Our neighbor Doris came by this morning with the bad news. Someone stole her Halloween decorations. She will put out her holiday displays no more.

This is a tragedy of neighborhood proportions. Every Halloween and Christmas, Doris, who is somewhere well beyond 80, puts out lovely displays. She has a perfect touch - modest but charming, never overwhelming, a gift to us all.

As evils go, this is a modest affair. And it's worth remembering that the overwhelming majority of people in our community have never stolen Doris's decorations. Most people are not bad. But that makes me no less sad at the prospect that we may never thrill to Doris's holiday magic again.

There's no point in even bothering to try to take a picture of the Grand Canyon, so here's Lee's Ferry:

L and I just got back from a lovely week circling the Four Corners. We saw:

• Aspens turning where the head of the La Plata River meets the feet of the San Juan Mountains
• Ruins in the Dolores Valley, where the Anasazi toiled in the shadows of Mesa Verde and get no respect because of their cliff-dwelling kin
• The old orchard at Lee's Ferry, a wonderment on the flood plain of the Paria - a blooming desert
• The Grand Canyon

Sadie is so busted. From the front page of this morning's Albuquerque Journal (paid sub. req.):

The one improvement in her life, her owner says, is that she recently figured out how to open kitchen cabinets to get at the trash can.

This amused me:

It's a Tikimon "hand-activated spinner". You push down on the top bit and the little guy in the middle with the stickey-out tongue spins around. It was the toy included with a Carl's Junior child's meal.

We already knew where the cool cats were hanging out in virtual Albuquerque. Now even more so.

A new pumpkin patch has sprouted, largely of its own accord, in our backyard.

Last fall, I put one of the Halloween pumpkins out in the raised bed in the backyard, smashing it open with the idea that the birds would eat the seeds. They seem to have been less than interested. Then over the last few weeks, Lissa has been disassembling the planter box and using the dirt to make a new mound in the back garden. The pumpin seeds, mixed in with the new mound's soil, have sprouted enthusiastically, on several fronts.

It's late enough in the summer that we should be past the risk of squash bugs, which have made previous pumpkin experiments sketchy. So perhaps this fall, we can sit in the backyard in our accidental patch and await the arrival of the Great Pumpkin.

Lissa notes that SpongeBob always wears the Yellow Jersey.

Using my l33t haxor crutch skills, I was able to load the dishwasher this morning. Slowly but surely, the little victories add up.

In honor of Lance, and my goofball friend Barbara, and that guy with the cast, I reprise Bonus Time:

Back at the finish, we sat around on the lawn in the shade of a big tree for a while. The guy on the beach cruiser was there, grinning, and Charlie and Katie rolled in the grass.

Later in the afternoon, everbody got back together at the park for drawings for a bunch of swag. Barbara, the organizer, called bib numbers and if we were there, prize action ensued. There were bike tires and Harley Davidson beer glasses and water bottles and all manner of goods donated by the event's sponsors. I won a helmet and explained to Barbara that it was destined for the head of my cancer survivor wife.

The guy on the old beach cruiser came up to collect a prize - I wish I remembered what - and Barbara pointed out that he is a cancer survivor, one year out. So now I understand the grin, and the fealty to a beautiful old Schwinn beach cruiser and the way he didn't seem to care about the discomfort of riding with a big cast on his arm. This guy is on bonus time.

Thanks for all the kind notes. It's odd how this blog thing has created an extended community of folks I've never met face to face.

The knee is still swollen, but it's moving a lot better now, and I've got a lot more energy. The question is now to use it, what with only one functioning leg and all. Books, I guess. FInished Daniel Coyle's new Lance Armstrong book, which is a ripping good read. My buddy Paul yesterday brought over Jane Leavy's Koufax book, which shows great promise, a trip back to my youth in LA.

The knee bender contraption is up to 60 degrees flexion. Doc says I need 70 as quickly as possibly. PT says 110 to ride the bike.

So I survived yesterday's knee surgery with no nausea from the anasthetic, and almost no pain. That's the good news. The bad news is when the knee repairman finally popped the hood to look inside, things were substantially more messed up that we had hoped. He had to do some bone work, not just cartilege. I'm going to be laid up much longer than I thought.

Back on the plus side, I've got one of those cool CPM devices, idly popping my knee up and down while I'm parked on the couch watching Dr. Strangelove.

We're not entirely clear on how we first got hollyhocks in the garden. Our best recollection is that we got an old stalk from our neighbor Alison across the street and shook it over the garden to scatter seeds. Or maybe we bought some. Whatever. They just volunteer now, wandering the yard looking for a cozy spot to do their stuff. This year, thanks to the prolifically wet spring, they're putting on a show:

I assume the varieties of color we see are the result of hybrization, because I sure don't remember ever having salmon pink (not shown) before.

The show's going on all over the 'hood, with an especially striking one up the street that's a sort of lemonade yellow with just a hint of green. Double blossoms. Magnificent. Must see if I can score some of the seeds when it's done blooming.

(See Sim Yard for last year's disquisition.)

I awoke this morning to a plate of seven plump, lovely, freshly baked biscuits on the kitchen counter - a visit from the Biscuit Fairy? I almost plopped a couple in my lunch, but then thought better of it. What if the Biscuit Fairy was planning on having friends over for lunch? Or, worse, what if the Biscuit Fairy was a Vengeful God, and left the plate out on the counter to test me, like Lot or Job or one of them guys in the Bible?

sculpture by Nora Heineman-Fleck

This works on so may levels.

The lily in our pond is happy this year.

The shade structure that collapsed in the big March blizzard let the sun in, and the lily responded with a lovelier than usual bloom. The fish, which have always been a bit of a mystery, seem more so. The cattails (the "weeds" of the title - I didn't plant them) seem more exuberant as well.

"Now, I have to go play on line Pictionary, if you'll excuse me."

In which Nora does Mandelbrot with a randomly sweet color sensibility.

The Phelpsoids' assessment of last week's Angel Action:

Some really tolerant people dressed up in PVC pipe and thread-bare, ratty sheets masquerading as angel’s wings, and people holding up banners attempted to block our fabulous signage, but it worked as well as stink trying to escape a feces eater. As we ducked in and out of their foolish attempt at sign blocking, Megan expertly maneuvered around their smelly selves, and said, "14 years on a picket line will teach you some pretty awesome tricks, amateurs."

As Nora put it, "What a great way to spend 14 years."

Kids with the moral fire and mischief of youth. Nothin' like it.

The angel on the left is my daughter, Nora. The angel on the right is her friend Kelsey. The people behind them are - well, I'll let you judge for yourself. I think not angels.

The backstory dates to October 1998, when Matthew Shepard was beaten to death in Laramie, Wyoming. When Fred Phelps, the notoriously hateful homophobic preacher, brought his bile to Laramie to protest at Matthew's funeral, people were dumbfounded. When he returned to protest again at the trial of one of Matthew's assailants, Romaine Patterson was ready:
(click through for more)

I decided someone needed to stand toe to toe with this guy and show the differences. And I think that at times like this when the world is talking about hatred as much as it is right now, that someone really needs to show the difference. So our idea is to dress up as angels. And so we've designed an angel outfit. Our wings are huge. They're like big ass wings. And there's gonna be like ten to twenty of us that are angels. And because of our big ass wings we're gonna COM-PLETE-LY block him. So this big ass band of angels comes in. And we don't say a fucking word. We are a group of people bringing forth a message of peace and love and hope. And we're calling it Angel Action. Yeah, this twenty-one-year-old little lesbian's ready to walk the line with him.

The Phelpsites set up on one corner at the entrance to the University of New Mexico, and the counter-protesters set up on the other. And out of that crowd of counter-protesters emerged three angels, with these really big-ass wings.

They turned their back on the Phelpsies, and they raised their wings, and they just stood there.

After a few minutes, the cops, who were being pretty diligent about trying to keep the Phelpsoids and the counter-demonstrators apart, politely asked Angel Nora and her friends to take their big-ass wings back across the street. Which they did. They're good kids. They made their point.

Justin, who played Matthew Shepard when the kids did The Laramie Project last fall, held one pair of wings for a while.

I found the sight incredibly moving.

The Fred Phelps road show is coming to Albuquerque today. Daughter Nora and her friends are making angel wings.

Much duct tape and PVC pipe are involved. I am very proud.

Pika's Duke City Doorways is up, including a door and a gate by my talented wife.

We signed up for Netflix, and I'm now confronted with a dilemma: How do I tell which Jackie Chan movies suck?

I got hooked almost 10 years ago when my sister dragged me to see Rumble in the Bronx, which was hilarious. After that, we'd see each new one together. I've taken no great joy in his crossover into American cinema, but I loved the old Buster Keaton kung fu master stuff.

My first Netflix pick was Project A, which left something to be desired. I mean, the kung fu bicycle scene was genius, but the rest of the film rather flagged. And his body of work is so, um, voluminous. I must find a filter.

Friday, my yellow LiveStrong band broke. I'd been wondering how much longer I should wear it, and I figured that was an out. Then last night at dinner, Lissa asked me if I wanted to wear hers. Jeez. The cancer survivor gives you her LiveStrong band. You pretty much have to wear that.

Old school chum Kenna Ogg recently tracked me down, having found this:

That's me on the right and Mike on the left, though Kenna and I are both at a bit of a loss as to Mike's last name. It's from David Mackintosh's and Gigi Bailin's birthday party during our freshman year in high school. You can see my unerring fashion sense has deep roots.

What kind of police state is this that we're living in, when my daughter can't buy spray paint for her science fair project and can't go hear all-girl Japanese punk bands?

Congratulations to Inkstain founding member Scott Smallwood, whose work is a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Twice.

When Sadie came nosing into our room a little after midnight Tuesday morning, whining, waking us up, my first thought was that Timmy had fallen down the well. But we don't know anyone named Timmy. And we don't have a well.

Then I thought perhaps another pop culture icon had died.

When I got up Tuesday morning, I realized that the snow had collapsed the bamboo shade lattice Lissa and I had built in the backyard. Sadie was trying to tell us something.

Inspired by the Brittlebush Collection, we greet spring with the work of the lovely and talented L. Heineman:

We had another incident last night. Around bedtime, Sadie was wandering aimlessly through the house, staring at me, unable or unwilling to settle down, like she was trying to tell me something.

