But, c’mon, guys. This is making it too easy.

Disporting itself in public, no less!

Spring has, at least here, at least for the present. Only a fool (and not this one) would state with any [...]]]> It’s long been an axiom of my existence that any word or phrase can be used as a euphemism.

But, c’mon, guys. This is making it too easy.

Disporting itself in public, no less!

Spring has, at least here, at least for the present. Only a fool (and not this one) would state with any confidence we’re not going to get slammed with some kind of awful Arctic storm here directly.

Tonight it’s cloudy and the air smells of rain. Weather radar shows rain appearing to come this way.  That doesn’t mean it’ll actually fall.

There are, or were as of yesterday, at least twenty cranes still hanging out at the RGNC field. This is late in the season for them to still be here.

Rambling?  Yes. Basically I’m just checking in to show I’m still alive. I’m not yet as productive as I need/want to be, but I’m starting to get more writing done. Otherwise … thought I had something significant to say but it’s fallen out of my head.

Oh. Here’s a cute site that lets you write upside (sadly, WordPress won’t.) If you want to screw with people’s heads. And who doesn’t?

Hat tip to Scott Bieser, who put it up on Twitter. Check out his online graphic novels-in-progress Odysseus The Rebel and Escape From Terra. He does great work. He also did the artwork for L. Neil Smith’s wacky and delightful pulp SF alternate-history graphic novel, Roswell, Texas. Which you can read free online in color, or buy the handsome print version (B&W only, sadly, for cost concerns) conveniently here by clicking on the title.

Enough for now. I’m tired. It’s late. I’m off.

It’s a beautiful autumn day. The trees have mostly turned gold. The grass in the RGNC field, which a giant noisy machine was mowing as we left, is still green.  The sky was clear and painfully pure [...]]]> So today Emma and I got an early start for a walk on Bear’s Ditch – before noon!  Yay!

It’s a beautiful autumn day. The trees have mostly turned gold. The grass in the RGNC field, which a giant noisy machine was mowing as we left, is still green.  The sky was clear and painfully pure blue. It was mostly calm, except for a breeze that was all too brief. Because it was cool at my house when we left I went with trousers instead of shorts, and rather regretted it.

I heard cranes almost as soon as I got Emma out of the car.  It took me a while of, well, craning around, but as we walked along the preserve’s southern fence to the ditch entrance I finally saw about a dozen, high up to the south of us, in small groups that joined and broke up again.

Trees line both sides of the ditch for maybe a quarter mile north from Candelaria.  Then they give way to a clear view of the RGNC fields to the west, and on the east a field between the ditch and RGB, for one or two hundred yards. As we neared the end of that I heard a crane cry and looked up to see a solo bird flying not very high overhead. He was evidently lonely, and calling up a storm in his attempts to find his flock.

I felt seriously sorry for him, up there feeling isolated and alone. Though they’re big, formidable birds they clearly rely heavily on the flock for survival, especially on migration. Just as the redoubtable Emma depends on her pack. But I assured him (not that he, or she, could hear me) that in that place and time it was unlikely he’d be alone for long. While they’re not out in the enormous numbers we’re likely to see in just a week or two there are plenty in the area now.

Still, I continued to feel bad, until I heard other voices answering the lone flyer. I looked up to see two more winging to join him. They all seemed relieved to find each other.

So I was happy. And all throughout our walk I continued off and on to hear the cranes.

Such is autumn in Albuquerque.

We also encountered two of the Very Nice Family, namely Mom and Dad, riding their mountain bikes. They were cheerful as always. They greeted me as “the Turtle Guy.”

I’m not sure I want that on my gravestone. Still, there are worse things to be known as.

We went out to walk the bike path and trail that follow the clear ditch that run past the RGNC. It was hot; I was hoping to beat the days’ worst heat by getting out and back before it peaked around 5-6. I reckoned without our high desert sun, which even when [...]]]> That’s basically it.

