Author: Foxfier

Former sailor, current geek, conservative, mother and practicing Catholic. Refugee from the Seattle blob. (No, we DIDN'T vote for those taxes!) Elf is my husband, our kids are Princess, Duchess, Baron, Empress, Chief, and Contessa.

“Time Passes By”

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My every-day work made it challenging, and the last two years have been heck for trying to do research on pretty much anything. I mean, even field geology and biology were fraught in 2020 in NM, because the governor banned out-of-state residents from having access to state or national parks! It’s hard to study the geology of, say, Frijoles Canyon or the Valle Grande caldera complex when the state police won’t let you get close to the gate. I suspect academic credentials, connections, and a few other things eased into the right in-boxes might have opened access, but I didn’t bother trying to go to the state archives, for example. Everyone I worked with at the state archive in Santa Fe has retired, or moved up to bigger things, archivally speaking. Time passed.

Well, *that* is worrying kinda stuff.

Cat Rotator's Quarterly

For various reasons, Kathy Mattea’s song “Time Passes By” has been popping up on my mental playlist recently. That one, and “Record Time (33,45,78)” seem to sum up my experiences at various times, although “Record Time” is probably the more accurate of the two when it comes to describing my world. Anyway. “Time Passes By” is about loving and living while we can, but the point is that things change, no matter what we might want.

A new generation, so to speak, now runs the large museum where I have done a lot of work and research. It has been a few years since I was last digging around in their archives, and the new folks don’t know me on sight the way the older staff did. They have changed some policies, which led to a bit of confusion until credentials were confirmed. Academics and museum research is a small…

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Walking Dogs, Christmas Trees, and Spudding In

Oil-related terms.

Cat Rotator's Quarterly

All of these terms are from the oil patch, although not all of them are used today. I grew up around family members who were in, or who had retired from, the blue-collar end of the oil business. One great uncle built and maintained derricks, one worked as the chief of a seismograph crew, one had been a roughneck before becoming a toolie . . . I learned about steel Christmas trees, walking dogs that didn’t go places, cat crackers, and other mysterious terms.

I was reminded of the jargon while perusing a local museum. It has a fantastic section about the oil and gas industry, with some updated exhibits about the technology of fracking and “directional drilling.” When I was younger, we called it slant-hole drilling, and it was as illegal as illegal could be. Oil leases were elongated cubes. You had a permit to drill straight down. You…

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Stranger than fiction (or is it?): one man’s journey from far-left terrorist to neo-Nazi ‚ and guess what stayed the same…

Misread the guy’s name as “Horse Mauler.”

If that had been correct, it still wouldn’t be the strangest/most disturbing bit….

Spin, strangeness, and charm

MEMRI’s Domestic Terrorism Threat Monitor is not concerned with US PTAs who despise complete reverse-racist tripe “critical race theory”m but with the real hardcore kind. Their latest is devoted to the bizarre case of Horst Mahler and his followers.

I dug a few background details about this stranger-than-fiction character out of the German Wikipedia page (caveat lector).

Horst Mahler’s father, a dentist and apparently a fanatical National Socialist, shot himself when Horst was a middle schooler. He was able to go to college on a merit scholarship: at first he joined the traditional German nationalist “Waffenstudentenverein” Thuringia— an old-school German student fraternity where the members engaged in non-lethal fencing duels in pursuit of the well-known dueling scar. He soon quit Thuringia to join the center-left SPD (social-democratic party),: he was later expelled for joining a more stridently left group, the SDS (Socialist German Student association).

Meanwhile he’d obtained his…

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Unable to deliver your parcel?

A phishing setup that redirects to different scams depending on if you’re on a desktop or a mobile device.

Monday Evening

‘Tis the Season for the Wayward Package Phish:

“Attempting to visit the domain in the phishing link … from a desktop web browser redirects the visitor to a harmless page with ads for car insurance quotes. But by loading it in a mobile device (or by mimicking one using developer tools), we can see the intended landing page …

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Help With Moving For My Health

Sarah needs help.

Even just talking to her in text, the change when she spent a week at lower altitude was recognizable.

According To Hoyt

So we found a new place, but between the pandemic shutdown and it being so soon after buying the last house, we’ve drained our savings. After much urging from friends and family, I am asking for help.

Yes, I’m embarrassed and terrified, but I’ve never really charged for my work here, and we truly, desperately and very urgently need help. The figure I put up scares me, but it scares me even more not knowing where it will come from. I want and need to write stories, and I can’t while locked in stress over this thing looming over us.

Health Moving Expenses Go Fund Me link here.

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A very unfortunate Covid-policy casualty

Calling-all-RushBabes

For 50 years, the University Unitarian Church in Seattle put on a Handel’s Messiah Sing-along, Play-along on the day after Christmas. Yes, that’s 50 years! They packed the sanctuary to the rafters with singers and orchestra, and anyone could come and sing or play, just for the price of a ticket. The Messiah was a big fundraiser for the Lefty church’s music department. The church ladies made cookies and punch, to refresh the singers and players between parts, and after three solid hours everyone was happily exhausted. Both singers and players would come back year after year; we in the orchestra marveled at how well the pickup choir did on all the arias, recitatives, and choruses — sometimes we’d forget to play while listening to the singers!

In 2020, the Messiah was canceled, as indoor gatherings were prohibited. For the first time in 50 years, the Church regretfully cancelled the…

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Be He Ne’er so Vile, This Day Shall Gentle His Condition

Anyone need their blood pumping?

Cat Rotator's Quarterly

What is this day? Why, the feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, of course. What do you mean, you didn’t go to mass, or feast your neighbors and show your scars? The battle was a mere five hundred years ago!

For a more rousing version, played by an Italian organist on a French instrument:

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