Slight change of plans…

Posted on January 11, 2023 by John P

I had a post all laid out in my head; I was going to write it last Friday afternoon after I flew Clovis. Something about all the sammiches I ate while in Los Angeles for Xmas. She had other plans, though…

Friday started well enough. I didn’t forget anything and the folks at the site next to me, who came along, were ready early. We got to a spot on the west edge of the San Rafael Valley, I set up the drone, beeped up* Clovis, put the drone in the air close, but not too close, to us, and struck Clovis’s hood. She did what she normally does: look around, rouse, give the lure hanging under the drone a good hard stare, and launch herself off the fist. She took a couple tight circles gaining altitude, then flew off a bit and continued to mount. I didn’t think anything of it – she’ll often go a ways away to take advantage of wind and to give herself a more direct climb to the drone/lure combo. But this time, ah, this time. She spiraled up and then turned and headed south along the edge of the grasslands. I pulled my regular lure out, whistled and swung, but she was gone. We walked to the next ridge south, I called again, nada. Back to the trucks, load up and head south – luckily the Apache Rd. heads southwest from where we were. We drove until the telemetry said she was 90 degrees to our left (generally, SE), parked, and N and I started after her, while J stayed with the vehicles. We chased her for a little over an hour until I called it off: it seemed like we were bumping her. We’d get within a quarter mile, then the distance would jump up by a half mile or so, lather, rinse, repeat. I went back out later in the afternoon to make sure she was in the same general area – I wanted her to settle down for the night…

I was up well before dawn Saturday morning, with high hopes. The sun was just brightening the sky when I got to the Apache Rd.

I turned on the telemetry receiver. Silence. I drove down every left-leading Forest Service road I could, until stopped by gates. Nothing. TL;DR – I spent Saturday driving around trying to get a signal with no luck at all. I was pretty crestfallen Saturday night My plan was for more driving Sunday, then, if she was still out, look into buying a couple hour search via a light plane.

Sunday morning I needed to zip into Tucson to pick up a package – I decided to come home via Sierra Vista and the Coronado National Memorial/W Montezuma Canyon Road. Once I was though the pass, I was high above the San Raphael Valley moving southeast to northwest. I thought I’d have less interference from ridges, and be able to hear her if she’d moved south in the Valley. More driving, more silence, more worry. One of the best pieces of falconry advice I’ve ever gotten is, ‘when you are out of ideas, go back to where you turned the bird loose and reset’. I did. Back to the beginning – I parked the truck, got out and swung the lure & whistled for 10 minutes. Still no Clovis, but when I returned to the truck, the iPad told me it knew where she was!! At this point, the transmitter was in super-battery-saving mode and only pinging every ?5? minutes (note to self: look it up) so the stop helped but also meant that if she was moving she could be long gone by the time I got to her last known location, a mile and a half away. But I had a place to go to!!! Got as close as I could with the truck and walked towards the marker on the iPad – a pair of cottonwoods 1500 yards away. There was a fence between us. so I stood way back and called. No luck. You don’t want to call your bird anywhere near a fence – that’s how wings and necks get broken. So I *whispers* shimmied under the rancher’s fence, stood up, and SAW HER. Got well away from the fence, whistled, and swung:

And that’s the story of my weekend. Clovis’s weight was down but not way down – she’d fed herself at least once. Currently we’re resetting – I’m making sure her weight is stable so I can cut her back to flying weight and then we’ll do a couple short flights!

Today’s task – after a morning visit to the Tumacácori Mission – is another drive to Tucson, this time to pick up a steel plate with high-tech tape on the bottom. The long distance telemetry antenna has a magnetic base, my truck has an aluminum body, the cap is fiberglass, and the pinched nerves in my neck won’t survive another session of holding the antenna onto the roof with my left arm 😉 .

