Thursday, December 28, 2006 11:52 AM
It is cloudy, windy and raining sometimes today. A first in my experience down here in Q, but Phil and
Ed says that it is not unusual for this time of year. So I am holed up working on the website and on glyph pictures and ordering the panels for our test from Harbor Freight.
I had many pictures in the small Camera (Fuji) form yesterday and this morning. Since the petroglyphs are not for everyone, I'm putting them here from now on as I add discoveries or new information. I'll make a permanent navigation bar on the left of all the commonsense pages later. For now click here to see yesterday's glyphs and new stone grinding basin.

Here's my brother yesterday walking from the petroglyph site, across the wash to the hill where the grinding basins are located.	Above: This morning I'm enjoying my first senior discount coffee. I think my hair looks grayer. My brother is smirking to the right. He forced me to ask for it at the counter, and they told the serving wench that I was really old and too embarrassed to beg for senior discount. He had no problem at all, which explains a lot about why the way things are.
	Not fair! Phil who is only 43 got a senior coffee without asking. Phil's tied only loosely to the earth in many ways, and to the society not at all, so of course he will not have lasting emotional trauma from this event, whereas I will be writing poetry and friends who will say "you don't look that old, hell you don't look a day over 56!" Check out Phil's page by clicking here!

In each of us there is an organizing animal. Some of us give it more rein than others. Brother and I saw this on the way back from the petroglyph site. I just had to capture it for you.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006 8:20 PM
Man o' man, this freechicken living gets very busy sometimes. Today was not a research day, it was a doing day. My solar panels for the test system did not get ordered and many other things on the list were pushed back. I did get water, went to coffee in the morning with Ed. Met my brother and went to the petroglyph site and watched him shoot professional pictures with a D200 Nikon with a lens bigger than my, my, um, arm (Mike - he said it was camera of the year last year). Below are a reduced sample of just a few. For those waiting for the CD of the original images - I have the pictures in RAW format and will make jpeg images of them at a size that will fit onto one CD. I put the images from his 2Gig flash cards onto three CD's in the largest size, RAW. Each image is 15 to 20 mb in size, so you'll have plenty of detail to enhance. In the few below I just made a few adjustments to improve the contrast as little pictures. Then I'm off to finally get to your email. Sorry for the length of the page - it is getting long, I'll break it up tomorrow morning. My sister-in-law is ill and was not able to go with us to the petroglyph site. We're hoping for a full recovery because there is a foot print in sandstone said to be very very old about 4 miles away that Phil will take us too. The evening meal was me cooking steaks for Phil and Ed in the Safari, which tasted great.

I've darkened these two. The one above was visible a little to my cheaper camera, but the one to the left was at the top of the bluff and completely hidden. Only because we had weird desert weather with clouds filtering the bright sun, could I see this one. In fact we found two more grind holes (metates), and two additional sets of petroglyphs. That brings the number of grind holes to eight for this site. If you're a member of my free chicken mailing list and if your interested in getting a CD of the petroglyphs let me know by email. You'll have to pay the cost of the postage and the CD. If you're not a member of the free chicken mailing list, well, you should be. Email me to get on the list or if you have a friend who deserves to be reading this blog - yeah take that just the way you just thought.

Above - one of the many grind holes - this is the 2nd one of 5 at the largest site, across the wash from the petroglyphs. Not to be leaving on a serious note for the night, but hey, Evalyn, what's that on the figure to the left. I'm too polite and cowed to guess.

Above, the sun was too bright outside and I'm just learning how to control this little Fuji camera that Ed gave me for Christmas! But you can see the kitchen on the left and the bathroom is behind me. The camera is sitting on the bed, and that upholstered thing at the lower right of the picture s a seat (sort of) that covers 6 T-105 Trojan deep cycle batteries, the throbbing heart of my solar electric system.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006 8:27 PM
My brother and his wife, Gail, did arrive here in Q at about 3pm today. I did get the trailer cleaner than it has ever been before. I took a few pictures of the clean desk and clean trailer and will put them up early in the morning. I feel poleaxed. Energy drained flat. Tomorrow will be a blast. We'll be taking great petroglyph pictures, and tonight I've been looking for interpretations. I'm coming up pretty empty on the web, which is odd, as there are a huge number of petroglyph sites in the Southwest. Where are the interpretations? Links anyone? Pictures tomorrow morning. Get some sleep, you've had a hard few days I bet. Night chickies.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006 8:22 AM
It's the day after Christmas. The little market is open again and I can try and get my bracket welded. My brother and sister-in-law are due at noon, and I've got just several projects on the fire for today. My brother is bringing one of his professional cameras and I will get good high resolution photographs of the petroglyphs for those who requested them. I'll put together a CD with the images and information regarding interpretation (if I can actually find good interpretive sites). If any blog reader has links to Pima Indian culture sites or Hoboken please send me the links. Well I've got coffee in hand and will have some more on the solar designs this week of course.
Two changes I have made since coming back into the desert, no TV, and no news, have helped me concentrate on so many other things. I'm a stress puppy during transitions and coming here from my job in Oregon is always a stress. Yet here I have so much more around me and so much to explore. The noise of news and TV is just noise to me. I realized, I can't do one thing about what they are showing me. It's global, its titillating, it already happened and it is so small a snapshot of the larger issues. . It is a one way communication of doom and titillation. I understand doom and what we face, but TV is not preparing us for what comes, only selling advertising and grabbing your attention for a moment. .

I wanted to share so of the silly odd things in my life as they come up, so I'll include my sandal repair from yesterday. I have some Birkenstocks I bought in the 70's. They spent a lot of time immersed in water in Lake Shasta as I used to houseboat there every year. They have since then been beat to death in the desert, and lately I've been riding my bicycle with them and climbing rocks. They are falling apart. But I adapted to them long ago, and they were almost to the point yesterday, having separated one half of a whole sole, that I decided to give them a little shoe goop (glue) to make it just a while longer. So I glued and glued and glued and then used duct tape to hold the glued pieced together. Ridiculous, and this applies to concepts, beliefs as well as things. There is no room for adaptation in my thinking until I finally say, well I need new sandals. There is no room in my thinking when I think all we need to do is tweak the Empire machine a little, and the world will get better. No, the world is past that. Time to get new sandals. Time to get new thoughts, skills and goals.
Have a good day chicklets!