The TV hit series “Breaking Bad” aired its last episode 13 years ago. Although a cult favorite which my wife and I watched and enjoyed, I always thought it portrayed Albuquerque and New Mexico in a bad light, given it focused on illegal drug activity.

More than a year ago, the Albuquerque home of fictional “Breaking Bad” character Walter White was put on the market for $4 million. The home is a nice enough example of the northeast heights neighborhood in which it is located, but not nice enough to fetch that price. At 1920 square feet, the original asking price came out to about $2,083 per square foot.

Of course the listing agent was hoping that the price was justified because of its fame — or infamy.

Once the listing agent realized they weren’t getting many inquiries at the original price, the house was then offered for a mere $400,000 — still a bit overpriced in my way of thinking. But apparently the new price was attractive to at least 20 potential buyers who made offers.

The Albuquerque Journal reported last Friday that the buyer was Adin Ross, who the newspaper said was “known for his livestreaming content on Twitch and YouTube.” Sorry, but I’ve never heard of him, but that only shows that I’m way behind the times on social media.

The new buyer says he wants to turn the property into a “one-to-one” replica of how the home appeared in the TV series. I’m not sure what that means either.

I’m wondering how much commercial attraction this “one-to-one” home will get for a TV program that’s been off the air for 13 years. I suspect you can just drive by it and get as much of a thrill as paying to go inside it, but that’s just me.

At any rate, it got me to thinking about how much $4 million can get you elsewhere in New Mexico and what is the most expensive home currently on the market in our state.

As you might expect, Santa Fe leads the list of most expensive homes on the market.

I found about six houses currently on the market in Santa Fe in the range of $3.8 million to $4.2 million, including home below that only has two bedrooms but a fancy duck pond.

I looked up “Most expensive home for sale and New Mexico,” but I’m not sure that as fluid as the real estate market moves that what I found is current.

Two years ago, this home in Santa Fe was said to be the most expensive home listed in the state at $9.95 million.

The most expensive real estate listing I found on Zillow was for $31.5 million near Lindrith, NM. (Yeah, I had to look on a map too to remember where that was — Rio Arriba County.)

The listing is not really just a home — it’s a ranch with more than 20,000 acres of what is described as the “legendary mule deer area of New Mexico.” However, the house on the property isn’t much to look at unless you fancy a deer antler archway to your front door. And if you want a big ranch, I’m sure there are other listings for that kind of property that don’t appear on the Zillow listing.

Given the choice between these listings, I think I’d go with the home with the duck pond in Santa Fe. It’s within walking distance of the plaza and you probably wouldn’t be overwhelmed with wanna be guests during the city’s annual Fiesta or Indian Market since it’s only got two bedrooms.

In last week’s Albuquerque Journal, there was a sad (to me) story that the Gallup Independent newspaper was ceasing operations. The long-time daily newspaper on the far west edge of New Mexico had been struggling financially, like many other print publications around the nation, and finally faced the realization it could no longer continue.

As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up working in the family-owned Ruidoso News, a weekly newspaper that my father helped shape into an independent and valuable source of local news in our mountain community. My father sold the newspaper after almost 20 years of ownership, and it changed hands several times after that, finally to be acquired by a national newspaper group. Under that ownership, with profits becoming more important than keeping the community informed, it eventually ceased operations.

The Independent, under the ownership of the Zollinger family, was almost 100 years old. It served not only the Gallup area, but was a source of information for many on the Navajo Nation.

“I grieve, mainly for Gallup,” publisher Bob Zollinger said when discussing the closure of the newspaper. “It doesn’t feel good. It’s a death.”

But in the same edition of the Albuquerque Journal that announced the closing of the Gallup Independent, there was some hope.

Source New Mexico, which brands itself as “Scrappy independent journalism for you” wrote a story which appeared in the Journal about some shady handling of funds intended for victims of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon fire in northeastern New Mexico. Source New Mexico is an independent news organization supported by donations from readers and grants. You can reach it online at:

https://sourcenm.com/

The story said that the federal official who was in charge of a multi-billion dollar fund to compensate victims of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon fire personally received a six-figure payment from the fund because of “smoke damage” to his Angel Fire resort home. Angel Fire was far from where the actual fire burned.

Many victims of the fire lost homes directly from the fires from the flooding aftermath and many of those are still struggling to secure compensation for their losses. The federal official in charge of allocating those funds received $266,000 in compensation for smoke damage to his home and his wife, a realtor, received more than $250,000 for business losses.