*attaching the transmitter to Clovis’s tail mount

The initial (Friday) flight:

Really rockin’ in Mimbres

Posted on December 12, 2022 by John P

Maisie and I went for a walk after setting camp this morning (in the same site Lotte and I used when we bicycled through). When we got to the trailhead there was this:

Transcribed:

Current Research

A red paint pigment known as hematite appears to have been used throughout the Spirit Canyon pictograph site. Finger smudge and brush techniques represent several painting styles that is [sic] present at the site. Research indicates three prominent styles of Apache pictographs are present. Apache Style 1 has one arm/hand up and one arm/hand down. Apache Style 2 has oversized hands and elaborate headdresses. Apache Style 3 has both hands/arms up and the torso has rings around it (emphasizing clothing and/or jingles). Mountain Spirit masks aid in determining if it attributed [sic] to Chiricahuas and Mescaleros and/or associated to the Western Apaches.

Up the canyon we went and it was beautiful! A typical canyon wall:

And then there were the pictographs! I’ve tweaked some of the following shots to make them ‘read’ better – the unmanipulated verions are on Flickr, too.

A wall.

Style 1

Style 3

And I don’t know what this is but it is amazing. My first thought was sea scorpion 😀 .

More as I learn more. Speaking of which, I learned the difference between petroglyphs (picked, scratched or incised) and pictographs (painted on surface) today! A good day!!

Chile Relleno Diary entry no. 3

Posted on December 10, 2022 by John P

This is the big one – the omphalos of my chile relleno quest. I stopped at Chope’s three and a half years ago on the big bike ride and had the best plate of stuffed peppers I’ve ever eaten. Knowing I was going to be back in the same (general) area? A visit was a must.

Seems like the restaurant side of the house has closed, but the Bar & Cafe is still popular. When I pulled up a little before noon, there were 2 other parties waiting for the doors to open.

I am not going to attempt an ‘objective’ evaluation – I have too much wrapped up in this spot. There’s the bike visit. There’s the gf and her dog element: when I came through in 2019 I was involved with someone whose mother had owned land in the Mesilla area, and who had once had a beloved dog named Chope. I figured that wasn’t coincidence and I was right. And there’s the ongoing hope that some good things have not gone into the toilet during the past few plague years.

I’ve carried this receipt in my wallet for years. Check the date!

Place: Chope’s Bar and Cafe, La Mesa NM

Variety: chile relleno plate. Three chile rellenos, smothered (with salsa verde in this case), beans, rice and flour tortillas. Peak lunch experience. I started with a glass of beer, some corn chips and a small bowl of hot green salsa while I chatted with the locals down the bar. Then the plate came out. I don’t want to make too big a deal of it – this is not molecular gastronomy or summat. What it is, is cheese and pepper and breading and sauce. What it is, is delicious, filling and hugely comforting. If you’re passing through the Las Cruces/El Paso environs Chope’s is strongly recommended. Nose around for hours – they’re definitely open noon on Thursday ATM.

Me gusta mucho.

Morning Drive

Posted on December 5, 2022 by John P

I’m in Mimbres NM for a while and took a ride up the valley to see if the Forest Service had shut off water and power to the campground I’m planning on moving to on Wednesday. I’m happy to report they haven’t; at five bucks a night this is going to be a cheap 10 night stay! Coming back, the morning was so lovely that I saved a couple 30 second clips from the dash cam to share.

Mist in the pines.

One state north, this would be called a “park”, as in Winter Park and, yes, South Park. Not sure if there’s a New Mexico specific descriptor.

Roswell Museum

Posted on December 1, 2022 by John P

I visited the Roswell Museum yesterday; it’s an interesting mix of art, historical objects (with, for many items, the usual issues of who they originally belonged to and how they were acquired) and a re-creation of Robert Goddard’s Roswell workshop. I’m going to embed a widget that lets one scroll through the photos I took – I’ve done my best to credit and describe in the captions.

