Way Out West

This weekend I’m in the beautiful state of New Mexico visiting my good friends Gong and Bonnie, who live in Santa Fe. It’s my first trip here ever, and it’s beautiful. The light, in particular, is unnaturally gorgeous. Or, at least, that’s how I’m explaining the photos I’ve been taking today.

Photographic Evidence

My friends live along a dirt road that’s dotted with small clusters of these uneven, odd-sized mailboxes.

Mailboxes

I heard the sky here was big, but it’s really big. This picture was taken from the Railyard district of Santa Fe.

Sky at Railyards

There’s a lot of money here, and a lot of it is spent on art, apparently. I took this photograph of a Buddha᾿s head sculpture from the ceramic sculptor Jun Kaneko through the glass of a downtown gallery.

Jun Kaneko

And, of course, because I᾿m a dog person: a picture of Annie, newly adopted into Gong and Bonnie’s home. The pink bandage is from an I.V. from an operation she had last week.

Annie
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  1. Brian Artka

    Is Annie a German Short Haired pointer? She looks just like the dogs I grew up with. Despite being great hunting dogs (by instinct), they are also great house dogs. What did she have an operation on? She looks fairly old too..

  4. Bonnie

    Hi Brian,
    Our best guess is that Annie is a bluetick-pointer cross. We don’t know how old she is; best estimate is between 10 and 12. She was thrown out of a car in a rural part of Arizona. She’s the sweetest animal. Can’t imagine how or why anyone would abandon her. She came to us with some seriously bad tooth and gum issues. She was in five-hour surgery on Wednesday of this past week during which the dental veterinarian extracted seven (count ’em) teeth (mostly large ones) and cleaned her gums and bone of infection. She’s doing great and we hope to have around as long as possible.
    Bonnie

  9. Steven G. Harms

    One of the things I loved most about moving to Austin out of the Bay area was seeing the sky again.

    Don’t get me wrong, as Fievel Mousekowitz knows, it’s all the same same big sky somewhere out there, but there’s a difference when you can see 3?/4 to ? radians of it when you walk outside.

    San Francisco is the most beautiful city in the world, and the wheel of the Empire turns in NYC, but until you feel the fear and trembling that a giant Western sky can put on you, you’ve not truly lived.

  11. Mer

    Hi Bonnie,

    I think Annie is a catahoula leopard dog.

    My dog Pebbles is one, and Annie looks just like her. People often confuse their breed with an Australian Sheppard/ Labrador mix. They are an interesting breed, and once we found out what she was it answered a lot of our questions.

    Good luck with your future with Annie, she looks like a sweetie.

  13. jeremy

    I am glad that you enjoyed it out there! I really have such an affinity for that area. It’s the light, the color, the sky, the way each sight line is a picture waiting to be taken…

  14. David Wogan

    Nice, I was just out west as well. Took a vacation through New Mexico and Arizona, then back to Texas. Pics up on Flickr soon.

    Saw the Very Large Array telescope. Theres some good stuff out in NM, but it takes forever to drive between them.

    Sorry your flight back didn’t go as planned.

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