This morning, I nervously opened the paper to see which pop culture icon was dead. Elton John? Neal Cassady? Paris Hilton? Could it be that Neal Cassady died long ago, and Sadie had finally noticed? Could it be that Sadie was upset about Paris Hilton's cell phone being hacked?

Then I realized I'd left my bike helmet, gloves and shoes on the floor in front of the chair Sadie likes to sleep under, blocking the entrance to her den. She was trying to tell me something.

Last night, Sadie was behaving powerfully strangely. Lissa and I were reading in bed, and Sadie was moping around the bedroom, looking at us, sniffing at things, sometimes just standing there sadly, as if she was trying to tell us something.

When I opened this morning's paper, I understood. Hunter S. Thompson and Sandra Dee had died. It's like Sadie is some sort of pop culture doggie savant, like she knew.

Certain evidence has emerged regarding the November-December bowling ball incidents, prompting decisive action:

It seems a reasonable request, eh? Jake?

I came home to find a bunch of pink rubber bands on the couch. I put one on:

A couple of months ago, a friend at work asked me how much longer I was going to wear the yellow. "I don't know," I said. The real answer is, "As long as Lissa does." I asked her if she was going to take off the yellow and switch to pink. She said no, she'll wear them both.

Then so will I.

Via BoingBoing, a fascinating hypothesis: could breast cancer be caused by artificial light?

The University of Connecticut cancer epidemiologist says there still is no scientific consensus about why the incidence of the disease is so much higher in the developed world.

The literature on breast cancer is littered with discredited theories about environmental and lifestyle factors that may contribute to the onset of the disease.

"We knew more about the cause of breast cancer 20 years ago than we do today," Stevens said. "What we do know is that it must have something to do with industrialized society."

Only a few theories have withstood scientific scrutiny, and no single factor explains a great percentage of breast cancer cases.

But that hasn't stopped people from looking for new explanations.

Now, Stevens and a few other researchers are focusing on a little-known suspect - electric light.

Their theory that artificial light can cause breast cancer is simple. Prolonged periods of exposure to artificial light disrupt the body's circadian rhythms - the inner biological clocks honed over thousands of years of evolution to regulate behaviors such as sleep and wakefulness. The disruption affects levels of hormones such as melatonin and the workings of cellular machinery, which can trigger the onset of cancer, Stevens theorizes.

In which daughter Nora speaks sensibly to the grownups (scroll down to find it):

Sex education that opens a dialogue between students and teachers is the ideal. Though this isn't always possible - sex is an awkward subject - censoring information is probably the worst way to keep us safe and healthy.

For our anniversary, Lissa and I bought ourselves a present:

It's "Mountains and Rivers," from the 1862 Johnson and Ward Illustrated Family Atlas. It is a graphic assemblage of the world's mountains and rivers, arranged to show their relative sizes, from the mighty Mississippi/Missouri system to the lowly Merrimac.

The Rio Grande is there, flowing out of the Rocky Mountains, past our house and into the Gulf of Mexico. The Colorado River, strangely, is not. (1862 was before John Wesley Powell mapped the Grand Canyon, but by that time people had a pretty clear idea where the thing started and ended.)

The mountains are sadly only numbered, not labeled with names. There must have been a key that went with it which is sadly lost to history. But great passes are named, and high mountain cities, and ecosystems: "Lower limits of the growth of pines in the Torrid Zone, 6,000," and "Region of Lichens and Umbilicariae."

It's a wonderful exemplar of the time - the globe could, for the first time, be looked on as a whole, and the counting and mapping and categorizing of the entire planet could finally be done. There's such a sense of European optimism in it, as if naming and mapping gave dominion. Seems charmingly naive.

The repairman was by this morning to replace the motor in our dishwasher. He suggested we use Tang every once in a while to keep it clean. Yeah, that Tang. THe powdered drink mix. He said it's the citric acid.

Kraft doesn't quite endorse the idea. But they don't discourage it:

We have heard that some consumers have used TANG® Drink Mix to clean their dishwashers. TANG® does contain citric acid which can act as cleaning agent.

TANG® Drink mix is intended to be a food product and Kraft Foods does not advocate its use for any other purpose.

My long quest for a broccoli refrigerator magnet is over:

I found one today at Rainbow Man, in among the old Navajo rugs and jewelry and Santa Fe Railway memorabilia. It's the railway memorabilia I go in for - old placemats, and occasionally the lovelyMary Colter faux Mimbres dinnerware they used in the dining car on the Super Chief. I almost missed the metal tray of refrigerator magnets tucked in a corner, they just caught my eye on the way out the door. 50 cents each.

Score.

It was the tail end of a nice few days wandering Northern New Mexico with my beloved. L and I are a good team when it comes to wandering aimlessly. We shopped some, saw some art (if you're in New Mexico or headed this way, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum has a terrific show of Charles Sheeler, the modernist photographer) and added some new lines to the big map on the wall of my office on which we mark all of our New Mexico travels.

And I found a broccoli refrigerator magnet.

Mom and Dad came over to help set up the luminarias, and we went out for Chinese. It's quiet now in the neighborhood, and pretty.

Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Daughter Nora today made a print of this photograph of the first missing bowling ball. Label it Exhibit B:

If you have seen this bowling ball, please notify the authorities.

Another bowling ball suggestion:

I suggest adding a garden sprinkler system for further hilarity.

(Obviously taking due care to protect loudspeaker, light and webcam in
the process)

A reader suggests that continuing to replace the bowling balls as they are stolen would be wrong: "Noooo "they" will win then. John, there's principle at stake here!"

This reader's alternative suggestion:

1. Point webcam and light at 'crimescene'
2. Place loudspeaker near 'crimescene'.
3. Rig loud speaker and light to trigger when bowling ball is lifted from post.
4. Post hilarious pictures of thief having the living-be-jesuses scared out of him on your Blog site.
5. We laugh ourselves hoarse and you hopefully keep your bowling balls in future.
6. Thief is scarred for life and develops a Pavlovian fear-response whenever he thinks of stealing something in future. He gives up his now impossible life of crime and goes to college were he excels in medicine. He later develops a cure for cancer and in his Nobel prize acceptance speech credits YOU with changing his life.

Another promising suggestion to deal with the neighborhood epidemic of bowling ball theft:

Paint your name on the ball (possibly on the back
so it isn't visible), and a request to return it if lost.

Readers offered several suggestions for dealing with our bowling ball problem:

• Some coarse chicken wire covering the bowling ball and your choice of weak or strong current. Might want to get a sparky (Australian: electrician) to suggest a non-fatal voltage... something like an electrice fence amount of unpleasantry : )
• Being in America you've got access to firecrackers right? Could one be rigged to 'go off' when the ball is lifted from the post?
• Goodwill has bowling balls for .75 to $1.25 here so it's cheap enough to replace them. I say, keep replacing them.

Wife Lissa, who is something of a goofball, installed a large post in the front yard - a 4x4 set in concrete - with a bowling ball as a finial. It is both amusingly decorative as well as functional: when she's thinning cactus or iris, the post serves to display her "Free Iris" or "Free Cactus" sign. (You can see it in the background in this June 2003 photo. Mark this Exhibit A.)

About a month ago, someone stole the bowling ball. She quickly replaced it. (Any thrift store worth the name has a big box of bowling balls for cheap.) This week, we were again bowling ballglarized.

It's a bit of a dilemma. One hates to give in to the forces of darkness, but how many times will she need to replace it? Are the thieves hoping to collect enough balls to start their own alley? If so, where will they get the shoes?

Nora suggested coating the next ball with itching powder. I suggested one of those bank robbery exploding dye packs, though the engineering details are a bit murky in my own mind, so perhaps that's not practical.

Suggestions are welcome.

Lissa and I finally made the pilgrimage this afternoon to the new Trader Joe's in Santa Fe.

When people ask where we're from, we typically say "L.A.," but we actually lived for many years in South Pasadena, a little bit of old-school suburbia between Los Angeles and Pasadena. It's the home of Joe Coulombe's first Trader Joe's, and we did a lot of shopping at the second, a crowded little cheese and wine emporium on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena. The stuff was cheap and good and, most important, a bit odd. Workers wore Hawaiian shirts, stuff was stacked around in wooden crates like it had just come off the boat. And did I mention that it was cheap?

The first TJ's in New Mexico has been greeted with almost religious fervor, but to be honest I was a bit nervous about making the pilgrimage. In this age of Wild Whole Oat Foods markets, with their colored concrete floors and beautiful produce and oh-so-hiply-pierced staff, I was worried about what TJ's might have become. But I was pleasantly surprised. There was Joe's low-sodium V8 knockoff vegetable juice - cheaper than V8 at the regular supermarket. Intriguing frozen vegetables. Frozen salmon patties. Stuff stacked around like it had just come off the boat. And did I mention that it was cheap?

Be tough, wear yellow.

From Borowitz:

STEINBRENNER ACQUIRES NUCLEAR WEAPON
Trades Alex Rodriguez to Kim Jong-Il

New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner acquired a nuclear weapon today in a transaction that sent slugger Alex Rodriguez and an undisclosed sum of cash to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il.

While national security experts were divided over what possible use Kim might have for the All-Star infielder, there was unanimity of opinion about Mr. Steinbrenner’s plans for his newly-minted nuclear arsenal.

“The warhead that George Steinbrenner has acquired, if deployed on a ballistic missile he already owns, could reach Fenway Park in a matter of minutes,” said Donaldson Tobin of the University of Minnesota.

With the Yankees gone, I must now choose a team for the coming world series of baseball.

Watching the Red Sox against the Yankees, I grew a certain grudging respect, so that was a definite possibility. However, Lissa's late mother, Mary, was from St. Louis - a Cardinals fan. In addition, Lissa suggested she'd smack me if I didn't root for the Cards.

Fair enough. Cards it is. I love post-season baseball. As Luis said, bring it on.

Been travelling. Now I'm back. Saw some rain, some art, learned some fun stuff about snowpack and runoff, and spent far too much time in airports. Remember when airplane travel was an exciting novelty?

From lunch:

Good advice. Today I'll avoid the political blogs.

It's that time of year in Albuquerque. Lissa snapped this flying over our house this morning while I was in the shower:

It landed at the apartments around the corner.

