2018 – Page 16 – Turning51

Cute dog pics

After that last post (?!?!) we definitely need some cute dog pics before I lose my remaining 3 readers! Sorry I don’t have time to use software to write the funny quotes right on the pics.

Come ON, dad, there’s a storm coming!

Hehehehehe…

How to play fetch with a leashed dog: first you throw the ball, then you both run after it.

I did NOT knock the Christmas tree over! Seriously.

I know there’s a toy up there.

Look, Ma, I can fly…oomph.

Wait – that’s not the neighbor’s cat.

We know you’ve got salami…hand it over.

What are we even supposed to be?

What kind of hiking trail is this?

I don’t care what’s on my shirt, I just want dinner.

If you’d just scoot the rug a little to the left, please…

So let me tell you a story. Back when I was young…

We promise we’re not going to get lost in the woods.

Moving sucks for grownups.

That sign up there doesn’t say dogs can’t be ON the hot tub.

What do you mean, “Get down”? You let the cat on the window sill.

What’s so funny about my ear?

This is another dream and it’s not a happy one. It’s nightmarish. If you prefer cheerful “news-y” posts about our latest escapades with owning too many houses, then just skip this one. I’m on day 3 of a migraine, and my brain should be back to “normal” soon.

“Oh my God. Oh my God!”

The camera phone footage swung wildly down and back up again, the scene hazy through the dirty airport windows.

“It’s sliding! Sparks! Oh God. Jesus. Jesus.” Others in waiting area A-26 crowd to the windows and pull out phones.

“It’s smoking! Is it on fire? Look, someone’s moving! Hunched over…Run! Go! Look she’s carrying – what, a child? Does she have a child? She’s fallen!”

Pain and choking smells of fuel. It’s dim and there’s a chaotic, metallic roar. Something’s wrong with my ears. A baby! Wailing at the top of her lungs, very nearby, yes, I remember them. Next to me. Her mama is Shanta. Santa? Sasha? No, Sasha’s Russian for “Alex.” I’ve got to make my brain work. Songta? Shawna? Baby crying hysterics. Where is her mother?

“Shanta? Shanta? Shanta!?”

I remember, we crashed. We were almost down, almost, almost. I watched the runway out the window. So close. And then such a strange motion in my stomach.

In a crash, the plane will burn. It will burn. It is burning. “Shanta!”

I stole her baby and crawled. The baby’s face was wet. Tears? Blood? Out, out, out, out, out. Run! My body doesn’t work right. Are there flames? Am I burning? I can’t tell. Hold the baby close and roll. Isn’t that what they say, drop and roll? Stop, drop and roll. No, just run, god, hurry, go. The plane will explode.

“How are you feeling, honey?” I opened my eyes and could see colorful blurs. A nurse smiling down.

“Baby? Baby?”

“Your baby’s fine, honey. Would you like me to go get her? We’ve checked her all out and she’s perfect. You did a good job, getting out like that.”

“Baby.”

“What’s your baby’s name?”

Shanta, Shanta, Shanta? What’s your baby’s name? “Baby.”

John’s here to visit me. Am I ugly now? My face burned grotesquely? I shouldn’t care. Vain. I do care. I remember the girl in junior high, her whole body burned. She hardly looked human. As cruel as children are, they did not taunt her. There would have been no point, it was already horrific enough. I knew I should befriend her; I think we could have overlooked it – some of us, to some extent – except she was so bitter, angry, venomous. I couldn’t stand to be near her.

Am I burned? I try not to care, but I do.

The nurse whispers to another nurse. Or is she the doctor? She is probably telling the doctor that I cannot remember my own baby’s name. But she’s not my baby. Shanta, are you dead? Your baby is alive.

Your baby needs you.

They let me hold her. I would squeeze her tight but I don’t want her to wake up and cry, or they will take her away again.

John is talking; he must be telling them she’s not my baby. Of course she’s not my baby, I’m such an old lady now and anyway, Baby’s not my skin color, couldn’t hardly be mine. Maybe they think I adopted her. Or that she’s my grandchild. Maybe they know she’s not my baby and they are just humoring me because I’m off my rocker from the crash. So good of them to let me hold her anyway.

There is noise and commotion, a woman shouting and pointing. She comes closer and demands Baby. What do I do? What if she’s not careful with her?

John moved between me and the angry woman. With her was a well-dressed man, also angry. Suddenly the man swung and slapped the raging woman, telling her to get ahold of herself.

