Tests failed, Tests passed.

 The last months the bulk of my energy has gone into my new day job that i started in the second week of June. The job has been tough. It has taken a lot of my willpower to keep doing it. I have felt at times like I am hanging on my fingernails.

I am a very spiritual attitude towards it.  I have this conviction that everything about this job is a test. In fact it has felt weirdly like a reprise of all the tests I have failed over the last twenty years in various jobs. The little bit of grace I have gotten in this job seems to be from the few tests. I actually passed. For this reason I must see it through, or else I will get these same tests again, only harder. That's the way it works. if you kick the can down the road, it only gets more difficult.

My job entails being in charge of a team of four engineers. The fact that it is management is important to me. But it is difficult in part because the engineers live on the other side of the world. Even keeping weird hours, they do most of their work during the night here. So to get a jump on things, and not look like an idiot on the management call in the morning here, I have been getting up at 2:30 AM. It lets me do some work in uninterrupted concentration, because once the day starts, it is impossible to devote any time to concentration. My time may be borrowed at any time. I hate it. 

The hour between 3 AM and 4 Am belongs to me. I make coffee and drink it. I linger in prayer, and read a Bible passage that I find in the Bible I got for my confirmation, which remained pristine for years, and then grew very ragged during 2011-2012 while I drove around the country in a spiritual crisis. The worn cover reminds me of those times.  Among the prayers I pray is to be able to do my job well.

How my life would have been different had I been so conscientious all this time, I think. 

The job tires me out so that by Friday afternoon I am exhausted, in a good way, the way working people are. This despite the fact that it is optional for me to go into the office most days (part of the grace granted to me by passing previous tests, by being responsible while working remotely). 

War and Rumors of War

 As I write this, in the third week of June 2023, I can say that this is perhaps the most tense time in my lifetime, as far as the public mood. 

Rumors of war and chaos swirl. 

Would there be anyone who be terribly shocked if, by the end of the summer:

1. the U.S. were in an open hot conflict with China or Russia, or both?

2. the U.S. dollar collapsed after the majority of the world's population goes off the dollar trading standard (which is about to happen)?

3. the U.S. experienced hyperinflation?

4. the stock market collapsed?

5. the real estate market--both commercial and residential-- market collapsed?

6. unemployment skyrocketed?

7. the supply chain of basic goods fell apart?

8. crime in the cities became ten times worse than it currently is, so that these weeks will seem as the "good old days??

These are just for starters. Perhaps none of these things will happen. What is significant is that the expectation of these things being possibly imminent has never ben higher than now. 

How weird it seems, the days, when we could live our lives day by day?

Thinking about these things, I can only throw myself on God's mercy and beg Him to be merciful with us. Collectively as a nation we know we have not lived in accordance with God's will. We have spit in God's face and said that we are our own masters.

How in the midst of this could God be merciful to us, and let us find a way out as a nation, and a world? One sees the rising spirit among the people. Yet this rising up is labeled as the worst, most dangerous, most hateful thing to happen to the country.

I am tempted to pull back from thinking about all this. I need to live my life. I have a new job. I need to go on. I need to take care of myself. It is all I can do. It feels like a failure to do this, a withdrawal from a life long interest in current events.

I am so small. I feel like the least influential person to have walked the earth. In reality, the only power I have is that given to me by God, by His grace, to effect changes in my own life, and in those of others.

Introducing the Godly Physicist

 This is my new personal podcast. This is not connected to the show I do on Badlands, but just me talking to my iPad and uploading the video to Youtube on my personal account. So far they are all short--under ten minutes.

You have begin somewhere.  That's the first hurdle. Jessica told me from an article she read that most people give up after three episodes. I have made it to four. So the second hurdle has been passed. She said most people hit their stride after twenty.  I am determined to keep going no matter what, even if no one watches for a while. I actually got eight views on one of them!