It's our 15th year, and I'm not jaded. It's still fun to see hundreds of hot air balloons flying over my city.

One of those proud Dad moments: Nora's byline in the morning paper, alongside my own. (I've gotta say, in all honesty, that what she had to say was a fair piece more important than what I had to say.)

I went to the opening last night of the Albuquerque High theater kids' performance of The Laramie Project.

It was draining and moving and I'm tremendously proud of what the kids accomplished. It's a play worth caring about, and they honored it.

Tonight (Fri.) and Saturday this weekend (Oct. 1 and 2) and next Thurs. - Sat. (Oct. 7 - 10), 7 p.m., at the Albuquerque High School theater, 800 Odelia Rd NE. (Odelia is Indian School west of Interstate 25, enter the theater on the school's east side entrance.)

For those of you reading this in Albuquerque, the Albuquerque High School theater kids are doing The Laramie Project over the next two weekends. It is the story of Laramie, Wyoming, in the aftermath of what happened to Matthew Shepard. My daughter, Nora, is in it, and I'm really proud of her and her theater colleagues for doing something important. You should go see it if you happen to live here.

Thurs. - Sat., this weekend (Sept. 30 - Oct. 2) and next (Oct. 7 - 10), 7 p.m., at the Albuquerque High School theater, 800 Odelia Rd NE. (Odelia is Indian School west of Interstate 25, enter the theater on the school's east side entrance.)

When we first moved to Albuquerque, the video store within walking distance of our apartment had a Hitchcock section. This was a perfect solution, because otherwise where do you file the Hitchcock movies? Horror? Mystery? Comedy? Romance? Over time, we trekked through most of what they had, but Hitchcock made a lot of films, so we've still not even come close to seeing them all.

When in doubt at the video store (there are so many bad movies, choices always pose such risk) one can always pick up a Hitchcock and rarely be disappointed. Saturday night: Stage Fright. Marlene Dietrich was delicious.

Daughter Nora, at sixteen, has raised the cheerful mockery of her parents to a high art.

"This is what happens when you don't have cable," she said after I explained that we were watching not one but two turltes in the backyard. See, we've got two turtles, but we hardly ever see them, and it's been since forever that we've seen both at the same time.

Lissa was still in bed this morning when Sadie raised the alarm. I though she was just barking at the back door to come in, but when I went out she was barking and dancing around two turtles scrunched inside their shells by the back door, trying to avoid Sadie's excess of enthusiasm. I brought Sadie inside, alerted Lissa, and an hour of amusing turtle watching began.

First one of the turtles (they are named Speedy and Olivia, though we are not entirely sure which is which - they look quite similar) bumped at the other one, crashing into its shell. Then they wandering began. Lissa took many pictures, referred to old photographic documentation to try to sort out the question of which was Speedy and which was Olivia. Olivia climbed up into one of the little bird baths that sit on the ground. She's a desert turtle. That seemed odd.

Nora mocked us, suggesting alternative names for the turtles and repeating variations of the cable TV joke. She even turned on her computer, that she could mock us in her blog. But she did have to venture outside to see for herself the turtle sitting in the pond.

"She thinks we're kooks," Lissa said, "but she did want to come out and see the turtle in the water."

I too love the New Mexico State Fair.

But aren't saguaro cacti native to Arizona, not New Mexico (or Hawai'i)?

Lissa notes the old saw that human hair will keep deer out of your garden. For several years she's been cutting my hair in the backyard, leaving the clippings laying about. We have had no deer. QED.

OK, if I was a bike racer, does that mean I would spend the time to swap out my heavy, goathead resistant training tires for something lighter when I race? Even if it's just a "B" race, a tuneup?

If I was a bicyclist, husband, friend, does that mean I'd go for a lovely long slow ride with my wife on a sunny Sunday late summer morning?

But what if I realized halfway through that I still had my racing tires on the bike?

P.S. This morning, I pulled weeds from the garden.

My beloved just fried up a big pan of potatoes and onions for breakfast.

The smell of Walla Walla sweet onions in the morning makes me feel loved.

The southwestern travelogue continues, this week taking us to the Valles Caldera, where Lissa and I took advantage of their decision to cautiously open things up for a mountain biking experiment this weekend.

We pronounce the experiment a success, though the fact that we don't really mountain bike made even the beginner trail a bit arduous.

I once described the Caldera as being, to a geologist, like "a secular sort of sacred ground." It was there, in a volcanic formation, that Brent Dalrymple in the 1960s found the rocks that clinched the deal for the theory of plate tectonics, launching a revolution in earth science.

For that alone the Valles would be a spectacular place, but there's so much more. Created in a massive volcanic eruption 1.2 million years ago that created a crater 15 miles wide, the Caldera is a geologic wonder. There's no place short of an airplane where you can see the whole thing, because subsequent volcanic eruptions dotted the crater with massive volcanic humps. The humps are covered with pines (it was one of the humps on which Dalrymple found his Rosetta Stone), and beautiful meadowed valleys thread among them.

The problem is that until recently the bulk of the Caldera was in private hands. The federal government bought the land in July 2000, setting up a trust to administer it. It remains a working ranch, and public access is being slowly introduced, with an eye toward finding ways to let us in without screwing the place up.

This weekend's mountain biking was one such experiment. They opened several routes, from the relatively less hard to the relatively more hard, along the old logging roads that cover the Caldera. They limited the numbers, and sold tickets. It wasn't cheap - $20 each. But since the whole point of the Valles experiment in federal land management is to try to find ways for preservation to pay for itself, I didn't mind.

Our ride took us across the main valley (that's what you see in the background in the photo above) and up into the woods for a long, level traverse of one of the volcanic humps.

Red-winged blackbirds were everywhere in the valley, and mountain bluebirds. "If I was a bird, I'd live here," Lissa said. We didn't see any elk, but we could, uh, tell they had been there. (Last time I was there, when I went for the story linked above, we saw a huge herd of elk as we were leaving the place. Magnificent.)

While we celebrate Lance Armstrong's victory today in the Tour de France, it's worth a moment to reflect on the story of Sister Mary Andrew Matesich:

Her doctor suggested that she consider entering a clinical trial, in which she would receive an experimental treatment. The idea intrigued her. "I am a scientist myself," she said in an interview. "I have a Ph.D. in chemistry. The scientist in me was interested."

The idea that she could help to advance research appealed to her intellectually, but in a religious way as well. "As a sister, a member of a religious order, someone in a service capacity my whole life, I want to continue to be of service to others," she said, adding, "I wouldn't be alive today if other women hadn't been in clinical trials."

L and I went on a wander yesterday afternoon and ended up walking in Otero Canyon in the rain. It was lovely.

We were headed to the back side of the Sandias, the mountains that loom over Albuquerque, but a big heavy thunderhead was draped over them so we headed down South 14, out around Oak Flat, and ended up parked at the Otero Canyon trailhead as the clouds began drifting south onto us.

We figured when we started there was a good chance we'd get soaked, but it was warm and nice and we had our rain gear, so we just wandered up the trail a bit - not far, but enough to feel the atmospherics of a lovely summer shower. And the smell. Desert mountains in a summer rain.

It's been extraordinarily wet at our place this summer, though a big part of that is the random luck of the summer thunderstorms. The official Albuquerque rain gauge is at the airport, a little less than five miles from my house. They've gotten 2.43 inches so far in July. I've gotten 4.21 inches. The luck of the thunderstorm draw. It's also, more deeply, the nature of the highly variable desert climate.

If you live in, say, coastal North Carolina, where you get a lot more rain (they average 51 inches a year to our 9.4), you also have a lot less variability. The wettest year on record in coastal NC is 69 inches, the driest is 39 inches. In other words, the wettest year on record is 35 percent above normal, the driest is 24 percent below normal. In a dry climate, the variability is much greater. The wettest year on record here is 17.6 inches, 87 percent above normal. The driest was 3.6 inches, 64 percent below normal. Generally speaking, desert precipitation regimes have a much bigger "coefficient of variability," to use the statistician's cumbersome but helpfully precise moniker for the phenomenon. This, more than the simple lack of precipitation, is what makes deserts harder places for plants and animals and us people to live in. The most helpful definition I've found of drought is "less water than you've come to depend on." If the Anasazi had gotten a predictable 11 inches a year up at Chaco (avg. 11, max. 21, min. 5) they'd have been fine.

That's not a very romantic way of looking at the rain in the desert in the summer. The numbers help explain it, give it depth for me. It's the lack of rain, and its power when it arrives, that is its romance. That and having my beloved with me for the walk. That's romantic too.

(Data courtesy of the fine folks at the Western Regional Climate Center)

This email from Byron Poland made my day.

I too have a yellow rubber bad with the words LIVESTRONG etched in it. I wear it for my mother who has survived lung cancer (removal of one lobe)and 5 years later brain cancer, 1 brain surgery, 4 weeks of radiation and 1 dose of stereotactic radiation. The radiation cooked most of her hair permanently, and she goes around proudly with her bald head (i'm growing up to match her well). She has lived through a second brain cancer scare just last year, that required another brain surgery! She is by far the strongest person I know, and no she can't climb the Alps,or the Appalachian Trail for that matter, but she is alive and Living Strong. Lance is a huge motivation to thousands and thousands who have had to live through cancer. I wear a yellow rubber band to remind me I really don't have it so bad.

A friend at work told me how her mother week before last was all concerned about the weather. "I don't think the weather's supposed to be bad here today," my friend told her mom.

"No, in France," her mom replied. She was worried about the bike riders.

I tell you this story by way of explaining that what Lance Armstrong does matters, and why I'm wearing a goofy yellow rubber band around my wrist. My friend's mom is starting an aggressive round of chemotherapy this week. The whole not-dying-and-living-to-ride-again thing is so incredibly important.

I don't for a minute think Armstrong let Ivan Basso win at La Mongie Friday because of the cancer thing, as some in the press have tried to suggest. But I also don't doubt for a minute the sincerity of Armstrong's attempt to help Basso's mother. "We've been friends for a long time and off the bike we're trying to work a little bit on his mum's situation, to try to see if she can win the fight against cancer," Armstrong said. There's a sort of awkwardness to the normally smooth-talking Armstrong's cadence in that sentence that's endearing.

