Chewed Mala

This picture has nothing to do with chewed malas. I was playing around with my iphotos and turned a pretty ordinary Utah picture into B&W and I think improved it immensely.

Today I had my painfully hand sewn rakusu written on and stamped by the rochi. This makes me more of a Buddhist than I was before. While I was meditating my dog Shadow was busy chewing up my two bracelet malas, which are made of wooden beads. I imagine that the sensation of splitting the hard little nuggets with her teeth must have been a sensory experience of some value to the dog, but I assure you she is in the dog house now and she knows it. One of the malas I found beside the river in Irkutsk, and I took it to be a Sign. Now the dog has eaten it. Is that another Sign? Is the fact that I spent the whole day finding as many of the beads as I could and gluing as many of them as possible back together also a Sign? Oh yes, she also chewed up the lovely silk bag I keep them in, which I bought in Viet Nam. I also mended that as well as I could. How pathetic can you get? Would a sensible person just have thrown the whole sad mess away and started looking for replacements? Just for the record, I did look for replacements on the net and all I could find was touchy feely New Age crap that I wouldn't put on my dog. Of course if she had attempted to chew them she might have been deterred by the fact that they were all 'crystal' and would have provided an entirely different sensory experience.

Canon Service is Great

Just wondering if anything will show on this night photo of a family of young musicians at the campground where I hosted last summer. Of course I took the picture with my Canon GL2 which is a video camera, but I am addicted to it's still photo capabilities. It broke shortly after this. My old Canon Hi 8 was long ago invalided out, but I had all this Hi 8 tape I couldn't use, so a couple of weeks ago I bit the bullet and called the Canon number and amazingly helpful people explained to me that I could get a quote on fixing the cameras. The quote was reasonable, the service was quick and now my GL is home and I am afraid to touch it. The problem was "sand" in the works. Everything in this area is impregnated with desert dust. I am afraid to take it out of it's plastic bag to use it.....

Today I was standing peacefully in the kitchen thinking about nothing in particular when a great crash followed by a roaring sound shook me out of my reverie. No sonic boom this. A huge branch had fallen from one of my pecan trees and slid half off the roof. The man across the street got it all the way onto the ground. If the UPS man had been standing there asking me to sign for my camera he could well have met an untimely demise and all his chirpy charms would have been lost to this world. Fortunately nothing was in the way of it's majestic fall. I set about with my pruners and saw and in a relatively short time had it cleared up. This was a wake up call. I have to get the trees neutralised before something worse happens. Now I have some nice pecan fire wood, some of it dead and hard and dry.

Guy Stuff

The photo isn't of Guy Stuff. I like to think of it as the other fast food. I bought the cheese curds at some little dairy in Utah, the cherry tomatoes at a farmers' market in Lakeview Oregon, the apples were gathered at Fruita in Capitol Reef Park, and the bread baked in an outdoor brick oven was also from Utah -- Oh yes, you can't see the pinyon nuts I gathered in Nevada.

Today I decided to go to a computer group instead of my usual tai chi. I thought there'd be young nerds there, but no. They were all pretty old. Guys. Not nerds. All Mac people. I think the young'uns don't need support. What they see on the little (or not so little) rectangle is all they need. There was one photographer there with an intimidating arsenal of camera equipment. He takes millions of photographs. He gave me his website so I'll see what his pictures are like when I'm through with this. If I go back I'll bring cookies - the edible type I mean......

On the way home I saw something was going on on our dead mainstreet. It was a car show. I had a nice chat with a man with a beautiful 1928 Model A. There were two other '28 Model As, hacked and mutilated into freak car hell. There was a 1963 Chevy transformed into a rolling shrine for the owner's father, who had owned the car. He now reposes in an urn on the passenger seat. The car was gleaming black, with skull hubcaps and steering wheel, and skulls in every imaginable place and even a black chandelier hanging over the back seat. The upholstery was black velvet embossed with silver skulls. Some people were quite uneasy about the car, but really wasn't it a moving tribute, so to speak? I mean, why get buried in your car where no one will see it? There was a 1964 yellow Corvair convertible with a loving documentation of the steps to rehabilitation. The backgrounds seen in the photos was of tattered desert and a couple of old wooden sheds. The engine had the traditional Corvair sheen of oil on it. Not a high end restoration, but beautiful. There were a whole lot of Corvettes, including a 2007, which has a really heavy ass on it, which I think is a mistake. Also the ubiquitous Mustangs.......... ah that oily aroma! I remember it well....................................

Since the title of this post is Guy Stuff, I must regretfully report that at a Climate (read global warming) conference I went to in Albuquerque on Wednesday no women were represented! Man after man stood up with his little jokes and pie charts. There was a Swiss reinsurer there who was urbane and assured and quite frightening. Actually the Lieutenant Governor of the state was a woman and she said a few words. The governor appeared in video form only.

On Being An Angel

For the last couple of days I have been an angel. It was really quite an effort though of course it was quite impossible for me to assume a beatific expression to replace my habitual cynical sneer. Ridiculous as it may seem to you who know me I have been sketched and photographed from every angle so I can be a model for angelic persons in slightly modified versions of Renaissance paintings. The artist is a Mexican priest with an unusual vision. He made me a pen and ink portrait and I look like somebody's great grandmother who starved to death on Route 66 on the way from Oklahoma to California in 1933, so I know he has no illusions about what I look like. He just thinks it's beautiful, so I'm not arguing. We went to dinner at J's, and there were two other Buddhists there, so we exerted a little guidance on the artist to see the world from a Buddhist perspective. I don't know. He said unequivocably that Mexico is so corrupt that it can never change. Shouldn't he believe in Divine Intervention?