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

One Day in Colorado

 Today I am recovering from a lightning fast one-day trip I made up to Colorado on Friday. I flew up to Denver on Friday morning at 6 AM from Phoenix, gathered a rental car, and drove it to the Denver suburb of Broomfield where I attended the graduation ceremony of my twin nieces Maura and Sarah, who are the daughters of my sister Kate.

It was somewhat of a last minute thing, as I had received their invitations but mislaid them, and when I found them and opened them last Monday, I saw I had but four days if I wanted to attend. I used up a good chunk of airline miles from my credit card getting up there and back. I knew I would regret it sorely if I didn't go.

Fifteen years ago when I started this blog, I was living as a guest at my sister's house on her horse farm outside Boston. Maura and Sarah were delightful little three-year-old girls whom I tossed in the air the minute I met them, having arrived there after a cross country road trip after losing my job in Colorado and setting out into America (again). How long ago it seems, yet only like yesterday.

I hadn't seen any of my family in two years. The pandemic, and politics, had driven a wedge between us. My sister didn't know I was coming until a couple days before.

I was worried that my nieces--who once delighted at my presence--would look at me with the eyes of a stranger, as they seemed to do the last time I saw them, wearing masks in Estes Park, and cowering in fear behind their mother. 

My worries were unfounded. I recognized them in the parking lot of the event center in Broomfield and called out their names. They recognized me and I gave them big hugs, but without throwing them in the air, of course. How I cherish those memories.

I got to spend about two hours in total with all of them before heading back to the airport to catch an evening flight back to Phoenix.

"I need someone to cry at my funeral," I told them, after telling them how beautiful it was to see them.

Maura in particular appreciated that, as she wants to study forensic science in college. 

"You always had. haunted house vibe," I told her.

The Day of a Hundred Broadcasts

After the debacle of last Wednesday's show, it was clear I needed more practice at doing livestreaming on Streamyard.  So on Thursday I logged into my Streamyard account and undertook to practice until I got it right.

On Streamyard, one creates "broadcasts" that can get sent out to the major video platforms, including Youtube and Rumble. That is, one "streams" on Streamyard, but can configure Streamyard to forward the stream in real time to Youtube, for example, so that one is "streaming on Youtube" through a particular channel there.

Spellbreakers get streamed this way via the Badlands Media channel on Rumble. Up until now, Patrick--being the pro--has always been the one to set this up, configuring the time of the broadcast, etc., as well as the unique id keys that one must use (like one-off passwords) to be able to connect into the Badlands Media channel on Rumble.  

Basically Streamyard is the interface you capture the video and audio, and then send it on to Rumble/Youtube. You can broadcast this way live (which is what we do on the air) or make a recording and stream it at some later time to Youtube/Rumble.

We don't stream to Youtube because Youtube does not allow discussion of the topics on Badlands, including "vaccine hesitancy", "election denial", etc.--basically anything that a room full of Trump supporters would talk about. Rumble is much more chill about that.

In order to get better at using Streamyard, I decided Thursday would be the "Day of 100 Stream Recordings" I logged into my personal Streamyard account and went through the process of creating a new broadcast recording. I watched the playback each time, starting from "Test Strean 1"  all the way upwards to one hundred. I took several hours. I learned a ton about what works and what doesn't work, as far as camera angles and microphone position.  I love learning things this way--working out the fundamentals patiently until I get them right.

It isn't the same as doing it live, to be certain. Among other things, I have to learn to time the start of my Streamyard live broadcast with the start of the "show" that goes out on Badlands, which is set up by someone else. I botched that completely on Wednesday, so a lot of people thought the show hadn't started (it hadn't) and probably ditched out. 

I hate giving my audience a bad experience. I very much want them to be entertained, and come away happy they gave an hour of their attention to me.

In Which I Faceplant

 Tonight I did my second-in-a-row solo broadcast on Spellbreakers. Patrick wanetd me to do it completely by myself, setting up the broadcast in Streamyard and initiating it. Not only did I mess that up, so that the show started five minutes later, running without intro music, but I got lost during my own slides. 