We went out to walk the bike path and trail that follow the clear ditch that run past the RGNC. It was hot; I was hoping to beat the days’ worst heat by getting out and back before it peaked around 5-6. I reckoned without our high desert sun, which even when the air is cold can heat you up pretty quickly.

Emma usually goes into the ditch right before we head onto the bridge that leads from the Nature Center gate to the bike path on the levee. There’s a notch in the bank there which makes it convenient to get to the water. Today was no exception: she piled right in, slurped up some water, then walked a few feet back along the bank and for some reason nosed back toward it.

As she reached the bank here came this frog out of the grass, flying high in the air. Cleared Emma like Evel Knievel jumping a schoolbus lengthwise, plopped into the water behind her, and was seen no more.

Not sure what kind of frog it was. I’m familiar with leopard frogs and bullfrogs. This one, like the others I’ve been seeing around the ditches lately, looked dark for a leopard. Whereas I’m used to bullfrogs looking like, to be blunt, extra-thick cowflops with eyes, and this frog was definitely not in that size class. Then again, logically even bullfrogs must go through some kind of intermediate state between cure little tadpole and Big Fat Wad. Rather like the rest of us.

Anyway, Emma seemed to be the least startled of all of us. I was certainly taken by surprise. And for the frog, not happening to notice the splashing, utterly overt approach of a big black predator certainly constituted an Awareness Fail.

Oh – happy Fourth of July, everybody. I suppose it’s a good time to remember, nostalgically, the freedoms we’ve lost.

As I mentioned in our last thrilling episode (and, yes, I’m easily thrilled) I’ve got both Dragon NaturallySpeaking and my DVR up and running. So today when I took Emma Dog for a walk down by [...]]]> A bit of an experiment today – take that as yesterday, Friday, May 2^nd, the day before this nominally posts.

As I mentioned in our last thrilling episode (and, yes, I’m easily thrilled) I’ve got both Dragon NaturallySpeaking and my DVR up and running. So today when I took Emma Dog for a walk down by the Nature Center, I decided to try my hand at an audio diary. I keep a journal of our walks anyway, and it’s struck me several times just how convenient it’d be to be able to record interesting events, sights, impressions, and suchlike, just by speaking. I do carry my beloved Pilot T/X religiously, but writing into it’s … not so efficient. Especially since Graffiti 2, their writing interface software, basically sucks. Although in truth I’ve never been terribly accurate at writing on my PDA.

But talking, obviously, is pretty easy.

Also, of course, it’s my intent to dictate my fiction on the go, implementing what I’ve long thought of as my “Man in Motion” concept. So I reckoned this’d be a prime opportunity to test several things at once.

What follows, therefore, is my transcript of the day’s session. It runs 1006 words. It’s proofread, but not edited – I’m proud I only said “um” once. It’s as close to word-by-word as I could make it.

Feel free to skip this one. If not – here goes:

===

Okay this is me, down on the covered trail by the Río Grande Nature Center, and once I got to the levee path it wasn’t a bad day. The wind’s mostly blocked off, so it’s mostly cool and pleasant, and I’m glad I’m in the shorts. Just heard a woodpecker going off; there’re many swallows curveting around, many, many, and the Nature Center fields here right by the bridge back east across from the bike path are flooded into such an extent we actually have Canada geese swimming in some of it, which means it’s flooded pretty deep. I guess that’s the way our government saves our precious water resources, although in truth the runoff this year is liable to be high. Anyway, it’s about 4:37 p.m. if I didn’t mention that. I’m gonna try keeping an audio diary here some, and just see how this works. We’ve got the machine set up so that it’ll transcribe into Dragon on the notebook computer, so good for us.

My God! Couple minutes later – I saw my first hummingbird of the year hovering up here by a tree and while I was at it I saw another one – there’s two of them! Hooray for that. A flicker just went by. Actually saw the first swallows a couple weeks ago when we were out here. And as I say, they’re really going to town down here now. . . .