“You don’t tell me to – It’s not your sister who’s dead, asshole!”

“Security!” The nurse shouted, and I heard it echoed over the intercom. Why would they use the intercom to summon security and worry everyone in the entire hospital? Don’t they have some sort of code or a silent panic button?

A policeman leaned down and gently took Baby. I cried.

Moved in but still remodeling

Guess what this is?

Yep, a window at night, with no blinds or curtains, with paint and texture splattered all over the windows. With an old-fashioned camera, I would have known how to blur this to look like gently falling snow. But not with my iphone; I just point and shoot and there you go. Paint splatters.

Most of our windows have paint on the outside, and paint and dry-wall texture gunk on the inside (I don’t know what it’s really called. It’s the stuff you spray on to make texture on your walls).

It comes off fairly easily with a razor blade, but we have a lot of windows, half of them on the second story. And scrapping thousands of dollars worth of brand new glass windows with a razor blade sort of freaks me out. John is assuring me it won’t scratch.

This morning I noticed that John is all out of breakfast cereal (because he eats it for dinner) so I decided to cook grits for breakfast. Do we have pots and pans? Sure we do! Here’s John fetching me a pan.

Seriously! Do you see him down there crawling under the table? LOL!

We haven’t done any unpacking yet because there’s not really anywhere to unpack into.

Installing cabinets in the dining room:

This is a new wall outlet with 2 usb ports:

Pretty cool, hu? The dining room wouldn’t have been my top choice location – it would have made more sense in the office. But the dining room is where John needed to install an outlet, because the new cabinets would block the old one. We can worry about installing fancy outlets in the office later. Much later.

Here’s the office, by the way. There’s no furniture or shelving in the closet, so I don’t know how to unpack these boxes.

You know it’s bad when you start writing notes to each other on the boxes (which have sat there way too long). Back story – I periodically try to reduce the amount of stuff we own, and John often objects. This is in reference to an automated ball-toss machine that we once bought for Kira, our fetch-loving mutt.

Project anyone?

Well, that last post was on the heavy side. Let’s lighten it up a little!

This house just came on the market a block away from us. We noticed they were holding an open house when we were driving by last weekend, so we stopped to take a look.

It’s actually one of our closest neighbors, even though it’s on a different street. We can easily see it from our house; it’s at the bottom of the hill to the southwest of us.

It’s the same territorial style as ours, except it also has the traditional white trim that goes with the territorial style, that ours should have, but doesn’t yet. John’s really anxious to get some white pergolas built, but first things first. He needs to install the kitchen cabinets! And maybe unpack a little.

The neighbor’s house is also the correct stucco color.

LOL, “the correct stucco color”! I won’t even go there. All you’d have to do to get John and I to run screaming from the room is chant, “stucco color!”, “stucco color!” Ahhhh!

Here’s the back:

I didn’t take any indoor pictures because, oh my gosh, it’s a project. The carpet looked older than I am, even though the house isn’t as old as I am. Crazy wallpaper everywhere. Carpet can be changed easy enough, but it’s an awkward layout, plus they added a strange addition and it doesn’t flow well. But it’s a great price per square foot in an excellent location!

Don’t worry, we’re not buying it.

Does one’s brain write dreams ahead of time?

Instructions for reading this post: don’t skip around, scan, or skim through it. It’s a long one, but you’ll want to wait until you have time to read it straight through. Mainly that’s because there’s a “plot twist” of sorts toward the end.

I’m actually going to post a dream I had this week – which I wouldn’t typically do, because, who cares about other people’s dreams, right? And this dream isn’t uplifting or funny. It’s actually disturbing. But there is something that was absolutely fascinating about it – and that’s the fact that it contains, at the end, a movie-like plot twist. And the curious thing is, I don’t understand how that is possible.

I always assumed the brain made dreams up as it went along. One thing turns into another thing without any planning. But this plot twist appears to have required some planning ahead. There were elements that appeared early in the dream that were foreshadowing the plot twist, which would not have been plausible without them. Does the brain write dreams ahead of time, and then roll them out like movies? I don’t think so. Or was it just chance, and at the last minute my brain was able to realize that a plot twist just happened to be possible, like when you unintentionally set someone up to crack the perfect joke?

Here is the dream, you can decide for yourself.

It all started out fine – we had a new house. It was a reddish-brown color, real adobe with thick walls, set into the side of a hill. I remember in particular the master bedroom, which was rounded, as is common with adobe, although the rounded effect was exaggerated, as is common when a newer building mimics an old style.

