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A laugh a minute
It's coming at me from all sides now, boy howdy. The big news of the moment is that I got home from an outdoor concert on the 4th of July to find I was only a block away from a voluntary evacuation zone for a bleeping forest fire. One block! It's been that kind of a week, all right.

Let's see, where to start? On Tuesday I became the proud owner of a 500MHz first-generation TiBook and had a good look at OS X 10.2. On Wednesday morning my wife left for a long stay in Iowa -- saying goodbye was an experience roughly akin to bungee-jumping (remember that?) with my own entrails, but we Internet editors are a sturdy breed. Wednesday afternoon I taped a radio show for KRZA-FM in Alamosa, Colorado about the writers series I'm running this summer. That same evening I went out to look at a funky old adobe house I'll probably have rented by the time most of you read this. Oh, and the tribal lands of the Taos Pueblo are going up in flames, even as we speak. At least nobody's trying to bust my bunker ...

But lemme tell ya, this fire thing is bizarre. The picture above shows you what it looked like in the beginning. I could see the whole thing develop from the concert venue, and that was weird enough. Started by lightning, the fire has since burned over 1,500 acres and is about to wreck several very important watersheds, not to mention Pueblo sacred sites. I can open my front door, walk half a block, and see the smoke and flames! When the wind's blowing toward town, the smoke is really thick. It's totally surreal to see the tourists crowding the sidewalks as if everything is normal, with smoke blotting out the sky and ash raining down. Maybe that's a normal day in Fort Worth, how do I know.

Applelinks West
House-wise, the dwelling gods have pretty much boxed me in. Everything else I've looked at has turned to crap before my eyes (usually on the second visit), and you may remember the deer's head incident from last week! Monday afternoon is when the nice man wants an answer, and just now, on Sunday evening, it looks like I'll be pulling out my checkbook. The house in question is unlike anything I've ever lived in (understatement of the new millennium), and I venture to say that hardly any of you have, either. There is no way to grasp the full extent of what it means to say "an old adobe house" unless you have direct experience. Think of it as living inside a giant Mac SE built of dried mud ...

The walls are well over a foot thick. There are raised sills between each room that you have to step over. The doorways between the rooms are rounded, sculpted, and there are nichos in the walls. A nicho is, well, a niche, carved out of the adobe and used for placing images and statues of saints or the Virgen de Guadalupe, otherwise known as La Guadalupana. This house has a nicho in the "dining room" with a Guadalupana statue in it, for example. The original builder carved himself an unfinished wooden virgen, then went down to the St. Francis of Assisi church in Ranchos (the one Georgia O'Keefe painted so many times) to see what colors the altar Guadalupana was painted, came home and used the exact same ones. And why the quotation marks around "dining"? That same room has a huge pot-bellied woodstove in the corner: I'm not sure if one can even share the same room with it when it's cranked up.

The living room has a large kiva fireplace. (Man, I'm gonna be burning that wood.) This space has been retrofitted with actual windows you can look out of -- if you know old adobes, you're nodding just now -- but they don't open, of course. You want air, you leave the door ajar and let the skunks come in. This will be where I'll set up my computer desk, probably over on the left, once "Peyton" takes her futon couch away. At least there's plenty of room, and the house even has a kitchen and a bathroom. Yes, "even." I told you this was funky, didn't I? Those last two rooms were retrofits, see. These kinds of buildings didn't have indoor kitchens or "bathrooms." Heck, this one even has a bathtub and a washing machine, wow.

The outside of the place, as well as the general neighborhood, is enough to send visitors from The Outside running for the Ramada Inn as fast as their rental car will take them, down the winding dirt road to the highway. The same can be said for just about any northern New Mexico neighborhood that wasn't built yesterday, but don't get me wrong, it's really quite scenic -- junked cars and single-wides notwithstanding -- and most of the drive-by shootings take place at the bottom of the hill, not where I'll be living. My place is actually on a ridge and the [gulp] next-to-the-last house on the road. Beyond that is nothing but open country. No fences, no houses, no roads, just rocks, trees, and mountains all the way to the horizon. The owner tells me that packs of coyotes come down from the canyon on a regular basis, so he has an old wooden ladder up against the side of his house so the cat can climb up and escape.

Peaceable kingdom?
Meanwhile [pausing to cough from the smoke], there's the TiBook! At 500MHz, it's a tick faster than anything else I own and should provide many hours of wholesome entertainment. Someday when I grow up I'll have an actual new Mac once again, but for now this brings me into the magic world of OS X, I'm happy to report. My first impression of X is that it's so polite, I think I'm in small-town Iowa having punch and cookies at the parsonage on a Sunday afternoon. What in God's name was all the fuss about?!

That TiBook, though ... my tangerine clamshell iBook, now in Dubuque with my beloved, is sturdy enough to drive nails with, but the TiBook feels like it wants to crumple in my hand! It won't, of course, but what a difference. I just ordered a case for it too, from MacResQ. I'm giving them a free plug to because the nifty red (!) nylon carrier is less than twenty bucks and I'm happier than a pig in spontaneous organic fertilizer. They even throw in a free day planner (like I'll ever use that), a buncha pens, and a free calculator. [NOTE: MacReQ can keep the plug, 'cause they're a good outfit, but the bag in question isn't padded at all and won't be carrying my laptop! Stay away from that item, then -- sorry!] The only better deal than that is the TiBook itself, which comes my way from a generous source that shall remain nameless in return for a wee bit o' work.

I'll close with a short anecdote about my new neighborhood of Llano Quemado, which means "scorched plain," or something prescient like that. Last night I had a talk with a guy who lived down that way when he first came to Taos. He said that he and his wife were lying awake one night listening to a very persistent barking dog. (Yap, yap, yap, you get the idea.) Suddenly they heard, "Bark! Bark! Bark!" [BANG-BANG-BANG!] and that was that.

Gee, I wonder if I can get DSL.

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr invites your emails.

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(Beautiful land for sale here: "What It Is About El Rito,")

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