Category Archives: 2000’s

Placitas – Impossible to Stay but Hard to Leave

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

That adobe was built sometime in the 1930s as a turkey barn, then later converted to a dairy barn until the 1950s.  The walls were 18 inches thick, the floor a couple of inches of poured concrete, flat roof that held several thousand gallons of water when snow accumulated on the roof and the canales intended to drain the melt became solid ice.

No heat, rotten iron pipes for plumbing, and a back wall ready to collapse next snowfall.  The vigas holding up the roof, cracked timbers sagging with the weight of 75 winters.  Roof leaking into the adobe walls, eroding them beneath the vigas enough to cause me to arrange the couch I slept on in such a way there’d be something between me and it if the whole thing collapsed.

The rent was so high I couldn’t afford to pay it, eat, feed the cats and pay the utilities, even with the intermittent jobs I could pick up.  So they’d cut off the utilities every few months until I could raise the money to have them turned back on.

Maybe the best place I’ve ever lived.  Certainly the hardest.

That last winter living there I was shovelling snow off the roof, slipped and fell into the snow on the ground below and lay there unconscious some undetermined time before I awakened and struggled indoors.  Stove up something awful the rest of the winter.

But the cats loved the place and so did I, even as I watched the walls dissolve and the crack between the back room wall and ceiling widen.  The near-certainty the house wouldn’t last another winter gradually had me wondering whether I could find a bridge to live under without giving up the felines.

Gale had been suggesting for several years that I move here and live in this cabin on his place.  Another winter in Placitas, the cat necessities, and the vice grips of no-obvious-alternatives gradually persuaded me.

Gale and his brother drove up from Texas with a trailer, packed me up and hauled me, the cats, and all my worldly goods down here in one fell swoop.  A person can count himself lucky if he can have one friend in a lifetime like Gale’s been to me.

For several years here it’s been easy to not think about what comes next, to just savor being here and the absolute luxury of not being in the joy of Placitas, the adobe, the proximity of some bridge to live underneath.  We seemed a lot younger, that short time ago, Gale and me.  The cats, too, for that matter.

But aging comes more quickly these days and it’s creeped into the picture until it fills it.  The Coincidence Coordinators are nagging at me with increasing urgency and insistence to look for the next bridge not to live under. 

So far I believe I’ve been the luckiest man ever to walk the face of this planet, possibly among the happiest.  I’ve discovered I’m nowhere near as tough as I once thought myself to be and Placitas taught me I’m also not the pioneer my ancestors were.  I wouldn’t change a minute of those years after I gave myself a Y2K, but I sincerely won’t regret not doing it again if I don’t have to.

But maybe now I’ve toughened up enough to make the next step as much a blessing as this one’s been.

Old Jules

Today on Ask Old Jules:  Marriage Before Sex?

Old Jules, why is it important to get married for having sex?

 

Trapped by Time

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I had the vague, but mistaken notion I wouldn’t post on the blog today.  I awakened fresh and full of energy, went out onto the porch to chat with the cats and none were available for comment.  So I went back indoors, put coffee on, did my usual getting started routines and bounced around as though I’d become a young man of, say, 60 or 55 during the night.

By the time the coffee was prime, Hydrox spoke outside the front door.  But him being an old guy, when I let him in he promptly headed for the bed and crashed.  Caused me a moment of concern, because the cats here always demand a few moments of quality time, each, me talking to them, scratching them behind the ears, holding them upside down, then finally pulling their tails while they pretend anger and trying to get away.

But there he was, curled up on the bed without so much as a sidle-against-the-leg.

So I plunked down at the comp to begin the daily download ritual and glanced at the time.  3:35 AM.  Sheeze!  3:36 by the time I pulled my eyes away.  The damned computer clock must have gone wokkyjawed!  So I pulled up the sleeve of my sweatshirt far enough to show my watch, which promptly sided with the computer, despite the fact I’ve tried to treat it well.  All I demand of a watch is loyalty when it comes to a crunch, aside from occasionally telling me what time it is.

5:00 AM is when I get up.  Not sometime after 3:00.  I sometimes awaken at 4:30 and lie there a while savoring being alive, but I don’t hop out of bed like some fool and start making coffee.

So I’ve somehow hornswoggled myself.  Might just as well see what’s blogworthy, thinks I.

The NASA site reports Spitzer’s still out there dragging surprises out of the Universe:

NASA Telescope Finds Elusive Buckyballs in Space

Astronomers using NASA‘s Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered carbon molecules, known as “buckyballs,” in space for the first time. Buckyballs are soccer-ball-shaped molecules that were first observed in a laboratory 25 years ago. They are named for their resemblance to architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, which have interlocking circles on the surface of a partial sphere. Buckyballs were thought to float around in space, but had escaped detection until now.