Amarillo RR Museum (2)

Posted on November 29, 2022 by John P

The second Amarillo RR Museum attractant was the HO scale layout in their building. It models a section of the Santa Fe railroad between Canadian TX and Texico NM. An absolutely amazing track plan getting built with care. I’ve been interested in model railroading since I was a kid; to see current state of the art writ large was fantastic. You can see the track plan here and the designer’s commentary here. Some photos with commentary (n.b. the layout is very much a work in progress):

The bridges over the Canadian River – the ‘easternmost’ point on the miniature Plains Division.

They’re modelling specific structures on the route. In many cases (the Canadian R bridges, for example) they’ve done some selective compression, but the goal is to create scenes that someone familiar with the area would recognize instantly.

Two common support elements in modern large layout design are helices and staging yards. A helix lets one gain or lose a lot of vertical separation in a relatively small footprint; ideal for two level track plans like this one. And staging yards allow for trains to wait in the wings before they take their turn on stage. Bottom yard is for trains from the east, the top is west.

Controls, both miniature and full sized. At the top are the Digital Command Control interfaces and power supplies. DCC is a flavor of power line networking – the power line in this case are the tracks which supply both go-juice and throttle, sound card, lighting, etc. info to the motive power. For a glimpse of what DCC and modern loco electronics can do, take a look at this. I’ve cued the video up to the engine’s (a Rapido E8 in Amtrak Day One livery) startup sequence. Below is the RR Museum’s dispatcher’s panel. Apparently. one of the members’ mom worked for the Santa Fe when they closed the Amarillo dispatch center and the museum got possession of the actual Amarillo panel! They plan on operating the layout prototypically with the dispatcher controlling main line switches, signals and, via radios, train movements (telling the engineers what to do). Too cool!

There are more layout photos n the Flickr album, here. I’m considering starting my Cali coast portion of the trip (Feb and Mar) in San Diego so I can check out the San Diego Model RR Museum. The La Mesa Model RR Club operates a model of the Tehachapi Pass and there are two other layouts in the museum. A goal, once I become a little less nomadic, is a small layout – or at least a module/diorama – of my own…

Chili Relleno Diary entry no. 2

Posted on November 22, 2022 by John P

The subject of chili relleno burritos came up last week, when Angeliska and I were discussing the blessed stuffed pepper. I knew I’d eaten one somewhere, but couldn’t remember where. Heading into Roswell proper a couple days ago It hit me.

Place: Burrito Express, Roswell NM

Variety: burrrrrito (con frijoles)!

An ideal lunch on the go. The pepper was hot enough to make its presence known but didn’t overwhelm the cheese or beans. If these were available back home I’d be in trouble; as it is, I’m going back for more next week. Side (dish) note – I ordered fries to eat on the drive back to camp and they were great. I may have lucked out, but hot and crisp crinkle cuts are unicorn rare in my experience.

chile relleno burrito, babys!

Amarillo RR Museum (1)

Posted on November 21, 2022 by John P

My first stop (other than the truck area of Interstate rest stops) on my westward journey was the Amarillo Railroad Museum. There were two attractants – this post is about the full-sized one on the tracks out back: the White Train.

From 1951 to 1987 the White Train moved nuclear warheads from the Pantex facility northeast of Amarillo where they were manufactured to where they were deployed. I’m not sure how I stumbled over the White Train; I’m thinking maybe it was a stray historical photo the Instagram algorithm tossed on to my timeline. Regardless, once I found out I could see a representative consist in northern Texas, a detour from my normal New England to Austin route was a must.

The typical train was an engine – as far as I can tell. just one, since the train topped out at 35 mph – a guard escort car, a power buffer car, some number of weapons transport cars, another power buffer car and, bringing up the rear, another guard escort car.

The guard escort cars were just what it says on the box: repurposed Army kitchen cars set up for the security detail that accompanied the warheads. There were bunks, bathrooms, a kitchen/lounge area, a comm station and a lookout turret. One of the cars was open for exploration and my gosh, what a Dr. Strangelove vibe. You can see all my photos from the museum here; but a couple of the things that struck me:

Hot brass vacuum system, because you don’t want expended shells bouncing around when you’re shooting evildoers.

