Our golden doodle, Chester, turns three years old today. He still has lots of energy and acts like a puppy most of the time, but we’re okay with that. He gets better every day in responding to our commands. He thinks everyone and every dog wants to be his best friend, and a treat is always welcome.

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This last Sunday, my wife and I, along with our dog Chester, explored an unexpected geological treasure near Las Cruces. It’s appropriately called “Slot Canyon,” and as my wife noted, it looked like it could have been on the set of an Indiana Jones movie.

It’s a very narrow canyon gouged by rushing water though the sedimentary rock in the Robledo Mountains, northwest of Las Cruces about halfway up the road to Hatch. The trail through the bottom of the canyon is as narrow as a foot wide in some places, and the walls reach 50 or 60 feet high, obscuring the sky and sun along much of its quarter-mile route. The canyon zigs and zags through distinct layers of sedimentary rock, some with compressed fine sand and others with larger aggregate.

The trail is off of New Mexico highway 185 and the trailhead is not marked, but relatively easy to find. You have to climb over a locked green gate (or if you’re Chester’s size, scramble under a barbed wire fence) to start on the easy to follow trail. It’s on land that is part of the Organ Mountain-Desert Peaks National Park. If you go to https://www.alltrails.com/ and enter “slot canyon” you will see several slot canyons listed around the country, including one near Las Cruces. Click on that and it will give you the information you need about the trail.

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We greeted several other hikers and dogs on Sunday morning, so the trail may get crowded at times . The canyon is so narrow that you should probably take a mask to wear during these COVID-19 times in case you come face to face with someone and have no room to socially distance. I think winter is a great time to go — just bundle up because it’s chilly in the always shaded heart of the canyon. Later in the spring or summer might not be so good because of the chance of encountering rattlesnakes. And if there is any thunderstorm activity in the area, you’d definitely want to avoid the canyon.

The hike up to and through the main part of the canyon is very easy, about a mile round trip. There is a longer loop trail above the canyon that gives you nice views of the Robledo Mountains, the Uvas Mountains and the Rio Grande Valley. All worth a short drive up the valley from Las Cruces.

The main takeaway is that you can always find interesting places to explore right outside your door if you just take the time. And in these months with lots of sitting around the house, isn’t that a good option to have?

A faculty organizer for the 2006 Rio Grande High School homecoming dance was in charge of selecting a memento for the event. His choice — a shot glass.

Following an apology from the school administration, the faculty member who selected the item said he “didn’t think students would actually use them for alcohol.”

Um, sure. I’m going with the theory that students put water in these small glasses to hold their boutonnieres or corsages to keep their Homecoming memory fresh after the dance.

In 2006, an 8th grade student at Rio Rancho Mid High School was booted out of class for five days after he was spotted passing some kind of drug to his friends. The school had a zero-tolerance policy for drugs, so it required immediate action.

When the drugs were turned over to authorities to analyze, it was discovered several days later that they were — wait for it — Gas-X.

The news article about the “drug” incident never disclosed what reconciliation might have been offered to the student. We can only hope he hasn’t moved on to Beano.

During the pandemic, as my wife and I have tried to limit our excursions out of the house, we’ve started watching more and more mysteries on TV. We have, I think, become self-anointed experts on what makes a good mystery.

It always starts with an unexplained clue (or in some cases, a dead body), then goes into a series of twists and turns, is sprinkled with interesting characters/suspects and ends with the mystery being solved by a determined sleuth who never assumes the most obvious solution is correct.

So on our daily walk Monday along an irrigation ditch, I spotted something that was a clue to some kind of mystery. Semi-hidden behind the trunk of a large tree just outside a rock wall was a pair of square-toed cowboy boots. One standing upright was fairly easy to spot, and the other was scrunched between the trunk and the rock wall. The boots were well worn but from my observation, might have been made serviceable with new soles. I chose not to pick them up for further examination over concern that they may have been worn by a COVID-19 carrier. Not having my fingerprints on them was also something that crossed my mind. I also thought it best to leave them there to see how the mystery develops. (They were still there Tuesday, and from footprints nearby, it appeared that several people had given them closer inspection.)

So why where they there? There was no unusual disruption of the ground around the boots, not even bare footprints. I looked up in the tree to see if I could see more clothing, someone hiding in the branches, even perhaps a body. Nope, no more immediately observable clues. Why didn’t the person who owned them simply drop them off in a garbage bin nearby? Why not put them in the trash at home? Why were they partially hidden, but still visible enough to be discovered? How long had they been there before I spotted them? What kind of shoe — if any — replaced the boots when the owner left the scene. So many more questions to be answered.

