Cinco de Mayo & my new 'typewriter minute book'

Durango's Del Alma had a Cinco de Mayo celebration today out at the Sky Ute Casino.  As soon as we got there, I got a couple of carne asada tacos at the Tacos Nayarit stand.  Just as we were finishing them up a wind shear came through like a knife, carrying such force that several vendors' stalls were demolished.  Two ambulances carried off a couple of injured people.

When things settled down a dance group from Tamaulipas performed 

We decided to walk through the casino to see if there was anything else to eat, but it was too depressing and I couldn't breathe very well, so we headed to Bayfield...

Statue at the entrance of the Sky Ute Casino

Serving the Southern Ute Tribe

Old cabin in Bayfield

There are several places to dine in Bayfield right in town, but we ended up in "nuvo Beighfield" to eat at a barbecue place new to us but had apparently been there two years.  On the way home we stopped at a little consignment place in Gem Village, where I got this here great book for $5.  I have since been googling "typewriter minute book" and the name of the company, but nothing whatsoever can be found.

The Urban Verb's garden...

Spring is here in SW Colorado by the Florida River, but if anything wants to grow it will have to do so on its own.  While I am good at creating book gardens, I am completely daunted by how one might create the manicured-natural-out-of-doors-made-with-plants variety.  In this photo we see an enclosed space next to an unused chicken coop that one day COULD be a vegetable garden or something (or so people keep telling me.)  How does one go about doing that? Dig up the grass and weeds?  Hmn.  That should be fun as the grass roots around here go down about 6 feet. Then I guess you need to do something with the dirt.  Rake it or something.  Make rows?  Pile them up?  Add fertilizer?  When does water go on, before or after the seeds, plants, or whatnot go in?  If we ever wanted to raise chickens, would this be a bad idea for the garden?  Do chickens run around gardens?  Is chicken poop good or bad for plants?  Do chickens eat carrots?  I have no idea.
Urban Verbs: the only one of you

Purple something-in-the-yard

Now if you walk around our estate further, you will see there IS some nice foliage apparently growing on its own.  Like some iddy biddy little purple somethings-or-other.

Peonies.  Maybe.

Useda-be poppies

Plus we have peonies that never, ever, ever grow into anything much.  There was one year, like in 1989, when they produced one glorious bloom.  Since then, bupkis.  There are also a bunch of poppies that have been mowed over so many times that they too have forgotten how to produce blooms.

To my credit, I HAVE planted columbine in a few places, and they seem to forgive my lack of skills and do what natural things are supposed to do, i.e., NATURALLY grow and survive.  I mean, (the Urban Verb asks) isn't that what nature does?  Isn't that what makes it natural?

Something else I have planted that returns obediently and independently year after year: chives.  (Nota bene, JTH out there near Keystone-at-the-Crossing: If chives grow out here in the Urban Verb's garden, they can grow anywhere.  Maybe even in people's closets in their shoes.  Maybe we should give it a try):

Everything that grows here, including the eponymous chokecherry, grows by a river, which encourages everything along even when I can't.  I was looking into it for fish today, but I think they know how to lie quietly and blend in with stuff.  Moss and sticks and stones and whatnot. 

 I took a picture of the steps going down to the river (That's me on the right--I don't know what the hell that shadow is on the left--maybe a bear or something):

Here's further down, where the steps go up (if you're already down)...  

And the house this morning, just after I picked up the morning paper...

 Beware of mountain lions...

A year later....

Ok yes so I lost this blog for a year, which just goes to show a) the silly busy-ness of it all; b) how hard it is to remember Google usernames and passwords; c) how sensitive I am to friends' comments ("You?  A blog?  I hate it!"); and d) how little I have to say that is say-able to the public, albeit one that is extremely small.  What bounced me back into this was Aunt Snow's hospital post in her Doves Today blog about what it's like to have diverticulitis.  Hoses and knotted skeins formed into the shape of a large intestine.  Reminded me a bit of my own guts, although they haven't flared up like that and the issues are elsewhere.  My innard problems aren't columnar, either, but the idea that something other is going on inside than appears on the outside is a powerful one that is a physical version of Dorian Gray's psycho-moral reversion.  Lots of people are hurting worse than I am (in fact, I have no big complaints at all, I'm just thinking).  Like BI who told me yesterday that the plate in her neck has come apart and that she will have to have her neck re-fused so that metal doesn't hit the spinal cord.  Her pain won't be reduced, but she'll have less of a chance of being injured or paralyzed.  Or Ladykate, who writes to say there are lumps on her thyroid that have to be checked out.  Maybe they'll have to take the whole thing.  This while in the midst of teaching and helping people in bad shape who have been treated like animals while trying to cross the Arizona border.

She probably feels like her insides look like a map of that lovely border area, where all kinds of biopsies ought to be taken and aggressive cancers removed.  I suppose then, thinking about it, that I didn't write for a year in this blog because I couldn't how to incorporate Red's loss into it.  He would have enjoyed helping me find my voice and vision in this thing, but instead he only had time in July to take me to his closet so that I might pick out any books I wanted to take home.  I couldn't bring myself to do it, as if taking a book would rob him of a few extra pages of his own life, which would come to an end in October.  Red Bird's Blog

Alaska

The Alaskan was different.  Firmer, a tad fishier, like it had been swimming upstream all its born days.  But which one was it?  King?  Coho?  I miss Alaska.  We went there every summer for four or five years in a row and I barely learned anything about it.

Whither anthropology...?

It's feeling a lot like something other than humanism.  Unless it/we/they renew the challenge to unite the "sides" that should not have been separated in the first place under the original liberal arts.   I spent an hour talking with a biological anthropologist this morning, realizing that our world views are extremely different.  Is she less an "anthropologist" because of it, or is she the historically "truer" anthropologist while I'm a Boasian latter-day critical postcolonialist?  And what does it matter?  What do students learn from me?  What do I learn from them?  I feel the need growing to write a new book.  It's hard to focus, however.  My brain is cluttered like Dr. Sologueren's collection, jumping today from Manthropology to space renovation to safe space training to Native elders' assessment of Alray to presidential hubris to Native American sociology majors to sexual assault in the dorms to applied environmental health methods to taste testing Alaskan wild vs. Scottish farmed washed down with a mellow Valpolicello.  

Anthropology of Gender Winter 2011

The term ended well for most of the students and for most of me.   It was grueling in a lot of ways made all the worse by the embedded nature of the gruel.  Time taken from teaching by committees and interviewing for a position that still is not filled.  Embedded within that process are professional, generational, irritational, pedagogical, and other matters tied to labor relations, employment expectations, and what might be called viral feminist aftershock no longer pertaining only to women.  In fact, women might be sorry they pushed for some of these issues.  I am being vague.  Viva la vague.  Until I'm ready to discuss this and many other things, I will just keep laughing about something I saw on "The Office" tonight:

Am I back?

After several months I am writing again.  I thought that I had lost everything and was surprised at how perturbed I felt about this.  So not much writing will take place here until I know...something.... I'll explain the headstone later.