Living strong doesn't have to be about time trialing up L'Alpe d'Huez. It can be something as simple as being fearless about tearing apart the drier to fix the drive belt yourself, even when you're scared you won't be able to put it back together.

So I feel a little bit silly about the fan boy thing, wearing the yellow thing on my arm. But it's for my friend's mom, and my dad, and my beloved Lissa and all the other people who stare down chemo and puke and lose their hair and turn around to live their lives. "It's a long way from Indianapolis to Puy du Fou," Armstrong said after he won the opening prologue of the 1999 Tour. Indianapolis was where he underwent cancer treatment. Puy du Fou is where he put on his first yellow jersey.

Words to live by.

My wife, Lissa, is not only beautiful, but smart and talented. Here's proof:

Last night I threw some clothes in the dryer that I needed for work today. When I went to take them out, they were still sitting there wet. I figured I'd forgotten to turn the dryer on, so I hit the start button, heard the engine rev up, and left.

An hour later, they were still sitting there, wet. The dryer was busted. Dollar signs flashed before my eyes. "Don't worry," Lissa said. "I'll deal with it tomorrow. We can put up a line or something until we get it fixed."

This morning, she told me she had an idea what was wrong. Maybe it was just a busted belt. This afternoon, she called me at work. It had been a busted belt, and they had a new one at the store where we bought it. Total cost to fix it: $13, plus a few hours of her time. Lissa completely rocks. But it gets better.

When she had the dryer torn apart, she found a ton of change that had fallen out of various pockets over the years. The total take: $14. That's a $1 net profit.

Friends Paul and Anita dropped by yesterday with a turtle for us.

We have a male - Speedy - and they brought him a mate. Their backyard is a turtle world, and they're always looking for good homes. We were flattered that we passed muster. We're looking for a name. Suggestions welcome.

Nora thinks she's figured out how to get my blog's feed to show up on her friends page. Let's see if this works.

My socially conscious daughter points out in the comments to my previous post that she and her friends are not Eurocentric. They also circulated a petition demanding that the United States, "as one of the leading industrialized nations of the world," remove the bureaucratic barriers that are preventing refugees from Zaire's civil war from finding asylum here.

My socially conscious daughter and her friends yesterday evening collected 34 signatures on a petition abhorring the terrible violence now besetting the border regions between Latvia and Estonia.

Their petition demanded UN peacekeeping forces and "immediate foodstuffs and monetary support to the suffering civilian populations." The majority of people they approached signed, though some disagreed with the petition. One person asked them if they supported the war in Iraq. When they said "no," she responded that she did, and would not sign. Another said, by way of explaining his refusal, "I'm an American! I'm a Republican!"

Lissa's garden goal is to have something blooming throughout the year. It's rather an evolutionary process - each year some experiments, with the things that survive seeding or being replanted the following year, and the things that don't being replaced

It's like a big game of Sim Yard - add water here, some seeds there, then let the game run for a cycle to see what happens.

This year, the hollyhocks have proven themselves extraordinarily robust, a seemingly natural follow-on to the iris bloom that lasted through mid-May. They're doing so well, in fact, that Lissa's going to have me weed out quite a few of them once they're done blooming. We haven't planted a hollyhock in years, but they seem quite happy reseeding themselves and spreading out to find the wet spots. Now that there are places that get reliable water, they're exploding. They seem to be hybridizing, too, with all kinds of weird color mixtures from white to a deep red with lots of pinks and purples in between.

Around the neighborhood, lots of cholla are in full bloom, but ours is just starting. The various cactus have been coming in waves, too. And in the backyard, the yarrow is doing its thing. It's modest, a soft canopy of tiny flowers that lacks the bright and frilly colors of its more showy neighbors:

The bees and the butterflies know, though. They're absolutely swarming over the top of the yarrow, doing some serious feasting. The flashy colors may be the best evolutionary adaptation to the human garden, but the yarrow's got a fine state-of-nature thing going for it.

So if you're in Albuquerque, you've gotta go have coffee and a sandwich, or desert, at Cafe Riviera. It's on Constitution, just west of Carlisle. I swear, we were sitting there this evening having dessert, and they had a guy on the patio playing a trombone.

Right off the bat, any place that has a guy playing the trombone is obviously great. But I've had this fantasy for years that someone opens a little coffee place in our neighborhood, so Lissa and I could wander over on warm summer evenings for desert and to watch the people come and go - and they'd be smart and interesting people, probably wearing sandals. And the place would sell the New York Times. I mean, you can get the Times out of a machine in front of the supermarket, but that's not the same as picking it up off of a pile next to the coffee pump pots.

OK, Cafe Riviera doesn't seem to have the Times. Yet. But they've got pump pots, and the people looked interesting. So go there and spend your money, please. This is my fantasy. We can't let them go out of business.

Check the T-shirt below carefully:

That's a GEGL-shirted DCM doing what he apparently does naturally, broken Coracoid Process or not.

It's for sure always weird meeting someone in person after knowing them for a long time on line, but Dave and Cate didn't disappoint. Dave's so, umm, serious on line, and then he and Cate drive up in this utterly extravagant convertible Mustang rental - red - and he has this impish little understated smirk when he's cracking wise that one simply can't see on line.

We dragged the two of them halfway across the state in the course of a couple of days, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I s'pose it's our turn now to go to North Carolina and eat some of that utterly strange-sounding barbecue.

The members of Thespian Troupe 1775 of Albuquerque High School gathered Saturday evening for their annual banquet and new member initiation, and it was a long and proud affair. It is as much about the general feeling of shared accomplishment as it is about the particulars of theater. These kids put on show after show all year long and work their tails off and at the end realize they have accomplished something very special. Tears for the departing seniors, laughs, amazing poise and some whacked-out kid in the light booth who couldn't resist throwing up a lightning bolt zig-zagging across the curtain at one point in the evening's festivities.

Who was that in the light booth?

And for my birthday, I got a new frying pan.

I was explaining blogging once to Dad, that it was sort of like a diary but on line for the whole world (or any subset that's interested) to read, and he asked, "Do you tell the truth?" Well, no. He has a point. There's some discomfort levels I just can't get past in a forum as public as this, so I certainly don't tell the whole truth. Hopefully enough to get by.

So I've not been all here this month because it's been brutal and exhausting and I'm very, very tired. So let's talk about the iris and the anniversary:

Out in the front yard we've a triangle of iris that are putting on a show this year the likes of which we've not seen this decade we've lived here. They started as a little clump left to us by the former owner, frankly unloved. Lissa has loved them extensively, separating and spreading them until one whole corner of the yard is well groomed iris country. She's added a lot of new bulbs, but the patch is still dominated by the purple that we started with.

Last year we added an automatic drip irrigation system, which means that for the first time the iris got consistent water instead of the haphazard hand-watering we’ve always done. Then this spring things were unusually wet. Between the sprinklers and the spring rains, the iris seem content and willing to show their gratitude with a magnificent display.

The other great thing April had to offer was Mom and Dad's 50th anniversary:

Lissa and Nora, with a smidge of help from me, threw a party for them and their friends over at their place, then the five of us went out to a nice dinner. It was sweet and lovely and they seem both happy and content with a fine marriage and genuine lifetime spent together.

Oh yeah. And my kid and her chums at the Albuquerque High School drama department did King Lear. Nora gets pissed if one suggests that that is an ambitious thing for a student drama group to do, and I've come to realize that she's right. They do tough stuff all the time, and real work, kids or not. So I'll just say I was immensely proud to see my daughter up there on stage, and King Lear's an ambitious undertaking for anyone.

See, April 2004 wasn't so bad after all, was it?

Lissa and I went to a car show Saturday. This was an unexpected pleasure.

We went because the article in the newspaper mentioned restored travel trailers, which are a hoot. It's always been a fantasy of Lissa's to buy a little old '50s or early '60s trailer and restore it. So we drove on over to Rio Rancho to see the car show that had the trailers. And the trailers were nice, for sure, six of 'em lovingly restored. But the car show - that was the attraction.

As we walked up and down the rows of impeccable autos, it occurred to me that this was some sort of quintessential American art form - the perfect upholstery, the shiny lacquered paint. The aesthetic is rich and complex - why a load of old '60s Mustangs, but no Astin Martins? Why a Dodge Challenger ("the last American hero, the electric sintar, the demi-god, the super driver of the golden west") rather than a Jaguar? And the wheels, almost always mags, rather than the stock? And one of these.

It's that magic time of year when the garden offers new surprises every day. Today it was one of our tulips, a little gem on the mound in the back yard.

The wisteria is starting to leaf out, and the first iris - a lovely little white thing - is blooming in the front yard.

Lissa got the irrigation system in our back yard running this afternoon, and most of the work is done on the front irrigation. I've been pretty diligent about weeding every day during my vacation, so that's largely under control.

It cooled off nicely as the sun went down, so Lissa and I took a long walk down through the neighborhood to Central, past the high-end folks waiting for a table at Scalo to Flying Star, which is low-rent enough for us without being unapproachably hip. I had shrimp pasta with corn and poblano chiles. L had a patty melt, minus the cheese, which I think is an odd concept (what exactly is left to melt?) but she seemed to thoroughly enjoy.

I feel unbelievably relaxed, like I can really sleep now. And so to bed.

A group of teenagers in the house for a self-assembled "pi party". Their plan - to bake pies. First choice for the recipe - Google. Second choice - a cookbook.

We drove Janis up Jemez Canyon today, a day that had that first-day-of-spring-emerging-from-hibernation feel to it.

You can see from the clothes that it's still got some chill to it, and if you looked in the opposite direction, toward the north-facing slopes, you'd have still seen snow. But it was warm enough to eat quite comfortably on the patio at the Laughing Lizard. The locals were emerging into the street, aggressively wearing shirtsleeves, with cheery hellos and big spring grins.

We drove Janis up to the soda dam, a big plug of travertine laid down by hot springs across a narrow point in the canyon. It's an odd tourist destination - it smells bad, and you've got to brave traffic to cut back and forth across the highway to see the dam and the most active little springs, which are across the road. But it's geology at a near-human time scale, worth the trip.

Mainly we just ogled the rock, which is at its best down the canyon in the Triassic redbeds of Jemez Pueblo, the reddest rocks it has been my privilege to see in my travels 'round the southwest.