The roof is leaking and there are termites in the vigas. Where do I begin?
And I have decided that I will complete the first draft of the book I'm working on by the end of this month. I'm not going to bed until I complete Chapter Twelve, but I think I can do that tonight...........................

Love and Weather

A tornado warning just broke in to All Things Considered. Probably I should unplug my computer. We have had water crashes here today. You cant call them rain.
The picture is of Maple Grove in Utah. One of my favorite places. This was taken a couple of weeks ago. I met a man there, and I fell in love with him which was fleeting but good...... Last week-end J and I had a stall at the Wine Festival. Chocolate wine was featured, and the gourmet foods on hand were curly fries, roasted corn, burritos, gorditos, tacos and barbecue sandwiches. There was some pretty good country and blues music and the weather held. I sold 20 or so of my incomparable greeting cards and I think six of my equally incomparable books. J sold several of her pamphlets about Hopi legends and global warming etc. She had some lovely framed pictures illustrating her theories, but I thought her price of 150 was a tad high, even for the German Air Force who made up quite a percentage of the people who stopped by our stall. It was fun. Next time I go on the road I might try hitting a few festivals. I think I'd need more saleable stuff. I made back the space rent I guess. I dont think I want to try Christmas Bazaars. I went to one once and I was immediately crushed by an oppressive sense of horror at the ghastly objects laid out for my delectation.

Ismay Trading Post

This is the Ismay Trading Post. I passed it on my way from Bluff, Utah to Cortez, Colorado. It looked like it was abandoned thirty years ago, but the sign said 'open' so I went in. A skinny old man was presiding. You can buy corned beef and Spam and pop and candy and enamel basins and cups with decals of pink roses and a few 'Indian" items such as juniper seed necklaces and beaded belts and a pipe that looked like a hash pipe. There were two tin buckets of fresh peaches on the counter. Two Ute boys who had been practically flying on their bicycles came in and bought some candy. I was looking desperately for something to buy when I saw The Pots. They were sitting on a dusty shelf. Plain terracotta, glazed on the inside, unsigned and undecorated but I thought them beautiful. I asked the man where they came from and he shrugged and waved over his shoulder. I thought perhaps he meant the Phillipines. I bought one pot. He threw in a peach for free. When I was about two hundred miles down the road I realised that I had to find out more about the pots and maybe buy some as gifts. I was tempted to turn around and press the old codger into divulging their origin, but phoning or emailing seemed a more reasonable option. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find out any more about them. The maker must not have thought them worth claiming as his or her work. The Mountain Ute do have a pottery, but they dont answer my emails. One day I will return to the Ismay Trading Post and pursue this. It will probably be closed for ever by then.

I solved the problem of the lost maggots, kind of. I cant see these posts when I use Safari but I use Safari to create the post because I cant add photos with Mozilla. However I can see my posts on Mozilla. No problem until a couple of days ago. Oh well, it's entirely inconsequential..............

Where are my maggots/

All right. This is a test. Yesterday's post has not shown up on my blog tho' I am assured it has published. Second time this has happened to me. Of course it must be my fault as I am such a twit but many of us are...........

Maggots

Before I left for the summer I pretty much emptied the kitchen closets. On the bottom shelf I had left some tightly sealed spices, a sealed can of VietNamese coffee that tastes and looks like coal dust and an opened pack of paper coffee filters. The first thing I did when I got home was to grab a filter and make a pot of coffee, using the coffee I had with me in the van. It tasted really bad. The next day I happened to look at the coffee filters and they were pullulating with maggots. Well to be honest they weren't actually pullulating, but I could see at least a dozen maggots creeping about merrily in their high rise with a view. I like the word pullulating. One rarely has a chance to use it. Anyway I am mystified. The closet doors were firmly closed, there is a backing of fake wood between the adobe wall and the shelves, so how did a fly get in? What did the fly lay its eggs on? The filters were the very cheapest from the Infamous Big Box Store, but surely they aren't manufactured from anything that a fly might consider an ideal nursery for beloved offspring? I scrubbed out the closet with straight bleach, but the mystery remains. Once my daughter found maggots in a bag of sugar that I had opened less than a week before ..... And once at work I found a true pullulation of maggots in the drain line from a blood gas analyser......... What is unsettling I guess is the thought that maggots are always in the wings waiting for us. I did hear on NPR - or was it BBC? - that surgeons are using maggots to clean wounds like they did in the good old days. And leaches are back too. I remember when Boots the Chemist carried leaches, but they did not display them out front. They must breed those medical maggots in a sterile environment one would hope. They wouldn't just scrape them off a handy road kill would they? Or from a pack of coffee filters? I did not photograph the maggots. Photography was far from my mind as I banished them.

I have returned to a green desert. What are usually dry red expanses of desert are now dense celebrations of wild sunflowers as tall and brilliant as their domesticated brethren, and the smell is wonderful. The cottonwoods and poplars and pecans are heavy with deep green foliage, and half dead trees along abandoned irrigation ditches are looking up hopefully.

Where is this post????? It is not showing up on my blog....................aauuugh