JHFARR.COM

It sure is easier to praise some people when they’re dead. Not to be crude, but as a practical matter—when their bad side isn’t around to give you grief, you know? My aunt was an amazing, highly accomplished woman with friends all over the world. Independent when it wasn’t fashionable, she didn’t get married until she was 56. But when it came to family, while she was generous and attentive and my favorite aunt, she never had a lick of empathy and could no more deal with an emotional issue than fly to the moon. It was so much harder dealing with her in the later years, which I guess is something anyone who knows me can look forward to. No, wait, I’m in my later years!

Above is another photo from the Crosshill Road hoard. Judging from the rolled up cuffs on the short-sleeve shirts and her wearing glasses, I’d put this one in the late 1950s. The guy on the right is attaching the tow hook. I don’t know what the guy on the left is doing, but he’s the pilot and maybe something else besides. Oh, that aunt of mine. That thing on the nose of the glider is a pitot tube used to measure airspeed. You’re probably impressed. I’m sure I learned that from my dad, who had a lot in common with his sister. [cough] That must be her purse in the grass. I hope she didn’t leave it!

But I’m feeling prouder by the minute when it comes to all these idiots. Seriously. They’re my idiots, by God, and only I can call them that with honor. Now that they’ve finally left me alone, I can celebrate a few things. Besides the fact that no one’s driving me crazy, I mean. I can appreciate my aunt’s accomplishments, what she gave of herself to make a difference. In private moments I may even feel envy. To the world I now say, yep, that’s my aunt. Taught nursing at Hopkins, bro! Died solid and respected, even loved. Way to go, guys (the old man, too).

I’ve never been up in one of those things myself, either.

Damn.

Who are these people? I found this in the vast horde of uncataloged photos I rescued from my late Aunt Mary’s house in Maine. They look like long-ago relatives of mine—there must be some shared DNA—but I have no idea. Maybe my upstate New York kin? And look at that guy’s hands!—are those farmer hands or what? What kind of a party is this? What in God’s name is that woman in the background wearing on her face?!?

Right now there’s a 4 ft high stack of boxes, plastic bins, and one old suitcase behind me where I’m sitting. That’s what’s left of the horde. You wouldn’t believe how much I found. Freaking tons of stuff: Maryland in the ’30s, WWII in the South Pacific, people I don’t know, all kinds of family shots I’d never seen because someone other than my father took the picture, etc. My aunt was quite the baker and must have invited every nonagenarian in East Vassalboro over to celebrate their birthdays. Naturally she took photos and ordered prints for everyone. (New ones, not like the above.) There were so many duplicates that I eventually just gave up and had to toss a million photos of old ladies eating pies!

There was more than just old photos. When Aunt Mary was a U.S. Army nurse in Australia during WWII, she picked up lots of lots of souvenirs, or tried to; I found an old letter apologizing for the lack of any Aussie tourist trinkets other than opals and kangaroo skins. So guess what I’m looking at right now? KANGAROO SKINS, can you believe it? Here I am at 7,000 ft in Taos, NM in 2013, five days before my birthday, with a couple of wallaby pelts as old as I am. Ack! There’s also a boomerang, I swear to God, with kookaburras, no less. See?

Carved by aborigines for the tourist trade?

That’s a little one, about 14 inches across. When I was 16, I found a couple of bigger ones in my grandmother’s attic. My father and I went across the road to a high school athletic field to try them out. (Of course he knew just how to throw the damned things.) Pretty cool, though! They do “come back” if you haven’t whacked your rabbit with it, but it’s this vicious whirling instrument of death you have to duck. No doubt there are drunken Aussie daredevils or sly natives who snatch them out of the air, but don’t try this at home.

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?

No, we’re not exactly underwater here, although Albuquerque got hit with a monster storm the other day. But there hasn’t been a summer like this for a few years.

The way it works (when it does work) in the desert southwest is, humid air sweeps up from Mexico and we have thunderstorms in the afternoon or night almost every day for a number of weeks. This can happen with such regularity that long stretches go by without our being able to sit outside at cocktail hour, plus it gets cold for summer evenings, often 60 °F or below at this altitude. The rain is rarely heavy—there are exceptions with flash floods—but the air is still so dry, whatever falls chills things down via evaporative cooling. We often put on warmer clothes about the time the sun goes down, in any case. The thing is though, once the monsoons kick in, it’s almost never hot again that year. We’ll have some upper 90s in early June, and then that’s it. No mas.

The same so-called monsoon rains aren’t quite the same in hotter places such as Tucson. I’ll probably never be there again this time of year, or ever—but it will drop from say 110 °F to 95 and you’ll get sweaty and swat mosquitos while floods roar through the arroyos and over the roads. The latter is a hoot to witness, anyway. People stand out in the street and watch!

Usually it rains so seldom here—like almost never—that when it does, I have to remind my wife how to work the windshield wipers. (Now that’s dry.) Sometimes you see drivers going really slow because the road is wet. It’s like, “What the hell is this?” Also, their wipers probably don’t work because the rubber’s dry and cracked.

Finally, in case you’re wondering, most of the annual precipitation in el Norte comes as snow… Urk. Yes, that’s right. Last year I built my first fire of the season in late August. It can happen. I’m sitting here right now, in fact, on July 29, in long pants and sleeves with the front door open, and last night I had to close two of our three windows. These days you can tell the tourists from the locals pretty easily, because the former are the ones out in the morning wearing shorts.

»Buy This Photo!«