Lissa's friend Janis - a deep old childhood sort of friend - is visiting for the weekend from California.

We hit a brief but thick snowstorm yesterday on the drive to Santa Fe, leaving the plaza (above) in picture postcard condition. Early lunch at the diner (I barely got in on the tale end of breakfast, which meant a breakfast burrito slathered in rich red chile) and then over to the Georgia O'Keefe.

O'Keefe has almost become a cliche, a pastiche of rich-toned southwestern landscapes, but the museum does a good job of reminding that she really stands square amid the sweep of 20th century art, more than cow skulls etc.

Janis wanted to see the folk art museum, which is another treasure, almost visual overload. To recuperate, we had coffee at the newsstand in my sister's old neighborhood off Canyon Road, where we stumbled into one of those classic Santa Fe moments - pony-tailed guru, speaking to eager disciples:

"The word is the vibration."

So the bike's sitting in the garage with a flat. The front yard's torn up from the plumber's backhoe. And Lissa's lying in the bedroom with a face full of stitches from dental surgery.

But the toilet now flushes, and I just heard Lissa in the kitchen, rooting around for something to eat. I just need to pick up some tubes and a new back tire and I'll be set. Mmmm. Kevlar.

So the inevitable plumbing adventure we've dreaded is now under way here at Casa Heineman-Fleck. It started late last week, and finally came to a head Saturday. Water currently arrives fine, but is not really capable of leaving. This means trips to our neighbor Alison's, or to the YMCA for a shower, or to Mom and Dad's. For our plumber, Mike, this is fabulous - not so much because of the financial benefit, but because it means he gets to rent a backhoe.

And then (I hate to belabor a point. No, that's wrong, I think we must belabor this point.) there is this, from no less than Andrew Sullivan:

The pictures of all those regular and not-so-regular couples waiting patiently in line for hours and hours and even days to get a piece of paper which probably won't give them any rights at all - that's revolutionary in the public consciousness. Suddenly, it's not the gay pride parades and mardi gras festivals that illustrate gay lives. Suddenly, it's love and patience and kids and umbrellas and bouquets and tuxedoes and all the other bric-a-brac of living.

On my earlier squib pointing readers to the Albuquerque Journal's gay marriage poll, I drew several unexpected responses from readers who think same-sex unions are "abnormal". Josh Marshall last night published an amazingly touching letter from a reader about another time and place in our society in which the same argument was made:

I'm 62 years old and grew up in Missouri. When I married my first wife, who was Japanese American, we had to do so in another state. At that time it was against Missouri state law for interracial marriages to take place. Times change.

40 years later the pain of that state-sanctioned inequality, which made some couples second-class citizens, still stirs an old, deep-felt resentment. While I'm not gay, I certainly have sympathy for the state-sanctioned unfairness that gay couples endure and believe that in another 40 years (probably much sooner) gay marriages will be a simple, accepted fact of life.

A package arrived recently from my sister.

It included a copy of "I Ripped My Pants". While at the beach, Spongebob sees weightlifters looking buff and tries to show off, with hilarious results. I don't want to give away the ending, but let's just say the title offers something of a clue.

It includes "An Ocean of Tattoos" ("Kids: Ask an Adult to Help You." - always good advice).

The new stove arrived yesterday. The old stove was one of those hideous cheap white things that's always the cheapest thing on the showroom floor. We inherited it with the house when we bought it.

The new one is a thing of beauty.

That's my first omelette cooking on the new stove. It has spinach and broccoli in it.

Is there some sort of postmodern irony associated with the fact that I blogged the omelette before I finished eating it?

Lissa and I just finished putting new lights in the kitchen.

We replaced the old (very old) incandescent fixtures with flourescents. More light. Less electricity. Woot.

So if Glynn's description of his Christmas is to be believed, we here in New Mexico have inadvertently participated in some sort of antipodal tradition. Liissa cooked up an enormous pan of prawns for Christmas dinner yesterday, along with rice and roast beets. Lots left. Momentarily I'm off to the kitchen to sculpt some sort of prawns-and-beets omelette. (Trust me, I know it sounds weird, it'll be delightful.)

Mum and Dad joined us for the day, in which Nora's best present seemed to be her paid LIveJournal account and ours seemed to be the leisurely opportunity to just hang out. Mum and Dad made me an embroidered Tour de France T-shirt, Dad got some special beer, Mum got earrings and I gave Lissa one of those little kit bags to hang under your bike seat to hold your driver's license and a spare tube. She seemed briefly mortified until I assured her this did not mean she would have to learn to change a flat.

I took a Christmas ride, and took advantage of the temporary lull in the shopping season map out a route I'd always wanted - a high-speed spin along the loop roads that circumnavigate our two shopping malls. They are fine little roads, twisty, a perfect route for a criterium, but the blasted shoppers are normally in the way. Not on Christmas Day! I flew.

One of my gifts, from Nora and Lissa, was a DVD of Life of Brian, turns out Mum and Dad had never seen it (horrors!) so our after-dinner involved filling that gap in their cultural education. ("Blessed are the cheesemakers....")

Then, in a great horror, I dropped Dad's Christmas six-pack of Fat Tire in the street in front of their home as we were schlepping in the Christmas presents. We were good, and cleaned up the broken glass. One bottle survived.

Here's how Lissa is great.

Too much stress in the week over this, big opus that had me wound tight. I woke up this morning with a bad headache, stumbled into the kitchen, and there was no coffee. I stood and stared at the empty filter in our mister coffee, dumbstruck, unable to move.

Lissa: "Are you OK?"

Me: "We're out of coffee."

Lissa: "I'll go get you some." And she dressed in a flash and was out the door to Einsteins, and back with two cups of coffee.

I sat in the comfy chair reading a magazine. I couldn't bear to crack open the morning paper on the step stool by my feet. Lissa grasped what I needed and picked up the paper, going straight to my story. She read it, and pronounced it a success. I felt quite loved.

My dog, Sadie, amuses me as follows:

She spends a great deal of her energy looking out the front window. To enable this, we've put a stool by the window for her to sit on. When the curtain's closed, she'll stick her nose under and push it up. It drapes over her head, and from the front yard she looks like a Nun. We call her Nun Dog when she does it.

She seems to like this. Now when the curtain is pushed to one side, she'll still slip her nose under it so it's draped over her head. And lately, as in the snap above, she'll slip her nose under it, then turn and look into the house toward us, Nun Dog in reverse. This amuses me.

Nora emerged from the intellectual fog late this afternoon, having written a novel in a month. Mother and father are proud.

Drove down to the Bosque del Apache today to see the birds. Mom and Dad joined us:

picture by Lissa Heineman

The chief attraction is sandhill cranes:

picture by Me

It was a pretty cold day, as you can tell by Mom and Dad's bundleosity in the picture above, but much of the bird-watching at the Bosque del Apache can be done from the comfort of a heated car, a network of dirt roads winding through an artificial wetland created by humans to save birds.

I'm in the midst of reading Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, which plays with the premise that domesticated plants - the apple and tulip, for example - have been engaged for years in a sort of coevolution with us, exploiting our desire for the sweet and pretty to extend the reach of their genomes. In that framework, the sandill crane is pretty interesting. It's a magnificent bird that we've gone to great trouble at the Bosque del Apache and elsewhere to save, pulling it back from near extinction in the 1930s. We're often less successful saving less attractive creatures from extinction, I think. Pollan's on to something.

Though there's an interesting sidebar to be worked out here involving spandrels and the snow goose. I wish I could find a better link on Google to explain spandrels so I don't have to, but it's an analogy from a 1979 paper by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. They point to the spandrels in San Marcos Cathedral in Venice, gorgeous painted architectural features created in these weird corner bits left over in the space where two arches meet. It's hard to visualize, but the Gould-Lewontin point is that there wasn't a great plan to create these cool spaces, just a clever use of a bit of architectural leftovers. The evolutionary metaphor is that sometimes features are just an evolutionary exploitation of junk, scraps - like jaw bones becoming the bits in the inner ear.

So what does this have to do wiith Pollan, sweet apples, cranes and snow geese? You can use the Pollan theme to explain the cranes - big majestic birds who have evolutionarily exploited our fondness for big majestic birds. We grow corn for them, and build great refuges. But the snow geese? They're exploiting a spandrel. They're a pest, vastly overpopulated as they hang in farmer Brown's field. Coyotes are exploiting spandrels, too. While the wolf has seen its range drop almost to nothing, coyotes have expanded in the presence of European humans' spread across the Americas. And tumbleweeds. Man, those suckers have found a spandrel. When we cut down the stuff that was in their way, they rolled from the Dakotas all across this great land of ours, exploiting our spandrel.

There's some work required here to sort out the details, but I think there's a fun piece in here somewhere if I can think a bit harder about it.

That's as maybe, of course, because the main deal was that we had a great day today, Lissa, Mom and Dad and I looking at magnificent birds and shivering against the wind.

Fine dinner this evening at TaeJa, and as a bonus the chopsticks wrapper provided full amusement:

Take a closer look:

It's a minor point, but worth noting — the restaurant is Korean.

This is serious:

What is known about these cancers is that Dihydrogen Monoxide is found in detectable and biologically significant levels in virtually all tumors and other cancerous and pre-cancerous growths.

Cancer research has made significant advances in the detection and treatment of many forms of cancers. With each new advancement, the role DHMO plays in the cause of cancer is likely to be better understood.

Maybe I'm loony to apply the collective open source free software model to everything, but I think it may apply to ecosystem restoration.

Lissa and I went down to the bosque this afternoon to cut some salt cedar. As you can see, the cottonwoods are in full color, and it was a beautiful warm afternoon. We walked into the La Orilla burn site, where a fire in the spring of 2002 torched 35 acres or thereabouts. It's become a case study of restoration - well cleared, with new cottonwood poles planted. But the invasive salt cedar is pushing its way back in.

The coalition of government agencies with jurisdiction here, led by the city, is trying to keep on top of the situation by revisiting the site periodically and whacking down the salt cedar to give the cottonwoods room and time to take hold. But what if a bunch of the users of the space took matters into their own hands and just whacked down salt cedars here and there as they walked in the bosque?

Couldn't hurt.