Fortunately not many were watching, as Trump was on CNN and Badlands had its own coverage of it running opposite my show, so that regular viewers of Badlands were probably watching one or the other of these. I actually hope few people watch the rebroadcast.

My problem was that I got bored by my own subject material on the air, and I lost my confidence that I was providing any useful information or insights to the audience, whom I felt pain for, listening to me struggle to get to my point.

By the end, I realized what I should have been talking about all along during the broadcast, which is where I hope to pick up next week. Everybody bombs on stage. It's part of the process. Lucky me.

In Which I Solo on the Air

Just before last week's episode of Spellbreakers, Patrick sprung the idea of my doing the show on my own at times when he was unable to do it. In fact he'd canceled two of the three previous episodes, including the one right before the aforementioned Badlands conference as he was traveling. Instead we had showed unconscious to fail to do the show. I was determined that even though I was a newbie at streaming at age 58, and had brought no previously existing fanbase to Badlands as had most of the other show hosts, I could outlast any of the youngsters if I wanted. 

Yesterday before this week's show, Patrick followed through on this idea, sending me text messages telling me he wanted to teach me how to run the platform that we use for multicasting streaming, called Streamyard. As I had learned, using Streamyard allowed one to broadcast to multiple platforms at once, such as Youtube, Rumble, Facebook, etc. Of course we cannot broadcast to Youtube, as Badlands has been banned there because of the topics we cover.  Instead we have become of the biggest channels on Rumble, just as Rumble has taken off as a home for dissident refugees like us.

I'd been using Streamyard for the show since starting in January, but I didn't know much of the details of how it worked, as Patrick had set up each week's broadcast. Now I got a tour behind the scenes by his adding me as an admin to his premium account. It was like seeing the cockpit controls of airplane. He whizzed through the tutorial with me furiously trying to absorb the details and taking scrawling notes. In just ten minutes I was to be on the air by myself. He would listen into the broadcast this week just in case it went south.

My main goal of being on the air by myself, with over a thousand people listening to me live at once, and more thousands to follow from the recording, was to get through it without technical issues. In fact I shared my seven goals with the audience at one point in a Keynote slide:

1. Get through the show without audio and video issues that compromise the broadcast.

2. Fulfill my duty in promoting the sponsors (I love this part).

3. Make Badlands look good.

4. Discuss current events and other content pertinent to the topic of the broadcast and theme of our show.

5. Be entertaining to the audience.

6. Interact with the listeners in the live chat at some point (this is perhaps the toughest part).

7. Make Patrick look like a genius for trusting me to do this.

I mentioned that #5 is the golden rule. If one is entertaining--even in a disaster--then all else is forgiven.

Here then is my solo effort, if you care to listen to it. And make sure to hit the Like button, even if you hate it!

Live on Stage---Yours Truly

 We arrived back home in Scottsdale from our twelve-day voyage refreshed and joyful from the experience. As it was Wednesday afternoon, I had but a few hours to settle in before I had to do my weekly scheduled podcast with Patrick on Badlands called Spellbreakers. I had done one show from the hotel in Santa Fe the week before with my portable we camera.

Then in the last weekend of April, I was able to attends the Badlands conference held in Chandler (a suburb of Phoenix) at which most of the Badlands personnel, including most of the podcasters of the dozen-plus shows, were present. The format of the conference was not individual speakers but panels of various mixes and matches of the presenters. Having been not sure I would attend,  for various reasons, I was late to the party and had placed on several panels already--one on holistic health, and the other on logic. 

The format turned out to be better than I expected. I recognized many folks in attendance who had also been at Patrick's Threadfest conferences in Nashville and in Fort Worth, where I had spoken as a presenter. It was a big reunion, although the crowd skewed slightly younger. Patrick himself was there too, of course, although he was relieved to be just an attendee and not running the show. Among other things, he doesn't have to worry about being stuck with the bill for the rooms that were not booked as part of the package deal with Hilton. 