We’ve all seen sneakers dangling from powerlines where they were tossed by kids or blown-out flip-flops discarded along a street, so seeing abandoned shoes isn’t that unusual. I suspect these boots were left by a person most likely in the country illegally, walking along irrigation ditches to avoid authorities. But I’m still curious about why they were abandoned in that manner in that particular spot. Did they contain clues to a bigger mystery? Yes, I know I’m over-thinking a mundane discovery, but I blame COVID-19 for too much idle time in my brain.

My wife has frequently told me I should write a mystery book, so maybe this is the tipping point to begin that project.

We live in a great neighborhood, made better by the interesting mix of people who live here. My next door neighbor and I have frequent conversations across the joint wall in our back yards while sipping a glass of wine or his favorite Jim Beam. An occasional discussion focuses on our neighbors and how we might write a titillating fictional story about all these characters and the mysteries they might be hiding. I’m certain all have perfectly normal lives, but what do we REALLY know about them? Weaving these characters into “The Mystery of the Abandoned Boots” would be a natural.

I encourage any suggestions you may have about how the mystery might unfold. I may include them in future posts on this topic.

Now I need to start writing my novel. Yeah, sure.

In 2012, the Alamogordo owner of a 35-pound desert tortoise discovered that the critter had figured out how to push open a gate in his back yard. The tortoise, off on an unknown adventure, could not be found anywhere.

Imagine the surprise of the owner when a week and one-half later he got a call from a golf course in Ruidoso — about 45 miles away — to say the tortoise had showed up on one of the course’s greens. The news report of the incident had no mention of how the animal and its owner were identified.

What’s more baffling is how quickly the lumbering Gopherus agassizii (scientific name) managed to cover the distance to Ruidoso in such a short time. By my rough calculation, it covered about 4.5 miles per day — a lot even for a guy like me.

Maybe it was picked up off the street in Alamogordo and dumped off near Ruidoso when its captors discovered it did not have a pleasing personality. Maybe it snuck aboard a vehicle and clung to its undercarriage until falling off somewhere near the golf course.

At any rate, the critter wasn’t talking and was probably glad to be back in its yard, surrounded by extra security measures and contemplating a book with movie rights about the adventure.

Wish I could say I thought of this, but I got it from an Instagram post by my long-time work associate, Andrea.

If you’re like us, we have a steady stream of deliveries at our door because of COVID-19 restrictions, and with the holidays we’re getting even more deliveries. These people are working late into the evening, they’re at our door and gone so fast that we never have time to say thanks. And we’re especially grateful to our USPS route driver, Lillian, who never fails to give our dog, Chester, a snack.

Understanding how hard these delivery folks are working, Andrea set up a snack bucket outside her front door as a simple way to thanks for their work during this difficult time. We’ve done the same and I’ve posted a couple of pictures of our “thank you bucket.” And thank you, Andrea, for a great idea.

I began playing rugby in the 1970s, having first seen it played when my wife and I stumbled upon the annual Aspen Ruggerfest tournament on an early fall excursion to Colorado.

We were living in Santa Fe at the time, and when we returned home, I poked around and discovered that there was a local rugby club, the “Santa Fe Santos.”

The first time I showed up for practice, no one had a real rugby ball, so we played around with a football in a small park just up the street from where were living on Canyon Road. I eventually figured out the rules of the game (complicated because the British invented it) and became a marginally useful player.

Over the years, I ended up playing for a team in Albuquerque, helped start another team in Albuquerque and eventually ended up as volunteer coach for the New Mexico State University rugby team, the “Chiles.” That team even made it to the national “Final Four” in collegiate rugby — a club sport.

Looking back on what appealed to me about rugby, I think it was mostly that it was an outlier kind of sport. Not like mainstream softball, flag football or pick-up basketball. It it was full of really unusual characters that made it highly entertaining. And there was a high level of comradery because of the unusual nature of the sport and the fact that so few people were involved in it. I also really liked rugby jerseys.

Rugby has been tamed a bit from when I played it, and I guess that’s a good thing. But I guess I really miss some of the characters, even though some stuff they did was bad, but mostly harmless. And of course the fact that they liked to drink lots of beer and Guinness resulted in some bad decisions along the way.

Some of my memories of rugby:

The team from Harvard Medical school that rolled cadaver skulls onto the pitch at the start of a game to intimidate the oppononent.

A guy once described as “smart as a box of rocks” who managed to get free drinks every time he could recite the names of all the 37 bones he had broken during his career.

A student player of mine, who when asked if he knew what a “pseudo intellectual” was, responded by asking: “Isn’t that one of those Japanese wrestlers?”

A guy who used to start the Aspen Ruggerfest tournament by playing the Star Spangled Banner on his accordian.

A guy who swiped a lawn mower to “trim” the shag carpet in the lobby of a plush hotel. (Yes, he paid to replace it.)