Our ulterior motive in this case was art supplies - the slender salt cedar shoots have a beautiful red bark, ideal for making stuff out of, and Lissa has long coveted a working supply. So we haulted out big armfuls. I think we need to make it a habit to go back and get lots more.

Sister Lisa sends along this, a photobloggish account of one family's evacuation from our old neighborhood in Southern California.

Downloading some pictures, found this:

Mums in Lissa's garden.

Nora off to a play this afternoon with her pals, so Lissa and I threw dog in car and headed for the bosque. With the big clompy brace off of her formerly broken ankle, Lissa is fully mobile again, but the doc said she should avoid cycling for another couple of weeks. (Not the cycling itself, but the getting on and off bits, apparently.) Thing is, as I mentioned yesterday, the fall colors are peaking, so we did a walk instead.

We traipsed up the levee from where Central Ave. crosses the river near Albuquerque's downtown - that's old Route 66 for those interested in Americana. They've spent a lot of time and energy since June clearing out overgrown underbrush in the woods along the river to reduce fire danger, and it's now a lovely open forest of cottonwoods. You can see out to the river from the levee bank. I'd been on a tour with the city open space guy for a story for the paper, but Lissa hadn't been yet, so it made it a learning, informational sort of walk.

It's a beautiful stretch, with moments again and again where the Sandia Mountains (see the top right picture) pop out over the cottonwoods to the east.

When I wandered into the kitchen this morning to make breakfast, there was a large bowl of split peas sitting on the stove, soaking in water, ready for soup. I am reasonably certain they were not there last night when I went to bed. I think we had a visit overnight from the Split Pea Fairy.

Daughter Nora sends along this:

This ultra modern aluminum foil hat will protect your pet from the brain scanning rays of the NSA, fbi.com, and CIA satellites that are monitoring their little subversive thoughts. You may not have considered this before, but your lead lined hat is worthless if your pet can give away your secrets to the very people most dangerous to you - your government!

But we both know that the government's 'pet mind reading threat' pales in comparison to the unknown dangers of aliens reading your pet's mind. The PFHT Special Edition [PFHTSE, pronounced Pfootsie], has a hydrocarbon-chain lining specially designed to filter the hydrogen band alien brain scans. This space age material may appear to the untrained eye to be just plain plastic shopping bag, but your pet will know the difference.

I was doing some arithmetic the other day and realized that, despite not being a sports fan, sports on telly takes a significant chunk out of my life. But there is a gentle pleasure on settling down on our big new couch and blocking out responsibility for the leisure of a ballgame.

In the spring, it's the Giro d'Italia, the Grand Boucle in the summer, then the fall is crammed with the Vuelta and championship baseball. To fully enjoy, one must have a team, which makes the Giro less important (U.S. Postal doesn't race it), the triumphs of Cancer Boy an obvious choice for Le Tour, and the U.S. Postal armada a sentimental favorite in the Vuelta.

For fall baseball, things get more complex. To first order, I have a weak Yankees bond built when their games were the only thing I could get here in Albuquerque on the radio. I grew up a Dodger fan, a fact that makes my mother cringe when I now say anything suggesting I might approve of anything the Yankees do. But it is what it is, and being a Yankee fan makes things easy every fall. This year, however, there is the sentimental Cubbie thing, and I feel a certain envy for those diehards. A few years back, I made a personal pilgrimage to Wrigley to see Baseball, and it was in all fairness a religious experience. And my sister, now living down the road from Fenway, has been speaking of the Red Sox in ways that give me pause. So perhaps....

Given the pressures of my busy life, I was feeling a little bad about the time lost to the couch for sport, but Lissa looked at me sitting there the other night all relaxed and happy watching a ballgame and pronounced it a good sight to see. So I guess I'll be parked for a few more hours over the next couple of weeks.

When last we met, our intrepid hero John was paying a Friday night visit to the emergency room with his father, seeking assurance that Dad's heart pains were not cause for alarm. They were not, paving the way for fresh adventure!

Feeling as though the snapshot of humanity he saw Friday night at the ER was insufficient, John spent Saturday evening at the emergency animal hospital while doctors there tended to his beloved pooch Sadie after her cruel and untimely victimization by an untethered hound.

OK, I'm making fun here, but the weekend pretty much completely sucked from about 4:45 p.m. Friday through 8 a.m. Sunday. It has had moments of improvement since them, but it still sucks.

Sadie and I out running Saturday evening at dusk, past a thrift store parking lot about a mile from the house, assholes there hanging out in the parking lot with two dogs. The whole thing was over in an instant - big bad dogs jumped Sadie, Sadie went down, big bad dog sank its teeth into Sadie's right shoulder (going for the throat but thankfully missing), I kicked big bad dog off cowering Sadie while the second dog orbited thinking this was some sort of game. Someone tried to apologize, John yelled very bad word in describing bad dog and suggesting that perhaps tethering it might be wise in future.

It wasn't until we got home that I realized how badly Sadie was hurt. The big wounds were beneath her fur, and they were punctures so they weren't bleeding a lot. But they needed to anesthetize her at the doggie emergency room in order to shave, clean and stitch her and put in a drain, so she had to spend the night.

When we picked her up this morning, she was still woozy from the anesthetic, but she wouldn't lay down, she just sort of wandered around the house like a stumbling drunk. She's finally sleeping, hard and sound. She's an ugly bloody mess.

Too many stories in the doggie ER - the woman with a Jack Russell trying to give birth, but a puppy was stuck (and the woman's too-cliched cowboy husband making macho jokes that were embarassingly insensitive, and the woman's baby in a car seat, almost an afterthought), the quiet mother with her son and a listless cat in a sort of big Tupperware bin ("Mom, where's my book," the boy says, finally walking over and grabbing it out of her purse), the guy with a big black lab that had been hit by a car, but he had no money, couldn't pay, and the sad conversation that followed. And then the elderly couple this morning, when we came to pick Sadie up, the women red-eyed like she had been crying, or hadn't slept, or both, paying the final bill and making arrangements for the cremation. That was the saddest moment of all, yet there was warmth in the exchange: The clerk explained at the body would be sent to the company that does the cremations, the woman wanted some some reassurance that the company was, I don't know exactly, "good" or "reputable." "They're great," the clerk told her. "They've dealt with a couple of animals of mine." It was a little moment of extraordinary humanity.

The bike ride seems almost like an afterthought, but it was as fine as a bicyle ride can be. Jaime and Steve are coming up on their respective Ironman races, so they both needed to spend six hours on the bike today. I had no such intentions, so they started at Jaime's house, rode the hour to my house and picked me up. We headed east into the canyon and up through the mountains over Tijeras pass. It's a weird sort of pass, without an obvious top, but rolling up along old Route 66 we finally hit the point where you can look east and see beyond the mountains. It is where the mountains end, and the great flat middle of the central United State begins. It was a perfect fall day - warm enough for shorts and short sleeves, but cool enough to be perfectly pleasant. The wind was from the west - a tailwind up the canyon as we climbed, a brisk headwind coming back down. Those canyon winds are notorious among local cyclists, and this was the perfect sort of day for that particular ride, the sort of day for which bicycles were invented.

Coming back down into the wind, we flew. I took one turn at the front, but basically Jaime, who is the strongest, did all the work, bulling into the wind as Steve and I tucked in behind. You can see in Jaime's body language when the noodling is over and the serious riding begins, and at that moment you have no choice but to latch onto his back wheel or say goodbye.

That descent was a moment, however long it lasted (a half hour to get down through the canyon? I've no idea, no earthly idea), of perfect concentration, meditative, nothing left in my mind but the flood of immediacy that the ride itself presented. This is why I ride.

Oh, and did I mention our DSL has been down all weekend? Did I mention this weekend sucks?

Across the hall, the woman laying in hospital gown is holding an ice pack on the right side of her face. She's talking to someone just out of sight in the room with her, and now she's gesturing with both hands, trying to explain what happened. Each hand is one of the cars, and in the midst of the gesture, they hit, T-bone style. Looks like she'll be OK. She seems stoically calm.

Next room things aren't so sanguine. Another car accident. The woman who was driving, maybe the mom, maybe not quite old enough, is also holding ice to her face. She's standing. She's not the patient. She tries to explain to the other people there how the accident happened, and she breaks down. She thought he'd stopped in front of her, but then he didn't stop....

People come and go, until the nurse has to come in and tell them there's a limit of two people plus the patient in the room. "They're just too small," she says. We look around our room, do a quick count, figure out who should leave when she comes in to tell us the same thing, but she never does.

After a while, they say they want to take her (we still haven't seen "her", the patient across the hall) to x-ray to see if any of the bones around her eye are broken. They wheel her out, sitting in a tipped up wheeled hospital bed, and it's a teenage girl. Her face is all bloody, and she's scared. "Daddy, come with me," she says, and her Dad tries to find a way to walk alongside the rolling bed, but there's no room, he's got to be either in front or in back, and the struggle to figure out how to stay close to his daughter seems too much for me to bear.

As for us, Dad's OK. The chest pains that brought him (and us) to the ER on a Friday night were not a heart attack, and they couldn't find anything else wrong. He's gotta go back in first of the week for more tests, but our little drama seems so manageable in comparison. He's home taking it easy, I took Lissa and Nora out for ice cream, and the people across the hall are probably all still there.

L's ankle is now safely immobilized in a big clunky removable brace as she clomps around the house. Its purpose is to allow the body to do its modest yet amazing self-healing job on the spot where a bit of tendon in her ankle apparently pulled away a bit of bone where it normally attaches. What happens, according to The Doc, is that new bone grows out and around the dangling tendone/bone end, enveloping it and pulling it back into place where it's supposed to be. This is remarkable, and will take five weeks, during which family logistics will be a loving nightmare, as L can't drive.

So the doc took a second, closer look at Lissa's x-ray and didn't like what he saw, so it's back in to an orthopedic type tomorrow to figure exactly what's going on.

Hustled home after work last night and stuffed down dinner (Nora made cheesy garlic breads) so I could make it to school in time for Open House, to meet Nora's teachers. I was running late, so I had planned to skip the principal's opening schtick, so I made a beeline past the cop on duty at the school door and straight to where I thought Nora's first classroom was.

The school was strangely empty, but I figured everyone was still in the auditorium listening to the principal. Then I looked down at the Open House flyer clutched in my hand. The school was strangely empty, I realized, because I was there on the wrong night. Open House is not 'til Thursday.

