Laurie, Tristan and me at a restaurant. The only restaurants we went to were Chinese to get spicy food or when we performed with the group from the Canarias.

Over the next several months, I'll be doing a series called "Tales From My Youth..." that will include odd jobs and various incidents from my teens and early twenties. The difficult part of doing the series is creating photos to illustrate the tales. So while looking for old photos that might be helpful, I came across a few photos of Laurie, Tristan and me when we lived in Spain in the late 1990's. Since we were studying dance and guitar while we lived in Spain, I took very few photos and Laurie very little sketching and no painting. We did become part of a performing group from the Islas Canarias, so we have photos of us in costume and, a couple of photos taken by a friend.

Practicing my guitar

Laurie, Tristan and me in costume

Laurie and Tristan

Laurie

Tristan

“What a bloody mess!” I exclaimed as the lights flickered on illuminating the contrast of the red on the white tile and stainless surfaces that made up the autopsy room. “The old hacker’s outdone himself this time” I thought as I stood there seeing blood everywhere — it was streaked up the walls and across the ceiling, a bloody handprint dripping down the tile where he was apparently leaning on the wall while thinking or sipping his coffee or both. A bloodstained, unfinished cup of coffee was sitting on the edge of the counter below the handprint and a streak of blood that about encircled the room. The old hacker had scrounged that cup of coffee off me at the beginning of my shift, and only drank a third of it during the autopsy that he performed while I was busily cleaning the food service area.

In the late 1970’s I worked at a hospital cleaning the kitchen and cafeteria six nights a week. It was a job that suited my university schedule very well. The morgue was at the back entrance to the hospital across the hall from the service door to the kitchen. While my main job was to clean the food service area, as part of the hospital custodial staff, I also had to help clean other areas of the hospital when custodians were out sick or on really busy nights. When I interviewed for the job, I was asked if I had any problems with cleaning up after autopsies. I didn’t, so after my training on cleaning the food service area, I was trained on how to clean the morgue.

The morgue was made up of three areas — the entrance, which had a three door high body refrigerator, with long doors that opened down like oven doors. The body trays slid out so bodies could be easily transferred from and to gurneys. There was a bathroom with a dressing area and a shower, and the autopsy room with an operating table in the middle, electric saws and drills hanging on hooks on a ring, and adjustable lights attached to the ceiling above it, a drain in the floor below it, and cabinets with countertops on one wall. All of the surfaces were glazed tile or stainless steel, so the entire room could be hosed down. 

One of the tasks when cleaning the morgue was to open the door on the bottom body fridge, slide out the tray and take the stainless steel bucket of “guts” out and empty it into the incinerator, rinse out the bucket and leave it to drain on the operating table. I was told to throw out whatever was in the bottom body fridge into the incinerator, and not to open the other two body refrigerators unless there was a note left on them that said to clean them.

After I got over the initial shock of the bloodiest mess I had faced in my year as a hospital custodian, I went about cleaning up as usual — I got the ceiling and walls cleaned up, the bloody coffee cup bagged up with the other trash, all the instruments cleaned and shined, and all the bits and pieces of hair, bone and flesh mixed with the blood rinsed off the table and down the drain. I opened the body fridge to throw out the guts, and after the initial shock that made me jump back a little, I started laughing. When I pulled out the tray, a leg was lying next to the bucket with a tag on the toe that read “DO NOT THROW!”

This tiny little toad is next to a 1 1/2" thick 2X4 — we only see about half of the 2X4.

Bilbo the hedgehog was a little shy

Bilbo finally emerged from his ball

Beautiful funky chicken

The June bugs are finally out

Watching the dog and pony show

Apple, a sweet little burro who was born under an apple tree in Corrales

Apple

Corgi

What begins with a toad ends with a toad

Beaker was getting pretty annoyed by me trying to get him to pose. He spent most of the time biting on his rope, but he gave me a couple of cute birdie looks between bites.

Sasha: "BANZAI!!! AAAaaahhhh!"

Spunk: "Wha... What was that?" Sasha: "Hahahahaha! Sucker!"

Spunk: "Okay! Where is that sneaky little kamikaze kitten?" 

Spunk: "There you are you little cat fink!" Sasha: "??????"

Spunk: "Gotcha!" Sasha: "Umph!"

Spunk: "Take that you sneaky little kamikaze kat" 

Spunk: "Bonsai me will you? Ha!"

While walking along the ditches last night, I saw lots of bullfrogs. When there isn't dried foliage on the edge of the banks to sound my approach, I can sneak up and get fairly close to the frogs, and get a few shots before they hop into the water. While the bullfrogs look very much alike (they are bullfrogs, after all) they display unique patterns in their markings, and different shades of green.

I got this frog when I started my walk. He's in the last photo taken 40 minutes later shootin' the bull with the another frog.

The frog on the left is in the 7th photo above; here he's Shootin' the bull with another frog.

The 4th of July was a fun filled day starting with photographing the parade in Corrales, and then dinner in the evening followed by a walk to the river to photograph Albuquerque's firework show.

The dragonflies are out and there is a nice variety of them this year. There are several that buzz around but never seem to land. Dragonflies are quick and I find them very difficult to photograph in flight.

Pedaling around the streets of Albuquerque.

Sasha's soft, mystified look reminded me of "Play Misty for Me", possibly the first movie directed by and staring Clint Eastwood. It was released about a month before "Dirty Harry" in November 1971. "Play Misty for Me" is a strange, surreal thriller and the 10th movie Cint Eastwood was in after "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and before "Dirty Harry". I have seen 9 of the 10 movies Clint Eastwood was in from 1967 to 1971 — the one I didn't see is "The Witches" (a "spaghetti comedy", I suppose) that Eastwood had a minor role in (he apparently got $25,000 and a new Ferrari to appear in the film). It was released in the US in 1969, but a lot of hit films were released in 1969, so I assume "The Witches" got little attention in the US. "Play Misty for Me", on the other hand, was quite successful with an estimated budget to make the film of $725,000, it grossed $10.6 million at the box office and another $5 million in rentals.

Sasha was also mystified by the fact that our swamp cooler wasn't cooling, I got up on the roof to see what was up with the cooler and discovered the pads were completely clogged with cotton from the cottonwood trees. I normally wait until after cotton season to put in new pads, and spent almost an hour on the roof cleaning the cotton and calcium carbonate off the pads and out of the vents in the sides of the swamp cooler where the pads go. For those of you who don't know what swamp coolers are, water is pumped into a trough that distributes the water onto the pads. A large fan pulls the dry outside air through the pads and the water evaporates in to cool air as it is blown into the house.  On a dry day, our swamp cooler keeps the house about 20 degrees cooler than the outside temperature, which is better than the 10 to 15 degrees cooler expected from a swamp cooler. I think we benefit from having a lot of plants growing on, and around the house, and mulch and ground cover plants instead of hardscaping. I'll install new pads in mid July after the cotton has played out. Sasha was happy, in a misty bliss of cool air, after I got the cotton out of the cooler.