I’m slowly catching up, still a day or two behind, but there are four more to see.
Meanwhile: here, for your viewing pleasure, is a baby horned toad. Yes, I finally “caught” one. This is a telephoto shot from about four feet away, cropped in Photoshop to bring it even closer. That’s one reason it’s a [...]

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 [...]

I want to title this image “Prayer,” for some reason. Enjoy!

Yesterday evening

It’s only 4X optical zoom, but that helps, and there are enough pixels that I can go in deeper with a crop. Here’s one of the first hummingbirds of the season, zooming in for the kill:

If only it were as warm outside as it looks

That last post on politics was an aberration, exactly what I’m struggling to avoid, and is no more. Back to nature, then, where more silence is probably required.
Last night we had dinner with an older couple (yes, older than I am), people of very limited means, who somehow own a piece of land way up [...]

I do like to eat a fine, juicy hamburger — why do we call them that, anyway? — preferably with cheese, while sitting at the Taos Diner eying the waitresses, north county hippies, Indians, and crazy people. Such a comforting milieu.
But what about the cows?

Eerie in the afternoon

It’s something in the eyes, especially the black [...]

The area where we live was once made up entirely of family compounds — you wouldn’t exactly call them farms — and to some extent still is. Livestock would be corraled here and but herded elsewhere in the neighborhood, like up on the mesa or down in pastures in the valley. It looks sort of [...]

A couple of days ago I noticed a neighbor of mine, “Joe,” carrying old tires up the muddy road. Now that was interesting, taking them to the road instead of away, so I hiked up the driveway in the melting goo to see what was going on. What he’d been doing was remarkable.
Whenever a vehicle [...]

No, that’s not a new band!
This will never make sense without an understanding of how this house is put together (or isn’t), and I don’t know exactly what I could do to give you a picture. It’s just so weird.
But the southwest side of the old adobe is a semi-modern (35 years old) addition [...]

All evening long we’ve been hearing a succession of thuds and clunks coming from the roof. “It’s either chunks of melting frozen snow falling off the trees, or we have raccoons dancing on the roof,” I told my wife. She laughed. If she’d seen the three ‘coons I saw last month, she might have locked [...]