Cheering us up

I think we all need cheered up after those miserable last couple of posts. And I’ve got another post in progress, about more issues at the Placitas house, that I’ll post today too. Always issues! So meanwhile, let’s take a breather.

Here’s my boss (in the red hat) playing water guns with my coworker’s children in the park:

Here he is drying off in the New Mexico sun, lol. In the background you can see two coworkers having a very long discussion. About what, I don’t know, but they are both on the team that is struggling a bit right now with team cohesion (among other things). Hopefully this retreat was helpful.

He’s impossible to see, but there’s a coworker of mine up in that tree. He’s in the center of the photo. See, even New Mexico is sometimes green.

Speaking of green, here’s my backyard after we had some actual real rain a week or so ago. It left everything completely wet! In some parts of the country you take that for granted. It rains, things are wet. Around here it’ll rain and you’ll go outside and everything’s still dry. How is that even possible? This time there was so much rain overnight that things were still soggy in the morning. Like it should be.

In other cute and cheery topics, Laura sent me these photos of pig races, lol, they are adorable:

My friend Tracey sent me these rodeo photos that same weekend. It’s too funny, I have a good friend and a daughter in the San Francisco Bay Area and do I get photos of sophisticated cultural events? No, I get rodeo pictures from both of them. I guess because the sophisticated cultural events are too ordinary to be remarkable.

Speaking of local culture, look at all the organic Asian sauces I discovered at Sprouts Market!

Speaking of retail opportunities, for those of you who are familiar with the San Francisco Outlet Mall in Livermore, get a load of the Santa Fe Outlet Mall:

Yes, it is open! For those of you unfamiliar with the San Francisco outlet mall, it is a terrifying, thronging mass of humanity. Busloads of tourists pour out of San Francisco and drive all the way to Livermore to spend enormous amounts of money at the outlet mall (I often wonder if they know what they’re getting into, it’s a very long bus trip). When we lived in Livermore, we lived very near that mall. One time we accidentally turned into the mall parking lot on a weekend afternoon and it took us an an entire hour of gridlock before we could get back out of there! Thousands of parked cars and busses cover acres and acres of pavement and nearby fields, and all the driving lanes in the parking lots are completely bumper to bumper with people simply idling, waiting for someone, somewhere to pull out of their parking spot and attempt to go home. Talk about taking a wrong turn!

Meanwhile, one day after work a week or so ago, I decided to stop by the Santa Fe outlet mall, which is less than a mile from my house. I’ve never been there since I’ve moved to Santa Fe, even though it’s very close by. I went into the Loft, which a coworker had recommended. There were as many sales people as there were shoppers (a total of about two of each). It was a very relaxing shopping experience, and I got several cute summer items at less than half price.

Ignore the wrinkles, that’s just from being crammed into my bag for the weekend trip down to Placitas. They just need a moment in a hot dryer.

And, a snake. What, you don’t find snakes to be cheerful? Yeah, maybe not. But I figured this would be a good spot for it because I don’t have enough to say about it to make it its own post. So, yep, a snake. Probably a bull snake. Harmless. Useful. They eat mice. Yay!