“We found what are now the largest molecules known to exist in space,” said astronomer Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “We are particularly excited because they have unique properties that make them important players for all sorts of physical and chemical processes going on in space.” Cami has authored a paper about the discovery that will appear online Thursday in the journal Science.

But I see by the date that was 2010.  Nothing there worth blogging.  Out-of-date old news.  Sheeze.

Old Sol’s UV pics on spaceweather.com don’t get updated weekends, normally, so a person’s left looking at how it was October 25, 2005 compared to yesterday, instead freshly dressed and spiffed up for a Saturday in February, 2012. 

Any port in a storm, I reckons.

As you can observe for yourself, the drama continues.

Anyway, I see time’s moved right along and it’s 4:59 AM.  Won’t be long before the data’s posted on the various sites so I can download it.  Probably just time for another cup of coffee, another moseying around outdoors to see if any felines have discovered the world made it through the night.

5:04 AM, Yeah, Niaid’s up and around, came in and had her morning hissing/swatting match with Hydrox, rousted him off the bed and stole his place.  Now he’s wanting back outdoors to see what’s in the news.

The Invader-cat doesn’t know how things work around here yet, so it’s out there under the window meowing to itself in puzzlement, hoping I’ll be putting out some viddles.  And the various roosters must have picked up on the house activity noise enough to get them crowing, wondering what-the-hell’s going on.

About all I can tell you about what’s in store for today is a nap.  I don’t care what the Mayan calendar says.

Old Jules

————-

Today on Ask Old Jules:  Are We De-evolving?

Old Jules, are we de-evolving?
The rules of natural selection and competition don’t really exist now. Everything is pretty much given to you as long as you have money. Could this mean that humans could be different in the next hundred years?

 

Disambiguating, De-Obfuscating and De-Horsemanurizing the Previous Post

I just got to say I love that word, disambiguating. 

Anyway, here’s Old Sol today.

And here he is October 23, 20o5.

Planetary positioning today

Planetary positions October 23, 2005, with particular emphasis on Saturn, Uranus and Earth/Mars positions.

Please don’t in any way interprete this to mean I believe you’re interested, or that I’m offering any sort of theory, opinion, statement or hypothesis.  I’m just posting some images of Old Sol’s face and the concurrent locations of celestial bodies relative to one another.

Further deponent sayeth not.

Old Jules

Why Superstitions are a Bad Thing

Accidental Posting.  This is the post for tomorrow I was working on when I hit the wrong button.  It’s still the post for tomorrow.

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I suppose there are a lot of good reasons to be tolerant of the superstitions people hold, but it’s not always easy to put up with it. 

For instance, a lot of people are so superstitious about this and that, they don’t help bring up Old Sol mornings.  That naturally puts a heavier load on the rest of us.  Not being sure someone else is going to cover it requires iron nerves if we decide to sleep in, or happen to croak during the night.

Last time I flew anywhere the airport security folks were so superstitious one of them wanted to physically touch what’s in my  medicine bag.  Can you imagine that?

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to remember when that was.  I don’t think I’ve been through airport security since sometime before 1998, but I think I must have been later than that by several years.  It’s only since people got superstitious about other people of Middle Eastern extraction, I think, that anyone’s gotten that submerged in his fantasies he’d do something quite that far off-the-wall.

But it shows up other places, maybe worse.  For instance, I’ve got this stuff made from red clover, bloodroot, galangal, and sheep sorrel I use on myself to get rid of skin cancers popping up from time to time because of my not protecting myself against a particular insecticide when I was a young man.  The easy way was to buy it because making it is a considerable chore.  

But a few years ago the FDA got all uppidy and superstitious about it.  Went out and attacked the bejesus out of all the websites where a person can buy it, ran them off.  Even the name is verboten.

Then a few days ago Gale was telling me about some stuff his dermatologist was having him rub on his face to get rid of skin cancers.  That is one horrifying face old Gale’s putting on at the moment, same as you’d expect if he was using the same stuff I’m using, but doing it on his face.

It appears to me what Gale’s putting on his face is the exact same concoction the FDA was so superstitious about people using if they were buying it off the web, or making it themselves.    Maybe it was the fact every Native American tribe on the continent’s been making it and treating themselves with it for all manner of carcinomas since before Columbus.

That ought to be enough to make anyone makes a living off treating people for cancer, or selling pharmaceuticals to them for big bucks superstitious.  It goes against every superstition the medical and scientific communities hold dear.

