Category: blogging

Oh The Indignity!

Do you know what I had to do today?

It’s….it’s…a shock!

I had to SCRAPE ice off of my windshield so I could drive my car to work.

I know! Startling!

Back when I lived at a mile high, it was pretty standard stuff to walk to my car and have to deal with all that the frost laying on the windscreen (<- that's for my UK readers). I remember it well. Oh those were the days....I'd fire up the engine, get the defroster blowing some heat then I'd take a firm hold of my deluxe long handled easy-to-use ice scraper. While shivering in my long coat, work clothes and nice shoes, I'd scrape that bad boy squeaky clean. I was rather proud of my ice scraping capabilities back then. Heck, I don't even own an ice scraper anymore. I think I held on to that deluxe ice scraper for about two years after moving here to so-called sunny California. I remember cleaning out the Jeep and lobbing my scraper into the trash with a satisfied "I live in California now, dammit" smile. Let me just say this....an ice scraper doesn't help much with the fog. I simply traded one road hazard for another, really. So this morning, my lack of ice scraper ownage was never more apparent. I looked at the thin but sturdy layer of frost, and sighed. It was time to make do, and my library card was placed into service. Maybe later today I should go to my local library and check out "Call of the Wild” just to remind myself about what being really cold is all about.

(Thank you Albuquerque Public Schools for making me read Jack London so I can reference it now…. From great literature to a blathering blog post in three easy steps.)

There I was, shivering in no coat and my work clothes with nice shoes cursing and fuming as I scrape, scrape, scraped the frost. My old skills came in handy as I quickly knocked down the road hazard and got on my way.

What a way to start my Monday.

Can I get a pobre cita?

No? Fine. I’ll be a grownup today. But I’m not going to like it!






It appears that I’m derivative of myself. It was a year ago that I discussed this same topic. Only back on that day, I was in the haughty position of having parked my car in the garage. No such luck today, The Good Man got the good spot. *sigh* Love AND marriage.


iBienvenidos! Welcome! Come on in!

Snacks and beverages are over there, games and fun stuff are out in the backyard.

Please, come in! Friends, family, casual passerby, you’re all welcome to the brand spanking new home of that venerable ol’ blog called Oh Fair New Mexico.

Thanks for helping me move, I owe ya one!

After almost four years and a thousand posts, I decided it was time to move to a self-hosted blog. All the cool kids are doing it.

Heck, the New Year seemed like as good a time as any to launch my new address.

To help get this blogwarming party started, I wanted to give my readers a gift, and so I decided to read another New Mexican folktale as my first post in the new location.

Readers of the original Oh Fair New Mexico will recall that I did my first folktale reading back in June. I had so much fun, so I decided to go again.

This selection is called “The Orphan Boy” and is taken from the book Cuentos de Cuanto Hay, Tales from Spanish New Mexico

The story collection is published by University of New Mexico Press, and was edited and translated by Joe Hayes.

So, without further ado, I welcome you to “The Orphan Boy”, as originally told by Porfirio Roybal of Jacona, New Mexico.

If you’d prefer to just read the story yourself, click here.

Or, to listen to my read, click below. It runs just over ten minutes. Player opens in a new window.

Karen Fayeth reading The Orphan Boy



Story was recorded using Garageband with some relatively low-tech gear, but it gets the job done. If you are an audiophile, I guarantee this recording will make you nutty. Read the .pdf instead. Let me know if you have any technical issues.




Perhaps a Sunlamp Is Required

On this post-holiday rainy day, I reserve the right to be melancholy.

Holiday blues, weeping gray clouds, and general lethargy. Sure. It’s my prerogative.

I am loath to say the next seven words I’m about to say but…

I heard this great story on NPR.

You may not realize how pompous I think the people are who quote NPR. Now here I am committing the crime I rail against.

The story was of a musician named Shawn Camp who had a record set for release back in the year 1994.

Through a series of events, the record was shelved until recently. Camp met the new studio head at Reprise who gave Camp’s record a fresh listen and it was finally released in September of this year.

What’s got me going here, got me writing a whole blog post about this story, is one of Camp’s songs that they played on the air.

It was a beautifully written song about being at the funeral of his grandfather. For some reason, the words reminded me of the incredibly sad funeral I attended back in August.

Despite the passing of four months, I find I still grieve for my friend. I guess there’s still something left to grieve, because lately he’s been showing up in my dreams.

Listening to Shawn Camp’s song reminded me of a dream I had just last night.

It was me, and my friend, and we were dancing. Just a simple two-step, nothing fancy, but we danced and he was whole and healthy and grinning from ear to ear.

My best friend was there too, and before I was even done, she got the next dance with him. The three of us laughed like it was, well, 1994, and it was good.

Now, this dream was particularly odd because in real life, my friend wasn’t much of a dancer. Oh, he was long legged and tall, a perfect partner. But he had a farmer’s sensibilities and didn’t dance that much. He could, and did, but it wasn’t something he did a lot.

But there in my dream we danced. When I woke up, I remembered seeing my friend’s body laid out there in a casket inside the El Paso First Baptist Church.

The old Southern saying is “now, don’t he look natural?”