The bedroom had a view across to a hill in a distance, where I could see a high-end, low-density, newer subdivision scattered in the hills. I couldn’t actually see the far horizon, only the top of that ridge, which bugged me slightly after the long distance views of our house in Placitas. It was as if the whole world was contained within the boundary of that ridge. But it was still a pleasant view, and I knew the lights of the houses on the opposite hill would be pretty at night. There was also a patio off the master bedroom with the same view.

I remember thinking it would be a bitch to go jogging from that house, down to the bottom of the hill and then back up the next one, then turn around and go back down the opposite hill and back up our hill to our house. But then I realized it was more like a basin than two separate hills, so I could probably run laterally from the house, parallel to the ridge, and it might be fairly flat that way. Then I decided it was too far to run anyway. And then I realized I wasn’t really jogging anymore anyway. Perhaps I could walk it, and maybe there would be parks along the way to rest.

John and I had just moved into the house, and we had family visiting – Laura was there, and maybe a couple others, I can’t remember who, but we were a group of about 5 or so.

Here is where the dream gets stranger. A couple of people whom I did not know sat down at our dining room table right before we were going to eat. I thought we should tell them to leave, but John said that would be rude, and there was room for them, and they would leave soon enough. The table was long, and seated 5 or 6 on each side. Our group ended up sitting on both sides of them, and we were talking over them, which seemed rude of us. But I figured they could leave if they didn’t like it, because they didn’t even belong there.

But then the dinner that I had taken care to cook for myself, vegetables and things, was overcooked and mushy and bland. And I knew it was them who had done that to my food, had left it sitting and allowed it to overcook. I was annoyed, and wasn’t hungry anyway, so I left and went to our room.

I was happy with my computer or books or whatever. But then 3 more people, whom I also didn’t know, came into my room and were messing with my stuff. It was almost like when you’re a child, and the neighborhood kids come over and play with your toys. And you’re afraid your toys will get get broken or lost because they’re not as careful as you are. Then I was really annoyed and ordered them out, and they left.

Then Phil, my old coach and mentor from almost 20 years ago, came to visit me. I was sad to see how old he was; very old, and on IV lines. I gave him a hug and he was so frail and his white skin was like paper. I felt bad for him, he was so very old, so close to death. I put my hands on the sides of his pale face and looked at him, and he was almost like a baby, he was so old. And I thought of Laura when she was first born, hooked to lines and tubes like he was, and I remembered how I thought she was going to die.

Phil told me that Amanda had left him and he hadn’t known what to do. So he had gone on a cruise, the kind that stayed close to shore, just like I had once suggested to him back when we were coaching together. I didn’t remember that he had someone named Amanda, and I didn’t remember telling him he should go on a cruise. But it made sense, because I knew he had once sailed across the Atlantic on a small sailboat (this is true in real life, he did). I had been impressed to hear that he had sailed across the ocean, but he had downplayed it, and wouldn’t talk about it, only saying that he had not enjoyed it; it was tedious with nothing but open ocean, and he would never do it again and did not recommend it. (All of that was true in real life).

So in my dream, it made sense to me that I might have suggested that next time he just take a cruise that stays close to shore! And he had, and he told me that he had enjoyed it, and thanked me for the suggestion. I asked him how he had managed to find me to visit, but he didn’t seem to know.

And then suddenly I realized what was happening. Those strangers in my house were grim reapers, like in the TV show, “Dead Like Me,” where people who have already died come to you shortly before you die, so at the exact moment that you die they can make sure your soul releases from your body. They escort you to the afterlife.

There were several of these grim reaper escorts, about the same number as we had family visiting. I realized with horror that they were there because we were all going to die at once, that very evening. I had to let everyone know! They didn’t understand! Those grim reapers had come for all of us! We were going to be hit with some sort of catastrophe. What could kill us all at once? I thought for a moment it could be a fire, but then I decided it was more likely that it would be a stray bomb. It seems the country was at war, but that our isolated neighborhood was an unlikely target.

The horror of the sudden understanding that we were all going to die imminently jerked me awake (or so I thought). But I think it simply ended that stage of the dream and I wasn’t fully awake.

Because then my perception shifted, and I saw those same events as something completely different. It was like at the end of the movie Sixth Sense when you suddenly realize reality wasn’t at all what you had thought.

