CoC Meeting: Margarita's Relay & MVT Explore!

The Mountainair Chamber of Commerce will meet at 11:30am at Alpine Alley, Tuesday, June 1. If possible, please phone Scott and Mary, 847-2478, to place your lunch order in advance. Lunch is always busy, and your consideration in this matter wouild be appreciated. Chamber meetings are open to the public. Visitors welcome.

Pond, Arthur Park, Estancia NM
from Zees Go West blog

Guest speaker, Margarita Hibbs will do a short presentation regarding Estancia Valley Relay for Life, a cancer charity scheduled August 6, Arthur Park, Estancia. 


Agenda: MIA, none sent with notice. For agenda or questions, contact Scott Remmich, saremmich@hotmail.com, or Dorothy Cole, 847 2832, dcole44@q.com. It may be too late to add an item to the June agenda, but you can always ask. The meeting schedule always includes a period for announcements from the floor.

The most recent (last Thursday) MountainView Telegraph issue contains the annual issue of Explore!, 2010-2011 Visitors Guide (in downloadable in pdf format), with the Mountainair Chamber's group ad featuring local businesses and upcoming events. Ads and articles run on pps 30-34, with additional articles on the MMAC Sunflower Festival, Salinas Pueblo Missions ruins, Manzano Mountains, rodeos and Fiestas on following pages. The issue also contains maps, photos, articles and comprehensive information on area attractions ~ as well as a memorable headline gaffe on pg 26, another reminder not to trust Spell Check.

Just Imagine

Just imagine ~ coordinating Mountainair and other East Mountain arts and cultural events. Supporting local arts just might mean supporting area events not necessarily in Mountainair before heading for Albuquerque. Let's include Valencia County. Belen Arts League's Gallery, Through the Flower and Tomé Gallery come to mind. Collocate, develop and promote an Arts Loop.

Is there a future for reciprocity? One cannot but hope... and imagine it. This weekend, if you do go to the Tijeras art market or the Belen Art League's ongoing spring show (through May 29) at the Harvey House Museum, just imagine stopping by Cibola Arts to pick up a handful of fliers for LeRoy Simmons' forge art opening at Cibola the following weekend? Are there fliers for the Sunday concert? Email Ray Terhorst, ray032483@gmail.com, and tell him you need flyers to take to Tijeras or Belen. 

Just Imagine Gallery Diane Buster Impressionist Painter, Showing in the Gallery May 14 - June 9 The Tijeras Arts Market weekends May - Oct 17 Come for the ART, Stay for the MUSIC! Present this coupon in our coffee house May 29 or 30, or June 5 or 6, and receive one free drink with the purchase of a drink of equal or greater value OR Bring this coupon on the same dates to the gallery and receive 20% off the item of your choice, some restrictions apply. Not to be used on artist consignment merchandise, layaways, or sale items. Visit the Tijeras Open-Air Arts Market sponsored by Just Imagine Gallery & Coffeehouse each weekend May 1 - Oct 17 for live music, entertainment, artist demonstrations, plus arts and crafts. Don't miss our activities booth where your child can create their own special crafts project. www.justimaginegallery.com 488 E Highway 66 (Highway 333) in the Village of Tijeras, NM, 87059, 505-281-9611 aking@nm.net  From Albuquerque, take I-40 east, seven miles to the Tijeras exit, go right off the exit, and make a right at the signal. Watch for the banners and the rock wall. We are across from the library and just west of the Western Mercantile

Just imagine... there's time too for you to visit one or the other and still make a stop at the Memorial Day Car Show & Park Dedication (10am-2pm) at the Community Park. 

Car Show & More

Saturday May 29, the #Mountainair Community Park will be dedicated as and become the Chavez Memorial Park. Enjoy a family day in the park: food, fun, prizes, vendors, music

Are You Ready for East Mountain Fire Season?

Arene Perea, Information Officer, Forest Service, Mountainair District (847.2990), sends the following update, which I am posting to both community blogs because of its importance.: 

Fire indices for the Mountainair Ranger District changed to High for us today also.  See the message below from Karen Takai, Sandia Ranger District.  Some good information and advice ....

---

Hi All, With daily red flag warnings,  higher temperatures, and low humidity we are seeing a drying trend in the East Mountains. FIRE INDICES ARE NOW HIGH .....Please make sure you are ready for our fire season.


Hopefully this document will open for you all. Please copy and distribute to your groups. It is an explanation of what red flag is and recommendations by the East Mountain Interagency Fire Protection Association  for our East Mountain communities during Red Flag Warnings. See below for details.

A few reminders.!!!!!

