a cold morning at the end of january; i get up and take care of the dogs. the dogs are screaming and running around, until i let them out, let them pee and poop feed them, let them get cold, let them back in, and they all settle in on beds or chairs, or in the case of one, on my lap. he's the little one, soft and fluffy, with no particular appetite in the morning, but if there's a lap, namely mine, he'll find it and let me pet him indefinitely into the morning. he was also there when i woke up. i credit him with my good mental health and sustained ability to carry on.

my research brought me back to this file that my mother gathered, so it has a lot of her handwriting, and i'm thinking about her a lot. in fact both my parents died in late january, my dad a few years back and my mom a few years before him - so it's that time of year. and apparently both my parents went off do research on their ancestors and a lot of their work ended up in this one file that i have in front of me. i am one of the few who can read her handwriting though, so that gives more urgency to what i'm doing. the information i'm after leads me back to oneida county, new york, in about 1863, and it turns out that in the times of those ancestors, the oneida community was big in that area. it was actually big in about 1844, and had dissolved by 1863. all this timeline i still have to put together. and the best i can figure, my ancestors were not involved with that commune.

but the oneida community was a so-called "perfectionist" community, and that doesn't mean they had to have everything perfect, so much as it meant that they believed we were already perfect, and therefore could practice free love (they coined the term, apparently) and this was quite a scandal at that time. they were a community - owned everything as a group, and had a certain philosophy that everyone bought into when they joined the community.

my ancestor, however, bought an old woolen mill and converted it to a factory that made horse hay forks. and he did this right in the middle of the civil war - probably with the encouragement of the union authorities who knew they needed implements and such for the war effort. he was good at that kind of implement manufacture.

as i look at these old books i realize a lot of this stuff is not really freely available on the web. my mom went and found these old books in the library - copied the pages as appropriate - wrote the reference on the page itself in her handwriting. now when i look them up on the web amazon will have a hardback copy for like fifty bucks with no reviews - these are not flying off the shelves - and the information in them is for all practical purposes not available to the public. i search my ancestor and the company he established, and nothing. it's there, but google books hasn't digitized it and made it available at a wider level, as it has done to some others.

i am struck partly by the feeling of reading her handwriting when trying to decipher what i have. also, she appears to have saved an entire newspaper article about the oneida community, and i know she always liked their silverware - as if it was a tangent for her, she'd found maybe just enough to suspect that these ancestors had something to do with them, but in the end, came to the same conclusion that i did. they arrived well before the community did. they farmed or worked in the area. they certainly were aware of the community and the reputation it brought the area. but they went on living their lives around it. if one of those ancestors (keep in mind that within a few generations, i can have eight or sixteen who arrived in oneida county at some time and married within the area if not from the commune itself) is connected to it, i could simply have overlooked the possibility. it's an open book, still.

the retired life - getting tired by nine, so i go to bed. but then i wake up easily at six, and feel it's all natural, to do this, to be wide awake, to watch the sunrise as i sit here typing. there is still a bit of snow, especially on the shady sides of things - but the new mexico sun beats down and melts most of it where we have cleared a few trees away. and i read about the "bomb cyclone" on the east coast, pounding such places as boston with a foot or two of snow. it's not that i'm jealous. on the contrary, i'm getting a little tired of the slick roads and steep curves.

my marketing is a little frustrating, both in that i get my books out only to a limited market, and that whatever aggressive marketing i do comes at the expense of actually writing stuff, which in the end would be more productive. i've become impatient with fantasy, more determined to write the real truth, get it right, document, etc. yet i go into my book, which i'm calling one woman's voice, and i have lots of loose ends - i'm a long way from finishing. recently i got into the photos, uploading them, labeling them, etc., and that helped. still so much to do!

our lives have been more than filled by four lively dogs who really need a lot of attention. the children who we gave the dogs to really kind of dropped the ball, left us with the dogs. my wife finds it hard to give away a dog but is at the point where she realizes, having four is like having a ball and chain. i think it's healthy to give four long walks - about two miles a day - and am trying to keep it up even through the bad weather. but i'll be the first to admit that we have about three too many, and we are both at the point, finally, of seeking retirement. i found myself seeking it a few years back but now i kind of sense my wife seeking it too. just wanting some peace. just wanting to sit and reflect.

for us, this is going to require some faith - that the last two of our children will achieve some measure of independence. by last two i mean numbers eight and ten, as nine is a little eager and has already achieved some. but eight and ten will have their own issues, and getting through school will be the first of them. we may have to change locations a time or two before they really get out the door. and changing locations may not in fact help everything.

a little too much of the personal - the sun is rising in the east - from which direction, we have roswell, and miles and miles of scrubby national forest, part wooded, part just open, and hot and dry. at this point, the land starts going downhill toward artesia and roswell, and the hot air starts coming down out of the mountains sapping up every bit of moisture there is. such things as the inch or two of snow up here, it's gone pretty quickly. to the west, you have a ridge, and a bit more snow - to the north, more mountains, more snow; to the south, a ridge or two of mountains then desert all the way down through el paso and into mexico.

