After just a few intermittent days of sun and warmth, we are back to unremitting gray, depressing darkened skies and snow – spring snow, that melts into muddy blackness in hours, before the next snow dump briefly hides the muck. Around my home that muck is worse than usual, much of it the blackened ashy residue of last spring’s wildfire that somehow clings far more readily and tenaciously than ordinary spring mud.
I find it a challenge not to become depressed as the exceptionally endless gray periods of this past winter have extended far longer than usual, through all of February and now much of March. One of the normal blessings of living in New Mexico is how much sun we receive. I remember only one other time in the past 50 plus years when, in my corner of the state at least, we had such week upon week of gray weather. One of those was the first summer I moved up here, near Mora, from my previous home just south of Santa Fe. I never needed my light summer clothing that year – it didn’t get either bright or warm enough to shed long-sleeved blouses. That was the summer of 1990. I questioned what I had done to myself by moving… thankful to realize by the end of that year that it had been an aberration, not repeated until this past autumn/winter/now spring when it has been gray for weeks on end.
I have a close friend who lives on the Oregon coast – and have teasingly accused her of sending her natural climate down here to torment me, while she responds that I’ve caused her to have to cope with too much hard-to-tolerate heat. The exchange of “normal”, apparently part of the shifts in pattern reflective of climate change, between here and there displeases us both.
I am mindful of the scientists warning that our concepts of normal must also change. Well aware that I should be grateful for the snow bringing much needed moisture to this still drought-stricken state, I ask for the virtually unobtainable – winter weeks of sunshowers, those ephemeral hours we sometimes enjoy in summer, when one can be sitting in sunshine and watch it rain hard just a quarter mile away. In past years something akin would occur from late February throughout March and sometimes into April – a heavy dump of snow over a 12 hour period followed by bright sunshine melting the piles, filling the creeks that run into the lake that supplies water to Las Vegas (the original one) NM. It is the unfamiliar gray day after gray day for a week or more at a time, all through this past winter and now into spring, that I find hard to endure.
It is probable that the gloomy weather contributed to my decision last week to get baby chicks. My flock of hens (and a few roosters) is sizable, their egg production more than I can readily dispose of since a few long-time customers have moved elsewhere. I do not need to enlarge, nor really to renew the egg factory. I just want something that, when I look at it, says “spring” and gives me reason to smile. See if you don’t agree.
1eclecticwriter 
A Rant for Rant’s Sake
February 23, 2026Without getting into the value and risks of A.I, I can categorically say I am beyond disgusted with the irrational, contradictory and impersonal mess that computer automation has made of so many unavoidable interactions in daily life. Speak to a person about an erroneous bill? You’re kidding, right? Accept an invitation to join the users of an online ticketing purchasing system? God forbid anything interrupts the multiple reverification steps vetting one’s efforts to complete the sign-up, as it will most certainly fail. Make an appointment to receive a phone call about seeking to obtain an estimate for a home construction project? Be prepared to be pestered by no less than 4 text messages reminding of the appointment. And the same with scheduling a medical appointment, which is then followed by a demand to rate the quality of the service received, and persistent reminders that the copay has yet to be posted.
Block the number of that pestering reminder, you suggest? Been there, done that, all it does is initiate a robo-dial from the next number in the phone bank.
Do you remember when one could, in the process of signing up for a subscription, specify that one’s contact information was NOT TO BE SOLD, or shared to any other entity? That option has long since ceased to exist. Now every request for a donation or to join the supporters of whatever cause, or even just to subscribe to a paper or magazine or online information cite carries with it the onus of also deciding how much of an inundation of more such solicitations one is willing to endure.
In tandem, offline, we now have to accept that incoming mail is 99% unsolicited demands to buy this, subscribe to that, support this, send money for that – all sent out bulk rate charges but requiring an ever more costly (over half a dollar now) postage stamp to reply. All with no guarantee the fully-paid-for envelop will arrive intact, if at all.
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While I did make a commitment to myself recently to get away from using my phone for most everything, and resume pulling out my laptop, I didn’t think I would start that process by posting a rant. But here it is. Not the first rant I’ve put up on my blog and probably, as things are going these days, not the last either. Not how I envisioned resuming writing – but then, better something than nothing.
Another day, not another dollar but maybe another mood and a more uplifting topic? No promises, but I’ll try.
Tags:A.I., automation, communication, frustration, technology
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