glory be to glorieta

after 14 months of beauty and challenges in the mountain desert forest, we say so long glorieta, hello santa fe. i say goodbye to our home with mixed feelings. on the upside, it was peaceful, beautiful...magical. simple. happy hermits. serene afternoons in the hammock and wonderful walks over curious terrain. the amazing jack russell terrier henry stopped by regularly. on the downside, the house was very cold in the winter. the 40 minute commute got to us after a while. too much driving, too little walking. so that's that. so long glorieta.

magical juniper

we remind ourselves that our living in the forest comes at a cost

culverting

under the railroad, wild squash in hand

one last cuddle with henry

another beauty of a new mexico sunrise

ice on the car

noteworthy

science shows that playing in the dirt is good for our health

soccer is a better workout than jogging

blackwater is under investigation for unprovoked killing of 16 iraqis

canada has a desert

marry times

well it's been 2 1/2 months now since my last installment. i have been sporadically updating at best, so here's a new day resolution to write more regularly.

the maritimes were marry indeed. i gaped at the gap in the inn of the mountain. i napped, laughed and lazed and drank from beer fountains. i ran, swam and tubbed, feet clammed and mud.

then there was jocelyn's booze crooze. i mused and shmoozed with the booze crooze blues. bemused and news with the booze crooze dues. we lit and fused with the booze crooze shoes.

there was lots of booze

people got down, you know what i'm sayin

people got silly, you know i aint playin

even a bit frilly perhaps

jolly good chaps

aint that sweet, we got the dingle blues

full photo album (anyone can access)

word of the day

jeremiad \jair-uh-MY-uhd\, noun:
A tale of sorrow, disappointment, or complaint; a doleful story; also, a dolorous or angry tirade.

This age in which leisure and letters were gilded with commerce did not see the decline and fall of art, despite the jeremiads of such artists as William Blake ('Where any view of money exists,' he prophesied, 'art cannot be carried on').
-- Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century

Johnson's jeremiad against what he sees as American imperialism and militarism exhaustively catalogs decades of U.S. military misdeeds
-- Stan Crock, review of The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson, Business Week, February 2, 2004

latah, cicada

The cicadas emerged from the earth in great numbers this June. Everywhere the ground is dotted with their emergent holes, and my guess is that they were burrowed several feet down, below the frost line. In fact, Wikipedia informs us that there are 2500 species of cicadas throughout the world, and they burrow anywhere from 1 to 8 feet deep! Most species spend 2 to 5 years underground, feeding off tree roots. Some species have 13 or 17 year life cycles, an adaptation to throw off the life cycles of their predators. The Okanagana species is found in New Mexico, and one study claims its life cycle to be 9 years. It gets you to wondering.

Here's a short story of the cicada, © Latah Cicada Productions.

Cindy the cicada awakens after 9 years of restful growing. "Where am I?" she wonders. "How long has it been?" It's been 9 years, Cindy. You missed the new Millennium celebration, the start of the Iraq War, the Ewing brothers eating nasty cheeses in France, and a host of other things. And little does Cindy know that she's several feet under dirt, but her innate sense of gravity guides her upward toward the light. She digs and digs and digs, until at last she emerges, dirty and determined.


Just then, Henry the dog shuffles by, sniffing vigorously for food and feces. He finds a tasty cicada, and in an instant Cindy is no longer.


Meanwhile, Sinbad the cicada is emerging from his 9 year slumber. Sinbad's and Cindy's internal clocks have synchronized within minutes. Not bad considering a 9 year wait. Henry the dog has moved on to the compost pile, and spares Sinbad unknowingly. The little cicada crawls in search for the nearest tree. Instead, Sinbad ends up against a huge structure of pro-panel, steel and glass. But wait! Just before the glass is a mesh screen, to which Sinbad easily attaches his hook like legs. He climb up a hundred times his height and has reached his destination. Nothing left to do but lean back and crack.


After just ten minutes of loitering on the screen, Sinbad's exoskeleton begins to crack open. Ever so slowly, Sinbad the Second pushes out, keen to leave behind that dirty thick shell.

Meanwhile, twenty feet away on a nearby tree branch, Cinnabar the cicada the Second is also emerging from her 9 year old shell.


Oooo that feels good. It's taken a couple hours to crack out of her shell, and she'll hang out for a while longer to dry out and gain some wing strength.