• Remove wood piles and slash from around your homes
• Cut and rake up your grasses
• Clean out your gutters on your roofs
• Rake and remove pine needles around your home and dispose of them
• Make sure your hoses are charged with water just in case
• Have fire extinguishers near-by and available
• Make sure everyone knows how to use a fire extinguisher
• Do not park on tall dry grass
• Is your go bag ready for your family and animals
• Connect with your elderly neighbors and with persons with disabilities.. make sure they have a plan
• If you are working who will take care of your animals at home
• Is your emergency neighborhood phone chain operational
• Have vehicles always half full of gas in case you need to evacuate
• How much time will it take you to evacuate...time yourself.... if they said to evacuate...what would you do..
• We recommend that there be no open flame outside during red flag warning  (smoking, campfires dead out, bbq. welding )
• Help Our Firefighters! Be Ready!

RED FLAG WARNING

RED FLAG PROTOCOLS: Red Flag, a short term, temporary warning indicating the presence of dangerous combinations of temperature, wind, relative humidity, fuel or drought conditions which can contribute to new fires or rapid spread of existing fires.

The East Mountain Interagency Fire Protection Association composed of all jurisdictional agencies that respond to fire and emergencies in the mountain communities requests the help and cooperation of our visitors and community.


Fire response agencies have certain protocols within their agencies when a Red Flag is announced by NOAA.  The Dispatch communication groups (within all jurisdictional fire response groups) are immediately informed of the Red Flag warning. They in-turn pass this information through their communication channels to all response personnel and crews in the field.  Agencies then heighten their response by getting ready in case a fire does break out in our area.


For the safety of life and property we are requesting that our communities and visitors help firefighters by also following these community protocols during red flag events.

NO CAMPFIRES ~ NO BBQ OUTSIDE ~ NO SMOKING OUTSIDE ~ NO WELDING OUTSIDE

Until the Red Flag Warning is lifted by NOAA

Invitation: Small Business Development Forum

from Mountainair CoC president, Scott Remmich:

Greetings Chamber Members and Small Business Owners:

The Mountainair Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with the Estancia Valley Economic Development Association is hosting a Small Business Development Forum at the Dr. Saul Community Center on Thursday, May 27, 2010, from 1:00 to3:00 p.m.  On behalf of the Chamber, I want to personally invite you to participate in this exciting opportunity.  This may be the first event of its kind to be hosted right in our backyard. 

low clouds over the Estancia Valley

photo from Moriarty Soaring

As we prepare to host the event, we're honored that staff from our congressional delegation, Tom Udall, Jeff Bingaman, and Martin Heinrich, are slated to present pertinent and cutting-edge information for small business owners.  In addition, several micro lenders will also be present to share information about various development programs that are available for small business owners.  Regardless of your business plans, we encourage you to come out and support the local business owners in attendance and to hear about important business opportunities for our region and for New Mexico.

We look forward to seeing you.  In the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions.

Regards,

Scott Remmich, President Mountainair Chamber of Commerce
(505) 847-2223

June 6: Arts Council Entertainment, Dinner & General Meeting

from MMAC president Ray Terhorst addresses #Mountainair art lovers,

On Sunday June 6th from 3 until 5 PM at the Shaffer Hotel garden, the Manzano Mountain Art Council is sponsoring a free concert.  Noted western swing group, The Sons of the Rio Grande, will perform.  The arts council hopes you will attend this concert, the first of the arts council's annual Summer Concert Series, as well as the next two, scheduled on successive Sundays. More about the Concert Series will be posted separately.

\

Following the performance at 5:30 PM the General Membership meeting will be held at Alpine Alley.  There will be no charge for dinner to members whose dues have been paid for the upcoming year.  Dues are $15 for individuals and $20 for a family.  In order to take advantage of this offer, you must RSVP by May 31st and can do this by e-mailing Ray at ray032483@gmail.com or calling 505 705-5656.

So, come and enjoy the music and then get together for dinner with friends......RSVP soon.

#Mountainair Wired: Facebook’s Privacy Changes

A recent flurry of panicky and less than knowledgeable emails are making the rounds. I sigh to think that but heralding the deluge to come but read the early manifestations as a prompt to blog better information. The high road approach would have involved extensive research and links (that those most in need of the information may not have bothered following). This Faster Times piece covers the subject well enough to spare me that effort. I may revisit it as the topic further unfolds and develops. 

Additional sources for you to visit on your own ~ just type "privacy" into the search term blank and click the ubiquitous button or hit enter: Mashable, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, Wired or similar e-publication. Your favorite save the world newsletter, AOL or Yahoo news (oxymorons both), CNN, the 2-minute bite on your nightly news and the email forwarding mad BFF are not your best sources. Skim through a few of the links above, pick at least one you find readable, appropriate to your computer use, technical comfort zone and then subscribe to email or rss feed updates.  Create a Google Alert for "Facebook privacy" to have more than you ever wanted to know delivered to your mailbox or rss feed reader. 