Ashtrays everywhere, of course.

A pano of the turret.

Buffer cars are normally used to keep some distance between the crew and any hazardous loads. In this case I’ve gotta think they were mainly for protecting the weapons transport cars from an engine fire or the like. If something went seriously wrong with the warheads (I’m guessing they were rendered un-mushroomable, but cracking open casings in a derailment would suck) I’d want a lot more distance than 50 feet or so. The other thing these buffer cars did was supply power to the guard escort cars. The history of powering, heating and cooling passenger rail cars is fun digression that I might post on sometime, but regardless of that tech tangent, freight locos are not provisioned to deal with passengers, so a power car was needed.

Top is the guard escort car, bottom is the power buffer car.

I don’t have much to say about the weapons transport car other than I wish I’d had a geiger counter with me. There wasn’t much to see on the side of the car and, though I thought about climbing up to have a look at the top, I didn’t want to presume on my host’s hospitality.

I chatted with one of the museum members about modelling the White Train – happily, someone had been by earlier in the year taking measurements, photos, etc. with an eye towards producing some kits. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. I’d love to build 2 pair of guard and buffer cars and put a (freelanced, obv) shoggoth containment vessel on a depressed center flatcar and containment vessel support machinery on another, smaller flatcar. Yep. I’m a weirdo.

Roswell

Posted on November 20, 2022 by John P

Dawn finds me camped at Bottomless Lake SP, just east of Roswell NM. If you are like I was prior to last year, your first thought is !saucer people! And believe me, the town has embraced the theme. But on my way through Austin last year, my friend J clued me in on something amazing. The Pecos River flows along the Mescalero Escarpment (the western palisade of the Llano Estacado) a mile and a half from where I’m writing this, and waters some beautiful wetlands. Where there are wetlands in the US southwest, there are waterfowl. All kinds of waterfowl! In this case the stars of the show are thousands and thousands of Sandhill Cranes. You’ll probably get more crane content than makes sense over the next couple weeks… My original plan was to spend two weeks here, hawking ducks with Clovis. Alas, just as I was getting ready to leave New England news arrived regarding Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza. The advice from those in the know is “keep your raptors away from waterfowl this year”; infected raptors are showing 95% mortality within 48 hours. Ugh. I’m still spending the 2 weeks, but I’m going to bird watch, fly Clovis to the drone, ride my bike and maybe even go schnorkeling.

I’ll be here for Thanksgiving; my plans are pretty low key. I may actually learn how to use the combo microwave/convection oven to whip up some cornbread; beyond that, who knows. But! while faffing about on the dying birdsite (twitter has the Leon Skum infected HPAI) I saw an image that led me to this – a perfect painting of Thanksgiving in Roswell, complete with anthropomorphic Clovisbruja in a apron:

Ritual Cactus Offering

More soon.

Update. As is my wont, I’m wearing a semiotic dadjoke* t-shirt today. If you don’t know who José Guadalupe Posada was, I’ll bet you know his work.

You probably don’t know Marxist writer J. Posadas (pen name of Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli). From the linked article,

He led the Latin American bureau of the Fourth International, but eventually split from the revolutionary socialist organization in 1962 and created his own Posadist Fourth International.

Then, in 1968, he published an essay arguing that extraterrestrials would play a crucial role in a global anticapitalist revolution. By that point, Castro had already denounced him and Posadas was advocating a nuclear war to demolish capitalist states, leaving the working class to rise from the ashes. Still, his cult-like following grew—despite his increasing interest in communicating with dolphins.

I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism

As the Au Pairs sang, it’s obvious. Posada to Posadism to LGM** to Roswell!

*for pretty weird values of dad/opa

**little green men

Chile Relleno Diary entry no. 1

Posted on November 18, 2022 by John P

One of the themes of this western winter looks to be chile rellenos*. Already a favorite dish and a restaurant target when I get to New Mexico, the idea of documenting the deliciousness came up Wednesday night when Angeliska and I went out for a late dinner. So… ¡Vamonos!