An hour later, Sinbad the Second is feeling pretty swell. He flaps his wings like it's second nature and is off. Later that afternoon, while sunning on a grass stem, the finger of a monster, a human he thinks, picks him up. This monster moves slowly and gently, though, and Sinbad is content to sit on the finger.


The fateful meeting happens soon thereafter. Sinbad flexes his drum-like membrane, creating a deafening buzz that she-cicadas like Cinnabar find irresistible. Sinbad greets Cinnabar in a dusty meadow next to a fuzzy mullein plant. They exchange vibrations and mate.

Their encounter over, Sinbad flies off in search for another damsel in distress. Cinnabar flies over to a nearby tree branch. She deftly cuts slits in the bark and deposits her hundred eggs. Exhausted, she takes to the ground and dies, ending her 9 year life only a couple hundred feet from where she began.


Not too long after, dozens of cicada nymphs hatch and fall from their barky beginnings to the ground. They dig, dig, and dig far into the earth to spend their next 3,000 days in hiding.

if you want to see more pictures,

click on the photo album links on the left. you don't have to be a member of anything to see them.

summer sizzle my nizzle

sorry for dropping the blog for half a year, but i guess i didn't have much to say. da bush must have gotten that backwards. for the most part, i've been chugging along with this solar job, and trying to keep things light enough as the summer onslaught of calls continues. check out this billboard, and how it's being powered:


now that's what i'm talkin about. at least in california, solar has clearly gone mainstream. fossil fuels will inevitably become fossilized in our memory, and then we can have all our billboards lit by solar. the future looks bright.

in these busy days, julia and i have still managed to see some interesting sights in this magical land of entrapment. tent rocks are truly astounding, which we visited when julia's mom june was visiting. these rocks sure look rather...oh, never mind.




Then there is the VLA Very Large Array, the giant set of satellites out in the middle of central nowhere New Mexico. Government operated, it is charge with exploring the workings of the universe. The film Contact with Jodie Foster was indeed filmed here. And of course the visitor center claims that the "real" operation of the VLA has nothing to do with finding other life in the universe. Yeah right.


The VLA's several dozen satellites are HUGE, as you can see. They are mounted on several miles of rail so that they can be moved around to maximize optical resolution. And by arranging them in the peace sign Y formation, the effective circle that they form (the three end points of the "Y" forming the edge of the circle) resolves radio wave information as well as a satellite the size of that circle (several miles in diameter) would. Quite the technology.

Billions of dollars invested in these projects, thousands of scientists at work, millions of people adding computer power to the search...have we really not found life out there, or have ordinary citizens like you and me just not been let in on the secret?

Given that the universe is practically infinite in time and space, I think that there is lots of other life out there. To think that we are the only life in such a vast realm seems rather self-centered to me. But of course, our culture would know nothing about that.

it's been a while

jerbearticus returns
jerbearticus has learned
that as the world turns
the fire it will burn
so many hearts will yearn
for change to occur
to blur the gaps of wealth
a stealthy protest song
two wrongs to make a right
a fight to shine a light tonight
a kite to fly, a bird to sight, a bug to bite
the mite of the world
no cats, no steeples,
just facts and peoples

"I promise you a day will come when our children and grandchildren will look back and they'll ask one of two questions. Either they will ask, 'What in god's name were they doing? Didn't they see the evidence? Didn't they realize that 4 times in 15 years the entire scientific community of this world issued unanimous reports calling upon them to act? What was wrong with them? Were they too blinded, numb by the busyness of political life or daily life to take a deep breath and look at the reality of what we're facing? Did they think it was perfectly alright to keep dumping 70 million tons every single day of global warming pollution into the earth's atmosphere? Did they think all the scientists were wrong? What were they thinking?' Or, they'll ask another question. They may look back and they'll say, 'How did they find the uncommon moral courage to rise above politics and redeem the promise of American democracy and do what some said was impossible and shake things up and tell the special interests, ok we've heard you and we'll do the best we can to take your considerations into account, but we're gonna do what's right."
- Al Gore to US Congress, March 21, 2007

Keeping my fingers crossed for low-lying areas in the maritimes...

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas. Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean reports.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2099971.ece

so snow

It snowed so much the other day - I measured 27 inches. The nearest major town, Pecos, reported 32 inches! This is perhaps the most snow here that has fallen for more than 50 years. While the eastern part of the country is basking in record warmth, New Mexico's deserts are getting inundated with snow! My meteorological New Year's resolution: climate change is a reality. Here's to more extreme weather in 2007.