No, he didn’t look natural. In my dream smiling and laughing and giving me seventeen kinds of heck…that was natural.

I’ve always been pretty glad that at the end of the line for my dad, one afternoon when my mom had run into town for errands, my dad and I had a talk. It was uncomfortable and weird, but in that talk, a lot of things were said that needed to be said. I can happily say I have no unresolved issues there.

But with my dear friend, I have something unresolved. It niggles at the corners of my mind and sits on my chest when I have another dream in which he plays a cameo. I owed him an apology. I’d planned to deliver that apology when he came home from the surgery from which he never returned.

Perhaps in dreams I can find the way to lay my issues to rest, to lay down the burden I carry around, to feel at peace with the loss of my friend.

Or maybe we can just dance and forget about I’m sorries.

After my best friend is done (which may take awhile), I got the next waltz.

Cuz these Fat Babies were made for dancing

Photo by Karen Fayeth

Brevity Is Not My Middle Name

(Sometimes the pump just needs priming. After writing about having nothing to say, it turns out I actually did have something to say today. It was just hiding. Here’s a second post for the day.)

A few weeks ago, we had a manager’s meeting here at work. This is a once a quarter affair where we meet, eat pastry, and talk about our plans for the department over the next three months.

Part of these meetings is also a discussion about how we, the management team, can improve ourselves and be better leaders for our team.

This quarter’s growth topic in support of that goal was about our use of words.

A senior member of our staff held aloft the cap from a water bottle, and told us the goal was to “use a capful, don’t pour out the whole bottle.”

He told us to shorten the bullets on our PowerPoint presentations.

He told us to “speak in conclusions” in our emails.

He told us to always be aware of how many words we’re using and then trim it back.

Ironically, it took him over half an hour to pass along this message.

I deeply considered throwing the cap from my own water bottle at him.

But I didn’t.

Ahem.

Look, dear readers, you’ve been with me for over three years, and 1,000 posts which amounts to approximately half a million words.

Do you *really* think I can “use a capful” when I write?

People, please.

To paraphrase The Dude, I’m not really into that whole brevity thing.

I’m a writer! I’m a creative! I pass words like currency through my life. My husband and my best friend, the closest people to me, both have kick ass vocabularies! If you’re gonna run with me, you gotta love the use of words and language and be willing to endure my penchant for storytelling the whole damn six pack, not just the capful.

No, I say! No! I reject the capful and dive headfirst into the ocean of words, swim around nekkid, get the words all soaked into my skin and then I’ll use a few more adverbs just to make it more, erm, wordly!

Damnit! Asking me to ratchet back the words is like tying Rodin‘s hands behind his back and asking him to craft a masterpiece with his toes.*

Ain’t gonna happen.**

* Look who is comparing herself to Rodin. That’s a bit audacious, innit?

** That said…I’m trying. Well, trying at work anyway. Be warned, all the words I have to cut out of my days at work are so totally going to show up here.

Cartoon from Toothpaste for Dinner

A less than beautiful mind

When I look inside my head, as I usually do about this time of day, and ask myself “what would I like to blog about today?” I often see many colorful suggestions, images and ideas pop to the forefront.

Sure, many of the suggestions that my monkey mind puts forth are so capricious they become either not appropriate or too complicated to write about in about 500 words, on average. But I can usually find one gem among the rubble and bring that to you, every weekday, on my blog.

Today, on my walk over to the cafeteria to grab a salad and rush back to my office in time for another conference call, when I turned inward for a good blog idea, what I got, instead of colorful confetti and suggestions of “poop!,” was resoundingly gray. Quiet. Lonesome.

As gray as the cubicle walls that line my office building.

As quiet as the dark winter clouds that have gathered over the Bay Area to lie down and weep cold rain on our heads.

As lonesome as New Mexico state highway 285 between Vaughan and Roswell.

When I looked inward, I discovered that my brain hurts.

For every company that’s ever employed me, December has always been a busy month. My current employer is no exception.

At five months into my new gig, I really like it a lot, and as I’ve begun to hit my stride, I have discovered that cute little word “global” in my title means my days begin in the UK, lunch with Sao Paulo, a quick break for the US, afternoon tea with Australia, early evening snack with Hong Kong and I am put down to bed for the night with India.

All on the phone. All day long. The UK to India run encompasses about twelve hours of my day.

Then I wake up and do it all again.

While this probably sounds like complaining, it’s really not. My job is fascinating and fun and really good stuff.

But I am *tired*.

In the interest of my own health, I’ve begun working out again. Nothing major, Jazzercise a couple times a week and a sashay on the treadmill a couple other days a week.

I found I need that exercise to build up my stamina so I can sustain these long days at work.

But all that exercise wears me out too.

And my blog, my beautiful, wonderful blog. It’s suffering too. My goal of a post every weekday stands firm. Then I go and miss a day (like yesterday) and I’ve got to climb back out of the hole.

So all of these words (about 430 so far) are just my way of saying I don’t have much to say.

For today, anyway. That quiet, gray, lonesome mind only lasts for a little while. Then my severe latent childhood will kick in, and I’ll figure out how to write another post about poop.

You can count on that.

Artist Heather Gorham‘s interpretation of the monkey mind