going to a fire training this morning, but may take it online, if in any way that will work. i think, in the end, retirement is about pulling back, sitting in this chair for as much of it as i can handle.

woke up at the usual time, but it was late considering the things i had to do. i wanted to make a fire in the cabin and walk the dog but i had lost some sleep worrying because, according to one report, there would be freezing rain on the hill. we have to cross our own ridge, about eight miles half gravel, to get to the highway, and then go up and cross another 8700-foot mountain, cloudcroft itself, to get to the steep hill down to alamo.

and i had to go to alamo, and get there by nine o'clock, for jury duty. i am on the grand jury these days. that means, every other wednesday december through february, and this morning was one of my wednesdays.

at first, on the grand jury, they had twelve, they had two alternates, and they really didn't need me. but there was attrition. i went there an hour late one week and they put me on the second alternate's position (#14) where i couldn't hear that much but tried to get the hang of what was going on. by the time it was over i thought i knew, at least a little.

but waking up at seven the issue is whether you can make it over two 8700-foot ridges with what snow and ice is sitting on the road. out at our house it was mostly snow, though snow turns to ice pretty quickly on roads that are steep and in the shade. i almost called in can't-make-it but decided at the last minute to go. i gave myself only an hour and a few minutes, which is just a few minutes more than i need on an ordinary day going to alamo. but i could tell when i started out that i'd have to take it pretty easy over the first ridge. there was plenty of ice though most of it was in patches. there are cliffs off the edge of the road if you miss or go too fast.

down at the highway, though, it was clear. cloudcroft was clear too. i would have made it easily but two things happened. one was a slow truck on the way down to alamo. i hate passing people on the steep hill because you can never see far enough to do it safely. so i hung behind him and it cost me a few minutes; finally i was able to pass him about halfway down. then the second thing was, i actually got lost and turned on the wrong street once i was in alamo itself. and when i got back and turned on the right street, i still drove past the courthouse not even recognizing it.

so all that made me five minutes late, but it didn't seem to matter much. they stuck me in the first alternate's chair, but i noticed that not all twelve of the jury were there - one was missing. later the woman who had been first alternate slipped in and sat in that chair, but i wasn't clear about that, it could have been someone else. but for a while there, i was a necessary twelfth.

so what happened to all the others? not sure. it seemed to me that we started out with maybe eighteen, and that there were about eighteen or twenty on the list when i signed in. plenty of blank spaces. my impression is that people are using covid or whatever to get out of it.

now that i was in the first alternate's chair, i could actually hear more, and i began to take lurid interest in the cases. everyone was wearing masks including the policemen who testified, but still if i concentrated i could catch more of it than before, when i was actually somewhat behind them. Now i wanted to hear how each arrest was made. the cops seemed to want to justify themselves - how did it come to your searching his socks? this kind of thing. they kept referring to their training as if they were doing what they were trained to do.

No matter, we didn't have to decide whether people were innocent or guilty, only whether they had enough evidence to prosecute. we always said fine. these prosecutors were not going around prosecuting people for flimsy or contrived reasons, in fact they'd probably rather send these guys to some rehab program if there was such a thing.

so i'm sitting there in this room. the prosecutors were nice to all of us. two women seemed to act as bailiffs or recorders or some such thing. the twelve jurors looked kind of dead-faced, like they got sick of it long before i ever will. not a one had any idea of the icy conditions i'd faced. the desert, after all, is cold in the winter, but bone dry and not nearly as cold as what we have a mile up. when it was over they shot out of there, to go back to work, or wherever they wanted. i however was starving; i'd forgotten breakfast.

came down from the snowy mountains and into the endless roswell plain, for a long trip to lubbock across the texas line. no snow in texas, though there were signs they'd had some, and the flat plain went forever and gave me a break from dodging deer and elk who just dart out in front of the car in the mountains.

lubbock is a hopping city - unike the mountains where people have been passing around the same twenty bucks for many years. in lubbock some guy just gave the university forty-four million; he'll get a building named for him i'm sure. at the same time amazon moved in and opened a warehouse so hundreds of poor people will now get jobs and add to the traffic and housing crunch. people drive nice new cars and trucks around. the streets are orderly and it's easy to figure out where to go.

it was a mental health trip, mostly for my son, who has come to hate cloudcroft as the kids have been very mean to him lately. i've already given away more than i'd like to but that's why i was there and that's why it was a little rough coming back too. it's just hard to be up here now trying to do online school which he detests and being so isolated. but what can we do for him? i have some ideas but none that have really come together.

