Dude bought me breakfast this morning. Said I was gonna bring him gambling luck. Being an early riser on the Las Vegas strip is weird. I don’t claim any “healthy, wealthy, and wise” virtue here. My money came from privilege, and my early rising is a side-effect of the drugs I take to manage my …
The caption of the picture above is a bit of a fib, but it was true when I wrote it. I had to click through on the picture’s geotag to figure out that it was taken where the Sausal Drain connects to the Jaral Lateral near Belen in Valencia County, New Mexico. Not exactly lost, …
Other suggestions include keeping sleigh bells around to jingle when looking at thermometer. This was apparently before the widespread use of refrigerated air. h/t Yesterday’s Print and my precious university library privileges.
My co-instructor Bob Berrens and I added a slide this morning to our welcome lecture for first-year students in the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, hoping to foreshadow two questions we’ll be asking the students over and over and over and over this semester: Bob: That sounds great, how are you going to …
Continue reading ‘Why don’t they redo the Colorado River Compact?’ »
tl;dr I’m stepping down as director of the UNM Water Resources Program at the end of summer semester to write another book. longer When I was happily toiling those many years as an inkstained wretch, I had secret fantasies of leaving newspaper work to spend my waning years on the campus of the University of …
Continue reading ‘The next steps in “my semi-charmed life of the mind”’ »
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….’ »