it's definitely a rainy spell here, second or third full day of steady rain, and this is october, when the monsoons are supposed to be well over. generally new mexicans never complain about the rain; we feel we've been shorted over the years, maybe, and every little bit helps. but there is a point where things flood. down in the valleys, they don't really have dirt, since they've had so little rain over the years, so things flood pretty quickly; they flooded yesterday or the day before in artesia, dexter, and roswell, and it was looking pretty bad in alamogordo. up here in the mountains, we have grass, trees, things to hold the rain, and what we don't want, the washes just carry down the mountain.

so i was driving up from alamogordo, which is down in the desert, but was flooding, and i was glad to be on the mountain where i knew all the water would just shoot on down below me. a policeman sped by me going up the hill, and sure enough, partway up, an enormous boulder had fallen onto the westbound lane. the boulder was the same size as the lane itself. traffic was slowed down in order to crawl around it. keep driving, nothing to look at here.

deep into the stories of my ancestors in the 1700's, i've reached the point where i want to find some reasonable explanation and settle on it. my book is almost written. i've laid out who the characters are, and, in order to make it work, one just about has to speculate about some kind of irregularity that genealogists just didn't catch over the years. somebody had some child at some point, and the birth records just didn't catch it. it could be, that as we go along toward the revolution, some of them are actually going to england, and people are getting lost, or we are losing track of them. once the revolution starts, it's the "times of suffering" in boston, and who knows about that? it seems it changed things. the city itself took a beating. there were more soldiers than people, for a while there.

back here in new mexico, i'm kind of absorbed in using the web to find out whatever i can. there are two different lines, and they seem to come together, or have common people in them; and, they certainly have common places in them, besides boston itself. one is a farm in needham, which is out there in the western suburbs. another is cornhill, an old neighborhood of boston. i go in, and one place i get tied up is the mid-1800's, where they tend to write flowery prose but miss a few crucial facts. some of these people were simply unknown to them, and they wrote grand-style pronouncements about the ones they knew. they kind of messed it up a little too, for example, calling john the governor a knight. he wasn't, as far as i can tell, a knight.

kids are at school, and the rain keeps coming. there could be floods, even up here on the mountain. we check the news regularly, but, truthfully, i'm more concerned about the impeachment, than about the rain. i kind of take it for granted, that nature is unraveling, the world is falling apart, and there's not much we can do about it except get the president out of there. so hurry up about it, ok, and let's get on, and try to pull this earth thing back together.