in the middle of the night some kid on a bicycle, and a hoodie so he couldn't see to the sides, popped right in front of us on a wide street called avenue q. this kid realized his mistake pretty quickly and went back, but it was a sudden and very dangerous stop on my part and i was lucky i had my mountain reflexes ready, because it was like a deer or elk in many ways - random, sudden, unexplainable, very dangerous. we both shuddered. my son wants to move to town. this however won't be easy and i wouldn't want that to be him.

came back early this morning - a long ride up the plains through the roswell flats and the wide empty places. back in the mountains we got home just in time for it to start snowing. and now it's snowing some more....it was supposed to be rain, and maybe not so much, but it feels good to be home in spite of everything. my son though is very depressed, it just doesn't seem like a happy place at all. to him, lubbock is liberation, and he doesn't see what we do, that it's one of the most conservative, arrogant towns around, and on top of that, a city, with all everything that goes along with that.

we're happy in the mountains - back there in isolation, with the deer and elk, and all that go with them - but we can't speak for him. all we can do is do the best to put him in a place where he can succeed and make progress. pray for us.

got about an inch of snow here and then a cold spell, so some of it is still around. the intense new mexico sun will melt whatever it can but lots of it, in the mountains, is in just enough shade to stick around until it truly gets warm. and it's in no hurry to get warm.

a guy wrote to me about genealogy (see the comment under the picture of me, below) and i told him how to find what he was looking for. i'm not sure who he would be, as i only have his initials, but i encourage anyone on the quest to find who we are and from whence we came, so i put some interesting and useful genealogy links right in the comments. one is to the web archive, which will help you find all kinds of things i put on the web at one time or another....there is really no limit, since it very carefully recorded all kinds of pages and my somewhat random ones were right there in their collection. The web archive is really a kind of remarkable resource.

i've spent a lot of time lately in newspapers.com, another incredible resource, as though it is not complete it has just enough of a wide range of newspapers to haul in all kinds of useful information. unbelievable. and it turns out that as far as i can tell, the main advantage of ancestry.com, an also-incredible resource, is that it just harvested every single line from US censuses and city directories, so that now you can take almost anyone who lived in the US in the last three hundred years, and know where they were at least through the decades.

however these are kind of a rabbit hole when what i really want is to finish my latest book, which is a fantastic one but which requires a lot of time that i don't have. instead of digging into old newspapers like i want to do, instead i'm marketing my books one reader at a time by basically reading theirs. and here i find myself in elaborate worlds of fantasy, sometimes involving drone-like characters who have human responses programmed out of them, and in other cases lurid tales of drug-running in England involving such poor command of the english language one can hardly read them. they too are interesting but are big rabbit holes.

on my way to lubbock in the morning. will bring home lots of pictures, i hope. it's cold, very januaryish, both here and in lubbock, and i'm missing my parents a lot, as both died in january. an inch of snow, though, i can handle that. it's not going to keep me from driving anywhere.

Oklahoma

went to a wild reunion in the oklahoma panhandle, the tip of the finger, you could say, not more than a stone's throw from the new mexico border. our drive was over seven hours, almost entirely along the edge of the border, in eastern new mexico, with four teens and two dogs. it snowed a bit so the roads coming back were patchy and especially the last mountain.

we have a good reunion crew: my oldest daughter, husband, two kids; my wife's oldest daughter, husband, three kids; my sister, and us - four teens, two dogs, my wife and i. they rented an old bunkhouse out in the panhandle = boy was it flat, and cold, but very nice. i came to like the wild western decor as now i have a little more experience with it. and the people were from the panhandle, several generations. a real panhandle experience, i'll try to find you some pictures.

january popped up pretty quickly; not much chance to go back over family pictures for the year, and put things in their place. now that it's the heart of january / heart of winter, maybe i'll get to that. it's a fact, and you might not be aware of it, but this very blog is quite the repository of family pictures, but they're all hidden, and they aren't labeled - or rather, you can click the links to get to them, but you won't see the name with the picture, and that's to protect the privacy of the people involved.

i asked the step-grands about the quilt. they liked it, ok, though i think they're still a little suspicious of anyone who would give them a quilt. they look at me with a look sometimes. my question for them was whether they used it. but i can't be surprised if they say "yes" even if "no" is closer. i have to bring that motivation back and do the quilt for the next step-grand.

the food was delicious - lots of grilling, and a roast brisket bought from the local folks. fabulous. lots of times i sat around, dog on lap, and just watched all the kids. there was a passel of young girls - twelve, eleven, ten, all over the place - a few others too. my grandson took a shine to the puppies. kids tore around and went from one place to another.

the road back was icy, as i said, especially the last hill, after we'd picked up the two larger dogs, and now had four dogs, four teens and us in the car. i came down the icy hill very slowly but who can blame me? seems to me you don't want to drive all the way back from oklahoma only to go off a cliff eight miles from home. the poor larger dogs were traumatized by the kennel but glad to be back. me, i was expanded by the expansive pancake-panhandle horizon, and came back a little more relaxed, with a lot of fresh air in me.