You know, it really is so beautiful down here – I sat as the wind starts to mount, fortunately mostly over my head – that as always after I’ve laid off a few days I wonder why I’m not out here every day and possibly all day every day.

My God, here’s a dead tree to the side of the road, that looks as if it’s been pretty recently gnawed on by beavers – it’s not actually the road; it’s the foot trail still – along the east side of the clear ditch, but, wasn’t that way when we were last here. Actually haven’t been this way in a few weeks, plus the wood is still kind of yellow, almost orange, meaning it’s fresh. Haven’t seen beavers down here in years and years, but evidently they’re still here. The color of the wood is actually a lot like the color of the bellies of some of the swallows that we have; I can never remember if they’re barn or cave swallows whose bellies range from yellow to an orange that’s almost red, with very shiny blue backs. We have some of those as well as some of the white-bellied ones skimming along not for above the water. I guess there’s bugs down there.

We’re a few yards in the past where the beavers were, and something big just went into the water, although oddly enough it kind of seems as if it went into the water from a low-hanging branch, which doesn’t make sense, so I’m wondering if instead something big such as, well, possibly a beaver disturbed the branch as we passed. And now we have kind of a shrike-y looking bird, sitting up here on a branch as we approach the cut-out where Emma’s gonna go get water and I’m going to turn back.

Now, also the last time we were down here we saw a couple o’ muskrats gamboling right down by the cut-out where we’re now heading down . . . don’t see ‘em today. Here comes a mallard. . . .

It occurs to me in my vanity that regardless of how well this turns out transcribing in Dragon, I’m going to save it off as an MP3 and then save it to CD, in my vanity, as an audio diary, so there. I’m, in fact I’m so vain I may decide to put some of these up on my blog for download, and, as a play on “podcasts” call them “oddcasts.”

Okay, I noticed that every time I stop and start again, I start a new audio file, which doesn’t really break anything. However, um, I’ll go ahead and hit “Pause” from now on until I’m done for the day to simplify things. I’m, I’m guessing that using Audacity I can go ahead and join these files together if it really is important to me to do so, and it probably won’t hurt with the transcribing at all.

Okay, we’re back on the levee bike path now approaching the bridge back to the Nature Center, and Emma just found something down in the bosque to our right that was really interesting to her, and she really wanted to go and see and I wouldn’t let her, pursuant to our rule that I don’t want her making any . . . ooh, wait, Emma! Huh. I wonder if there’s lizards out, she just did it again. I don’t want her making any little friends I can’t see, and the corollary’s, I don’t want her making any little friends that I can see. I basically don’t want her sticking her nose in any place and coming out with something clinging to it. So . . . the poor child has had to cope with frustration here.

I also note as we approach it again that the sign by the entry to the Bosque Loop path says that the fire danger today is “very high,” which I don’t recall seeing before. I don’t know what the difference is between that and “extreme!” Here’s Emma peering out in the, out in the leaves again. I don’t know if it’s just wind rustling or there’s really something out there. Anyway, what I figure is that they had some extra money for their sign budget that they had to spend.

Okay, we’re back in the car. We did 3 miles straight up. Hadn’t intended to go that far. It’s 5:13 PM. We did 5295 steps, 4664 aerobic steps, 48 aerobic minutes – that’s pretty good – 361 kilocalories, and – that’s it, this is Victor, signing off his very first audio diary for May the Second of 2008.

===

And there you have it. And I did: I did save the files as MP3s, although I’ve not yet burned them to CD. Reckon I’ll wait till I have more.

On the whole I’d have to call it a successful experiment. It took me a while, maybe an hour, to proof it against the MP3s played in WinAmp, so it wasn’t real efficient. This time.

But I expect there’s a learning curve, in dictation as well as transcription. For that matter I dictated a mess o’ Annja earlier today, and discovered again how I can get frustrated with DNS; sometimes it just seems obtuse in transcribing what I say. And of course a fair amount of that is my simply not e-nun-ci-ating clearly enough. Practice will fix a lot of that, especially since the program also learns from my corrections.