I left the conference feeling much better about my podcast as a whole, having gotten much encouragement from people I met there who watched the show. In the end, I have the same craving as any performer to be appreciated by fans. One never gets enough of it.

Mr. Badlands Across the Badlands

 It was sad to part company and leave Santa Fe, as I mentioned, but at least we had a little bit of fun left in the trip, which was the trip back home west across New Mexico and eastern Arizona. We'd covered much of this ground in recent years going to and from Colorado on our summer trips, so we wanted to find roads that would be novel to us. We both agreed that the best choice would be to drive west on I-40 then cut down along the El Malpais National Monument, which is a massive long remnant of a volcanic flow--very stunning to behold. We drove up on the limestone cliffs to see the black flow below, like huge black lake of frozen lava. 

Malpais means Badlands, which was a nice tough, as my podcast is on the Badlands Network channel on Rumble. It's fun when life gives you these little ironies.

The scenery beyond that was breathtaking. So little people live in that part of New Mexico. We thought we had discovered one of the most beautiful parts of North America. It was easy to want to make this route part of our regular wanderings. 

We spent the night in Springerville, Arizona, near where John Wayne once owned a ranch. We'd been to Springerville before, but had not stayed the night. Jessica, as she is so good at doing, found a restored vintage motel, which is our favorite type of place to stay.  As we dined on steaks at a local cowboy bar, in aged booths that could use a good renovation themselves, the local regulars were watching the Phoenix news channels. 

"If you lived here, why would you ever want to go live in Phoenix?" I said to Jessica. She agreed with the sentiment. Of course the answer to that question is easy: Costco.

Pilgrimmage to Atomic City

 For our last full day in Santa Fe, the plan had been floated to drive up to Taos to visit the pueblo. I wasn't so keen on that, as I'd visited in previously and had no desire to return. The pueblo is beautiful but a visit there would be a long drive both directions, and while one is there on the site, it involves going inside people's adobe houses which are one gift shop after another.

Thankfully I was able through modest efforts to persuade a change of plans involving a more modest excursion from Santa Fe to places I was excited to revisit from ten years ago, namely the Valles Caldera, which is among my favorite overlooked place in North America. Did you know that there is a huge volcanic caldera that covers a huge chunk of northern New Mexico, and that it is spectacular? 

On the flanks of this ancient blow-out volcano sits a small town which sprung up on the site of a boy's camp in 1942, and where scientists gathered for wartime research. Of course this is Los Alamos--both the laboratory and the town. 

We made a fun day of it, driving up to the caldera into the snow and pines. The three others of the party were thankful we had made the trip. It is a marvelous experience in late winter. Then we descended into Los Alamos town, cutting through the laboratory grounds the back way which was new to me. There is a smattering of old buildings to see associated with the project and we walked among them.  I had talked extensively about the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos on recent episodes of my podcast show Spellbreakers, so it was fun to see the place with those fresh eyes of knowledge. 

We followed up by a visit to the Bradbury Science Museum on atomic history (named after a Los Alamos lab director, not the science fiction author). I had remembered the museum as one of my favorite (and free) experiences from my visit in 2013, and it did not fail to live up to that recollection, as all four of us agreed.  For our last dinner together we found a sports pub with an atomic theme and atomic-themed local beers and ales. It was glorious fun climax to our trip, tinged by the sadness that our time together with Rande and Karen had come to a close again.

The St. John's Curriculum in a Nutshell

 

Perhaps my favorite activity we pursued during our stay in Santa Fe was our trip outside the city limits to visit the campus of St. John's College, which is a tiny liberal arts institution, the curriculum of which consists of set rigorous four-year study of the classics, starting with Homer and the Ancient Greeks, and progressing forward in time. Years ago as a young man I had thought of going to St. John's for this very reason, but I had rejected it because they did not accept transfer credits--one had to start from the beginning with everyone else. When I went back to college, I went to a similar tiny liberal arts college (in Oregon) with the specific intent of designing my own St. John's curriculum, which turned into my becoming a physicist.