I am so lame.

Lissa's x-rays showed no bones broken, just soft tissue damage to her torqued ankle, but she'll be laid up for days. The doctor gave her an ankle brace and a prescription for pain meds and she's all curled up in bed in pain-induced second-day shock.

Nora and I are taking care of her.

Lissa blew out her ankle yesterday. Ouch.

I came home to find her sitting in her favorite chair with her leg up on an ottoman and ice on the ankle. She was hobbling. Today she can't even put weight on it at all. We fear a trip to the emergency room is in order. Ouch.

Lissa's back garden has really come into its own this summer.

The panorama above (click for a bigger image) is five shots electronically stitched together so you can get a feel for the joy of it all.

The sunflowers have been a show, and the raised bed we built several years ago has an abundance of zinnias that just keep on blooming. Over on the mound on the right, a California poppy is finally taking hold, and L's been persistent in raising some tomatoes for my breakfasts. Yumm.

The shiny thing on the left with the cattails growing out of it is our pond. Birds love it, as do we.

What I did on my summer vacation

After two travel-intensive vacations in June, I took the past week off work and just hung around. Here is what I did:

• Watched the Tour de France[1]
• Rode my bike in the bosque[2]
• Took Nora out for our very first driving practice[3]
• Rode in the Sunshine Spin fund-raising bike ride for the Lance Armstrong Foundation
• Watched the Tour de France
• Watched the Tour de France ("Armstrong is down!" "It looks like Ullrich and Hamilton are waiting!" "Armstrong attacks!")
• Rode my bike in the neighborhood
• Took Nora driving
• Rode my bike in the bosque
• Went thrift store shopping with Lissa. Found a nice Hawaiian shirt and my first silk shirt.
• Watched the Tour de France ("It looks like Hamilton will be able to stay away!")
• Rode bikes in the bosque with Lissa
• Updated my libxml tutorial
• Rode real fast in the bosque with Jaime et. al. ("Richard attacks!" "Fleck can't go with him!"
• Watched the Tour de France ("Ullrich is down!")
• Rode my bike in the neighborhood, finding a lovely new east-west route up through the heights.
• Spent hours wandering Lowes hardware and appliance store with Lissa[4]
• Ate lots of pasta
• Saw Pirates of the Caribbean with Lissa ("Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.")
• Rode my bike in the bosque for a very very long time
• Went shopping at Costco with Lissa[4]

[1] Mom and Dad have cable. Watching the Tour has become a family thing
[2] "Bosque" is a Spanish word that translates as "forest" or "woods". We use it here to describe the riparian woods along the Rio Grande. There is an excellent paved bicycle trail that runs about 20 miles from the Albuquerque metro area's north edge to its south.
[3] Nora just finished drivers' ed and has her provisional permit. It has been decided that Dad's temperament is best suited to the complex demands of driving practice.
[4] OK, these prolly sound like odd places to go on a vacation outing. But such is our marriage that Lissa and I love to go do simple things like that together. Shopping at Costco or wandering the aisles of a hardware store, done properly, can be a gas.

I was having a hard time understanding how to think about today's Sunshine Spin, a bike ride to raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation for Cancer Survivorship.

The organizers had set up two courses - a flat, pleasant 22 miles along the riverside trail, or a 50-plus miler that burned up our long Tramway climb into the foothills. I'd been planning on doing the long one. I'm in great shape, and I really wanted to burn it up, kinda see what I had.

It was about the bike.

And then I got sick two weeks ago, and when I finally got back on the bike I felt flat and weak and I figured there was no way I was gonna hammer up a big climb with the macho boys all around me. So I switched to the short ride. My friends Nancy and Charlie were going to do the short one pulling their three-year-old daughter Katie on a third wheel, and I figured it'd be fun to join 'em.

I got to the start late, right as the "peleton" was leaving, so I humped up through the group looking for Nancy and Charlie. I was hammering trying to get to the front of the bunch, looking for them, somehow missed them, doubled back and eventually we hooked up.

At the turnaround, Charlie started talking to a guy riding this beautiful old Schwinn beach cruiser. The guy was big and bulky, had a cast on his arm from some recent mishap, but he looked happy.

On the ride back, we picked up a fourth for our little caravan, Mark, who was riding a beautiful old restored Centurion. Mark and I took turns pulling into the headwind for Charlie, who was pulling Katie, while Nancy hung at the back and kept Katie amused.

I don't think about cancer very often any more. Lissa and Dad are both nearly 15 years out now, and it's just a distant and painful memory. But there was a moment during the ride, when I was hammering up through the bunch looking for Nancy and Charlie, that I stopped thinking about the bike and thought instead about what this whole thing is about. I choked up for a minute, because surviving cancer is about something really important. It's about not being dead, which is simple and straightforward, but it's about bonus time that is all good. We don't need to think about it all the time, but it's good to think about it now and then.

They've stopped talking about Lance Armstrong the cancer survivor lately. It's all about the bike again. In a sense, that's what you'd expect, it's healthy. But let's never forget what that boy stands for, OK?

Back at the finish, we sat around on the lawn in the shade of a big tree for a while. The guy on the beach cruiser was there, grinning, and Charlie and Katie rolled in the grass.

Later in the afternoon, everbody got back together at the park for drawings for a bunch of swag. Barbara, the organizer, called bib numbers and if we were there, prize action ensued. There were bike tires and Harley Davidson beer glasses and water bottles and all manner of goods donated by the event's sponsors. I won a helmet and explained to Barbara that it was destined for the head of my cancer survivor wife.

The guy on the old beach cruiser came up to collect a prize - I wish I remembered what - and Barbara pointed out that he is a cancer survivor, one year out. So now I understand the grin, and the fealty to a beautiful old Schwinn beach cruiser and the way he didn't seem to care about the discomfort of riding with a big cast on his arm. This guy is on bonus time.

Jaime had to leave, so he stuck his bib number and one of his friends' into my hand. One of Jaime's numbers won a CO2 tire pump goober, and the other won a $15 gift certificate to Manny's, a local coffee shop.

When I called Jaime, he was jazzed about the pump, but didn't really care about Manny's. So I'm giving it to Dad, the cancer survivor, and I'll take him and Mom there for breakfast.

It's not about the bike. That's just a way to get there.

Where does that cliche come from? My dog never gets particularly sick, and least not like I feel now.

I've had this fantasy for a number of years that all the exercise I do keeps my immune system in tip-top shape. That's why, the theory goes, when I get a cold it's always mild and quick. I don't remember the last time I've missed work - maybe that memorable evening during the 1998 election season when we all got food poisoning at work from the take-out-meal they brought in to the newsroom. That was hilarious. Election feed Tuesday, and half the staff was out by Thursday.

Today I had to kill a trip to Phoenix I'd been really looking forward to for a workshop tomorrow on communicating about climate. I waited until the last minute to pull the plug on the trip, hoping I would recover. Oh well. Sometimes you've gotta just suck it up and admit you're sick.

L's taking good care of me. Gotta love love at time like this.

I'll admit I was a little nervous about Martin and Lynn's annual Fourth of July party this year, what with Martin being dead and all.

See, it was really Martin'a party, and the man lived - and died - large and majestic, a big funny charming guy who dominated the little shaded patio every Fourth of July, overseeng barbecue and telling his stories and being the sort of lovable human glue that made people return to his party on the Fourth year after year.

The last couple of years were tough for Martin - his heart slowly failing him, an oxygen line trailing him around the garden - but he was still the same commanding presence at his parties. Only he would sit in one spot, and we would come to him, and his friends took up the solemn task of barbecue while he continued to hold court.

Martin died this spring, and Lynn's been having a tough time, but she decided about a week ago to go ahead with the barbecue. All the same faces were there, people I don't really know except for once a year. There was the usual big spread of food - Larry's salsa, a big fruit salad, deviled eggs, chips and diet Coke and I even ate a hamburger. It's a Fourth of July barbecue! It was good. I'm glad Lynn decided to continue.

I'm having a hard time sitting down to blog the vacation just completed. It's just too expansive, too many, too much. I think I'm better off just chipping away.

Let's start here. That's, left to right, Nora, Tom, Lisa and Lissa on the beach at Chatham, on Cape Cod. As a kid from the beaches of L.A., I didn't really grasp the Cape Cod beach thing until this trip. I've only been once before, in the dead of winter, and it was beautiful but not beachie somehow.

My sister's husband, Tom, spent much of his adult life on Cape Cod, and he did a great job of showing us around, explaining the infrastructure of the tourist world there (he's made his living in that infrastructure since he was a teenager), and then we sat a lot on the beach. Waves. The sound of waves. The smell of sea air. Nothin' like it.

That's my sister Lisa on the left, and daughter Nora, kicking at the cold Atlantic water. It was colder than the Pacific beach water of my youth, and the macho men would dive in to show off for their gals before jumping out with a shiver and shake. But the kids, they are tougher, and the kids splashed and played, body-surfing the slivers of waves and having that great goodness that is a beach as a child.

Bad Dad wouldn't let Nora go to the Harry Potter party Friday night, as we needed to get up at the crack of dawn Saturday morning to get on an airplane. So she and Lissa conspired to hit the 24-hour Wal-Mart before we left. 5 a.m., they bought the second one they sold (no long lines or kids in outrageous costumes at Wal-Mart, one guesses).

By the time we hit the security checkpoint at the airport, Nora was already on page 109. She read straight through the flight, and would be done if not for the necessities of our vacation intervening. But she pronounces it good.

No giveaways, though. We're waiting in line.

Geez, it seems like I've been travelling a lot lately. I'm sort of a homebody, but I'm really looking forward to this next trip, a week back east visiting sister Lisa and her husband Tom in Connecticut, with a couple of days down to Pennsylvania to see my Uncle Kelly and a couple of days with Tom and Lisa up on Cape Cod.

See y'all whenever....

Nora and I in the Missouri Botanical Gardens' maze.

A neighbor walking by this morning, Lissa: "We're seeing your cactus all over the neighborhood. Everybody's got a box on their front porch."

That's a blue bowling ball on the left, a thrift store finial for Lissa's free stuff sign post.

She's been on a garden thinning tear, and as she trims cactus or thins the iris bed, she puts out a sign that says "Free Cactus" or "Free Iris" beneath the bowling ball and sets the plants out on cardboard flats by the curb.

