About six weeks ago I signed back up for Facebook after leaving in 2016. I wanted to use the Marketplace to sell my teardrop travel trailer. This morning, I received a notification that my listing had been removed after over a month of being active. When I appealed the decision and asked for clarification of which rules I violated, Facebook responded almost immediately and without any explanation. It is a firm denial with no details. Therefore, I have decided to leave Facebook once again and put my energy back into this website instead.

Until now, I have neglected to do anything with the blog. This news feed section largely filled the role of a short-form blog but it lacks the multimedia capability that I am looking for. The first two posts are of my recent camping trip and of the parade on Monday.

My friend and I returned from our little weekend foray into the Lincoln National Forest. The weather was mostly pleasant with a bit of rain. Overall, cool and sunny. We did not hike Nogal Peak, but did wander around in the local area. This is an ideal time of year to visit the mountains. Today is the beginning of the Eastern New Mexico State Fair. The ENMU-R campus is closed, so this will be the last in a restful four-day weekend. I know that the campus has a float in the parade and a booth somewhere at the carnival, just not sure when everything is supposed to commence. The plan is to do a little photography for the campus website as well as Pecos Valley's.

No changes to the site other than a few new photos uploaded in recent weeks. I applied for the Webmaster position at the University on Monday. Agonizing over my resume and letter of interest basically consumed my entire weekend. I'm glad to be done with it for now. Unfortunately, I caught a bug at some point this week, but I am recovering nicely. My upcoming trip to the mountains is happening next Friday, so I plan to get the truck and trailer ready if I have the energy. This will be the first outing with the new person that I am seeing. Our plan is to camp at a dispersed site along a forest service road and then to hike Nogal Peak. This is the ideal time of year to be outside in New Mexico.

I made a few minor changes to the Contact page. It was always my vision to make the whole thing look like a payphone. For those of you born after the turn of the century, we used to have public telephones that you put quarters in to make a call. The cleverer among us just dialed 1-800-COLLECT and put our entire message in the name prompt. Also, the file drop no longer deposits to the Public folder on my site so anything that you share with me from now on will not be visible to anyone else. Visitors using a mobile browser will see a different simplified version of the contact page that does not include the payphone graphic.

There are some subjects that don't fall neatly into either the category of Roswell, because they are not iconically Roswell, nor 'New Mexico' because they are not landscapes or recognizable landmarks. Granted, most of the photographs that I make these days are limited to the geographic region of Roswell and the surrounding area, they aren't all obviously tied to this place. Therefore, I want to start a new series with a central theme of decaying infrastructure and abandoned things. You can scheck it out here --> https://www.gtripp.com/portfolio/forgotten-things

Admittedly, I'm not really a fan of this holiday. Furthermore, I question the wisdom of giving drunk people explosives and incendiary devices. Now that I have Klausie, the already annoying two weeks of blowing shit up takes on a whole new dimension of anxiety and distress. While I don't think there's anything wrong with having pride in your nation and your culture, in today's political climate I'm never sure whether it's genuine patriotism or unquestioning loyalty to a nationalist agenda masquerading as patriotism. It would seem, for the time being anyway, that America isn't quite done flirting with fascism and that makes me sad :-( .