Place: Nasha, Austin TX

Variety: Tex Mex-Indo Fusion

Verdict: delicious. An unbattered chile stuffed, in my case, with spiced lamb, and sauced with tikka masala. Nasha’s going to get another visit when I return to Austin in April. This dish gives me an opportunity to define my terms. I’m going to be pretty expansive re what’s a chile relleno (literally ‘stuffed pepper’). The criteria I’m going to use are 1) the pepper needs to be conical: pasilla, si, bell pepper, no, 2) there needs to be something inside the pepper, and 3) there ought to be a sauce involved, though I’m willing to entertain exceptions.

*I’m thinking that the plural might want to be chiles relleno, but that seems a little pedantic and precious. I might change my mind…

Got a match?

Posted on November 8, 2021 by dr.hypercube

I’m reviving the blog with another in a continuing series: linked items that have appeared on my radar screen. First up are Ofelia Esparza, Daniel Hernandez and Dio de los Muertos.

“We all suffer three deaths.” Ofelia Esparza, the East L.A. altarista, or altar maker, was remembering her mother’s words. “The first death is the day that we give our last breath, the day that we die,” said Esparza one recent evening in Boyle Heights as she and her daughters prepared for Day of the Dead. They were making orange paper flowers, the blooms crinkling loudly, taking shape in their hands. “Our second death is the day that we’re buried, never to be seen on the face of the earth again, which sounds very final.

“But the most final, the most dreaded, terrible death of all,” she said, “is to be forgotten.” *

The idea of the third death hit me hard this year. Though I’ve been really fortunate – the pandemic hasn’t taken anyone close to me – the daily knowledge of loss has been at my elbow since March of 2020, when I bolted from the west coast to hunker down in New England. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but it’s clear we live on in the memories of others.

Mr. Hernandez notes the commodification of Dio de los Muertos; inevitable, given the logic of late capitalism. I’m heartened by seeing the way it’s celebrated by folks I respect: focusing on remembrance rather than branded tequila 😉 . I vote in favor of Anglos screwing up Cinco de Mayo (afaik, not an important day in Mexico anyhoo) and keeping the first days of November for our ancestors.

A day after reading the L.A. Times piece, I was driving around listening to the latest Aria Code. I like opera (blame Bugs – seriously), but in the most naive way possible. I rarely have any idea what’s going on and almost never know what the lyrics mean. Aria Code is a great listen for someone in my shoes. I don’t retain everything, but for the duration of the podcast the hidden depths are revealed and I love it. The ep I was listening to was “Potion, Emotion, Devotion: Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde“. It’s an exploration and explication of Isolde’s final aria: the Liebestod (literally lovedeath).

But what is actually going on at the end of the opera – Isolde is not talking about death at all. she never says the word ‘death’. It’s this hallucination of Tristan being still alive. … It’s not about death, it’s about life. it’s about the memory of a person whom Isolde is bringing to life in her own mind. – Alex Ross, New Yorker music critic

So there you have it! Living on in the memory of others – the only reliable afterlife.

Still adventuring

Posted on January 30, 2020 by John P

A brief post to let y’all know that after a fun-filled summer and fall with H, J, and the grandkiddos, I am back out on the road. There are 4 of us: myself, Dinah the old DK/GSP, Lotte the #adventureteckel, and introducing! Maisie the v small #adventureteckel. We’re currently at Arcosanti (pictured above) trying to decide where to head next. More, when I’m motivated to write, but we’ve had puppy bonding and friend meeting in Austin, Christmas with family in Los Angeles, dinner with S & T in Tucson, big mine tour fun in Bisbee with S, the AZ Falconers Desert Classic at Biosphere 2 in Oracle AZ (I took a cottontail with Dan D.’s Harris’ Hawk!) and a best possible afternoon with L & D (back) in Tucson!

The partners in crime:

Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

"It's easy enough to stand still. The difficulty is to walk without touching the ground."