Things like this never happen when I have my camera with me.

Yesterday my wife and I took our exercise walk up the mesa. On the way back we saw two baby horned toads! These were two separate incidents, amazingly. And when I say “baby,” I mean tiny, about the size of my thumbnail. I took this relative abundance to be a good sign. After all, how many folks have ever seen a baby horned toad?

A couple of years ago I saw two babies riding on their mother’s back, one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever witnessed. She froze in the middle of the dusty trail, giving me a good long look as I stood right over them. This was extraordinary enough, to see the three of them, but then one of the little ones crawled off and walked a few inches away, onto a patch of sand that was much lighter in color than his (?) mother’s back. And then he changed color to match! I mean, in no more than a second or two. I didn’t even know they did that, but this one sure as hell did.

So today I walked up there by myself, and of course I took my camera. Hah. Nary a horned toad to be seen, naturally.

Run away, run away

But I did run across a piñacate beetle, otherwise known colloquially as a “stinkbug.” I’ve run into these before, and they deserve the nickname. It was the only animal I saw on this walk, but I had a good time anyway. I think I would rather just “be” out in the wilderness than do almost anything else in this world, even if all I see is a stinkbug. It has to do with the universal quality of consciousness arising from no thought.

I worry less and less these days. I know that’s odd, considering my history of apocalyptic rants. And by the way, did you know the Germans are preparing for a huge crowd in Berlin for Obama’s speech?

Oh, right here. Much work that I’m behind on, way off schedule on obligations to Web site clients, etc. Our house hunting is becoming a full-time job, now that the days are getting shorter — yikes! I pulled a recent contribution to the local alternative paper because it was too rushed and didn’t meet my standards. Playing music nearly every day to keep beauty alive and stay sane. All is well, just frantic. Many ephiphanies. Life goes on.

Soon.

Okay, here you go, growing just outside the door, practically. I make a mean apricot pie, or better yet, turnovers. Apricots growing right out of the ground! Don’t say I never gave you nuthin.

No, these aren’t ripe yet, but we’re gonna have a ton of ‘em

Aerial image © 2008 by Eva-Marie Brekkestø

Oh, those hoaxers are busy, all right. It’s hard work, too. Just you try getting a bunch of people out to a grain field in the middle of the night and creating something like this in a few minutes, then getting away without leaving any tracks or tire marks. This image is from Westwoods, near Lockeridge, Wiltshire, reported July 17, 2008.

Man, are there a lot of bugs this year.

The funny thing is, for the longest time before and after we moved out here I had the idea that there weren’t any bugs in New Mexico. I have no idea why. My late mother-in-law, reeling with ecological guilt, used to say “they don’t salt the streets here” in her beloved Des Moines. Maybe it’s the same kind of thing.

One of the reasons I wanted to move out here from Maryland was because there weren’t any bugs, you see. In one respect, I was right: because of the cold, there are certainly more insect-free months here. There have to be fewer mosquitoes, too, because it’s usually so dry, though the ones I do meet up with are awfully ravenous. Something to do with an average of 14 people per square mile, probably.

But there are insects, all right. I figure about 600 species of flies, mostly, all sizes. The other night I was sitting outside with my dinner, and two flies dove right into my gravy — they didn’t buzz around and accidentally fall in, they dive-bombed straight into it! What makes New Mexico flies special is that all of them bite: the itty-bitty gnat things, the welterweights, what look like house flies, and on up to great buzzing things the size of Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, only hairier. At night in the summer, it’s moths, or used to be. A few years back when we lived higher up in the mountains in San Cristobal, there were so many, it was ridiculous. I was almost afraid to breathe for fear of suffocating from them. They’d pour in through the screen-less windows and thud against my computer monitor until it drove me insane. Big ones, too. But it doesn’t seem that there are that many in these parts just now. Could be it’s the weather.

In Maryland we used to get these tiny little beetles that would crawl through the screens and fly in our faces while we tried to read at night. We also had blacksnakes in the eves, but that’s for another post. Here in el Norte, I’ve hardly ever seen a snake — fewer than back East — but I did find a baby scorpion crawling across the kitchen counter once. None of those last few are actual bugs, of course, and neither are the black widow spiders that live behind the power supplies and cabling in the corner underneath my desk. They never venture out, apparently, and I’m not complaining.