I had never been to the campus in Santa Fe, even while visiting Santa Fe ten years before during the height of free-styling digital wanderings in the Bimmer. Perhaps it was awkward then, as I would have been going out of nostalgia, wallowing in the past of a decision I had chosen long ago, wondering what might have happened, and regretting not having learned Ancient Greek as I could have. It would have been a backwards-looking visit, and in 2013 I was not backwards looking anymore, for once in my life, but as much in the moment as I had been in my adult life. I was making my way back home to see my parents who were still in good health in their living years. Now I am nostalgic for 2013, not 1985. Loss is part of life.

Instead the visit to St. John's was joyful and forward-looking, because I personally know a young man who is a freshman there--the eldest son of two of my high school friends who married in 2003. He was born soon after. I didn't see much of him growing up, but we have visited Fort Collins several times in the last few years and have met up with my old friends, and thus talked with the young man in question as he came and went during the adult conversation, up into high school, meeting his friends and girlfriend, as one is meant to do at that age.

He had chosen St. John's at a time when he was still a secular Libertarian. He was very much a believer in the principles of Ayn Rand. His father had been so in high school, but in a relaxed curious way without dogmatism. He is too easy going for that, which is why we still get along, even though he voted for the other guy in the last election, and knows who I voted for.

From his mother he gets his fire. She is Finnish. Her grandfather was a Finnish sniper in World War II. She is full of grit. 

At St. Johin's, however, the young man I mention found a home through the ministry of the local parish of an Eastern Orthodox church. Several months ago he told me about his conversion, after having read Plato in his first semester. He was recently baptized during the Orthodox Easter. 

He was at St. John's that day, as it was spring break and most of the students had decamped elsewhere, as students should do. For his spring break, he had gone to Arizona, swapping states with us, to stay at an Orthodox monastery about a hundred miles south of here. Later he said he plans to return there each year. His conversion has been worrying to his mother. I am pleased to feel like I am encouraging him to explore Orthodoxy, and to have converted. I think he will lead many souls to Christ by his evangelism.

My young friend out of town was probably for the best. I did not want to drop into his life at that moment. Perhaps next summer, when school is out of session. 

We settled for a delightful snow-day adventure to the campus, the four of us, where we went inside the student center and into the campus bookstore, which was a glorious place to visit, especially on a day with the snow coming down outside.

I relished going to the back of the store to see the wooden cubby-holes with the photocopied packets of the seminar materials for the the freshman through senior classes. There was the curriculum, laid out completely. I read every label, taking it in as a glance. I purchased a small volume of physics essays by Max Planck in the used section by the counter, where the pristine color-coded Loeb classics in Greek, Latin, French, and Sanskrit sit on shelves directly next to the painkillers and toiletries found in the college bookstore I remembered from 1983.  Alma mater.

A Study of Chiles in Snowfall

 We stayed five nights total in Santa Fe, the four of us in two rooms side by side. The snow came in a glorious soft coatings over several nights, and at times in the day. The snow looked so beautiful coming down around the colorful chiles that were hung throughout the narrow interior courtyard of the hotel. I photographed and took videos of them in fascination. 

Over the course of our stay we made an aggressive effort to experience the core set of tourist attractions of Santa Fe, including the old churches (including the "miracle staircase"). It being Lent, and all four of to some degree being Christian pilgrims of varying denominations, we lingered long in the St. Francis cathedral and the nearby garden of the Stations of the Cross, although none of us were Catholic. 

We visited the state capitol as well, on a day in which the legislature was in session and the lobby was crowded with groups of young people who had shown up to advocate for some type of cause which I never learned. This is apparently how it works these days, with social media. 

