Home at last…

I am home, the op was a success, and I am fine. Many thanks for every good thought and prayer. The battery goes in a week from tomorrow, and the programming a week after that. Only physical effect was a lingering headache where AIR got into my brain… really. The grinding when they drilled into …

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This year’s Boletes

Not a great year– the southern San Mateos, our main source, were a bit drier than we’d like– but we got a gallon of dried, first adequate harvest in 8 years. The photos span the trip down and back up the Plains of St Augustin  by the VLA; flowers, like the white poppies, show we …

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Carl Rungius painting

An unusual one, from the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, for “our” exhibition (be patient!), courtesy of the Museum and Kevin Sharp. Also the locked skulls that inspired Rungius. I found this letter from Rungius in a book I bought, unmentioned…

Countdown

As many of you know, at 6 AM on Monday, Agust 10,  I go “under the knife”  for the Direct Brain Stimulation operation— well, more like the drill, sitting up, awake if not wide awake (6 AM at University Hospital in Albuquerque means leaving here before 4 AM, and I don’t think that will be …

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Murmuration

Actually not the right collective noun exactly though it appears to have become the “meme”– that word again– the one that you can use to find all kinds of bird “herd mind” videos on YouTube. HT to my old bird hunting friend Jeff Ball in Bozeman…

Big Feet

The trail camera Guy Boyd bought me caught these rather alarming images in the Wilson’s yard up Muleshoe south of town last week. Perhaps, if only for the peace of mind of their old Lab Aero, they had best not fill the Raven feeders for a while…

Quote

Via Jim Spencer: “”Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?” (James Joyce)

“Better than Bacon”

This painting, in which Carl Rungius does his own version of a Charley Russell theme, is in the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole. Most of Rungius’s late great oils  have a distinctive theme or style, which I characterized rudely to two of my friends, art historian Jim Moore and museum curator Toby …

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