Cocoposts

Eating Out

Zinc, Yanni's, JB's, Ezra's and El Pinto this week.  Continual winter lunching at locations "in town" and in the North Valley.  The setting becomes almost as important as the food when the days are short and the dollars dear.  No rag tag service and dirty forks here.   Zinc has a nice table in a sunny window against the wall.  I also like sitting at the Zinc bar - which is actually zinc.  It feels nice and warm and zinc has clear health benefits.   Whether or not these can be imparted transdermally, I like to rub against the bar for luck when I'm there. 

Christmas Doomed

Marita Noon says so, in a nutshell.

During this Christmas season, hang your lights, cook your feast, and stay warm inside! If each of these issues moves forward without push back, it may be your last year to do so.

In Marita's world view, which coincides perfectly with that of oil and gas industry,  the American way of life is defined by and dependent upon the unquestioning and growing consumption of energy.  PERIOD.  Change means loss, doom, dread, shivering in dark caves, going on The Road and not in a good way.

Read the whole thing if you want to torture yourself with her rehashing of climategate.  The awful white on black lettering at the Eye blog is almost worse than her condescension and use of italics.  Or wait and the Journal will publish this tripe.

The climate has always changed and it always will. This is not consensus it's simple fact backed up by empirical data. How did some of us become so arrogant as to actually believe that we could destroy the planet by burning carbon based fuels? Sheesh!

Silly arrogant goose!  Be afraid, but be sure and be afraid of the right things:  Cap and Trade, Climategate/Copenhagen, and Carbon Rulings.

Happy Solstice

Simple poetry from the National Weather Service:

IT WILL BE PRECISELY 1047 AM MST MONDAY WHEN THE SUN ENDS ITS 6 MONTH JOURNEY SOUTH AND BEGINS ITS 6 MONTH JOURNEY NORTH. THIS IS THE TIME OF YEAR WHEN THE LONGEST SHADOWS ARE CAST BY OBJECTS IN THE SUNSHINE IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE.

Dog Door Dream

A devil dog was at the dog door.  I had to stop him before he would ruin my house.  The plan was to throw my coffee cup at his nose as it poked into the room.  But now the little door was shrinking and when I tried to aim the cup it got stuck.  The dog was going to bite my hand so I screamed, get out!  and woke myself.  The poor cat, abruptly awakened by my thrashing, scrambled away and scratched my right hand. It looks like a tiny devil dog bite mark.

I've been packing coffee cups, as it happens, but I need a break. 

There may be a little anxiety about the new homeowners (on the part of the cat, of course.)

Why Not To Ski

Joining the many many other reasons that I've always used to justify my reluctance refusal to venture beyond the ski lodge bar is this nightmarish news of a chairlift malfunction in Wisconsin in the Chicago Tribune.

Michael Krisher had almost reached the top of a hill at the Devil's Head ski resort when the chair lift he was riding stopped.  He wasn't concerned. Lifts stopped all the time when someone lost a ski or stumbled getting off. But after a moment the chair started to go backward -- slowly at first, then faster and faster.  "As we were going down the hill, you could just hear people screaming at the bottom," Krisher said. "I've never heard screaming like that except in the movies."

SunCal Collateral

The Albuquerque Journal notes SunCal news that some of us were expecting:

Lenders filed a foreclosure lawsuit against SunCal Cos. in state court in New Mexico this week to collect more than $180 million in outstanding loans their developer used to finance the property purchase from Atrisco Land Grant heirs.

I'm not singing I told you so.  The Atrisco Land Grant and SunCal story is too sad.  It was a quintessential sell-out of a rich land heritage and history - the 60's corporatization of the communal grant,  the board's poorly regulated sale of 55,000 acres to one company,  the shameless cash-strewn lobbying during the lege for a huge taxpayer subsidy, the souless mesa-eating sprawl that constitutes progress among the builder boosters and land owning leaders,  and now this foreclosure suit. 

SunCal's big broad beautiful promises may mean nothing.  Zip.  Nada.  No doubt this will be pinned on the naysayers.  If only we'd gotten that tax legislation passed!  Wait for it. 

Facts Disappear

“In Mexico it is dangerous to speak the truth. It is even dangerous to know the truth. 

Fernando Díaz Santana, radio host quoted in The Atlantic: The Fall of Mexico, December 2009.

The San Francisco Chronicle covers a gunbattle in Cuernavaca.

Two hundred sailors raided an upscale apartment complex and killed a reputed Mexican drug cartel chief in a two-hour gunbattle, one of the biggest victories yet in President Felipe Calderon's drug war.

Two hundred soldiers of the Mexican Navy battled for two hours to kill four men.  This leads one gentle commenter to suggest they might have been using rifles from the Mexican Revolution.