On the whole the recording came across pretty clear and the transcription was reasonably accurate. One complicating factor was the aforementioned wind: there were times, especially when we were on the elevated bike path, that the wind boomed loud enough to register as attempted words when I did the voice recognition thing.

In any event, there’s a lot of what I was up to today (as I said, technically yesterday; but to me the day don’t change until I’ve been to sleep. Or decided not to go to sleep.) Both personally and professionally.

As [...]]]> I just got back from taking Emma on a walk on the ditch that leads along the eastern side of the RGNC wildfowl preserve. It was a beautiful Spring midday, mostly clear; the sun was hot and the breeze cool, a combination I really enjoy. Too bad we don’t get it too often.

As we were heading back to the car along the southern fence of the RGNC fields I saw a couple of ring-necked pheasant cocks (okay, get the giggles out of the way. It’s what they’re called. Deal.) Albuquerque’s North Valley down by the Río Grande is infested with pheasants. The males strut around, looking absurdly gorgeous with their shiny green heads, red-circled eyes, golden breasts, and long-feathered tails. And of course what they’re doing is trying to attract babes.

So these two cock pheasants came running toward the fence through green ground cover that was maybe chest-high on them, four or five inches on average. It looked as though they were racing. Their courses converged until they came within about eight feet of the fence, when they stopped ten feet apart. Then they turned around and walked back out into the field, again angling toward each other, until they were walking side by side.

Then they stopped and turned toward each other. They started doing this bobbing routine, one ducking low while the other rose up, like pistons in a two-stroke engine. It looked suspiciously like a courtship dance; I was wondering if we were going to see some serious gay pheasant action here. Right out in front of God and everybody. Think about the children! (Imagine that as said by Bill Clinton in his customary Berkshire hog-as-televangelist squealing grunt.)

More likely it was some kind of rivalry dance. As I watched this Emma and I started walking again. Before we’d gone more than a few steps this hen pheasant comes booming out of the low brush right by the fence. She flew off at an angle past the fancy-dancing males and out into the field. The nearer male turned right round and went running off in her direction, chuckling to himself in triumph. The other emitted a loud clack of dismay. “Dammit!”

After writing some more on the new Rogue Angel yarn, I gathered up Emma Dog and took her off to the Nature Center for an afternoon walk. It’s a perfect Albuquerque Spring [...]]]> Or actually, just a pair of muskrats. They didn’t get up to anything … untoward during the short time I had them in view.

After writing some more on the new Rogue Angel yarn, I gathered up Emma Dog and took her off to the Nature Center for an afternoon walk. It’s a perfect Albuquerque Spring day: warm, clear, calm; the trees are getting green and the fruit trees and the lilacs fragrantly in bloom. A marked improvement over the gale we walked through a couple of days ago, and the Arctic day that followed it.

From the levee bike path I saw some big, soft-shelled spiny turtles sunning themselves down on the ditchbank. A guy cruised by us on a nifty recumbent tadpole trike, lower-slung and probably more expensive than my TriCruiser. Sometime this week I need to get my tricycle to a bike shop for an overhaul so I can start riding it before it gets brutally hot and I’ll snivel too much.

Not a lot of birdage about, though some of interest. Our usual Piper Cherokee-sized Canada geese kept flying low overhead, honking stertorously. As we walked north up the dirt path along the east side of the clear ditch, which is very pleasantly shaded by trees and brush, a bitty grey wren-like thing flew over with a whir that seemed to be a call, rather than the sound of its wings. It gave a little cheep as it lit in a tree to our left. Naturally it went promptly around the other side of a big branch where I couldn’t see. It seemed to have a very curved beak, almost like a thrasher. But they’re way bigger than this bird, which was so tiny I first thought it was a cicada – although we’re at the wrong end of the season to see them. It may’ve been a Canyon Wren.