The story did not mention whether the fund manager and his wife were members of one political party or another. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that diligent reporting by a free press uncovered this matter and brought it to the attention of citizens and government officials who I hope will be able to correct the situation. It was journalism at its best.

While I try not to be political in my blog, I make an occasional exception when it comes to freedom of the press and the First Amendment. I think it is important for readers to know that a free and independent press is essential to keep government officials honest, to be at school board and county commission meetings to represent the people who can’t be there and to keep citizens informed about what’s going on in their community. I’m sure most of my readers have had complaints over the years about legitimate news outlets but despite its warts, we’re much better off with a free press than without one. Think of Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Venezuela and other countries dominated by power-hungry individuals

Our own local newspaper is a shadow of what it once was. It was acquired by the same large media group that purchased my father’s Ruidoso News. The local paper seems to make most of its money on lavish obituaries and mostly publishes outdated wire or syndicated copy. True local interest stories are few and far between.

We need to support good local journalism, particularly in print form.

And remember that Thomas Jefferson was quoted as saying that if he had to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”

Yes, Chester our dog got it right for the second year in a row. He picked Seattle to win the Superbowl and the Seahawks came through.

With his winning streak, I’m wondering if Chester next year can come up with a way to communicate the points spread for betting purposes. Maybe I can paint each of my hands the color of the two competing teams and count the number of times he licks each hand. Of course, if I’ve just handled some freshly cooked bacon, I think the results would be tainted.

Anyway, Chester has a year to contemplate how he’s going to communicate the spread to all his followers. In the meantime, he’s content to watch re-runs of the Bad Bunny halftime show.

Yesterday, I chronicled my faithful readers (all four of you, possibly including me) about our faithful dog Chester’s conflicted pick of Sunday’s Superbowl winner.

In my annual highly scientific “toss out two different colored balls and see which one Chester picks” method of predicting the Superbowl winner, it was kind of a tossup. Chester first ran toward and then scooped up the green ball representing the Seattle Seahawks. But seconds later, he darted toward the blue ball representing the New England Patriots, grabbed it, then managed to stuff both it and the green ball into his slobbering and potentially toxic mouth. A clear tossup.

But later that afternoon, as I was playing his favorite “squeaky ball” toss game, he continued to gravitate toward the green ball. Finally, he would not relinquish that ball, even when I frantically squeaked the blue ball in front of his nose and then tossed it away from him.

Nope, not a smidgen of interest in the blue Patriots squeaky ball.

Below is a picture of him with his prized green Seahawks ball in his slobbery mouth.

You’ll note that the blue “Patriots” ball is forgotten and languishing behind him (circled in blue).

I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to interpret all of this.

I’m sure you’ve been waiting with “baited breath” for our dog Chester’s annual Super Bowl pick. But before we go into that, I looked up “baited breath” on the internet and discovered that the phrase was first used in the Shakespeare play “Merchant of Venice.”

Here’s the line from the bard, although he spelled the word baited as “bated.” And appropriately, a dog is mentioned in the selection:

“What should I say to you? Should I not say
‘Hath a dog money? is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ Or
Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,
With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this;
‘Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn’d me such a day; another time
You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much moneys’?”

Well I’m sure you didn’t tune in for a lesson in English literature, so here goes Chester’s pick between Seattle and New England, with the blue ball representing the Patriots and the green one representing the Seahawks.

What you can clearly see from this is — confusion. Chester’s apparent first pick was the green Seahawk ball, mostly because he appears to have spotted it first. He grabbed it with his slobbery moth, but then realizing that he was missing something, darted over to the blue Patriots ball and scooped it up with the green Seahawk orb already in his mouth.

Keep in mind that Chester has only successfully picked one winner through this scientific method in the past five years. That was last year’s surprising win by the Philadelphia Eagles over the Kansas City Chiefs.

So if you’re looking for a solid answer about who will win the Superbowl or are just wanting an answer to the meaning of life, I think I’d keep Chester out of the equation.

I’m not a fan of either team in this year’s contest, but I’ll look forward to the TV commercials, my home-made buffalo wings. and not having to watch endless candid glimpses of Taylor Swift in the VIP box.

This morning on my daily walk with our dog Chester, I spotted the first daffodil in bloom this spring. With all the bad weather that many people have experienced lately and bad news from around the country, I thought this cheery flower might make people feel better about things. Spring is just around the corner.

The street where we live is kind of like a red-headed stepchild. We live within the corporate limits of the Town of Mesilla, but really have little in common with the historic community to the west of us. We seldom see the town marshal’s vehicles patrolling our streets or any maintenance crews showing an interest in our streets or other infrastructure.

