Busy days.

Forgive me if I do not post regularly these days, let alone frequently. I haven't given up on blogging, but it's not one of my top five priorities these days. I'm rather more engaged outside the online world. (It's in the top ten, though, so please, don't stop reading completely.)

Put down a deposit on a place I *really* *want* to live yesterday. I did the same thing in LA: lived in the cheapest apartment I could find 'til doing so became unbearable; then backed up against a wall, I found someplace I'd *love* to live and decided it was sufficiently worthwhile to swing it. Most places I look at here are like 50% what I want. Albuquerque's positively overrun with substandard buildings: nice old houses sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub divided into postage-stamp sized "apartments" which don't meet even the crudest "decent housing" standards, for which exorbitant rents are charged.

This one's 99% what I want. The 1% that isn't what I want is *mostly* the higher rent, and the one thing that isn't is something that I can change.

I *can* do it. It won't be "easy", but it's absolutely plausible. I've done it before and survived. And it means *way* more to me to have a *decent* place to live than just to have the cheapest place in town. If everything works out, I won't have to drive *anywhere* except when I go back down to Texas to visit.

Speaking of which -- now that I'm the last tenant here, transients have started showing up where I live. Mostly asking "how much are these apartments", leaving me to tell these intrusive and unwelcome strangers that they're *not* for rent.

Rose and Harold showed up, late last night, totally drunk, and looking for shelter at the same place they've found it these last many years. I called my mother around midnight and called my former next-door neighbours shortly thereafter. My former neighbours came back today to check mail, and I spoke with the landlord (manager), and Rose and Harold shortly after that. I think the situation is resolved. But I *don't* want to live here anymore. Not one minute more than I must.

I would have been well within my legal rights to call the cops. I didn't. It wasn't an easy decision to make, either. I know enough -- *just* enough -- how they live and the unbelievable brutality they're subjected to daily not to willfully complicate their lives. At the same time I don't want the people they drag in their wake showing up, either.

Got a bicycle helmet yesterday, a Bell "Citi", which Consumer Reports gave its top ratings for 2006. Went riding. Had my first spill in forever. Painful, and not fun, but served a *most* useful "reminder" to me about what's involved with bike riding. Being my first spill with a new helmet I thought in terms of "protect the helmet!". Dumb, but there's what happens in a split second. My left arm hurts like hell but it's getting better. I'm OK.

LAPD's chief reassigns two top officers following the brutality against protestors and the press. I stand with Carol Sobel of the National Lawyer's Guild (with whom I volunteered in 2000, back when Bob Myers was NLG president) in her comments on "Democracy Now" today, expressing the wish that the press had expressed such outrage in 2000, when far worse atrocities occurred without the mainstream press even present to take notice, much less find themselves victimized on camera.

The job/apartment thing is tricky. But it's been tricky before for me, and I *know* I can swing it. I just need one piece of the puzzle to swing definitely into place.

After spilling off my bicycle, I rode several miles along the trails beside the canal just off the Rio Grande. What a joy. Got glimpses of an Albuquerque I never knew existed before. I've *heard* of it -- the great big system for cyclists to get around clear across town along old irrigation ditch channels, but never had ridden over *any* of it, myself. It was amazing. Even smelled like my grandmother's house, which was right in front of an irrigationa canal.

Not riding today. At this point I'm about doing "every other day" riding. Ain't perfect, but jeez, it's more bicycling and less aimless driving than I have done in *years*. Progress is *definitely* being made.

NPR's Richard Gonzales does a nice little piece about Alcatraz, but doesn't even mention in passing the utterly unique role that island played in the displacement of the Hopi. Sad. It's better than the "Unsolved Mysteries" piece about that one famous escape, to be sure, but still falls far short of what I *hope* to hear from public radio.

Local story: LANL's testing water samples from Rocky Flats. A couple of years ago the woman who blew the whistle on Rocky Flats gave me her empty thyroid pill bottle so I could scramble down (and climb back up) a cliff to take a water sample from the drainpipe leading out of CMR from the *one* place we toured with the Los Alamos Study Group that there were no yellow signs telling us *not* to go there.

"The personal is political": like it or not, this is a concept that I understand, deeply.

Björk has a new record: "Volta". Tempted to get this. NPR's music commentator, Will Hermes clearly conducted a decent interview but missed the point on her long-term artistic development completely, having *clearly* never heard "Glingg Glö". She was just at that music festival I wrote about because Rage Against the Machine seemed to have sort of "come back" into being, there.

I'm not saying it's a bad piece -- far from it, indeed. I'm just saying I could have done *perhaps* a littlle bit better, at least where knowiing Björk's previous work is concerned.

Now it's raining. It's lovely. For once, I hope it keeps up. Everything I need to keep dry is mostly off the floor, and a moat never hurts. :)