The last line of this story, lest you get a little optimism going, is this sobering tidbit:

On Wednesday, the severed heads of six state police investigators were found on a public plaza in the northern Mexican state of Durango.

None of that violence touches us, right?  :coughcough:  Oh, BTW, there's loco local news from Espanola.

The scariest bit in The Atlantic:

In seeking, much less speaking, the truth about what the army is up to, one often runs into the paradox of the Mexican reality: something dreadful happens and is then treated as if it hadn’t happened. Facts, like people, simply disappear.

I Like Beer

In Welsh:  Dw i 'n licio cwrw.

Instead of packing or preparing for Christmas or cleaning or doing laundry I'm drinking in bed listening to Welsh language clips.  This summer, after building a tiny house, downsizing and moving twice, I'm going to Wales to the fathers' home - a modest two story stone structure turned Esso station sometime before 1957 when my father took a trip there himself.

Following my  grandmother's handwritten directions he took a train from London to Swansea and a bus to the town.  In a letter back to her he described walking to the site of the old colliery in the rain along the narrow road.   From the doorway of a tiny cottage a familiar face looked back at him.   In this moment of mutual recognition he found a cousin who later drove him around.

They visited the ancestors' chapel and cemetery,  the family home turned gas station and the nearby woolen mill where he bought a blanket I still have.  They visited the River Towy where Reinalt and Douglas fish, in season and out!  They visited multiple pubs and talked of Welsh Nationalism and the "Welsh National Party."   My father told his mom: 

As a foreigner, I took no sides, but it seemed to me that they have so much to argue with, all the way from the true presentation of a unique culture, to the manifest exploitation of natural resources.  This, I might, explain, has to do with the establishment of a dam somewhere in Northern Wales, flooding certain sections (including villages) to provide hydroelectric power for England's Midlands.

He concluded the letter saying:

The land is beautiful and green and enchanting and I felt like home.  Not as a stranger at all, and that is strange. 

Dream House

In addition to the circus dreams, I have a lot of house dreams.  The house in my dreams (as distinct from an ideal house - a house of my dreams) is a constantly morphing structure.  Sometimes it is a mirror reverse of a real house I've lived in or visited.  Usually there's a monster under the floor, different coastline views from west and east windows, and previously undiscovered rooms.  An old wooden stairway will appear around a corner and up narrow rickety steps is a new upper floor.  

Last night the new room in my old house was stuffed full of boxes and furniture, including my big piano, all of which had to be carried down those impossibly steep stairs.  For a dream moment I contemplated pushing the piano out the window with the view of Maine.

All my precious crap will have to be crammed into a tardis-like storage container and I'm obviously having some anxiety about that.  You think?

Big Gamble

The Albuquerque Journal crows loudly about the Virgin Atlantic unveiling in an editorial entitled:  Big Gamble Lifting Off .  Shorter Journal:  Spaceport skepticism silly. 

The sky-high criticisms of Spaceport New Mexico and its $198 million public price tag came down to Earth Tuesday. A sleek spaceship has that effect on naysayers. Until then, it was easy to dismiss commercial space travel as a literal pie-pan-in-the-sky dream. But watching Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson greet his bullet-shaped SpaceShipTwo as it left the secrecy of its Mojave Desert hangar, and seeing Govs. Bill Richardson and Arnold Schwarzenegger christen it Virgin Space Ship (VSS) Enterprise, are hard evidence this endeavor is grounded in science and economic development.

Hard evidence = Smashing a bottle of champagne.  Everyone does realize the ship hasn't been ground or flight tested yet, right?  This "launch" was a metaphor.  Proponents get trekkie chills and lose their capacity to reason.  Cosmiclog counters with reality. 

... Ground testing starts on Tuesday, Branson told us.  The first flight tests, due to begin next year, would involve captive-carry flights during which the rocket plane would ride between WhiteKnightTwo's twin cabins so that Scaled's team can check the aerodynamics of the combined craft. Then there would be drop tests, in which SpaceShipTwo would be released and piloted through a glide back down to Earth. ...

There's always the chance of suffering a setback during the test phase, as the Scaled Composites team knows all too well: In 2007, a nitrous-oxide tank exploded at Scaled's rocket test site, killing three of the company's employees. The tragedy caused significant delays in the SpaceShipTwo development effort.

A lot can happen.  Like how the unveiling site in the Mohave blew away after the party. 

The UK Guardian captured a little snark between Govs.  

Schwarzenegger also did his best to make light of the freezing conditions, making one crack after another at the expense of Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor who has agreed to let Branson's Virgin Galactic company build its purpose-built Spaceport in the desert south of his state.

"We have many things in common," he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "We are both governors. Both of us plan to retire next year. And neither of us has ever won an Oscar."

