I don’t think this lovely scarecrow is very scary, but she does cut a good hay figure. Fall is in the air — I saw a couple of sandhill cranes fly over this morning, so I went out to the river before sunset and a small flock flew by. The problem is the river is running really high and fast, so the places they normally roost are underwater. The Martinez House got its color coat, and the cottonwoods are turning yellow.
Open door in the Old San Ysidro Church.
I gave Laurie a gift card to get her hair colored and styled for her birthday. Since she’s studying Old Norse, her inner Viking pushed her into going for the lighter red in her hair, so now my beautiful wife is a Viking redhead. Like Gorm in the Icelandic Sagas, I might not be considered the wisest among men, but we were both wise enough to marry beautiful women. His wife, Thyri, was considered Denmark’s Adornment. My wife, Laurie, I consider my Crown Jewel of Corrales.
For those of you who didn’t think it quite right to do photographs of balloons in B&W, here are balloons up-close and personal, in early morning, stark, bright light, backlit, and in living color. Several balloons where launching from the “goat head” field at the top of our road, so I grabbed a few photos as I drove by on my way to work. All the photos were done with my iPhone, and the effect on the last photo is shooting through a dirty windshield.
While I’m on the old adobe theme, this old house on Corrales Road next to the Tijuana Bar is finally getting some attention.
Last year around this time, volunteers from the Corrales Historical Society helped prepare and apply new mud plaster to the historic Martinez house in Corrales. Little did they know they celebrated the annual event of applying mud to the Martinez House for the last time. The owner of the Martinez House must have grown weary of the age old-tradition, and rare practice, of mud plaster after this past summer’s brutal storms, because on Saturday, the Martinez House got a new coat of cement plaster to join the ranks of the vast majority of adobe structures in New Mexico that are plastered and stuccoed.
The first photo shows the north side of the Martinez House with its new plaster, while the second photo shows a similar shot of the wall as it had been prepared for the new coat of mud plaster last year. The third photo shows the south and east side of the house with its new “brown” coat of plaster. The fourth photo, from last year, shows the south wall with the newly applied mud plaster and the east wall waiting for new mud. The last photo is a view of the freshly plastered east an north walls of the house.
After the “brown” coat of plaster dries completely, they should apply a color coat of stucco that I assume will be very close to the color of the mud they covered with cement plaster. The cement plaster and stucco will provide a much more durable and weatherproof covering than the mud plaster, but the old adobe blocks do not breath properly under cement plaster/stucco finishes, which is not good for the blocks. But the durability and protection of cement plaster has obviously become preferable to the cost and burden of applying mud plaster every year, a finish that offers little protection from severe storms like we had this past summer.
The summer monsoon was not nice to the mud plaster on the old San Ysidro Church in Corrales. The north side of the church is weathered and cracked with some large chunks of the mud plaster missing — washed off by driving rains in July and August. We were at the church for the opening of the Old Church Fine Art show, which runs through October 13th. Susan Graham, friend and fellow photographer, has two pieces in the show and won third place for her photo Floral Fireworks, a fantastic explosion of colors that has the appearance of a photo-realistic watercolor. Congratulations, Susan!
While this storm reportedly dumped 1/2 inch of rain on the NE Heights Tuesday afternoon, and while it looked impressive from our yard, it turned out to be much ado about nothing as it dissipated before it got to us and we got no rain out of it.
These two hawks were hunting from one of the trees on Meadowlark Lane on the way home, which provided quite a distraction for me.
I took this photo just after midnight on Friday morning. It was so windy and so much rain on Friday night, that the lightning was never clear, just bright flashes and loud crashes. Since the clouds are building up again, I thought I better get the blog posted before the storm hits and we lose power again. We got home at 4:30 pm yesterday and by the clocks that keep a memory of the time they went off, the power had been restored just an hour before we got home, which, if correct, means we were without power for 21 hours. The June bugs and roses are happy after the heavy rains, and Rosencrantz was enjoying a patch of catnip in the late afternoon light that was falling between the thunderheads building up in the western skies.
Off Center & Not Even 