hit. Those people truly believe that. Of course, their expenses are high. And if all of their neighbors are making $1 million/year, then they are the poor folk of the neighborhood.

It’s an interesting thing to me: how much money is enough. The Tony Robbins money-making movement is based on the idea that if you’re not making more money this year than last year, then you are essentially dying. In that view of the world, a person either grows or dies. And once the trajectory moves downward, it’s very difficult to reverse, if not impossible. A personal and financial death spiral.

Which is just absurd.

I think, anyway.

Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk) was a good book and a good movie partly because it addressed the idea of stuff owning you, rather than the other way around. It also showed that you can always walk away from it. People only have to have what they think they have to have.

Seasons are cyclical. The winter gives way to the tumult of Spring. Storms hit and move on, leaving gentle sunshine behind. I don’t have to make more money than I did last year. Whatever I have will be enough.

Native Landscape

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This sunset was still on the camera when I left for Virginia. I dragged it all over the country with me and now I’m not sure when I snapped the picture. I like the subtlety of the peaches, though.

I’m happy to be back in my vista.

People from the East and South complain of the open spaces here, how they feel exposed and swallowed up by the expanse of it. I recall someone telling a story about being tailed for miles on the highway on the eastern plains of Colorado or Wyoming — I forget which — slowing so the person could pass, though the other car never would. The driver simply clung to the back bumper. Finally the storyteller pulled over and the other car did, too. An East Coast woman tumbled out, apologizing, saying how she felt so overwhelmed by the empty sky and deserted highway that she just wanted to be near another car.

My New Hampshire boss complains that she has a difficult time judging distance here. She can’t tell how fast a car is approaching or how close it is, because she feels she has nothing to reference it to.

I understand what they mean because I feel suffocated in places like Virginia. The Appalachians are pretty, yes, but they hem you in. The trees, even shed of leaves seem to block the sky. Granted, it was foggy and rainy during our visit, compounding the feeling. Even the houses, though, seem to be built to wrap around you and divide you from the outside.

Not like our house, designed to pull the vista in and fill the rooms with it.

I drove from Abingdon to the DC area, to visit Allison. Oh, said the innkeeper in Abingdon, you’ll drive through the Shenandoah valley. It’s so beautiful. At one point it just opens up and you can see the valley and the mountains.

Even with all this fog and rain? I asked.

Oh, he said.

It cleared enough going north that I did see some of the valley and the distant rolling hills, which I just can’t quite bring myself to call mountains. Theirs is a vista of softness and blur. Eternally smoky.

Something in me relaxed to return to the crisp Western light, our slice-edged mountains. Even in a sleepy photo like this one, the outline of the peaks is crisp and defined.

I suppose it’s all what you’re used to. I grew up in the West and some restless part of me only settles down when I’m here. Georgia O’Keeffe came here for the light though, among countless others.

Great is the gift of being able to see.

The Great Backyard Bird and Coyote Watch

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All the animals are out and about now.

Spring may not begin until March — which I quibbled about previously, so I won’t reiterate my arguments, much as I enjoy reiterating my favorite peeves — but the wildlife around Santa Fe is gearing up for warm weather.

Tuesday evening, as dusk fell, a couple of bunnies came out to hit up the game bird block out front. And a jumping mouse hopped by. Then, yesterday morning, I awoke to fog outside the window — and a coyote walking by. Last night, a bobcat came up on the porch to nose around. And sniff around the game bird block.

Predators following prey in the eternal cycle.

The flickers have been diligently hammering on the house. If you’ve never heard a woodpecker at work on your house, well it sounds like the roofing crew showed up again. Maybe just the finish crew. But you could swear someone’s out there pounding nails. If you look behind the suet feeder in this photo, you can see the fresh hole in the portal post that this selfsame bird drilled into it.

I assume that’s her, anyway. She refused to give her name.

Being a woman, I decided food was the answer. The gal at the local Wild Birds Unlimited was dubious.

“Are you sure they’re not looking to carve out a nest?”

“It’s about the size of a quarter,” I say. “If so, they’ve got a ways to go.”

I’d walked in and asked for the Woodpecker’s Friend. Which makes sense to me, but I apparently live in my own delusional world. I’m at peace with that. At any rate, the thing I thought I saw at Christmastime wasn’t what I thought it was and it wasn’t called that anyway. The upshot? I have to be my own woodpecker’s friend. So I got the basic suet frame and the recommended suet and made David install it all over the hole, so the flickers would eat the suet and not the portal.

Right, he thought I was nuts, too.

And for a while, all we got on there were the bushtits. Which turned out to be really neat because they hadn’t visited us other wise.

Then, a couple of days ago: the flickers found the suet. They’ve been happily cracking away on it — and no other part of the house — ever since. I know. I am totally vindicated. I *am* the Woodpecker’s Friend. One day all you people learn not to scoff.


The Great Backyard Bird Count starts on Saturday. No qualifications required to participate. This year, if you tweet, you can use the hashtag #gbbc to report bird sightings. Hey, it does NOT get more fun than that people!

Nobody seems to sponsor the Great Backyard Coyote Count. But we caught one on the night-vision camera last night. It’s actually an amusing sequence as he and the bunnies visit throughout the night. Tonight we’ll see if we can’t snap one of the bobcat and maybe I’ll post the whole sequence tomorrow.

Oh, in this photo? I’m pretty sure he’s looking at Isabel in the window.

She’s hiding in the laundry basket today.