The roses and sunflowers were soft and pastel from the little bit of sunlight that filtered through the thunderheads tonight.

 

 

 

 

Over the past several months we have been clearing stuff wanted save out of these houses, and taking everything off of them that could be recycled, in preparation of tearing them down. Originally, this was going to be my summer project in 2010, but our battle with my cancer and Laurie’s anemia forced us to put it off for two years. We had to start dealing with it again when sharp pieces of aluminum roofing started blowing off in the high winds in March, putting our neighbor’s horses, tenants, and dogs in danger of serious injuries, and the possibility of damaging their motor home. Since neither of the houses have real foundations, they are slowly collapsing, so neither of them are worth trying to renovate. After they are demolished, and the land they occupy is cleared, we are planning on making it farmland.  Since it’s easy to irrigate, I was thinking we might start with feed grass or alfalfa that we can have cut and bailed, and then work up to larger production of green chile, corn and other vegetables in the coming years. Maybe we’ll add some farm critters in the mix as well. How does a yak, a llama and a Yorkshire terrier to herd them sound?

 

 

 

I went for a walk in the bosque this afternoon. Since I’ve working weekends and prepping the houses to be torn down I haven’t walked in the bosque since it was re-opened after being closed over 4th of July. The photo of the Sandias with the thunderheads turned out to be a lot of work. It is made of up four images — two of the Sandias and two of the clouds (each set side by side horizontal). I first stitched the horizontal images of together, which was no problem, but stitching the merged images of the Sandias with the merged images of the clouds, vertically, turned out to be quite challenging. I ended up using more of a manual process incorporating three separate programs to prepare and finally merge the clouds over the mountains, because the panorama program I normally use couldn’t handle the vertical merge and crashed, even after adjusting the images to reduce the load on the program. I think the final photo turned out pretty well.

While I was walking around the garden a dragonfly I had not seen before presented itself, and allowed me to get close for photographs. As I get junk cleaned up around the our old house and take off everything that can be recycled before demolition, it’s starting to look more and more like the photos of it when my parents bought it in 1958.

The last photo is scarabs on a sunflower. Scarabs are part of Egyptian history and lore, and the black and white scarabs, which I believe are adolescents, looked quite mummified in comparison to the adults’ iridescent green.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you remember Emerson, Lake and Palmer, they had an album by the same name.  When I was turning into the Sandoval County government complex yesterday, a crab spider descended from my visor and landed on my steering wheel. The spider had probably hitched a ride on me when I made my way through the trumpet vines, mermosa, roses and other plants that hang into our walk. I pulled into a parking spot, and before I got out of the car, I decided I couldn’t leave the spider closed up in the hot car. I got it on my key and then into my shirt pocket, locked the car and walked up to the entrance of the building to find a big sign that read “No Pets Allowed in the Building.”  Was I breaking the law knowingly bringing a spider into the building? Technically it wasn’t a pet, yet I put it in my pocket, and knew it was in there. It was probably silly to even think about, but given how some people react to spiders, and how serious government types have become over enforcing laws, I wondered if I could end up in a SWAT situation by bringing a spider into a county building.  I told the spider to stay in my pocket, went inside, took care of business, and safely left the building without incident. When I got home, I got the spider to crawl onto a plant — so all ended well.

 

For a wild day of running around dealing with paperwork, I managed to get lightning photos and photos at the Duke City Tattoo Fiesta.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the horses next door had no rider as it stood and faced the storm.  Both Annie, who dropped by the office this morning, and the skull on the car next to me in slow traffic, liked my Cucaracha Crunch Coffee. I think I better trade mark it before Starbucks figures it out.

We were planning on watching the moonrise behind the trees while we sat on the deck tonight, but overcast skies blocked the moon while the wind whipped through the trees, rain pattered against the canopy, and lightning and thunder flashed and crashed all around us. The trees and rain backlit against the clouds by the lightening are quite beautiful, however.