I suppose a person just needs to be especially conscious and tolerant of scientific and medical superstitions, more than others.  After all, they’ve got an army of police and other people carrying around guns willing to use them if anyone violates their superstitions.

The Tale of the Dreamsheep Mother and the Y2K War Gods

Sometimes I think the whole reason people have those superstitions is just to give them an excuse.  An excuse to explain how their particular brand of enlightenment is the only one anyone has any business adopting as a superstition.

Because it’s the one they believe.

Old Jules

UFO and Certainties About What Isn’t

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read.

We human beings love ourselves better for our certainties.  Most of us take particular satisfaction in sneering about the certainties of others when we’ve applied something we pretend is logic to prove theirs are invalid.  Pulls us up by the rhetorical bootstraps in a reality where being intelligent is considered a virtue almost as resounding as being ‘right’.

One of the areas of opinion that breaks down into sneers rapidly involves unidentified flying objects and whether creatures from somewhere else have visited this planet.  The ‘right’ side of the issue is they are fig-newtons of the imagination and declaring it to be so proves intelligence, level-headedness, education and superiority to those who believe otherwise.

The ‘wrong’, ‘stupid’, ‘irrational’, ‘illogical’ side is people who’ve experienced them.  Police, airline pilots, military pilots, lawyers, psychologists, physicians, and thousands of other people who might have been ‘right’ once, but were transported into the camp of ‘wrong’ by personal observation and experience.

A while back I posted about a visit I had with Kay’s aunt, Loretta. [An Afternoon with Aunt Loretta (Proctor)- Roswell, 1947] Loretta’s one of the folks still living who was close-enough to the Roswell UFO incident to have an opinion about it based on her own experiences and observations at the time.  I’ve got a lot of respect for the lady and value what she had to say, even though it’s just naturally ‘wrong’.

But I was backed into a corner of open-mindedness on the issue by a couple of experiences of my own.  One with a lot of other witnesses on California Avenue in Socorro, New Mexico.   The second was long-lasting and relatively close-up and personal.   Back during the Y2K time.

 

Pie Town’s located about 30 miles west of the Very Large Array [VLA] telescopes near Datil, New Mexico.  The village sits almost atop the Continental Divide, an isolated community in the middle of nowhere.

I was in the only telephone booth in Pie Town  around midnight. The town only has a couple-hundred people and there were no lights of any sort in town. Low overcast, 500 feet or less.

Whatever it was appeared above me below the overcast and stayed there while I told the person I was talking to on the phone what was happening.  It stayed maybe 10-15 minutes and gave me the willies badly enough, I got thinking I was the reason it was there.

I told the person I was talking to adios and went to the truck, took a .45 out from under the seat and racked in a round.  It moved a bit about then, not much but some, while I stood there pointing a pistol at it waiting in the dark. It moved a little more, seemed to descend — at least it got larger, and stopped again.

I decided to just get the hell out of there if I could. Cranked up the truck and drove about a quarter-mile and pulled off the highway to make sure it wasn’t following me. It sort of drifted or glided off to the north and vanished into the overcast.

The experience motivated me enough to try to find out whether objects of that particular description and configuration were common, because I’d never heard of one. I occasionally would research various UFO sighting archives on the web.

Years later I found that within a few days of my own sighting an object of almost identical description upset a lot of on-duty military personnel by behaving almost the same way at White Sands Missile Testing Range near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a couple of hundred miles SE from Pie Town. White Sands is an extremely high security area and they take it personally when something intrudes into the airspace over the place, more personally yet when it hangs around and isn’t scared.

There was [maybe still is] a squadron of F117s stationed at Alamogordo [Luftwaffe] at the time, and they scrambled. But the object removed itself before they arrived.

As for my own experience and the times involved — I’m having to best guess. The person I was describing it to on the telephone and I took a stab at it toward the end of our conversation before I decided to evacuate. But things seem longer and it mightn’t have been that long. Afterward, while I was standing there watching and pointing the .45 it’s anyone’s guess. Might have been as little as 5 minutes, seemed a lot longer.

Which is to say, I don’t know much about aliens and the things they fly around in, but I don’t put a lot of value on the speculations of people who know all about what they aren’t.   Even if they’re real smart and have a lot of school-housing.

Old Jules

 

White Doves, Rainbow Family and Esoterica

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

WordPress is being a communist this morning. Or maybe the world came to an end last night sometime but it hasn’t gotten to me yet because I’m so far out in the country.