They go. They go fast.

She's been doing this for years, and we now see our distinctive purple iris all over the neighborhood. This year she's been seriously whacking back the cactus, and she's become sort of a Lissa Cactusseed for the neighborhood. As I pulled in last night, a guy from up the street followed me up the driveway, his back of groceries in one hand and a flat of prickly pear paddles in the other. "So you just stick these in the ground?" he asked. "Yup," I said. "Just stick that bottom end in and they'll grow like crazy."

I hadn't met him, but Lissa recognized him. He lives a block up, the guy who last year had this perfectly charming fountain made of a euphonium (or was it a baritone?). Seems the perfect home for our cactus.

Packing this evening, going through my traditional list-making before a trip (toothbrush? deodorant?). We're leaving Saturday morning for St. Louis, to visit Lissa's uncle, Bill.

It'll be the second time we've made the drive out there, and I'm really looking forward to the trip. Last time was 10 years ago, during the early stages of the great flood of '93. It'll be great to see Bill. He's Lissa's best connection to her family past. He reminds her so much of her mother.

It'll also be good to have a week together with Nora and Lissa, without the usual distractions. No IM. No GNOME. No work. No blogs.

And now we have a digital camera. Travelogue on our return!

Blooming in the yard:

One man's flower is another man's weed, apparently.

Our neighborhood is alive right now with the fragrance of the lovely yellow-flowering Spanish broom - Spartium junceum L.. Here in Albuquerque, it's lovingly cultivated for its lovely open green stems and wild yellow blooms. We've had one for several years on the mound in our front yard, next to the cactus. It's always muddled along, but never really bloomed until this year, when we gave it its own dedicated drip water supply. Now it's on fire.

It grows well here in gardens, but doesn't spread much on its own. Not so elsewhere. Apparently in some wetter climates, Spanish broom is considered a Class A Weed.

Come to think of it, we could celebrate my birthday today. Nora got me Bagombo Snuff Box. (We have a Vonnegut thing.) Lissa made me sugar-free strawberry pie. (We have a sugar-free thing.)

One time when young I was on the radio on May 5, and I played the Beatles Birthday and dedicated it to Karl Marx:

You say it's your birthday
It's my birthday too - yeah.

You say it's your birthday
Well it's my birthday too - yeah
You say it's your birthday
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your birthday
Happy birthday to you.

Baseball's very mathematical, a game of discreet events. I think that's why it works so well on radio. Just one thing happens at a time. Fastball up. Breaking ball away. Outfield shifted around toward left. Jones delivers, and it's a ground ball to short - Gregorio up with it, fires to first, in time for the out. There is much more to it than that, of course, texture beneath the discreet events, but the steps can all be captured verbally.

I grew up on Vin Scully (go ahead, click on the link, it's worth it, I'll wait). When I was a kid, had a record album, a centennial history of baseball, and on it Scully told the story of a pitcher who had four strikeouts in a single inning. That is possible because of rule 6.05(c) , which spells out in rather complicated detail the consequences should the catcher not catch the third strike while first base is unoccupied. Four strikeouts in an inning is possible if a batter reaches first safely under 6.05(c) and the pitcher strikes out the side.

It's a rare occurence - 24 times in National League history (twice last year!) and 18 times in American League history. Chuck Finley has amazingly done it thrice.

Out at the ballpark this afternoon, I saw it happen. It was Triple-A ball, the local nine (the Isotopes) against the Salt Lake Stingers. Greg Jones, a right-handed throwing relief pitcher whose statistics suggested no great promise, took the hill in the bottom of the sixth to face 'Topes second baseman Jesus Medrano. I wish at this point that I kept a better scorecard, and could give you the pitch count, but you will have to settle for this - Medrano swung at a third strike that was in the dirt, it kicked past Stingers catcher Wil Nieves and went to the backstop, Medrano sprinting down to first ahead of Nieves' throw.

Jones struck out 'Topes left-fielder Chris Wakeland, Medrano stole second, then Jones walked Chad Allen. Allen is our big trouble at the plate, had tripled earlier, so Jones didn't seem to want to give him much. Designated hitter Rob Stratton hitting behind Allen is weak, so the walk seemed a safe bet. And sure enough, Stratton K'd, bringing up 'Topes third bagger Jason Wood. I leaned over to Lissa, as baseball smart know-it-all, and pointed out that Jones had the opportunity for minor baseball history. She gave me a look of confusion, as if she did not fully grasp the elegant possibilities offered by 6.05(c). But Jones did it, and some small piece of Triple-A history is now his.

And the 'Topes won. It was a sloppy game, but they won.

I've not yet seen a triple play in person, nor a no-hitter. But I've seen a pitcher strike out four batters in an inning.

"Only in Albuquerque," Lissa said.

The local outlet for Lafarge, the international rock, concrete and aggregate vendor, had an open house this afternoon. It was a delight. They were barbecueing hamburgers and hot dogs, and had some guy making balloon animals for the kids. One of the local radio stations was doing remotes. From a rock and gravel yard. We wandered the yard, checking out the crushed stone for L's latest garden project, and L got a free soda. Such a deal! And they'll likely have sold us some rock, though that would have happened anyway. We like their rock.

By a complication of her incredibly busy life, Nora was not able to make it to the awarding of her freshman year academic letter, which she had earned by virtue of her being smart and working hard in school and all.


It was a tricky parental moment. We really wanted her to go, so we could bust with pride while she walked across the gym floor. Lissa really wanted it. But Nora's on the stage crew for their performance of Othello, and tonight was the final dress rehearsal. That was for her a no-brainer - of course she would go to the theater. So Lissa and I went and sat in the audience while Nora did not walk up to accept her academic letter. We were still busting proud, and got to applaud a bunch of her friends. And afterwards we went up and grabbed her letter for her and it was all fine.


The seniors who had earned an academic letter all four years got to pick their most influential teacher. They each gave a little speech explaining their choice, and they had little gifts and flowers for the teachers, and it was about the sweetest thing I've ever seen.

Lissa and I spent a good bit of time yesterday just sort of wandering - lunch downtown, then an exhibit tracing the history of plastics at the University of New Mexico library, then coffee and a stop in the food co-op. Just idle wandering.


This evening, we killed two hours walking up and down the aisles of Home Depot, looking at stuff- picking which bathroom fixture we liked best, fondling tile, looking at paint chips, picking out a 4x4 in the lumber aisle.


After 18 years of marriage, that's the time that matters most. Never mind the fancy dinner date stuff, it's the idle wandering that's best. I treasure our time together in Home Depot.

Call me weakling. I am an aching mass of quivering arm muscles. Lissa and I spent hours this weekend breaking concrete. We cut a strip several inches wide out of our driveway, to get a new water line to our garden.

I admit now I thought it was a bad idea. But Lissa wanted to do it, and she is my betrothed beloved, so I went a long without complaint. This is an important lesson of marriage I have learned. Sometimes one just goes along without complaint. (Plus it's not like I had a better idea.) And of course, what I thought would be nigh impossible worked quite well once Lissa got a diamond blade for her saw, and neighbor Bud loaned us a steel pry bar and an extra sledge hammer.

Lissa, of course, is the muscular and competent one. I whacked with the hammers all I could, but I'm a skinny weakling, so I feel like I accomplished little, mostly cheering her on and pulling weeds while I "rested". The weeds are under control, and we've now got room for a nice new water line for our timer-driven drip irrigation system. But damn I slept lousy. My arms ache.

The embankment beyond the outfield fence at the old Albuquerque Sports Stadium was covered with lava rock, and "lava" became synonymous with the long ball. One of my
great baseball moments was when Daryl Strawberry, then with the Dodgers, was down at Albuquerque on a rehab assignment. Whoever was pitching had gotten behind in the count to Strawberry, and I leaned over to my friend Chuck right before the pitch and said, "Lava." Bang. Strawberry hit a rope into the lava.

The Dodgers'' farm club, the Dukes, left us two years ago, and we've been out of baseball ever since. But tonight I am listening on the radio to Albuquerque Isotopes baseball, playing their season opening series in Memphis.

Lissa, Nora and I were among the 6,000 (how do they know that?) who made the pilgrimage today to an open house at Isotopes Park today, the beautifully rebuilt ballpark. We'll have to pay more for tickets, and the food prices are exhorbitant, as befits a modern ballpark. But the grass is green, the basepaths are red and they put some lava beyond the center field fence.

Sure sign of spring - Lissa and I rode bikes out past the Bueno Chile plant, past the junkyard with the line of old Volkswagen vans along its back fence, our first long ride of the spring. The winter birds you sometimes see in the farmers' fields down there, in Albuquerque's South Valley, are gone, replaced by carefully leveled fields awaiting their seed. The cottonwoods aren't greening up yet, but the elms, evil invaders that they are, show signs of leaves sprouting.


The air had the soft feeling of the first sunny day after a week of rain, which is a feeling we don't often get here. We saw ducks in the ditch splashing and flailing and trying to make new ducks, a squirrel running along the ditch bank, a load of fresh graffiti down by the elementary school - all trappings of spring.

I'm book-flitting and found an interesting title at the library on technology and culture called Information Ecologies by Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day. They bring both software design and anthropology to the task, and are interested in splitting the baby between luddites and technoenthusiasts. This is an approach that interests me.


The fundamental question they are posing is this: Given technology's presence in our lives, how can we best bend it to our will rather than bending to its. This question is central to the familial revolution triggered by our acquisition of two mobile telephones. I have resisted this for a long time, been dismissive of it, argued repeatedly that I've never seen a need, nor wanted the tether that a phone implies. But our three lives have become a logistically complicated three-body problem, and we realized a few weeks ago that a cell phone could be an enabler and a solution rather than an ankle weight. Nora's activities are multiplying - theater, several clubs at school, tennis - and giving her the ability to call us on the move from one to the next in order to coordinate transportation, food and other necessities seems like a practical value. And allowing Lissa to be untethered while still executing her self-imposed role of enabling Nora's complex youth also seem like a practical value. So Nora and Lissa now have cell phones.


We'll see how the experiment works.

My goofball daughter sent me this:

This is my little bit of the Mandelbrot set. I got it from the mandelbit generator. You can get one there too.