Actually, with the possible exception of the big red-and-black ants that go after my sweetie every time she goes outside in her little flat sexy nothing sandals, most of the insects here are live-and-let-live. Ah yes, the Code of the West. I guess you can tell there aren’t many grasshoppers this year, because I haven’t mentioned them. They would definitely be an exception to the Code, although they never bit me personally. Now that I think of it, so would the box elder bugs, because they only recognize their own kind, aided by the fact that there are so many of them.

It’s not like we’re overrun with box elders, either, so the whole thing beats me.

No kidding, here it really is!

A small section of the Echus Chasma

Isn’t that a hoot? According to Reuters, where I snagged this, the European Space Agency’s “Mars Express” took this shot of a place called Echus Chasma. Here are the details:

A 4000-m-high cliff marks the edge of the source area of Kasei Valles in its western part. Gigantic water falls may have once plunged over these cliffs on to the valley floor. The original shoreline is still partially visible. The remarkably smooth valley floor was later flooded by basaltic lava.

The high-resolution photos (JPEGs and TIFFs) available for download at the ESA website should be great for desktop images, too. I’m grabbing a couple right now…

I don’t need to write about this stuff because, well, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but Barry Ritholtz does. Check out Idiots Fiddle While Rome Burns:

This is financial incompetence writ on a scale far grander than anything seen for centuries… something beyond cognitive dissonance is occurring — this is full blown case of dementia unfolding in the public sphere. When this era of excess and absurdity is treated by historians in the future, the question I expect to be asked most is not why many of these people weren’t jailed for their financial felonies. Rather, I expect them to wonder why so many of these folk weren’t placed in protective custody, and heavily medicated, for the only rational explanation for their statements and behaviors is that they have gone so far beyond the bend as to be completely and totally insane.

How did it get to be five days?? Anyway, FotoFeed is now current again. Today’s image is a cropped closeup from the shot below. It also shows up as the current header rollover on this page. (Mouse over my mug shot for a real thrill.) There’s even a hint of a rainbow:

Looking east toward El Salto and the village of Arroyo Seco

I took this on the way home from driving over Bobcat Pass (9,820 ft.) to look for elk. The beasts weren’t there today, but the scenery was stunning. The scene above is just north of Taos, by the way. Those are the Sangre de Cristos, of course, or at least a chunk of them.

It rained all Friday evening, which was novel.

I forget what happened the next morning, but we took off in the afternoon to drive down to a restaurant north of Santa Fe to meet my wife’s cousins. Very smart people. (One of them asks the most amazing questions.) On the way home we saw flooding in the arroyos, and later it rained all night again.

Today it didn’t rain, and we went to the Taos Pueblo powwow. There’s nothing like hearing the drumming and singing up close. For lunch I had a Navajo taco (the usual taco ingredients with beans & chile on fry bread). I had to have a Navajo taco because a), that stuff on fry bread is really, really good, and b) I’d just finished the last of Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides. The description of Kit Carson’s men driving the Navajos out of their mountain homeland and marching them off to exile at Bosque Redondo was fresh on my mind. The Army gave the refugees flour, but the wretched, hungry people had never seen wheat flour before and stuffed it in their mouths uncooked, making many of them sick. They must have learned to cook with it shortly, though the irony of the Navajos’ first learning to make fry bread at the Bosque is a powerful, fearsome thing — more than 3,000 of them died there from starvation and disease. The bread is mighty tasty, but you know there’s more than that at work, way down deep.

After we got home, I took a little nap and woke up crazy, like a panic attack, where all your options are bad. Suddenly, every endeavor was doomed. I was too old, too stupid, too fat, and too late. Where the hell had this come from? Trying to shake it off, I fired up the brushwhacker and cleared a path outside. Afterwards, my wife and I walked up the mesa and back, about a 2.3 mile roundtrip. I still wasn’t wholly reliable, though, not even after a double shot of tequila.

Then I had a brilliant insight: none of the things I’d woken up worrying about actually existed, or if they did, they hadn’t happened yet. (See, usually I miss that part, but this time I didn’t.) I tried this out on my wife, who mostly agreed, though I think she’d just as soon I take at least a few threats seriously, by way of motivation, so long as they don’t make me frown at dinner.

Sitting outside looking at the leaves shaking in the wind: suddenly, that was all that mattered.