Category: September 2017

Job Offer!

Yesterday I accepted a job offer from New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) in the Air Quality Bureau!

I’m very excited about the offer. I start on Sept. 25, which is a very auspicious day for me. 12 years ago John and I went on our first date on September 25. Good things start on that date!

I think I will really like working for NMED even though the pay is significantly less than I could make at either of the local national labs. That’s not because it’s a lower level job, it’s just because New Mexico is such a poor state, and local government wages are quite low here. But I just want a job I like!

I had also interviewed at LANL on Thursday, and I enjoyed the interview. But they’re not going to decide until the end of the month. And I don’t want to turn down an actual offer and in order to wait for a possible offer, or I could end up with no offer!

Plus for me there are definitely a lot of advantages to working at NMED instead of a national lab. For one thing, as an environmental scientist, my mission is the same as the NMED mission. Whereas when working for a national lab, what I do is not the purpose of the company. Environmental compliance is just a necessary requirement. This lack of alignment with company purpose and mission can have a lot of subtle but persistent negative impacts on job satisfaction as well as career opportunities. At NMED I’ll be a core professional rather than support staff, doing what NMED does.

Also at NMED, if I don’t happen to end up liking my particular job, I could easily move around to other jobs. I didn’t have that mobility at Sandia. (John has the ability to move around at Sandia because he does mission work.) But my ability was very limited there compared to what I’ll have with this new job. That’s the hope at least!

And anyway, Santa Fe is way cool 😉

Diet?

I just want to take a moment to fess up and admit that my diet isn’t working. Actually, I wouldn’t know if my diet is working or not, because I’m not sticking to it. It’s very possible that my diet would work, if I were to do it. So I don’t mean to blame the diet itself.

I have my excuses, of course. When does anyone ever have time to diet? I have the most success when I get too busy to eat, LOL. But eating right and exercising takes time and energy.

 

Dear dogs,

Awww, the poor gated dogs.

Reality check!

Dear Dogs: You’ve got the entire kitchen and dining area, a doggie door to a huge, COVERED patio and a beautiful & safe courtyard. You’ve got a ginormous “fuf” (https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0055DXLVW/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1), you’ve got complete access to all kitchen crumbs, and you can see, hear (and probably smell) me working in the adjacent room, you’ve got 3 freshly laundered doggie beds, dozens of toys on the patio, and dirt to roll in.

Which brings me to my point. Dogs don’t need access to the ENTIRE house. Ever. Dogs need food, water, safety, shelter, decent temps, and a good amount of affection. But not the entire darn house.

So guess what – that’s where you live now. You ruined my couch and now I have to sit on a futon with my friends (with no throw pillows)!

And you are about to ruin my genuine, imported, heavy-weight, flokati rugs, which have piles of sand under them from your rolling in the dirt, (no, I don’t sweep the dirt under the rug, it filters through, geez.)

Not to mention you puke and ass-drag on them! Yes, on my flokati rugs. Yes, ass-drag. I made it up, but I’m sure it’s a word, Google it if it’s not obvious. Actually, you might not want to google it, you might get porn. The internet is a scary place.

I hope John is reading this…The. gates. stay. closed. Always and Forever, Amen.

(There, I managed to use the words “ass”, “porn”, and “amen”, all in the same post, while innocently talking about my darling little poodles. I hope they don’t shut me down.)

The chile near-disaster

A month or two ago I ordered local organic green chile, which was scheduled to ship “toward the end of the summer” and they’d send an email when it was shipping. But I don’t think I always get all my emails. Or maybe they didn’t send one. At any rate, unbeknownst to us, they shipped at the end of last week. According to the tracking number that I later found on the package, our box of fresh, raw, green chiles were put into one of those metal parcel boxes on our street at approximately noon on Friday.

Unfortunately, we had left for the holiday weekend at about 10 AM on Friday. We had a lovely time in the Gila Mountains (pronounced hee-la). On Monday afternoon, on our way back from the Gila, John had me drop him off at work (yeah it’s just nuts, he works a lot of overtime). By the time I checked the mail that evening, and discovered the chiles, they had been cooking in the mail boxes the 90 degree heat for 4 days.

Amazingly, they were still pretty much ok. I only had to throw a few out.

I called John at work and he decided to come home and help me roast them that very moment, because he was leaving at 5 AM the next morning to spend the rest of the week in California. Here we are, peeling freshly roasted chiles on Monday night.

In the photo below, the bowl on the top left is the freshly roasted chiles, the one on the right is the peeled chiles, and the small one on the bottom is the skins I’ve peeled off. We leave the stems on and seeds in (I don’t know why – tradition?) Chile rellenos are served with the stem intact. Although most of these I will chop before freezing, because most of the time we use them like other people use chopped onions: in soups, stews, eggs, rice, etc.

The lengths New Mexican’s go for their chiles!

(Why does he have sunglasses on his head? I don’t know. Because it’s dark out? Because there’s nothing else on his head?)

Smoke

Usually when John goes on his frequent business trips to California he drives his Jeep to the airport and leaves it there all week. But this week I wanted the Jeep because I was planning a hike with a friend. The hike is only 2 miles away, but the road is too rough for my Mini Cooper. So John went to the bother of getting a rental car to take himself to the airport so I didn’t have to get up at 5 AM yesterday to drive him in so I could have the Jeep.

And now it’s too smokey to hike!

This photo was taken late yesterday, approaching sunset. So it’s not quite that orange this morning. But definitely still too smokey to hike. Luckily, my friend is coming out to visit me anyway. I can show her the remodel LOL.

I never liked John’s Jeep; it’s a difficult stick shift and the oversized tires make a grinding noise if you turn the wheel too far, but I have to grudgingly admit it has it’s uses.  My next car will be an electric car with high clearance. Do they make those yet?

Herbs

My house cleaners brought me beautiful herbs and vegetables from their garden!

Remodel Update

Just in case you’re wondering…Here’s recent photos of the remodel. At the moment, nothing is happening…the new floors should be going in any day.

It’s a mess:

Some, but not all, of the cabinets got painted.

Here’s the ones that aren’t painted (or installed either, for that matter).

Here’s the brick for the downstairs floors:

It came on a great big flatbed truck, with an attached forklift he used to bring it up the hill.

The mesquite for upstairs has also been delivered (ignore the fact that the loose pieces are laying on an old carpet pad, the carpet & pad just haven’t been removed yet.)

The mesquite is redder than it looks in this photo, and will be even more so after it’s been oiled. We love the amount of character it has!

Speaking of character, here’s our new back courtyard walls:

The front courtyard wall will be painted when we repaint the house a LIGHTER COLOR! The front wall blocks have been stuccoed, so you won’t see the block lines in the front courtyard once it’s dry (and painted). The back courtyard has split face blocks, which stay as is and don’t need painted.

Here is the cement pad for the hot tub! It doesn’t look like much. You’ll have to use your imagination. Someday there will be a patio roof, and brick walkways, and plants. And of course, a hot tub!

Oh, and here they are dumping sand. I’m not even sure what it’s for.

It could have something to do with redoing the living room floor – it was a sunken living room, so we had them raise it to the same height as the other floors, which they did with a wood subfloor. But they did a bad job (it wasn’t level) and it had to be ripped out. So now a different contractor is going to redo it, this time with cement, which will match the rest of the downstairs floors, which are cement slab. So maybe the sand is for the cement. The sand could also be for the brick. After brick is installed, sand is dusted over it, and the sand goes in all the little cracks and then the brick is tight and won’t shift. This is done instead of grout, and is the traditional way to lay brick in this region. In the end, it should look like this: