Farewell, Buddy : Watson 2000 - 2016

Watson, the furriest member of our family for sixteen years, went to feline heavan last evening. He will be missed tremendously.  The family cat, he was particularly connected to my wife, who passed away almost nine years ago. He soldiered on like the rest of us. Then my daughter grew up and moved out so it was just him and me. We were the best of buddies...my little shadow. We moved 1,000 miles to the desert and he took it in stride -- "Where is the grass?" I'm sure he was thinking. He liked chasing lizards but never caught one.

He had a long and full life. At age sixteen he was very elderly and suffered from hyperthyroid disease. His weight dropped to around ten pounds -- that was less than half his weight when he was a young and robust twenty-two pounds. He had a bout of diabetes but that went into remission.

The last month was a downward spiral. He refused to eat. He was a great pill-taker so he got his meds every day and I was giving him B6 shots. Finally it was a saddle thrombus that paralyzed his back legs. This is a painful and distressing thing and at his age there were no other options.  He suffered from separation anxiety every time I boarded him so an intensive care stay would have just been too much. The vet said the thrombus had a 95% chance of retirning even if we could "fix' it somehow this time.   He passed quietly into the next world.

Farewell

Vortex

 

 

  

Dust Devils and Physics...

''There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, at least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who going to be responsible for making bridges that won't fall down or airplanes that won't suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don't want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits ground. That's all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.''

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

I was born in the land of vortices. The Midwest knows how powerful they can be and how devastating. We usually saw the evidence of their passing and only caught sight of one on rare occasions. Tornadoes devastated large parts of St. Louis, my home town, in the late 1920s, the 1950s and most notably in the 1890s with great loss of life. I was a boy scout in the 1960s and we helped clean up debris from a tornado that touched down a couple miles from my house. The damage was very random-- a house would be gone but the birdbath was left untouched. Asphalt shingles from the roof were imbedded three feet into the ground by the force of the wind. I lived there for sixty-five years but only saw one tornado, about three miles away.

When I moved to New Mexico I learned that tornadoes were rare here in the desert and mountains but show up occasionally -- pretty much of a fluke. My neighbor could remember one way back in the mid-1990s. They are more common on the east side of the state.

This is the land of  dust devils. In a short time I've seen dozens of impressive dust devils travelling across the desert. I don't understand the process or physics of dust devils. They develop on sunny and clear days and aren't storm related. I assume they are created by the wind and maybe differences of surface temperatures. They seem to be short lived but can extend a thousand feet into the sky. They will suck up dozens of tumbleweeds and carry them up into the sky for hundreds of yards and then drop them on peoples' houses or into their yards. They seem playful and the couple times I've been in one or very close to one they seem almost invisible. They're best viewed from a distance. We are already on the downhill side of winter and heading toward the windy season so I imagine I'll be seeing a bunch in the coming months. I'll try to get some pictures.

N'Orleans, 1970

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin. -- Mark Twain

I often think of New Orleans…or N'Orleans or N’Awlins…depending on my remembrances, perspective and perhaps alcohol content. Back in 2013 New Orleans hosted the Super Bowl…it was Super Bowl XLVII, which I think is the 47^th Super Bowl.  I guess we can throw cursive writing out of the schools but have to keep Roman numerals so we can count Super Bowls.

Anyway, I was paying attention to the media hype running up to the Super Bowl game in New Orleans. CBS was broadcasting the game and milking it for all it was worth...this is like the "Black Friday" of television. Jackson Square has become the venue for several broadcasts and there are countless features about the many charms of N’Orleans.

N'Orleans is one of my favorite cities. What surprises me is the large number of grown-up people, seemingly adults and experienced, that are TV personalities who said they had never been to New Orleans and are there for the first time. Good grief people....where have you been?

For people my age (aging boomers) going to New Orleans was almost a rite of passage. You know...get a driver's license, HS diploma, draft card, etc., etc., The Road Trip to New Orleans, etc. We won't go into some of those "etc."s...every generation has a few and mine had a lot. I'm sorry that gas prices have put spontaneous road trips out of reach for most of America's younger generations. They seem to have lost something important. It is something of a bonding experience.

I've been to N’Orleans probably six or seven times and never get tired of it. Some places you can visit once and declare you have seen it and never need to go back. Modern cities are like that for me. Cities designed or developed after the invention of the automobile have always bored me to tears. Kansas City is an automobile town while St. Louis is a pedestrian city (ooops -- full disclosure...I was born in St. Louis and still say I'm "from" there after living elsewhere 38 years). San Francisco is experienced as a pedestrian city while Los Angeles is more of an automobile place. To my mind, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, and Miami missed out on something. There is a stage of development where a city gains a soul and some places jump over that and are just places. But I digress...I'll save that tirade for another time and I'm sure some people will disagree.

