David’s Ramblings

Wow amazing upbeat Motown sounding soul R&B all packed into one… can’t wait to buy the album…

I’ve inserted an image which is a link to Youtube since Google has broken the old way of embedding… ‘do no evil’ yeah greed gets in the way of good intentions always…

I just got back from a very busy vacation in New Mexico…

For the first few days I was doing some WWII reenacting as the commander of the German forces for the March on Rome event at Fort Stanton near Ruidoso.

Here I am trying on a panzer III for size…

After the event Lyn and I went up to Old Town Albuquerque and spent a day wandering around with no set agenda…

Here’s the church near the square…

and the church courtyard…

Next we went up to Santa Fe, we were disappointed after seeing how wonderful Albuquerque was with it’s large variety of independent vendors and broad range of goods. Santa Fe has wonderful architecture and scenery but the central plaza is high end chain stores selling Rolex’s, designer jewelry, expensive tasteless chain store art… it was like a them park mall designed by sterile Disney trained MBA’s catering to the rich. - In short a total waste of time. Only on one small sidewalk were there some native Indians selling crafts. Almost like an afterthought or a zoning correction.

A museum in the center of Santa Fe…

Some of the architecture in Santa Fe…

Next we went to Bandelier National Monument. That was an altogether much more fun outing. Bandelier has a nice forest in the Frijole canyon, early America dwellings and kivas as well as cliff dwellings carved into the volcanic tuff of the canyon walls.

Lyn in the pueblo village…

Lyn staking out her cave dwelling…

It was a long climb up three different ladders to the cliff dwellings…

Last we went to Los Alamos, the home of the Manhattan project and a longtime interest of mine. Here I am in the Fuller Lodge, soaking up history…

It’s been a while since I update the fountain, I’m still working on it though it’s taking time to get it right. But it is looking good!

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Two of my sisters came to Texas visit and find out how hot a Texas summer is… Hot! I’ve enjoyed hosting them for the week. Pity work was so busy but we did get away for a few adventures…

Karyn surprised while eating breakfast…
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Valerie learning how to handle a side hack rig, her first motorcycle experience on a ‘40 BMW R-71…
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I finally wore out the old tires and got a chance to mount new rubber on the rims I purchased early this year. I’ve upgraded to the Pegasus R model rims in black.

They radically change the look of Mur… and with BF Goodrich Radial T/A stickies she handles really well…

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Now to sell the old rims…

I started laying down more of the walkway around the base of the fountain. Man this is taking forever and was way more work than I envisioned at the start of this project. But is turning out to be a really nice piece and a focal point of the side yard. This will be a really nice place to site and contemplate.

I was out at Fort Stanton this weekend on a recon mission for the March on Rome Event. In addition to being an old West US Army fort the post served as a TB sanitarium, mental hospital and during WWII first as an internment camp and then as a POW camp for German “Hard Cases” and also held some Japanese POWs.

Most of our work was to map out battle sites for the upcoming tactical event; March on Rome. Here’s the entrance to the Fort Stanton BLM land.

The fort itself is a large collection of buildings at the center of the land. It also includes a nice and newly refurbished museum telling the history of the fort. Below is a picture of a barracks building on the fort’s main square.

The internment camp has more standing structures than the camps in Texas that I’ve visited. This large building’s walls are largely intact, though the roof has fallen years back. There is an elevated platform at one end and several enclosed rooms at the other, the main area being entirely open. This was the gymnasium build by the Germans who were held in the internment camp.

The embossing over the door reads Erbaut 1944 (established/built 1944).

Here is a wooden framed building on the site that’s fares a bit better.

A historical photo from the Fort Stanton Museum of the dining hall at the camp.

Another photo showing a two man barracks room of the internees.

A major project undertaken by the prisoners was a swimming pool modeled after the 1936 Summer Olympics pool in Berlin. A photo from the museum shows it being constructed.

another shows it in use…

The pool still stands…

The original diving platform can be seen in a photo above, here it is today…

The back wall of the pool and the remains of a sitting bench…

Wow what a soothing sound… dang I may have to move my bedroom to be closer to it…

Well the surrounding wall for the pool is at least. Set the pump in the bottom and tested how the water would flow and sound. Looking forward to sleeping with the window open and listening to the fountain. It sounds wonderful…

We took a couple of days off during Spring break and on one of these we traveled down to San Antonio. I picked up a really nice hand woven blanket from Guatemala! It’s now on the back of the couch in the living room and looks like it was made for the room. I also picked up a couple more talavera switch plates and two soap dispensers.

For lunch we went to Azucar restaurant which was fantastic… a great meal and good atmosphere!