A couple of weeks ago, a pothole just east of our house seemed to have appeared overnight. Although not large enough to swallow a vintage Volkswagen beetle, it might have caused serious damage to the front suspension of a Ford F250 Super Duty if driven fast enough. After wandering through the Mesilla Town website I was finally able to find a phone number to speak to a human. (Seriously, go on the website and see how long it takes you to find a good phone number https://www.mesillanm.gov/). Luckily I finally reached a nice young man, told him about the pothole and a couple of others nearby and he promised to fill out a work order to fix the problem.

The next day, someone — I assume from the city — had spray painted white lines around the offending potholes in hopes that a feral Chihuahua dog might avoid getting lost in them. Then came the rains. It rained for four solid days and soaked us with about 1.66 inches of the wet stuff — more than I remember experiencing in all my years here. That was followed by several nights of below freezing temperatures. That was the perfect combination to make the potholes grow even bigger.

When it finally seemed that the water had drained out of the potholes, I called the Town of Mesilla again and asked them if they could address the problem. Much to my appreciation, they appeared the next day and the potholes were filled. I made the point to thank them in person as they were dumping globs of hot mix on the offending street chasms.

This made me think of a story told by a good friend of mine in Santa Fe a few years ago. He said that a recent article in the Santa Fe New Mexican announced that the city was “declaring war” on potholes along the city’s ancient streets. As an example, the newspaper showed a picture of a nasty pothole near the downtown plaza.

He was a collector of old newspapers and proceeded to pull out a copy of the New Mexican from about 20 years earlier showing a photo of the same pothole in about the same condition it was in the most recent photo. The photo accompanied an article saying the city was “going to get tough” on potholes.

So looking at the illustration above, it appears we only have two choices to stop potholes on city streets:

1. Control the weather so we don’t get rain followed by freezing temperatures
2. Eliminate vehicles from roads

I’m not sure when the first oxcart or wagon rolled into New Mexico, but I have learned that the first automobile that came to our state showed up on a drive from Denver over Raton Pass to Albuquerque in 1897. That vehicle was a steam-powered “Locomobile” that was purchased by Albuquerque bicycle dealer R.L. Dodson.

The first gasoline powered vehicle in the state was owned by Taos physician Dr. Thomas Paul Martin, known locally as “Doc Martin.” His home is now the famous Taos Inn on the town’s main drag and includes a restaurant known as “Doc Martin’s.”

Martin is said to have brought the vehicle to Taos in 1900. There are no know photographs of that vehicle but below is a picture from a few years later with a newer car, loaded with members of the Taos Pueblo.

We really don’t know for sure when the first potholes arrived in New Mexico, but it may have started with what you see below.

I suspect potholes will be around to annoy drivers even after the whole transportation thing is fully automated and cars and trucks just float above the surface of a roadway. I think I’ll take a photo of the next pothole I see on our street and ask that it be compared to that same location 100 years from now.

The professional golf season has started, even though as I write this, large swaths of the United States are under severe winter storm warnings. In Las Cruces, we’ve been getting rain since last Friday and have now received more than one and two-thirds inches — a rare event for our high desert climate. The Organ Mountains were frosted with a thin covering of snow this morning, which was gone as soon as the clouds cleared out and the sun burnished the mountains.

Staying indoors is pretty much a given under these conditions, and watching sports on TV, reading a book or cooking something that takes most of the day are some of the best entertainment options to avoid cabin fever. I decided to watch sports and found the American Express golf tournament in La Quinta, CA. It was my best option since I don’t follow a lot of basketball and the two NFL playoff games weren’t until the day after I was writing this.

Watching golf got me to thinking about golf in New Mexico. I decided to see what the oldest golf course was in New Mexico and was surprised by the answer. It is the nine-hole course adjacent to historic The Lodge in Cloudcroft, which opened in 1899.

The Lodge in Cloudcroft was bult by the Alamogordo & Sacramento Mountain Railway, which had built the rail route primarily to haul timber harvested in the Sacramento Mountains to lumber mills in Alamogordo. Timber shipped by train from mountains was used to construct many homes and other buildings in El Paso and southern New Mexico at the turn of the century. The Lodge was apparently an afterthought to the railroad and was constructed as a traditional log cabin building further down the hill from the current building. The golf course was constructed further up the hill at 9,000 feet in the spruce, fir and aspen forest and along two narrow valleys where it still is today. At one time, it was considered to be the highest golf course in the United States. That honor now goes to the Copper Creek Golf Club near Copper Mountain, CO, at 9,800 feet.