I first went to New Orleans on a spontaneous Labor Day weekend trip back in 1970. There were three of us and we were all about twenty-two. I still use that trip as a yard stick on how tired I can be before I collapse. If I get that tired I need to pull over and get off the road. We drove out of St. Louis on Friday night, stopping briefly in Ste. Genevieve to pick up our third traveler, and then headed south through darkness and the Mississippi delta, which starts just a few miles south of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. We hit daylight somewhere near Vicksburg and finally made it to New Orleans by mid afternoon. We checked in to the Monteleone Hotel in the French Quarter and crashed in the beds for about three hours before hitting Bourbon Street around six or seven...still early.  Okay – now this was the Monteleone Hotel before it became "The Hotel Monteleone" that it is today. Our room was sparse and cheap...painted that light institutional green if I remember right. There were drain pipes running up one wall for something. We only slept there so we didn't care...and we could walk all over the French Quarter, which we did.

Labor Day weekend isn't Mardi Gras but it was still very busy and crowded. It was the end of summer and a lot of people were having one last fling. We had a great time. The movie "Easy Rider" had been all the rage the year before so we had that as sort of a mental travel guide. We had Beignets at the old Morning Call by the city market, cruised through the local cemetery, hung out at Jackson Square, saw Preservation Hall, Pat O'Brien's, the Old Absinthe House, plus a half dozen dives. (No parental guidance!!) We didn’t have much cash…but we managed. “Young Intellectuals” can make a beer last a while.

They say New Orleans changes people and in one way it changed me. The place is known for its cuisine. We were too poor (and grubby) to sample anything in a "real" restaurant but we managed to find a few spots back in the alleys or off on a side street where we could find some good food. I was a fairly picky eater up to that time but I learned to enjoy food and realized the fun of trying different things. I never ate a real salad until New Orleans. There were so many different kinds of seafood - a shrimp is not just a shrimp. I think I met my first oyster on that trip. I couldn't identify some of the food but it was good and enjoyable.

We were road-crazy and gas was cheap so we left New Orleans and went to Pensacola and camped out on the beach. We wanted some time in the ocean...or the Gulf…any salt water would do just fine. It wasn't too long before the sand fleas made us regret leaving New Orleans. We managed to get some sleep and headed back home the next morning. That drive home was surreal -- that is the memory I have of being tired. We got home safely and actually made it to work on Tuesday. I suspect our productivity was off a little.

Other trips to New Orleans have been less frantic. There is still a lot I haven't seen so I'll go back again. The food is worth the trip.

(Modified from the original posted on The Red Room in February 2013)

Watercolor Desert

I awoke to rain this morning and it has been raining all day. This has been a steady drizzle coming from a seamless gray sky. My usual landmarks; the Sandia Mountains and the Jemez Mountains those other mountains and mesas farther away, are invisible in the opaque mist. It is a little disorienting. The world seems closed in. The birds have all taken refuge somewhere…wherever birds go.  The only sounds are the dull white-noise of the drizzling rain and the staccato of the water falling off the roof through the canales…those boxy channels that drain water off of flat roofs in the desert southwest.  I have two large rain barrels that produce a low drumming sound…I can tell that they are full to capacity. They say we might have more intense storms this afternoon.

This is our monsoon season, the only wet and cloudy season we have. We have been in serious drought the last few years but this year, thanks to El Nino, we are making up for it. I don’t know how our rainy season will affect the long-term drought but we are closing in on the record for rainy years.  This is my first full experience with the monsoon season. I moved here a year ago and only saw a little of it -- mostly the spectacular lightning storms that put on a big show but didn’t offer up much rain. This year it has been more rain than lightning. Albuquerque, some fifteen miles south of where I live, had a recent urban flash flood that stranded cars and prompted heroic rescues of stranded drivers and pedestrians.  I heard that Phoenix had a similar situation. My only crisis is trying to walk out to the road to retrieve my mail. My road is only partially paved…what actual pavement it once had is mostly a memory.  There is a slight depression that collects about six inches of water and turns my mailbox into an island.  I pull on my rubber boots and galumph out to the mailbox and try not to slip on the wet mud.  Usually the mail isn’t worth collecting and certainly not worth taking a bath.

The one thing that I wish I could convey is how the desert smells in the rain. I am surrounded by sage, chamisa and saltbush that grow wild. In my front walled courtyard I have a small honeysuckle thicket and Pyracantha and Russian Sage along with desert willow and Mexican Bird of Paradise and trumpet vine. Everything puts out its small contribution to the rainy desert smells. There is a Pinyon pine just over the wall that makes a bigger contribution.   Only the Russian Sage and honeysuckle and trumpet vine are showing blooms. Everything else is bloomed out but the plants still have a scent in the rain. There is no wind today so it all just hangs in the air. It is all very subtle and very pleasant.