Best wishes for the new year to all my friends and family..
Best wishes for the new year to all my friends and family..
I am well aware that not everyone is a fan of my blog.
Cowboy and a pal drag me into the hills, where we find beauty, quiet and ATV tracks.
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No sleeping late on bright mornings.
And I’ve got coffee.
Playing it safe at Walgreens with an old Santa Fe-Albuquerque controversy.
Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass at Walgreens.
Jim Belshaw (once Arnholz) at Under Charlie’s Covers.
Moon over huevos rancheros.
Gettin’ their kicks over old 66.
Congratulations to … among others …
I had high hopes when I went to vote 50 years ago in a beautiful place at the foot of the Sierra Nevada.
I was 23 but Nov. 7, 1972, was my first time to cast a ballot because the 26th amendment and 18-year-old-vote wasn’t ratified until 1971.
I went with a couple of buddies — Craig and WJK — from the Inyo conservation camp 10 miles north of Bishop, California. Politically, the country was pretty torn up. We voted in a lonely hall in Round Valley. I sat up that night watching election results on on the lone camp TV, sitting on a plastic couch in the rec room with the camp dog, an ancient black mutt called Bummer.
Voting for the first time felt good but I got thumped. I voted for George McGovern.
Bummer was just there that night, not an omen. After leaving my California Division of Forestry assignment, I spent the next 40 years covering government and politics as a newspaper reporter and editor in New Mexico, voting in every election open to independents.
I voted early this election at the library in Placitas. I will be watching election-night results with a fun-loving blue heeler named Cowboy. I am glad to vote and I am as hopeful as ever.
When the counter is full at the Range in Bernalillo, I’m glad I live in a place where I can point the truck north on old 66 to Abuelita’s or Twisters, near the route of Coronado and homes of Puebloans who were already there, then east toward Placitas where Las Huertas Creek runs from a Sandia mountain canyon to the Rio Grande and close to that confluence at home consume my carry-out combination plate with green and sleep it off in a living room chair facing piñon-juniper foothills so quiet the croaking of sandhill cranes overhead wakes from me from an endorphin-ensured nap, satisfied by the chile-covered food, as the birds flying down from Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho circle upward, seeking a thermal for the flight south to Bosque del Apache for feasts on fields of winter grain.
dream ranch 