A few members of my college rugby team, who after an evening of drinking beer, went on to the NMSU golf course and rounded up all the flag pins on the greens and took them to their dorm. When I learned about it and barked at them, they quickly returned the flags. I suspect it’s why pins are removed every evening at the course now.

Players who shaved off the eyebrows of one of their teammates when he was asleep.

Another player, who for some unknown reason was asked what he thought his name would be if he was Jewish. His response: “Johnny Bagel.”

And perhaps most memorable was an incident with a free spirited player named Ralph. Ralph, who played with reckless abandon at times, had joined with other members of the team to help clean up a post-tournament event at the Southern New Mexico State Fair Grounds. When we were finished and were driving back to town on Interstate 10, Ralph was riding in a pickup truck in front of me. At about 70 miles per hour, he decided to climb out of the side window of the truck and into the bed of the vehicle. At that point he began stripping off his clothes — all of them. Standing upright with wind-whipped flesh and complete disregard for his safety, he began waving at passengers as they drove by.

I’ll never forget the look of horror in two elderly women in a Buick who happened to be rolling by Ralph’s truck when he blew them kisses in his natural state. I’m hoping they did not suffer heart attacks.

I’ll probably write more about rugby later, particularly why it was so rewarding to be a coach of young men — who despite occasional youthful foolishness, have turned out to be fine citizens and individuals who have made me proud. Among them are a bank president, fire chief, high school football coach, construction foreman, teachers, lawyers, small business owners, a high level law Border Patrol agent and good husbands and fathers.
I hope I played some small part in their lives.

In 2006, a sheriff’s deputy in Albuquerque pulled over a vehicle that was suspected to have been involved in a minor traffic accident.

When the officer approached the car, he found a somewhat confused looking young man who seemed to be wrestling with a moral dilemma.

Before the deputy even began the interrogation process, the driver blurted out:
“I’ve got to be honest with you. There’s 100 pounds of weed in the trunk.”

A quick search of the vehicle’s trunk — aided by the willing driver — revealed 68 bricks of marijuana, not cleverly concealed. Perhaps the driver thought that the traffic citation he was facing was worse than a drug conviction and he wanted to work out an on-the-spot plea deal.

That approach did not work for the hapless driver and it clearly shot holes in his theory that honesty is the best policy.

Yes, you read that right. Here’s the story, and it’s not as sordid and you might have been wanting.

In my freshman year of college at the University of New Mexico, my fraternity brothers learned that Playboy magazine was going to be on campus to do a photo shoot for next year’s male college fashions. The magazine was conducting interviews at the UNM Student Union for student models to wear clothes that were expected to be the “in” look for the following fall.

I went to the interview with another member of my fraternity and spent a few minutes talking to a rather voluptuous woman from the magazine staff, then left. After my fraternity brother completed his interview, he told me that the woman confessed to him that she had found me “darling” looking. I would have hoped for “handsome” instead.

At any rate, I got a call the next day that I had been selected for the photo shoot and would be paid a whole $50 for my services. That was about a semester’s amount of beer money at the time, so I jumped at the chance.

The clothes they gave me to wear were hideous. It was a moss green corduroy set of pants and a matching top, with leather lacing on the chest. I looked like Robin Hood without the triangle cap and a protruding pheasant feather. Errol Flynn would have laughed hysterically.

I was matched with two young, wholesome looking, fully-clothed coeds and stood on a rock while one of the girls twiddled with my lacing and the other hugged my arm. I struck a serious pose while hiding disdain for my sartorial trappings. I am attaching a photo below to prove this actually happened. I often wondered what happened to the two coeds who posed with me. Having to explain that they had been in a Playboy photo shoot carried much more baggage for them than me.

The magazine came out the following fall and I was a bit of a celebrity in my family and in the fraternity for a brief period of time. Then the memory mostly went away and the beer money was long gone.

However, it was always a useful topic in later years when at “get to know your co-worker” sessions, you would be asked to reveal something about yourself that others would never suspect.

I had told the story about 40 years later to one of my skeptical co-workers, Valerie, who thought it was hilarious. While I had no proof of my claim, she set out on a mission to find a copy of the magazine with my photo in it. Some time later on a business trip to Seattle, she came across a store that kept old magazine issues and after digging through stacks of musty publications found the September 1966 issue.

I still have it as proof of my hidden salacious background. And if everyone has one minute of fame and this was mine, it was pretty lame.

For several years, my long-time fly-fishing buddy Bill and I used a guide on the San Juan River who was quite the character. He would work on his guitar music in the winter, then guide on the San Juan in the spring, summer and fall, living in what we suspect was not much more than a lean-to on the banks of the river. He was a philosophical and gentle soul, and we wonder what has become of him.