Nor did we neglect the museums. I passed on the local art museum--it turned out to be underwhelming by report of Rande and Jessica, but made sure to explore the history museum which is located on the old plaza inside the ancient headquarters of the Spanish territorial governor. It was an excellent and well organized museum. 

One thing that struck me about the museum--and likewise the one in Albuquerque--was that it was not overly woke and laden with political hectoring by ideological crusading museum keepers, as has become the style over the last twenty years. The sections on the Spanish conquest were nuanced. The Spanish did "oppress" the Indians, but it was not a black-and-white issue in the exhibits. I knew this is because the heritage of the state of New Mexico includes wealthy and powerful white Spanish families going back to that time. They do not feel like they need to cast themselves as the bad guys, as do the non-Hispanic white elite of America, who are ready to throw themselves en masse into the sacrificial fire of historical oblivion over the sins of the ancestors (or other people's ancestors, if need be). 

In this way the historical museums of New Mexico may be among the finest still existing in the country, not yet overrun by these disgusting "neo-virtuous" trends of museum curation. They remind me of the old ways, down to the loving display of the history of Fred Harvey and his restaurants.

Nor did we neglect the galleries of contemporary art that line Canyon Road. Nor did we neglect the local bookstores--I unearthed a treasure on cosmic rays at the one across the street from the old Santa Fe depot.

Nor did we neglect the new cuisine, driving for lunch out into the snow-laded hills to dine at the restaurant japanese spa.  Japan and Santa Fe. In snow, they are perfect for each other.

It was impossible to capture the magic of the snowflakes as they swirled around the chiles in a still photograph. I had to settle for the slickness of the courtyard pavement to manifest their presence.

Los Poblanos and Ranchettes

 After the second night in Albuquerque at the charming El Vado Motel, we checked out and headed north out of the city on a side road. Karen wanted to see the Rio Grande itself, so we found a city park that allowed us to walk down to the river through a small woods on a level footpath. Her recent knee surgery allowed her more mobility and was keen to use it. Then we drove northward along the river through the relaxed Albuquerque suburbs to have lunch at working farm-inn called Los Poblanos, which Jessica had visited many years before and was excited to revisit. She had made reservations for us. I became fascinated by the antiquated tractor that was on display in the courtyard and took photos of its oil pressure and gas gauges, as that is the kind of thing I love. I reminds me of working on Volkswagens with my father in the 1970s. 

After lunch we separated from Rande and Karen, following our navigation through the ranchettes along the river north of the city, admiring the relaxed feel of them, and thinking that nothing so relaxed as this could be found anywhere in Scottsdale at a comparable price. After pushing north along the river as far as possible on these back roads, we got onto the freeway and headed north to Santa Fe, where we navigated to our hotel in downtown near the plaza, which Jessica had booked. By then the sky was growing a bit nasty with the threat of snow. I loved the idea that we would get snow. I wanted the weather that way while I was there.

Our New Mexico Trip -- Day Five: Albuquerque

 At the evening of day five we checked into the El Vado Motel in Albuquerque, a refurbished motel on old Route 66,  right in the heart of the city near where it crosses the Rio Grande (hence the Spanish name, which means ford). Albuquerque is the most "Route 66-ish" big city along the old route, in preserving the character of that old road and its place in America. 

There we linked up with Jessica's folks--his father and his wife, who had flown from New Jersey to meet us. The motel was pleasant and lively. We dined at a local downtown indoor hipster food mall, where we selected the dishes we each wanted from the various indoor vendors, and ate in the pleasant courtyard. The next day we went to the Albuquerque Museum, which was a very nice experience. At a nearby farm-to-market-style grocery (Jessica loves those kind of places), I noticed a "free library" on the counter by the cash register. It had a sign encouraging people to take the books. From my experience, one is doing a service that way, as there is usually not enough space for the donated books.  I took the copy of the Signet paperback edition of Hamlet, well-worn and marked up by its original owner many years ago from a college class, including the date and location of the final examination written in the inside flap. It's the kind of treasure I love finding. It is sitting on my shelf next to me as I type this, next to other titles in that particular Shakespeare paperback series. Someday I will own them all..