The Lodge and railroad were later acquired by the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, owned by the Phelps Dodge Corporation. But when a fire in 1909 destroyed the original lodge, the railroad initially decided not to rebuild it. A group of investors, including some doctors who saw the cool high and dry mountaintop location as a health benefit for ailing children, urged the railroad to rebuild the lodge. The railroad agreed and offered those interested to buy shares in the rebuilt hotel.

The golf course is unique and challenging. Although not very long, it features significant elevation changes, lots of trees and underbrush off every fairway and includes one hole where you can’t see the green when you tee off.

I’ve played it several times and have lost many a ball in the forests, usually on the right side of the fairway where my terminal slice comes into play. The first hole is pretty dramatic, a par four that you think should be a par three, with the pin a hundred or more feet below the tee box. Even so, the course is fun to play and hard to take seriously, so I just enjoy the unique experience.

Although originally built as a par 9, it becomes a par 18 because two different tee boxes are used for some holes and two different flagged cups are located on other holes.

I looked online about other states’ oldest golf courses. Many of them were started about the same era that the course at The Lodge was built. Wyoming and Nevada were the latest states to open golf course — both in 1917. The oldest course in the United States is Shinnecock Hills in Southampton, New York, where major PGA tournaments are still played.

And after the course at Cloudcroft was built, the next golf course in New Mexico wasn’t constructed until 1914 at the Albuquerque Country Club. I’ve played that course too and it’s flat and pretty boring compared to Cloudcroft. But instead of losing my ball in the forest, I can usually find it on the next fairway to my right, thanks to my predictable slice.

Last weekend was pretty gloomy in Las Cruces. We got more rain in a three day period than I have ever experienced in our 40 plus years of living here.

We decided to get pizza for the evening and as I was driving down a street right at dusk, I passed a brightly colored display on the side of the street in front of an abandoned franchise shoe store.

When I pulled up next to the display to investigate, a man quickly came out of his nice SUV pulling a trailer and was of course excited that I might buy what he had for sale.

The items he displayed were colorful plastic orbs of various shapes which he had made, including some that looked like hot air balloons, and all were electrified. Had it been 20 years ago, I might have considered buying one of these things, just to reward him for his persistence. But my wife and I have so much stuff collected over the years that I’m currently in the “let’s get rid of this” mode.

I spoke with the vendor briefly. He said he was from Las Vegas, NV, and had gone through Phoenix for a stop, then was heading to El Paso when he decided to give Las Cruces a try. Had he been here a week earlier, I think he could have sold several hot air balloon shaped electric orbs because of the local balloon rally that weekend. But sadly, he picked probably the worst weekend for an outdoor vendor to be selling things.

I asked him how successful he had been.

“Yeah, I sold a few,” he said, probably wildly overstating his success.

He said his ultimate goal was to end up in San Antonio, TX, where I suspect that if he found the right spot, he might actually do pretty well.

I concluded the conversation saying I might stop by tomorrow and take another look. But of course, I didn’t and I feel bad about that.

You have to admire street vendors — whatever they’re selling. I suspect they have an always optimistic outlook on how well their sales will go. And I believe part of what they enjoy is just meeting new people and enjoying new places.

And of all the street vendors I’ve encountered over the years, I’ll always remember the one roadside stand that I saw between Farmington and Shiprock. Its handwritten sign promised to sell you “Avon products and live goats.”

I didn’t stop to learn more about the sales offerings, and I’ve always regretted that. Who knows, I might have come home with a goat with fancy lipstick on its face.

When I was growing up in Ruidoso in the 1950s, my father acquired a little teardrop shaped camping trailer and managed to find a secluded spot on the lower end of Eagle Creek where he parked it for weekend getaways. My father named the tiny trailer “Petitesy” after a kitten that my brother inherited and tried unsuccessfully to get us to adopt.

I think the camper was parked illegally on U.S. Forest Service land, but no one ever asked us to relocate it during the four of five years it was there. The land surrounding that spot is now part of a development featuring high six-figure and higher summer homes.

I mention this because of a recent article by Source New Mexico indicating that fireflies (or lightning bugs if you prefer) can be found in certain locations in our state, despite some previous claims that they did not exist in our high, dry climate. Experts say that the number of these insects are declining throughout the world.

