Sorry for being tardy in tending to this blog ... can I blame it on the heat?
Well, it actually hasn't been that hot. We've had the AC on some days, but it hasn't gotten above the low 90s. Today was about 85 max and there was a little breeze, so it hasn't been too bad. Now YESTERDAY was wild ... not so hot but wind gusts in the 40=50 mph range!
Maybe it's the smoke from the fires; that's my excuse.
Noooo ... we've had some days with ruddy sunsets and a few days when we had an inversion that concentrated smoke from the Miller (nearby, just over the Continental Divide a few miles in the Gila drainage), Wallow (humongous, ca. 100 miles to the northwest and moving NE) and the Horseshoe Fire (further away in SE Arizona, pretty directly upwind from us) into our little basin.
So, I've just been lazy.
But we haven't.
We went to Ghost Ranch for the annual meeting of Quakers from the Four Corners states. Our keynote speaker was Niyonu Spann, addressing in words and song "Discernment: A Practice of Religious Truthfulness." We gathered in song ... with a little impromptu acting out of the words. The setting at Ghost Ranch is inspiring for us, as it was for Georgia O'Keeffe. I don't know the name of the little blonde girl, but I loved the fact that she's singing joyfully, even though both microphones are 6-12 inches above her head!
On the way home, we stopped to change drivers on I-25 south of Albuquerque and found a roadside memorial to Sofia Milovidova, who died there in 2006. First non-cross roadside memorial I've seen.
A life-and-death saga we've been watching from our breakfast table is a curve-billed thrasher nest in a cholla about 40 feet away. We've watched Ma and Pa Thrasher build the nest (they're indistinguishable) and then deposit three speckled blue eggs in it. After some days of sitting, there were little hatchlings (can't prove there were ever three). And then there was one ... and we noticed a strange cat starting to hang around. Thrashers have orange eyes, so they always look fierce and ferocious, and the nest is pretty well protected in the middle of the very spiny cholla. But, now Ma and Pa are sitting on any empty nest. I'm guessing the verdammte katze got the nestlings. Now to see if there will be a new clutch of eggs.
Saturday was our first day tending the art gallery in the historic Hearst Church in Piños Altos. William Randolph Hearst's dad, George Hearst, made some of his money in the mines there and his wife, Phoebe Hearst, supported the Methodist-Episcopal Church in that community. Anyway, it was a long day ... after "work," Sandy took me over to the Buckhorn Saloon for a wonderful Father's Day dinner of prime rib and then we went next door to the Opera House. The opener was an a capella group called GleeMaiden, four local moms who sing for (and sometimes with) their kids, followed by the Dixie Bee-Liners. This group out of Bristol, TN/VA, kept our toes constantly tapping! tv
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