Albuquerque was very relaxed. Such a nice change of place from Phoenix. I liked it so much better than I did ten years before when I last visited, and found New Mexico too rough-hewn for my taste. Like Las Cruces, I was now ready to move there---the last place in America with slack. Thank God it exists.

Sweet Home Portlandia

Apparently, judging from the Twitter posts I actually am motivated to make, I am still an Oregonian, still a Portlander.

Arizona has easy problems. Everything flows from the fact that the elections here are crooked. 

By contrast, Oregon is a sort of a basket case, as it always has been mostly, but it got its act together for a while after Tom McCall. I got to see the best of those years, and left just when it started to go bad in a way that is only getting underway.

I feel compelled to stay in the fight going on there. Who'd have known that my heart and soul belonged there still? When others give on something is usually when my interest turns towards it. 

I'll never move back there, though, at least not to anywhere west of the Cascades. The looming threat of the giant earthquake makes me think everyone who stays there is volunteering to be part of a mass human sacrifice event at some point. No thanks. So long as she still exists, however, I will love that place they came to call Portlandia until I die. I chose it, and now it still chooses me. 

Our best show yet?

 Lastest episode of Spellbreakers. We got twenty downvotes, which is over twice as many as we usually get. It' also as many as other Badlands shows get but which also get five times as many upvotes as our show. We must be doing something right. Got a note from a friend/listener who said it was best show yet, me being the straight man to Patrick.  

Our New Mexico Trip --- Day Four : Trinity

Crossed the Jornada del Muerto desert, going west from  Ruidoso back to the Rio Grande Valley. Why'd they have to scratch out Oppie's name? Shame on them!

Our New Mexico Trip -- Day Three: White Sands, Alamagordo and Cloudcroft

Las Cruces, as a small agricultural college town, reminded me much of my hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado in the 1980s. It was relaxed and open, and comfortable. It was hard to leave it so soon, but in after our second night we checked out and drove northeast across the White Sands Missile Range, where the highway is sometimes still closed for missile tests. 

Our destination was the White Sands National Park, where one can leave the highway and drive out into the dunes. I didn't expect to love it so much. The gypsum sands, even shifting so as to threaten the road, are indeed about as white as they come. It was a moderate spring day. We parked at one of the pullouts and enjoyed several hours of sitting in one of the shelters. Jessica made sketches in her sketch books while I took notes in my notebook of the thoughts going through my head. There were many families with children, who love to sled on the dunes. It felt like being at the beach but without an ocean. It was as peaceful as I have felt in a long time. We were glad we had gotten there early, as the line coming into the park at the entrance was ferocious by the time we left.

From there we drove into Alamagordo, which is an interesting town. There is no downtown really. Just businesses along a highway, and lots of low income housing and poverty. Not a place that one would find easy to live. We meandered through the city, even attempting to visit the World's Largest Pistachio, a monument outside a roadside stand which turned out to be smaller than we expected. In fact, Jessica had thought it was a real pistachio that was oversized. It looks better on the postcards than in real life. 

The most interesting thing in town is the New Mexico Space Museum, which has an outdoor permanent exhibition of parts of rockets and missiles that were tested decades ago at the nearby White Sands Missile Range. 

From there we drove up into the mountains, which are the last bit of the Rockies going eastward, the last mountains until the Ozarks. We stopped at the Old Apple Barn and had some coffee and pecan pie and then found our motel in the mountain community of Cloudcroft, which is like a Colorado ski town. We had dinner at the Cloudcroft Brewing Company, a local pizza brew pub which was lively. I enjoyed their imperial stout (I always order the darkest beer). The ski season was just ending. It's always a good time to visit places like this. It was nice to see snow still on the ground. 

