Daybook

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music: Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey. Scored a three-record set of early Springsteen for cheap yesterday. Music of my youth. Ben Hamper had a great line years ago in Mother Jones to the effect that Bruce Springsteen was a working class hero to middle class suburban kids who weren’t members of the working class. That was me.

books: Microbe: Are We Ready for the Next Plague. Full disclosure: Al Zelicoff is one of the smartest people I know, and also is very persuasive. And he’s been softening me up for a while in regards to the theme herein, which is that we need to think differently about how to watch out for the microbially unexpected. Plus he gave me the book for free. And wrote something really nice in it.

movies: Word Wars, a documentary about the really weird people who play scrabble. I mean really weird. Fun film.

rides: I don’t wanna make a big deal about this, but it is, to me, a big deal. Fifty-two days ago I had my knee cut open in an attempt to repair damage caused in a basketball game 18 years ago. I love to ride my bike, and for the last 52 days I have been unable to. I’ve been able to pedal on an indoor trainer. That’s exercise, but it’s not riding my bike. Today there was wind in my face, and the most beautiful row of sunflowers along the ditch in the far south valley, and a moment when it just seemed right to pop the chain over onto the big ring and go.

Growth and Nature

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A couple of good pieces in this morning’s Journal on the intertwined issues of growth and nature in New Mexico.

Laura Banish (sub. req.) talks about a new ordinance passed by the Santa Fe city council last month requiring developers to obtain water rights before they can build large housing projects. They go out and get the water rights, conveying them to the city, so there is sure to be enough water to serve the development. Developers are freaking out. The assistant city attorney thinks water rights ought to be no different than two-by-fours – something that’s essential for the housing. “The city doesn’t go out and buy two-by-fours for new developments. It doesn’t buy asphalt. So why should it buy water?”

Downpage on the same page, Tania Soussan (sub. req.) introduces us to Cliff Crawford, the University of New Mexico biologist whose work has provided the underpinning for restoration of the bosque.

Steve Vincent

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I’m not the same sort of journalist as the late Steve Vincent, so I dont want to sound like I”m arguing some sort of “band of brothers” melodrama here. He took risks for his stories. I do not. In that regard, we are playing – perhaps not a different game, but very different versions of the same game.

But I must honor his sacrifice, because he gave his life doing a very dangerous version of the same thing I try to do every day – help people understand their world.

As one of the commenters put in his blog:

It is brave to go to war with a weapon, but supremely brave to go to war with a pen and camera so the rest of us can know what is happening.

Arizona Sycamore

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Lissa planted a lovely new Arizona sycamore (Platanus wrightii) yesterday morning. As it happens, she rather by accident planted it dead center in a line so that you can see it out the back window when you’re washing dishes.


Arizona sycamore

It’s native to riparian areas of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. Thanks to the Institute of Natural Resource Analysis and Management biodiversity database, you can see it’s been primarily found in Hidalgo and Catron counties in New Mexico, with a few straggles elsewhere, including one in Spruce Park here in Albuquerque.

The Brace

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My shiny new Donjoy Lateral Unloader Brace:


knee brace

The purpose is to push the knee slightly outward, unloading the weight from the outside of the knee where stuff is damaged, carrying weight on the inside of the knee where things are in excellent chape. I’m supposed to wear it during strenuous weight-bearing activity (thankfully not needed for cycling). “Strenuous” currently includes pulling weeds, which I did this morning in the backyard for the first time in a month and a half. Or sweeping the bedroom.

Warm Mornings

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Were you Albuquerque folks feelin’ cranky when you woke up this morning, like you really hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep? Those of you who escaped to the mountains for a bit of cool had the right idea. With an overnight low in Albuquerque of 71 F, the rest of you just lived through, by one measure, the third-warmest month in Albuquerque history.

The measure in this case is the overnight low. The daytime highs have been unusually warm too, but not as extreme. My amateur calculation of the overnight low average is 68.5 F. That’s 3.9 F above the long-term average, going back to 1919, third behind the insufferable July of 2003 (71) and 1951 (68.9). And since July is the hottest month of the year here, those are the three warmest monthly average overnight lows in Albuquerque history period.

Daytime highs with one day to go are 94.2 (expect that to come down a bit, maybe 94.1 when the day’s done). That’s 2.4 F above average, ranking something like 14th or 15th warmest July – top quartile, but not nearly so far out on the tail of the July curve. That follows a trend in recent decades – more warming in the overnight temperatures, which I will pedantically point out is one of the “fingerprints” of greenhouse-induced global warming.

SS Dave

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Dave: I’m in if I can be the bosun. I could start raising some extra cash by driving around early in the morning on recycling day and stealing the aluminum cans people leave on the curb.

I’m not entirely sure what a bosun is, but I wanna be it. Do they have a guy on the front of an icebreaker who drops a rope down from the bow and shouts “Mark Twain”? That’d be a cool job too.