Those things go together, right? This is of course the famous Popocatepetl volcano in Mexico, which has been very active this year. (Here are the results of a YouTube search.) You’re looking at a telephoto capture of some of today’s activity at the 17,802 ft peak of this 730,000-year-old volcano, the second-highest peak in Mexico. Not all that dramatic, you might think, but you need to consider the immense scale of the phenomenon and the power of the natural forces working deep within the Earth. If that ash were coming out of a hole at ground level in Ohio, thousands of people would be evacuating right now.
From an early age, volcanoes have always fascinated me. The view west from Taos is full of extinct volcanoes, including huge ones like San Antonio Mountain and Ute Mountain. This made a huge impression on me after we moved here in ’99. When I take my four-mile hikes southwest of town, I’m never out of sight of half a dozen or more. The wild thing is imagining what it must have been like in northern New Mexico when they were belching ashes and steam like above, never mind actually exploding like the Jemez Caldera did! Boulders from that long-ago blast have been found in western Kansas, believe it or not. And the incredible variety of rocks and stones all over the landscape here? Well, what goes up must come down…
In the blog news department, I’ve successfully changed over to the Thesis 2.1 [← affiliate link] framework for WordPress, and the site is now completely responsive. You can see what that means if you make this browser window as small as you can, like it might be with a smart phone, for example. That’s a good thing, because anyone in the world with one in their pocket can visit JHFARR.COM and read this without zooming, but it really wasn’t the responsive aspect I wanted. It’s just that this choice (the Thesis Classic Responsive Skin) includes an amazing variety of design and layout options I wanted to play with. Infinite, really, with a little CSS. In the process I’ve added some new design elements that makes it easier to navigate through the tags and categories. Readability is improved. The thing runs noticeably faster, too.
It’s the “best tools” aspect of this that appeals to me. When I set up my new book marketing pages, they’ll be running on the bleeding edge. Nice! Amazing what makes some people happy, isn’t it?
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
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