Outdoor exhibit of a rocket engine at the New Mexico Space Museum in Alamagordo

The Old Apple Barn on the way up to Cloudcroft

Our New Mexico Trip -- Day Two: Las Cruces

We spent two nights in Las Cruces so as to be able to spend an entire day exploring the city, which was new to both of us. The hotel was a modern Holiday Inn Express which was crammed full of high school sports teams for the weekend. They put us right over the entrance so we heard the door opening and closing all night. Nevertheless the next day was spectacular. We went downtown in the morning to see the weekend street market on Main Street. The biggest prize there was discovering a fabulous used book store, COAS Books, which had one of the best science sections I have seen in years, no doubt helped by the presence of New Mexico State University in town. I picked up a number of treasures. In the afternoon we headed over to the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum, which was a terrific experience. Indoors was a wonderful exhibit on the nearby White Sands Missile Range, going through the history of rocketry. Outside we got a tour of the livestock and the vintage farm equipment. I could only think how much labor has been saved by the devices which have invented to cultivate and harvest crops.  They also had one of the best explanatory exhibits about dairy products I have ever seen. We found Las Cruces to be relaxed and accessible. By the end of the first day, I was almost ready to move there.

Our New Mexico Trip -- Day One: Stagecoach Territory

 Day One: Scottsdale via Globe on US-60 through the Apache Reservation, where we detoured on side roads to San Carlos, the town that is the Reservation "capital', the roads were full of yellow poppies from the rains. Stopped in Safford for lunch at a vintage hamburger stand we found, that had advertised in billboards on the highway.  In the afternoon, we made it to Lordsburg, New Mexico on I-10. It is not much of a town. I knew about it because it is mentioned in Stagecoach (1939), which is the movie that made John Wayne a star. It had been many decades since I was this way, in fact since May 1988 when I drove up from Texas to Oregon to go my college graduation ceremony. Going over ground like this feels like reawakening old parts of myself. Going East on I-10 we crossed the "continental divide", which there is just a plateau that separates the watershed of the Gila/Colorado (Pacific) from the Rio Grande (Atlantic). In the afternoon we checked into our hotel in Las Cruces, which is on the Rio Grande. It is small city, but was the largest population center since we left the Phoenix Valley

The Taylor Freeze in Pima, AZ (location). 

How to Hack Your Brain to Learn Science

 Spellbreakers from last week. Learn Matt's "Lazy Way" to master scientific topics in a short period of time.

The Desert Blooms for a Time

 Winter has turned into Spring. It was a wet winter, the wettest since we came to Arizona. The desert turned green with lushness and the rabbits multiplied ferociously. The green grass then turned brown quickly but the yellow flowers remain, and from eye level, the desert looks like a lush meadow.

I am still doing Spellbreakers with Patrick. We are on episode fourteen, as of last week. It has become somewhat of a challenge to keep up the theme that Patrick wanted, of "exposing scientific flim flam." The title makes me cringe. Patrick wants red meat. He has much more heretical views about science than I do. Every week is a challenge.

The show sucked up nearly all my creative energy until recently, including this blog. In the meantime, Jessica took a couple interesting road trips. In January we went up to Sedona to stay at a lodge that is in a canyon. The name escapes me now, but it is a spectacular way to spend a couple days. Then last month we took a two week trip to New Mexico that I will write a post about, which has become one of those trips that has shifted the course of my life somewhat. That is the best thing about road trips, and travel in general, is when it can do that. It doesn't always work, but when it does, it is spectacular. Last year's trip to Europe was the most transformative such experience in years, which is why I tried to write about it, and as usual, never finished the story. I stopped when I was in Poland. But that leaves out the rest of the trip. I will have to summarize that as well. It becomes more easy to summarize such experiences with time. When one tries to write about them in the heat of the moment, there is too much detail to describe. The essence of the experience becomes clear only after time.

The view walking in my "undeveloped desert" as of a couple weeks ago.