Category: 2018

I meant to post this link in my last post.

https://www.expertafrica.com/botswana/okavango-delta-safari-reserves/footsteps-across-the-delta/in-detail

It looks like so much fun, I just couldn’t handle getting out there! It took him 3 days to get there!

John left around noon on Friday.

2:00 Friday he texted from Houston.

5:00 Friday he texted saying he was on the plane.

4:00 AM on Saturday he emailed saying he was in Frankfurt.

2:00 AM this morning (Sunday) he emailed saying he was in Johannesburg.

6:30 AM this morning he texted saying he was in Maun, Botswana.

At that point, I’m thinking, wow, I’ve had two nights of sleep and he’s still traveling!

And just now, 1:30 PM Sunday, I just got this from John’s Garmin (satellite GPS unit):

Sorry that’s the only picture I have so far! I will post them when I get them!

He says, “Wow, it is great at the safari camp! We saw a ton of animals on the drive from the airstrip to camp. It was like driving through a zoo! :-)”

Oh, hey, cool, if you click on this link you can see where he is!!! At least it works for me. I hope it works for you too! You can zoom in and out with the + and – on the top left, just like google maps.

https://inreach.garmin.com/textmessage/viewmsg?mo=a574f829c35c4ebd9c2b21c04291d5bb&adr=%2b15052933344

Here’s a screenshot, but I hope the link works so you can see it for yourself.

I have a coaching colleague named Libby Gill whom I’ve known for awhile. I’ve never actually met her “in person”, but rarely would I ever meet a coaching client or colleague in person anyway. Someone in her circle has been a client of mine for a long time, so I’ve interacted with her over a period of time. She’s a coach and a writer.

I don’t usually read my colleague’s books, because it tends to be information I already know and work with myself, with my own clients. In general, coaching books lay out step-by-step processes for setting and achieving goals. They often include exercises for the reader to do, and examples from other people’s lives.

But because I know Libby, I’ve been thinking for awhile that I should read something she’s written. So I randomly picked one of her books, Traveling Hopefully, and ordered it.

Coaching tends to be practical and forward-looking, so usually the techniques don’t deal very much with past events. Coaching is mostly about, “Where are you now – where do you want to be – how are you going to get there?” So I was a little surprised when her book started out with childhood abuse and trauma.

Of course there are tons of books out there about trauma of all kinds. But the little I’ve read of them, I haven’t generally liked. They usually leave me feeling depressed and somehow damaged. I think in their effort to be sensitive, they end up being catastrophic and patronizing.

Libby’s approach is different. She starts with the trauma and then she moves on. Instead of writing a “trauma” book, she wrote a standard coaching book, but she took a step back and started with the trauma and then went forward with the practical self-knowledge and goal-setting exercises found in most coaching books.

I really liked how she handled the trauma at the beginning of the book. She was blunt, open and detailed, but also cool and professional. She didn’t minimize it, or gloss over it, but she also didn’t make it anymore than what it was.

Her account was straightforward – here’s what happened to her, here’s how those around her reacted (or failed to react), here’s the lingering effects on her of what happened, here’s exercises you can do to help move past your own trauma.

I also found her attitude toward her readers to be very respectful. She didn’t make any hesitant “maybe-you-aren’t-ready” or “maybe-you-can’t-handle-this” comments like, “If it’s not too painful…” No. Libby’s instructions assumed that her readers had their shit together and could do this. She says, “Think of five childhood dramas…write a short story – a paragraph or two – about each of the five childhood dramas you identified…” And so forth.

At this point in the book I didn’t think she really meant trauma-drama. I figured she just meant the time you didn’t get to go to the zoo because Grandma got sick. But then I turned the page and she shared her own childhood molestation story and I realized, oh. Damn. Her calm, cool demeanor does not mean that shit didn’t happen.

Then she went on to have us identify positive childhood events, and look at how those events shape our goals in adulthood. Of course doing the positive childhood event section was more fun than the “drama” section, but the balance of both was important.

Then the majority of the book continued with how to identify one’s own values, and set goals that reflect your values, and plan strategies for achieving those goals. I skipped all that, because I’m already obsessive about planning strategies for achieving goals, complete with timeframes and spreadsheets. (Right, John?) LOL.

We’re starting to plan for retirement, so John regularly gets emails from me that say things like, “When you get a chance, please send me several criteria of yours for a retirement location (such as “warm weather” or “nearby international airport”). Don’t worry about thinking of everything at once, this will be an ongoing exercise and we can add & alter things as we go.” (That was a real email, verbatim, from a couple of weeks ago. And I’ve sent many others of that sort.) His responses will go into a location scoring spreadsheet that I’ve already started.

I went out again this morning to buy more plants (hehehe) and potting soil and a garden hose. You could tell a storm was coming. I swear people start driving loco when they know it’s coming. I guess they’re all trying to get done and indoors before it blows.

The weather in New Mexico is never boring. Back home in the Pacific NW, we had drizzle, showers, sprinkles, mist, rain and fog; which all basically means about the same thing – water in the air, gently.

Here we have 50 mile per hour winds routinely, the intensity of the sun at 7,000 feet, and when it rains – it either evaporates so fast, because it’s so dry, that it might not even reach the ground (called virga), or we get electric storms with downpours and flash floods.

Last weekend the humidity was at 6%. Not a typo. Six. Six percent! Most Walmart-quality humidity readers (hygrometers) only go down to about 20%. We’re lucky if we get up into the teens on a good day, so they are useless to us. Humidity that low is hard on the eyes and nose and sinuses, and skin in general. Sometimes I can feel the dry air burning a single, desiccated route through my sinuses and occasionally that’s enough to trigger a migraine.