I was going to regale you this morning with some things I dug up online about building and retrofitting hydrogen generators to internal combustion engines yesterday but on the off chance the world ended last night, I won’t.  The whole thing might be a moot issue.   Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air

I’d also thought I’d share with you a couple of interesting things that appear to occur when the center of mass of a system of orbiting bodies changes, but if the world ended there’s no point getting into that, either.  I suppose I’ll be obliged to break my iron discipline and focus to tell you about a couple of things happened here a while back.

A while back this dove flew in here and spent a few weeks sharing the chicken feed on the ground.

I’d never seen a white dove before.  It’s forty miles to the nearest town of any size, fifteen miles to a village big enough to have a gas station/convenience store.  So I didn’t figure it was a pet.

But when I approached it on the ground it didn’t fly.  At first I thought it was injured or sick.

It had no fear at all.  Nothing seemed to be wrong with it.

A week or two after these pictures were taken it began spending more time higher in the trees and less on the ground.  Then it evidently just decided to move on to whatever was waiting for it somewhere else.

A free spirit.  Sort of reminded me of the Rainbow folk I’ve shared campsites with in remote places and occasionally picked up as hitch hikers.  Didn’t have much in common with the wild doves around here and nothing at all with birds somewhere else in houses with cages.  Marching to her own drum, not letting anything get into the way of doing it.   But not living in fear.

Which behooves me to tell you a bit about the Rainbow Family.

I first attended a Rainbow Gathering as part of a team of New Mexico Emergency Management Planning and Coordination  [EMPAC] personnel assigned to be there with the National Guard during the Taos gathering of the early 1990s.  I’d never heard of the Rainbow group prior to that, had no idea what to expect because neither did anyone else in New Mexico government.

What I observed was Woodstock without the music, a lot of folks who reminded me of my own younger times of long hair, protest, sex, drugs and rock and roll on the family side of things.

On the other side I saw National Guard troops loaded with live ammuntion and no clear instructions and rules of engagement being frequently hassled, treated with condescension alternately with re-enactments of some flower-chile ‘Come Join Us’ pleas from earlier times.  ‘Family’ members running alongside government vehicles engaging in every form of engagement except disengagement.

And  to complicate matters further,  a civilian group of Taos Hispanics who wanted nothing so much as the gathering broken up and out of those mountains they considered their own.

I spent a harrowing week or two up there trying to keep my mind from falling into a state of spacial-time disorientation.  When it was all over we drove back to Santa Fe wiping our brows in relief that nobody’d been shot, beaten to death by locals, no major incidents.   My thoughts at the time were as far from ever wanting to see another Rainbow Family member as they could get and stay on the planet Earth.

I count myself lucky to have encountered many of Family members in other settings during the two decades afterward, picking them up hitch hiking, sharing remote campsites, discovering there’s a side to some part of the Rainbow Family membership I hadn’t noticed in the Taos experience.

Gypsy-like free-spirited, thoughtful and considerate people just doing their own thing, trying their best not to leave any bigger mark where they’ve been than they absolutely must.  Good pleasant folks to spend some time with.

So long, I’d have to add, as a person stays clear of the party-animals and really cool people drawn to the mass gathering.

Old Jules

 

Shiva’s Headband – Old Sol’s Magnificent Coronal Hole

http://spaceweather.com/

I mentioned the other day how Shiva the Cow Cat dropped the ball while we were praying up Old Sol.  I’m not going to say with certainty Shiva’s responsible for this, but if she is, I’m going to give her a special scratch behind the ears as a reward.

CORONAL HOLE: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is monitoring a dark gash in the sun’s atmosphere–a coronal hole. It’s the dark vertical feature in this extreme UV image taken on Jan. 13th:

Coronal holes are places where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows the solar wind to escape. This yawning hole is about 120,000 km wide and more than a million km long. Solar wind flowing from its UV-dark abyss will reach Earth on Jan. 16th or 17th, possibly sparking auroras for high-latitude sky watchers.”

Mayan calendar enthusiasts, on the other hand, choose to ignore the coincidence of Shiva’s lapse and attribute the hole to the obvious sinister consequences of the rock calendar having runned spang out of numbers.

Meanwhile, astrophysicists, unaware of Shiva’s blink, speculate it’s the work of Proxima Centauri, a hot tempered red dwarf cholla who hangs out in the same honkytonks  as Old Sol, and who has a long history with a switch-blade.

I’m leaning to Shiva doing it, but what the hell do I know?

Old Jules

  

The Price of Solitude

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by this morning.

I’m having to re-boot my brain, trying to get a fix on this reality I live in this morning.  Spent the night busybusybusy in a sequencial dream I used to have, one of two, the first forty years of my life.  The guy I was in the dream had gotten a lot older these three decades I hadn’t been him, and so had the two others who showed up whom I’ve never known outside the dream.  But one of them turned over a D9 bulldozer, which slid down a slope about 30 feet and fell off a cliff.  I tried to warn him, but he ran down the slope, couldn’t stop, and went off the cliff too.