 

 

 

If $100 for a cup Civet Cat coffee is out of your price range, or you’re looking for a new coffee experience beyond beans extracted from weasel crap, try making Cucaracha Crunch Coffee. It’s easy and costs no more than what you pay for your daily dose of java.  You can do the “found method” (pictured) where you leave out a coffee cup with a little sludge in the bottom, and if a cockroach happens to crawl in your cup to get a buzz (pictured), you pour fresh coffee on it, let it swim around in the coffee (pictured), then sip and savor the coffee (pictured). Eating the cucaracha is optional. The “Hunt and dip” method involves hunting down a cockroach, catching it, and dipping it in your coffee.  Either way, you get a whole new coffee experience, and dispose of a few cucarachas without using poison.

Laurie had a bug studying with her this afternoon.  Below is the first yellow spotted butterfly I’ve seen. It’s tiny and has interesting double wings. The fourth photo is of tiny flowers that we have planted with corkscrew grass. There happened to be a critter hanging out on the flowers when I took the photo. The painted lady was feeding on the same butterfly bush as “Spot”, the yellow spotted butterfly, and I did some photos of them together; however, when I got the painted lady in the frame so you could tell what she was, Spot was so small it got lost in the flowers. When I got Spot framed so you could tell that it’s a butterfly, only a leg or so of the painted lady was in the frame. There are so many things that our eyes adjust for so automatically that we are hardly conscious of it, that the compositions we put together in our field of view can be almost impossible to capture in a photo.

With six kitties in the house all wanting out first thing when I get up every morning, I usually end up with a daily “pussy riot” because I won’t let them out  before sunrise. But far from our kitties rioting in Corrales, three members of the Russian punk rock group, “Pussy Riot” are on trial in Moscow on charges of “hooliganism”. In one of their protests in February against Putin running for President, they staged a “punk prayer protest” in the Moscow Cathedral asking the Mother Mary to deliver Russia from Putin.  The three women are facing up to 7 years in prison for their dissent, and Putin wants to make an example of them.  With all the serious crime and violent protests in Russia, it seems pretty pussy of Putin to pick on a group of girls whose public performance art is no more of a crime than driving a “Hello Kitty” car.

Now roll back the clock 163 years to 1849 in Tsarist Russia where Fyodor Dostoyevski found himself in front of a firing squad for his involvement with the progressive discussion group, the Petrashevsky Circle. At the last moment his death sentence was commuted to 4 years in prison in Syberia in what turned out to be a mock execution. It seems to me not much has changed from Tsarist Russia, then the Soviet Union, to modern Russia (with the exception that we would have never heard about “Pussy Riot” or their plight during the Soviet years), and there seems to be little difference in PR’s and Dostoyevsky’s cases. The girls haven’t faced a mock execution that we know of, and I doubt Dostoyevsky made a public scene praying for the Mother Mary to deliver Russia from the Tsar, but in both cases the penalties seem to be way out of proportion to the alleged crimes. Now I’m not going to argue that the US is any better as far as crime and punishment is concerned when possession of burglary equipment — a flashlight, for example — can get you charged with a felony and up to 5 years in prison. So I suppose a group staging a performance art protest against Obama in the Nation Cathedral might be brought up on similar charges, although I don’t think we could keep the group in jail for 6 months while awaiting trial for illegal performance art.

While Dostoyevsky went on to become one of the greatest writers of all time, publishing more than 30 novels, short stories and essays, which included his best known novels “Crime and Punishment”, “The Idiot” and “The Brothers Karamasov”, before his death in 1881.  I doubt “Pussy Riot” will ever produce great music (at least from what I’ve heard), but maybe their case will inspire more people to oppose tyranny.  Although, if the women are found guilty, and sentenced to 7 years in prison, which seems almost a given in Putin’s Russia, the message Putin is giving dissidents is that if they are planning creative and non-violent protests, forget it, they will be punished severely. Since most protestors seem to like violence, I believe the protests will escalate and become more violent if “Pussy Riot” is found guilty of “hooliganism”.

 

Touch of Class always puts out nice blooms, and it was no exception this morning. They sky was quite dramatic on my drive home last night, and the day lily was glowing in this morning’s sunlight.