One of his passions was Marilyn Monroe, and on one of our outings, he proudly announced he had accumulated a “buttload” of photos and other paraphernalia about her. We interpreted the word “buttload” in the most pejorative of meanings and I have used the word since them to describe a large amount of mostly noxious “stuff.”

Well, it turns out that buttload is a real word. I discovered it by accidentally flipping through an online news post the other day describing things that you probably never knew.

Here’s what I found online from some source I’d never heard of called “Ponder Weasel:”

“A Buttload is an Actual Unit of Measurement. Okay, the measurement isn’t actually a buttload. It is the “butt” that carries historical measuring significance. From the Italian word botte, the word for cask or barrel, the word butt came to into being as a unit to measure wine and other alcoholic beverages.”

There are lots of other citations on the subject on Internet if you choose to waste more time reading them after already wasting time on my post, but suffice to say, it was an unexpected find for me.

Full disclosure: The word does NOT appear in my 10th edition of the Merriam Webster Collegiate dictionary.

So in the future, when you want to sound just a little bit spicy, you can use the word “buttload” in normal conversation. Once the shock to your listener is over, you can then initiate a follow-up conversation to prove how erudite you are about the word’s meaning and origin. And you can thank me a “buttload” for this valuable information.

Last week, police in Roswell apprehended a California man on charges of kidnapping, robbery and carjacking. Taken to the police station to face further questioning, the suspect — wearing a blue jumpsuit from the Chaves County detention center — managed to break free from officers and run away.

About two hours after the escape, police issued an alert saying the suspect had been spotted on a security camera no longer wearing the blue prison jumpsuit, but a red skirt and a colorful scarf on his head. In addition, he was carrying a pink purse.

A photo of the suspect in the Albuquerque Journal shows him sporting a mop haircut and a distinctive red beard.

At the time of this posting, the suspect is still at large, apparently still making a fashion statement in Roswell.

It’s said that most pilots can sense the smallest nuance of change in the performance or “feel” of their aircraft. Being attuned to these clues usually results in quickly identifying the source of the change so necessary safety measures can be taken, if necessary.

I experienced one of these incidents many years ago while flying my hot air balloon on a ride I had offered to a local newspaper editor and his son.

While hot air balloons are not nearly as complex as fixed-wing or rotor aircraft, they do give the pilot signals when something is not quite right.

When you engage the burner of a hot air balloon, you often feel a bit of a jolt in the basket from the blast of propane-fueled flame. Burners are the incredibly powerful engines of hot air balloons, producing millions of BTUs and enough heat to raise the temperature inside the balloon’s envelope to more than 200 degrees in a matter of a few minutes.

On this particular flight, I could feel a much stronger jolt each time I hit the burner, followed by a quivering sensation on the floor of the basket. My first instinct was to check the rigging between the basket and the envelope, then the fuel system and its various components.

I saw nothing, but continued to feel the sensation. Not quite ready to declare an emergency, I looked around once more and observed my passengers — and there was the problem.

It seems that the younger passenger — probably 10-11 years old — had a fear of heights he had not been aware of until he was flying in an open basket several hundred feet above the ground. Each time I hit the burner, he jumped slightly, then began quivering in his knees until the sense of doom temporarily subsided. I assured him and his father that all was well and that we would land as soon as possible.

With that assurance, the jolt and quivering seemed to subside significantly. After a few more jolts and quivers, we found a nice open field in which we landed safely. I believe the young passenger literally leaped out of the basket upon landing. If he could have done so without embarrassing himself, I’m sure he would have kissed the ground.

The City of Sunland Park, located on the Mexico-New Mexico Border just west of El Paso, has gained a bit of a reputation over the years as the poster boy for bad local government.

Because of constantly changing managers, elected officials, clerks and police officers, stability has not been a phrase used to describe city government staff in the small community.

Perhaps its most memorable chain of staffing events occurred about seven years ago when the mayor at the time admitted to signing contracts on behalf of the city while he was intoxicated. Then later, apparently oblivious to the fact that there were convenient airline connections between nearby El Paso and Washington D.C., he drove a city car cross country to the capitol, got lost at one point and ended up in New York, then completely missed the meeting he was scheduled to attend. He still billed the city almost $2,400 for his trip. Figuring that the jig was up, he resigned and the city council appointed a successor.

The successor, it turns out, had previously been convicted of bribery, extortion and taking kickbacks. Because of his conviction, he could not be allowed to receive the oath of office from the sitting town clerk.

Undaunted, the city council tried again, only to select a successor who had to resign 10 days later because the meeting at which he was appointed did not follow proper procedures.

I’m wondering if some day, the Sunland Park City hall will have to add a new wing for a wall large enough to contain the names and photos of all the previous mayors — and maybe a “most wanted” poster board.