I run humidifiers 24/7 throughout the house, and a vaporizer in the bedroom. I’m generally reluctant to open windows, even when it’s nice and cool outside, because I lose all my hard-earned humidity.

But this morning, when I saw 40% humidity I knew I might not be gardening this afternoon. I’m taking advantage of the moist air, and have both doors wide open, the whole house as open as possible.

Just now we got a flash of lightening and I looked up, but before I could even decide to start counting (you know, to calculate how far away it was) it boomed. Like, I hadn’t even thought “one-thousand-one”. My brain was still at “uh” and it was already going “shshsh-crrr-boom”!!!

Well. Maybe I should shut the doors. And then came hail big enough to dent a car (and mine is not garaged). The dogs are trying to act cool with it, but they were falling over each other to see who could get the choice spot on the couch closest to me.

PS. I found bleeding heart and lupine! Two of my favorite flowers with the worst possible names! Wikipedia has lists and lists of all the different Lupinus plants, but nowhere do they explain – why are they named after a wolf?

Neither the bleeding heart nor the lupine I bought are currently blooming so I’m not going to bother taking a picture of them. But here, I’ll do your google image search for you. Lupine:

And bleeding heart. 

Google image mostly shows the flowers, but actually the leaves are pretty too, fine and lacy. The leaves vary depending on the variety. The one I bought has a reddish tinge to the leaves.

That purple flower in the center of this image search is not a bleeding heart, it’s a fuchsia, which I also love. They are not very winter hardy. I actually had a huge one in my yard in western Washington State, and it does freeze there. But Olympia is zone 8 and Santa Fe is only zone 6.

Some of the plants I bought aren’t going to last the winter. Often I’ll bring my patio plants into the house to winter as houseplants, but that doesn’t work very well because they always get little mites or aphids. I might try putting them into dormancy in the garage this year, and see if I can get them to resurrect in the spring. If not, I’ll just buy them again next spring. I figure plants are cheaper than groceries, and much more enjoyable! I’ll eat beans and tortillas 😉

Here’s fuchsias (which I didn’t find in my shopping adventures).

I could always order a fuchsia, but ordering opens far too wide of a range of choices. I could list 300 plants and trees off the top of my head that I’d want to order and then I‘d need to buy a new house. Ok, ok, I’m just joking!!!

Dear John – while you are away in Africa, I promise I will not:

• Adopt a puppy
• Buy a house

I’m buying plants instead, so you should be grateful!

 

What I’d really like to tell you about is all the shit that’s going down at work, but I can’t because it’s all hush-hush and confidential and personnel-related and no one’s business (until it’s everyone’s business when something official happens). Something official may or may not happen, at some point, don’t know when. At which point I guess I’ll have a story to tell.

Meanwhile, John has been flying to Africa – for what seems like forever. He left around noon on Friday and it’s now bedtime on Saturday. Last I heard, early this morning our time, he was in Frankfurt.

Today I had my first Saturday alone in Santa Fe. I had no plans whatsoever (other than feed the dogs and tidy the house). I could do anything!! What should I do? I’ve got the whole weekend to do anything I want. There’s a botanical garden I’ve never seen, lots of restaurants I’ve never been to, local trails (although the local forests are closed, boo-hoo). I think there’s an outlet mall I’ve never been to, as well as all the artsy tourist things (some of which I have been to).

Well, first thing I did this morning was get on-line to pay some bills while I drank my coffee (whoo-hoo, there’s real life for you). Then I went for a jog and then fed and walked the dogs (really nice having a jogging and dog walking path less than a block away).

Then I went to Home Depot and spent a bunch of money on plants (hehehehe, plants make me happy). I also had to buy potting soil, which annoys me because I have a bum elbow (sucks getting old) and I don’t like to lug those big bags. John goes to Home Depot like, four times every weekend, so it seems like he could get me potting soil, but he always thinks I have enough. He does not take me seriously when I tell him it’s not enough! Someone suggested I get the little bags, but I’m not convinced it’s easier on my elbow to get six little bags than two big bags.

Plus I got the wrong kind of potting soil – it’s too hot (meaning, too much manure). In addition to it stinking, my dogs think it’s edible (mmmm, yummy cow shit) and they are digging up my plants in order to eat my potting soil. All three of them!

Then I went to Walmart for deodorant (although the stench was the potting soil, not me), and I ended up spending a bunch more money on more plants (my reward for braving Walmart on a Saturday, although it was still fairly early in the AM). Initially I was just purchasing the deodorant but when I was at the check-out I saw all the plants. And many of them were different plants than what Home Depot has!

I said something about the plants to the clerk and she went to great lengths to tell me how I should not buy plants because then you have to water them, and the water is expensive – but she might as well of been talking to an addict. After I put the deodorant in the car to melt, I came back for plants. That same clerk saw me approach with a cart overflowing with plants and she just made a funny face. There’s no convincing people.

My backyard is almost done! (These pictures were taken before I jammed all the plants up on a wooden box so the dogs would quit eating the soil).

 

The patio is definitely looking better, but it’s not done yet. All those bricks still need sanded in – they’re still just set there, loose and wobbly. And he’s going to install little strips of sod along the edges. And I want to paint the back wall something a bit darker. I don’t know what to do about the weird retaining wall, it’s ugly.

Anyway, I am once again out of potting soil and I still have two more plants and about 3 or 4 more pots. My remaining pots are too big for my remaining plants, so one option is to buy a couple more of the same type of plant, and bunch them together in the same (large) pot.

But the likelihood that I’m going to get it all to come out exactly right is exceedingly low. I can see it now – “Oh, too many plants, I need more pots, oh, now there’s too many pots, I need more plants”…and on forever like that until I’m broke (but I’ll never have too much potting soil).