The guy I am in the dream spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get down that slope for a look, just to satisfy himself whether the obvious was true without going over himself.

Busybusybusy.  It wasn’t exactly old home week, but it never was.  From childhood until the age of 40 I knew those people in that dream but I never cared for them.  I thought they’d passed out of my life. 

I’ve been three weeks without seeing another human being, now I count it up.  Good things usually begin to happen in the mind after three days without seeing anyone, but a few spinoffs do eventually begin to happen triggering the awareness it’s time to have a few hours of human company.

Had an exciting day yesterday, for those of you interested, running some of the tests I mentioned a while back.  Most of the day spent running calculations for the barycentric centers of the solar system and earth at particular moments over the past 15-20 years, comparing it to concurrent events of a particular description.  It’s going to take a lot more work, but it’s looking fairly promising.

Maybe it was all that excitement caused the dream to start up again.  But at least one of those folks probably won’t be coming back into the dream.  I never cared much for him anyway.

Old Jules

Unforseen Consequences

That vertical rift you see on Old Sol this morning is a consequence of neglect.  While the Reiki cats and I were praying him up this morning Shiva the Cow Cat got distracted looking at the full moon still high on the other side of the sky.  She got out of harmony with the rest of us and the result speaks for itself.

Life’s full of that sort of thing here on this planet.  You can’t have any confidence you can get by with anything.  A couple of titanosaurs in Bolivia a few million years ago have themselves a secret rendezvous and next thing you know it surfaces and human beings are poking around nosing into their business.

Some Ichnogenus Gigandipus in Utah puts his foot off the designated pathway and a few million years later you’ve got the authorities swarming his footprints catching him out.

A lot of people think it’s just cameras, but that’s not right.  Do you think this guy in Kenya a million and a half years ago would have done anything different if he’d known it was going to come out someday?  He’d probably feel he pushed a stale yellow light that turned red before he got through the intersection and the camera got him.  He’s sitting out there somewhere fossilized waiting to get the ticket in the mail.

The planet and the Universe have us brainwashed into thinking we don’t leave any tracks.  But it’s a trick, and if we wake up to what we’re doing, say with our tracks of one sort, it sneaks in and preserves some other sort without our noticing it.

For instance, back when they started replacing real audience laughter and applause on television shows in the 1960s.  Who’d have dreamed they were teaching all the coming generations to be Pavlov’s dog with their emotions responses to what went on around them fed directly off a cathode ray tube?

That Santa Fe Trail on the image above is where the routes for land traffic from Saint Louis to Santa Fe converged before choo choo trains got into the act.  It’s the tracks of thousands of wagons, horses, mules and oxen branded into the landscape.

On the ground it’s abraded vertical walled arroyos a hundred yards wide.  You can follow it all the way from Santa Fe to Saint Louis if you know what you’re looking for.  And you’ll be able to do it again a thousand years from now if the mood strikes you and you have the time.

I’m just wondering what the consequences will be for Shiva the Cow Cat letting her attention drift over to the full moon.

Old Jules

 

The Great Continental Divide – The Rot Started at the Top

A few generations ago this parking lot was full of people journeying along Route 66.  People stopped here because their engines were overheating, or the kids needed to stretch their legs, or they just wanted to pause for a view of how the water divided.

The view wasn’t all that much, but a dad could walk down below with the kids, step behind a phony hogan, and tell they chillerns if they pee here their water would go both ways, ending up in two different oceans.

The hogan was a lot more inviting back then.

It hadn’t played hotel to a thousand stranded hitch-hikers and drunks looking for a roof.

The roof, of course, still held out the rain and snow.

It hadn’t entered the phase before even the drunks avoided it.

Though all the seeds were planted.  All they needed was nurturing a generation or two.

Garden Deluxe comes into Gallup on tanker trucks and railcars from California.  A local business family bottles it, labels it and keeps it thrifty enough so a bottle could be bought for half a US dollar when that roof still didn’t leak.

The Kachina were Hopi and Zuni.  Pottery, and silversmithing, all the tribes in the area.  Rugs, Navajo.  But while the years took the roof off that hogan the businessmen discovered Asians can make Kachina, junk jewelry, rugs, and pottery a lot cheaper than anyone struggling to hack out a living with craftsmanship on the Rez.

The motorists didn’t care.  They wanted the Made In China stamp already filling their homes in the lowlands.  The world they lived in took longer to send all their own jobs to Asia.  

Old Jules