I can confirm that at least at one time, they did exist around our camping trailer campsite along lower Eagle Creek. We were sitting around a campfire one evening and noticed some quickly moving glowing spots a few yards away from where we were. We first thought they might be glowing cinders from the campfire, but when we walked to where we had spotted the source of flashing lights, it was clear that the light was coming from some insects. I can’t recall how many of the bugs we saw flickering near our campsite, but there were enough to convince everyone there that the bugs did indeed exist.

I’ve never seen them again in New Mexico on any of our various outdoor outings, but I have witnessed them in Washington, D.C., near my wife’s family farm in Nebraska and in Austin, TX, where our daughter lives.

According to the Source New Mexico “four confirmed sightings of Photinus pyralis, the Common Eastern Firefly, have occurred in New Mexico since 2021. They all occurred between 8 p.m. and midnight in late June or early July in Northeastern New Mexico, specifically in Guadalupe, San Miguel and the border between Mora and Harding counties.”

Anna Walker, who is associated with the “Western Firefly Project” says she witnessed hundreds of them on the night of July 3, 2021 in Mills Canyon in northeastern New Mexico near the town of Roy. She continues to gather reports about firefly sightings, many of which turn out to be false, but is optimistic that there are enough in our state that you might some day witness them.

If you’re interested in learning more about firefly sightings in New Mexico, and have a sighting to report, here’s the Source New Mexico link:

Researchers insist fireflies exist in New Mexico — if you know where to look • Source New Mexico

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting many blogs lately. I am trying to recover from a painful sciatic nerve injury that I’ve had since Thanksgiving. My best guess is that I aggravated the nerve in my lower back/left hip while playing soccer with my seven-year-old grandson in our back yard. The injury has made walking and sitting in a chair for a prolonged period of time a bit unpleasant.

Yes, I know that these things can happen at my age, but we all want to think we’re still 28 years old. At least one other person I know says he suffered a leg injury over the Thanksgiving holidays when he was playing a game with one of his grandchildren. It just happens and forces us to think about how to be sure we don’t do this to ourselves again.

Anyway, enough whining from me. Below is a small gift that I share with readers every year at this time. It’s my New Mexico spin on “The Night Before Christmas

__________

T’was the night before Christmas in New Mexico

And everywhere luminarias were starting to glow.

The stockings were hung by the horno with care

In hopes that Pancho Claus soon would be there.

Outside on the porch, ristras swayed in the breeze

And as the sun dipped down, it was starting to freeze

Los ninos were dreaming, all warm in their beds

And swung at pinatas that danced in their heads

Mamma and Chester were snoozing away

In a bed that left me no room to lay

So I sat in a chair watching the pinon fire die

When I heard a strange noise coming down from the sky

I ran to the back door to look out on the lawn

Which was soft and white from a snowfall at dawn

We don’t get much snow in the desert, you see

So the view outside was exciting to me.

Then suddenly I spotted something that was even more to behold

It was pack of coyotes with a wooden cart in tow

In front of the coyotes with a beak that was red

Was Rudy the roadrunner, who was always ahead

And driving the cart was a fat jolly man

Wearing a sombrero and a waving his hand

It was Pancho Clause, of that I was sure

And he called to his coyotes as they ran in a blur

“Now Pedro, now Carlos, Jose and Miguel,

On Cisco, Jesus, Juan and Manuel

Over the mesquite bush, don’t linger and stall

Through cactus and sand dunes, now dash away all”

So up on my casa the coyotes flew

With a cart full of toys and Pancho Claus too

And a noise from above gave me a start

Coyotes howling as he stepped off his cart

He slid down the chimney with his bag full of toys

And began his work without any noise.

He wore a pony tail at the back of his head

And his velvet Navajo shirt was a cheery red

His shirt was laced up with fine goatskin leather

And his face was rugged from the Southwestern weather

His eyes were like turquoise, his dimples so sweet

His nose and his cheeks were like red chile heat

The steam from from a pot of posole in la cocina

Formed a shape over his head that looked like a Zia

He was a true Land of Enchantment elf

And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself

But seeing his smile, I knew I had nothing to dread

Knowing that soon I would be back in my bed

He said “Ya-ta-hey” to me as he started to work

Filling up the stockings, then turned with a jerk

He’d noticed biscochitos we’d left him for a snack

And stuffed a few of them for later in his pack

Then before I could blink, back up the chimney he went

Leaving only the smell of a sweet pinon scent

He sprang into his cart, gave his coyotes a shout

And was gone just like that, to the next hacienda, no doubt

But I heard him call as his cart flew away

“Feliz Navidad, In New Mexico we say.”