If you haven't the time to read through all this, here's the short version: if you already have email without ISP blocking application, use credit cards or worked where QC was common practice, it's too late. Your privacy is long gone. The only thing you are losing now is the final illusion. 

Welcome to the panopticon.  

See also: The Best of What's Left of Privacy on Facebook

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself-anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..." -- George Orwell, 1984

A few tips for quick not quite fixes: don't publish anything on the web you don't want the world to read. If you are worried but not ready to leave Facebook, prune your profile, stop playing games, giving gifts, taking quizzes and using cute apps, check and set your privacy settings to the most Draconian levels possible. You should have stopped depending on Facebook's default settings long ago. If you didn't, now is the time to stop. 

' 

So the question remains, "Are You in Danger From Facebook's Privacy Changes?" via The Faster Times by Pete Warden, 5/16/10, shared on Google Reader

"How am I in danger? Do people really care about what I post or like and dislike on a social networking site? If so, what are they going to do with the information? I don't get it."

This question came up in the comments on my blog, and though it's very simple, the answer's surprisingly complex and brings up much deeper philosophical questions. The short answer is that you're in no danger right now, despite all the gnashing of teeth and wailing in the tech community. There's no evidence that anyone's using this information for malicious purposes, just as I've seen no actual burglars using the information in Please Rob Me.


So why are the geeks so upset? They're looking down the road and imagining all the things that the bad guys will be able to do once they figure out what a bonanza of information is being released. Do you remember in the 90's when techies were hating on Windows for its poor security model? That seemed pretty esoteric for ordinary people because it didn't cause many problems in their day-to-day usage. The next decade was when those bad decisions about the security architecture became important, as viruses and malware became far more common, and the measures to prevent them became a lot more burdensome. The geeks were proven right: you can't start with a shoddy security model and just patch it into something secure.


I think the inelegance of Facebook's approach is what makes engineers' skin crawl. The model they use to prevent your information leaking out is a mess, both from the API side and in the user interface. This makes it almost certain that there are unintended holes leaking information that even Facebook isn't aware it's revealing and also ensures that users have no clue as to what they're opening up to the world.


Fueling the anger is the feeling that Facebook executives are being deceptive in how they've changed their privacy model. They appear to believe there's a simple trade-off between making money and keeping users happy and have apparently decided that they're in a strong enough position to ignore user complaints in order to increase their revenue. They're making information public because they want Google Juice. The more user-generated content they have on the public web, the more visitors from search engines they'll get, and the more important it will be for companies to have Facebook pages and advertising.


In practical terms, why is the information they're revealing important? Here's some of the scenarios that dance through geeks' heads:


Embarrassment: There's a lot of personal information we'd rather keep to ourselves that might be revealed by our fan choices or friendships. You fan a gay club, and a homophobic employer spots that. Your ex-partner's divorce lawyer spots you're a fan of 'partying,' and uses that as evidence against you in a child custody battle. Someone with a grudge targets your friends and family for harassment.


Big Brother: Social tools played an important part in the Green uprising in Iran, but there are now certainly  people within the regime using the same tools to track down dissidents. There are a lot of people within Iran who are fans of Mousavi, and since people generally use their real names on Facebook they could easily be found. I actually removed detailed data from FanPageAnalytics for Iran, Burma and North Korea because I was worried about this sort of usage.


Criminals: I'm skeptical that social network information will help traditional criminals, but there's a massive world of phishers, scammers and identity thieves I can see learning to use what's being revealed. If you got an email that said hello to you by name, appeared to be from one of your friends, and also included a link to something you were interested in, wouldn't you be a lot more likely to click on it? Facebook's starting to reveal the information criminals need to personalize social engineering attacks like phishing emails, it's just that the bad guys don't have the sophistication to use it yet.


So, don't panic, but pay attention to what Facebook's doing. In the short term the biggest security issue on the site is still the spread of traditional Windows viruses and malware, so keeping your virus checkers up to date should be your first priority. Long term, we need to figure out what information we want to reveal, rather than letting Facebook decide for us.

Photo by alancleaver_2000

New Mexico Arts Market 2010, Mar 23-24

The New Mexico Arts Market 2010 Celebrates Twenty One Years in Cathedral Park. Santa Fe Council for the Arts, Inc., announces the "New Mexico Arts Market," juried arts and crafts shows (local not International Forl Art, July, or Native American, August) featuring local southwest artists.  Held in the historical Cathedral Park, the date of the show is May 22 to 23, 2010.  

Cathedral Park, Santa Fe

Show times are from 10 am to 5 pm, both Saturday and Sunday.  The market exhibits some of the best arts and crafts made here in New Mexico and the southwest.  Come enjoy a beautiful fall day at Cathedral Park with these talented artisans and their artwork!  Cathedral Park is locate at the corner of Palace Avenue and Cathedral Place next to St. Francis Cathedral.