There’s a notch in the ditchbank that leads right down from the trail to the water, perhaprs halfway between the footbridge that leads back to the east side and Montaño, where it’s convenient for Emma to go wade in the water and drink. As we approached it I heard a big woodpecker thudding away off in the bosque proper, across the ditch and the bike path.

And then when we got to the notch, right there swimming south and not eight feet from the bank I saw a muskrat. A beat later I saw a second toward the other side of the ditch. They both dove pretty promptly; one surfaced briefly under some brush overhanging the far side. I bet they have a burrow under there.

As alert as Emma always is to possible threats, to my amazement she didn’t even seem to notice the muskrats. Which was good, since I don’t want her getting in any disputes with others creatures. She might’ve been too fixated on the water’s edge where she was heading.

On the way back we ran into kind of a knot of people, bikes, and dogs near the footbridge leading from the levee path to the RGNC proper. Not that surprising, given the day and the nature of it. But it tended to really slow us down.

Emma’s job, which she carries out with fanatical keenness, is to be my bodyguard. Whenever she perceives people and animals approaching us, she usually has to give them a suspicious stare. If they’re in front of us, this entails stopping; if they’re overtaking, she has to keep peering back over her shoulder and slowing way down. It doesn’t matter if they’re fragile granny-ladies or young mothers pushing strollers: they must be scrutinized. (“Dad! They may pack heat!”) I’m always having to chivvy her along.

As we approached the Candelaria exit of the path that connects it to the bike trail, a sturdy Latino gentleman with a moustache, upon seeing Emma, said, “My lord, that’s a beautiful dog!” Which was nice. I thanked him on her behalf.

And then, dear merciful heavens, the … special bike club emerged, mustering to be taken back to the home under the watchful eyes of their minders. Who must have patience far exceeding that of saints – the saints I’ve read of tended to be a crabby, censorious lot. I mean, gods guard over the Down syndrome folks and send them happiness, I was just as glad we got clear of that narrow passageway from the bike path before they came through.

Then, because our timing was on tonight, we got back in time to catch the bottom of the 1^st inning of the Sunday night ESPN between the Yankees and the Red Sox. Now, I certainly have no rooting interest in either team; to me it’s kind of like the Mordor-USSR exhibition game held each Spring in Hell. But I do love me some baseball, and they’re always … interesting to watch.

As [...]]]> When Emma and I went on our walk today, on the bike path and trails down along the clear ditch by the RGNC, it was a lovely afternoon. The breeze was cold, but it’s mostly a sheltered walk. Only walking west down the path from Candelaria did the wind-tunnel effect make it really bitter.

As we crossed the wooden footbridge across the ditch from the Nature Center gate a young mother with two kids by the far landing stepped aside to let us pass. A wise idea, as it turned out.

Her older kid, a little boy of maybe five or six, came tottering forward as we reached that end, blithely ignoring his mom’s repeated commands to stop. And then he did stop, and his eyes got real wide.

“There’s a big dog!” he announced breathlessly.

Yeah, kid. No diddly. Listen to your mama next time, won’t you?

Actually I don’t think Emma would ever remotely hurt a child. She got along well with the kids at the home she lived at for a year. It was the other dogs she had a problem with. Still, I prefer to avoid putting such things to the test unnecessarily.

There’s no question that, at almost 100 pounds, burly and black with a shoebox head, Emma looks formidable. Okay, she is formidable. Most people just assume she’s a he. A lot of people admire her, some with visible trepidation.

They should hear me coo at her as my baby girl…

It seems the cranes have finally flown away. I didn’t see any in the field along Veranda, east of the RGNC. It’s sad, of course, in a way. But if they don’t go away, where’s the poignancy when they return?

That’s not altogether true. The Canada geese don’t all leave. A goodly population sticks around and produces broods of deceptively cute babies. (Deceptive, in that their parents are huge and scary.) But when I hear the wild geese flying back as the autumn air turns crisp, it always stirs me at a very deep level.