Apologies that I don’t have any pictures of the dogs. Via the wonderful Wandrer, I’ve been playing a new cycling game that involves trying to ride on all the streets. For a modest fee, you can connect Wandrer to a cloud-stored archive of all your GPS-recorded bike rides, and it’ll keep keep track of which …
Continue reading ‘The dogs of the cul-de-sacs of Albuquerque’s South Valley’ »
“Well, you have your compost!” – L. Heineman We got 5.88 inches of rain this year at the “official” Albuquerque airport weather station, which for perspective is essentially a one-in-six dry year based on over a century of records. But we got 7.05 inches at our house. Plus, as Lissa pointed out, I have my …
Continue reading ‘2020 – as dry as a tumbleweed metaphor in a bad western. But compost!’ »
Some time around the middle of March, 2020, I found the above sign in a quick clip art search, printed it, and stuck it up with a piece of yellow masking tape on the door of my office at home before our first Zoom class. Or maybe my first Zoom lecture recording, I don’t remember …
Continue reading ‘The Pandemic and the Magic Masking Tape’ »
I barely have anything to say, so I ride my bike. Last Thursday, I rode through my 5,000th mile of 2020, something I’ve never done before. Like much of 2020, there will need be an asterisk next to this accomplishment, but it felt good to take the morning off and ride. Cycling has become my …
Continue reading ‘On a bike, fighting through the pandemic fog, with Silver Surfer’s help’ »
Walking in our neighborhood these covid summer nights, a friend and I have been counting roadrunners. They are incongruous, relic dinosaurs as apex predators (but what of the hawks, and cats?) in our suburban neighborhood. Early in the pandemic, we’d see one or two. Rarely zero, but rarely more than one or two. We’d see …
Continue reading ‘“I say, roadrunner once, roadrunner twice….’ »
From University of New Mexico Water Resources Program student Kirena Tsosie:
My current favorite word is “hooligan”. It’s origins are murky, but the authors of the Oxford English Dictionary say it first appeared in newspaper stories in 1898, to whit: 1898 Daily News 8 Aug. 9/3 The constable said the prisoner belonged to a gang of young roughs, calling themselves ‘Hooligans’. The story behind its emergence …
I was talking last week with one of my collaborators about the challenge of working. All the things that so fully occupied my time and brain seem so inconsequential right now. I envy friends filling the quiet with productive work. Me? I ride my bike. In the Time Before (was it just two months ago?) …
When I emerged from my office at home after recording my first university lecture of the pandemic era, Lissa told me I’d been using my radio voice. As a young journalist – before newspapers, before books, before my crazy new career as a university professor – I did radio. It’s been nearly forty years, but …