If you have any questions contact the Santa Fe Council for the Arts, Inc., email artscounsf@aol.com or phone (505) 424-1878. Sponsored by the Santa Fe Council for the Arts, Inc., established in 1978, is a New Mexico non-profit corporation and is partially funded by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission, 1% Lodgers Tax . 

2010 Torrance County 50+ Games

Summary and local qualifying results from qualifying games held in #Mountainair submitted by Jerry Melargno

The Torrance County 50+ Games offer all seniors ages 50 and above the opportunity to participate in a wide range of events locally and also serve as the qualifying competition for the annual State Senior Olympic Games to be held in Las Cruces July 28 – August 1, 2010.  This year 19 Torrance County seniors participated in 45 different events held in Mountainair April 26 – May 8.  All participants qualified for the state games. Our oldest participant was Frances Addison, 88, of Mountainair, competing in 4 events; the youngest, Barb McCune, 57, of Willard, competing in14 events. Other competitors were Alan Clute, Larry Foltzer, Laura Kayser, Joanne Koske, Jerry Melaragno, Bob Mundis, Richard Shovelin, Billie Stephens, Jean Stephens, Bruce Strickland, Ray Terhorst, Nancy Townson, Tom Valdez, and Virginia Valdez, all of Mountainair. Sam Chavez, Estancia, Pete Fredrikson, Placitas, and Tommy Negrete, Torreon, rounded out the team. 

Bingo, updates, more Spring Fling, birds

Both update and reminder are from Kristine / Stonehouse Gallery B&B

Congrats to the winners at Spring Fling Bingo, your new trees, herbs, and veggies have been weather hardened and are ready to plant, start digging! Thanks Dennis Fulfer, Scott Remmich, Ray Terhorst, Christine Franks, Marvin Pat Fulfer, Jay Mortensen for helping!

The rest of Spring Fling is tomorrow and Sunday - town clean days (or until the dumpsters at the MAC are full) and flea market, also at the MAC. It's not too late to find a spot to sell your stuff, email Kristine at stonehousegallery@gmail.com or just show up with your stuff, table and canopy or tailgate and $5 to hand over

DIY compost tumbler

I had topics on today's must blog list when I came across this video entirely by chance while in pursuit of totally unrelated material for another blog. Serendipity! I might get to one or both of the other and then again I might not. Or I might conflate them imaginatively. At least we're covered for today.

Celebrating Cinco de Mayo

Mountainair hosts no public Cinco de Mayo festivities. There are, however, a number of area events. 

Cinco de Mayo Celebration, Duke City Fix, story by Isabelle Zamora:

Fiesta de Colores is a vibrant show that combines dance and live music from two of New Mexico's favorite groups: Ballet en Fuego and Los Primos A masterful blend of the traditional with the contemporary, this lively production includes music and dance from Mexico and Spanish speaking countries around the world.

Ballet en Fuego combines vibrant choreography with colorful costuming and has performed internationally (including Japan, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Canada, and Spain).

Los Primos is a seasoned group of young musicians that perform with passion and a fresh perspective on the traditional music of the Mariachi and Trio Romantico.

Let's Party in Albuquerque -

3rd Annual #Mountainair Spring Fling

Thursday evening, May 6th @ 6pm, Spring Fling festivities begin with Bingo at the Mountainair Elementary School Cafeteria. 


Saturday and Sunday all day May 8th and 9th, Town Clean-up Days (until the dumpsters fill) and Flea Market at the Mountainair Activity Center on Hwy 60 W. 


Contact Scott Remmich at B St Market, (505) 847-2223, for more Spring Fling and Clean-up Days information; Kristine Lauritsen, stonehousegallery@gmail.com, about Town Flea Market vendor booths

Spring Fling sponsored by the Mountainair Chamber of Commerce and the Town of Mountainair

Mountainair Online and Online in Mountainair NM 

Happy 15th, Cibola Arts.

Tomorrow, Saturday May 1st, # Mountainair's Cibola Arts Cooperative / Group / Gallery's celebrates its15th (anniversary and/or birthday) with Gallery Discounts to mark the occasion

The birthday party (reception) will be from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday at the gallery, which is located at 217 W. Broadway (map).  The special 15 percent-off discount applies to all purchases. If you can't make Saturday, come by another day to wish Cibola a happy 15th. Gallery hours are Tuesdays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call 847-0324.

Upcoming events at the gallery include the show "Forging Fine Art from Steel," featuring the work of Mountainair's blacksmith-artist LeRoy Simmons, Dragon Ash Forge, opening reception Saturday, June 5, 2-4 p.m. The show will run until Aug. 1. 

Ship in the Desert , welded sculpture at Dragon Ash Forge

Forge art by LeRoy Simmons, photo by CD Hall

Links to more images of LeRoy's forge art