He even made a dig at Richardson's waistline, saying he knew how excited the future astronauts were to be able to experience the weightlessness of outer space. "Nobody is happier than Bill Richardson about that.".

Coco Pod

You can just go out and buy one of those giant storage containers, get it painted any color you want, get it tricked out with shelves, doors, windows, insulation, vent and a little shade porch on the south side.  Presto! Utilitarian interim or long term storage tackroom. Water and mouse tight.  At 24' it's bigger than the little 16' Nomad office-trailer that I'll park on the leeward side.   This summer I'll put up sail shade tarps and a flagpole ship-like in the middle of my little sea of goathead stickers.  Maybe I'll get a pirate flag and be like a zoning and building code pirate. 

My Sold House

I went and did it - sold my house and now have to vacate in the middle of winter.  The Whitelodge is snowed in and the ranch house is still largely in Phase I - dreaming and visioning punctuated by unpleasant spurts of wastewater permitting and writing big checks.

Renting prospects are, so far, expensive, dumpy, require leases and don't take persnickety cats or big ass dogs.  Those that do require references. 

I'm getting a little camper to use as a construction office.  And for the cat.  She'll just love it.  So will the neighbors.  I'll put Christmas lights on it. 

The cat is glaring at me from the piano now.  She probably guessed it'll have to go along with the exercise equipment I never use and over half my furniture.  Daunting. 

The really bad part is that all I want to do all day is read in bed, maybe complain on the blog a little and drink - coffee, tea and red wine in alternating order. 

But what I have to go do now is coordinate a septic tank deal and look at storage sheds.  Maybe some wood stove shopping!

Manure War

New Mexico is the focus of NPR Morning Edition story about dairy operations.  It is enough to put you off your cheese, milk and butter.   The tone was optimistic on the potential for change but they note a new statewide PR campaign by the dairy industry.  The billboard looks a lot like a SunCal ad, with cows. (Photo: John Burnett/NPR)

A homemaker named Jana Hughes, who lives next to a dairy near Hobbs, N.M., recently formed a group called Citizens for Dairy Reform, was shown a photo of that billboard.

"False advertisement," Hughes says. "I mean, as someone who lives around dairies and knows dairies, that is not how it is. We're talking 2,000 cows confined in a small area, living in their own feces and urine."...

Among state regulators, there's no question who's to blame for fouling the groundwater in Dexter. The water table is shallow in this part of the state, and monitoring wells downgradient of the dairies all clearly show excess nitrates. The dairies are under state abatement plans to control manure runoff.

New Mexico's dairy industry denies the New Mexico Environment Department's figure that two-thirds of its farms are polluting groundwater. Robert Hagevoort, a dairy extension specialist and industry spokesman suggests critics are too quick to blame dairies.

"They may have a septic tank that's leaking. That is the number one reason why domestic wells in New Mexico are contaminated," Hagevoort says.

Regulation Road To Tyranny

Drastic reductions in regulatory oversight by the State of New Mexico worries those closest to oil and gas production - for different reasons.  Some are concerned about enforcement because of the impacts of producing "clean" natural gas on other resources - like groundwater.  The industry is concerned that it will slow down permitting of new wells. 

Not to miss an opportunity for dramatic fear-mongering overstatement, the industry's fans and flacks also say those regulations are the road to tyranny. 

Tell that to someone with a poisoned well.

From the Durango Herald. 

ALBUQUERQUE - The state agency responsible for preventing contamination from natural-gas and oil operations and reclaiming past environmental damage will have to drastically reduce its routine field inspections as New Mexico searches for ways to plug a $650 million budget shortfall. ...

State officials warned legislators during a meeting Monday that fewer inspections could place the environment and groundwater resources at risk and that the division's vacancy rate of more than 16 percent could cause delays in the processing of any new applications to drill for gas or oil.

Guess which will be deemed more important.

Thelma's Truths

When I read the Albuquerque Journal I find Thelma Domenici's manners column is often what I enjoy most.  Hers* is the only writing that makes sense and rings true.  Her tone is clear-headed and her message is smooth.  Well, as smooth as possible in telling someone not to pick their teeth.   

She answers the larger-than-tooth-picking question this week:  Why do some people lose their manners once they retire?  

Retirement isn't an excuse for losing your manners. All of the social behaviors you learn during your lifetime should become a part of you and who you are to the core. You shouldn't change dramatically from your true self upon retirement.

I'm pretty sure she wrote this one for me.  In fact, I'm her don't example in many instances.  Like, I get invited indirectly (a clear don't) to her Christmas party where she serves the best little peppermint cocktails.  You have to have about six before you get a decent buzz. 

That some of us picked our teeth at the table before we retired doesn't diminish her larger point. 

* Yes I do need an editor to remind me that Hers should never have an apostrophe.  How embarrassing.