I realized that I was a very old woman in an expensive nursing home, confused with Alzheimers. That’s why there were long tables, strangers, and mushy food in the dining room. That’s why the majority of the dream had taken place in my bedroom rather than the main part of the house. That’s why there were strangers in my room messing with my stuff.

Phil wasn’t Phil, he was just some random, very old man who had once been left by a woman named Amanda, and had once taken a cruise that someone had suggested to him. We each imagined we had known each other long ago, but neither of us were who the other one thought we were. And there were no grim reapers, only nursing home staff, who are actually a little bit like grim reapers. Even in the confusion of my dementia, I knew that we would die soon and those strangers were there to help us on our way.

The Spider

Every morning, for the two months I have lived in this house, I have kicked apart a spider web in the corner of my kitchen below a cabinet. And by the next morning, it has reappeared.

I have a new vacuum cleaner and a new floor steamer, both of which I’m very happy with, but neither of which dislodged the spider.

I started feeding my dogs in that corner, just because it’s a convenient corner. I might have vaguely thought that the regular commotion would encourage the spider to move elsewhere. But it didn’t. I may have just inadvertently been feeding the spider.

After about the 50th morning of kicking that web apart with my foot, I realized it was probably a black widow web. They are distinctively messy. But I told myself not to be dramatic, after all, I’ve been living here for 2 months and they’re very reclusive creatures and surely it would have gone away by now if it was a black widow. But then, I’d never seen the spider. Just the web, every morning.

Until tonight. There it was. In all it’s glory – a fairly large black widow. For a moment I thought it must have come out to die of natural causes, because what else would it be doing out in the broad daylight? Actually, it was evening, and dark, but still, the kitchen light was glaring. Then it moved slightly.

I stared at it and knew I had just a second or two to pull this off. I could kill it quickly or fail to. If I failed to, I would imagine it hunting me down in my bed at night (they don’t do that, but my imagination does). And I’d have to have an exterminator out, because these little beauties can kill a small dog. And an exterminator would be a big nuisance and probably $150 for an inside treatment – and I still wouldn’t know for sure that it was dead.

I thought briefly about grabbing my phone to take a picture, but my phone was in the other room, and I knew the spider would be gone by the time I returned. And I didn’t need a photo, I needed it dead. I quickly scanned the kitchen for likely weapons (or maybe I was just standing paralyzed, pretending to scan the kitchen for weapons). Either way, it moved again, and just I whipped off my slipper and dispatched it. First whack. I wouldn’t have gotten the chance at a second whack.

Sorry, spider.

And how stupid is she?

I’m at work, going through stacks and stacks and stacks (hundreds) of multi-page reports that the oil & gas plants and other facilities have sent us recently. And I notice something unusual. One of the facilities recently sent reports of an obscure type, from previous years – Dec. 2014, June 2015, Dec. 2015, June 2016, Dec 2016, and June 2017. Usually we just get current reports.

I sent an email out to the other managers, my boss, and my employees saying essentially, FYI, we got this unusual submittal, and it looks like maybe someone specifically requested it?

My star employee, the brilliant, hardworking kid who started the same time I did, without whom I’m not sure how we’d be getting anything done – he emails back to say, “I believe this is the facility you and I spoke to on Jan. 25^th regarding their reporting. They told us the 60.7 reports they had submitted only contained NOx data and not the CO and other data required. We told them to submit the complete reports.”

And he hit reply-all! Great. Way to make me look like a dolt who cannot remember anything, in front of all the rest of management.

Apparently I’M the one who specifically requested those reports (actually he did, but I was on the call, supposedly at least tracking what was going on).

Work Progress

After four and a half months, I can now say, “I will look into that and get back to you,” with increased confidence.

Hope for spring

I’ve been discouraged lately and not sure why. I may be working too hard. Or maybe it’s the mid-winter cold, dark and dirt. So I have a “happy light” at work, and orchids from Trader Joes 😉

Also last weekend we went to the Albuquerque biopark. There’s not much blooming yet…just a few tiny early crocuses.

And a very nice Christmas rose (not really a rose – it’s Hellebore).

Not much blooming outside, but inside there’s a wonderful conservatory – we sat in there for a long time.

These flowers don’t even look real!

It’s large enough to hold a gigantic tree.

We went there last weekend, and stopped by again briefly this morning after ordering the brick at the brick supplier.

But…what we don’t yet have in spring color, we make up for in sunset color. Guess that dirt in the air is good for something. Here’s tonight’s show:

Dirt

I’ve got two prissy full-bred poodles and one dirt devil poodle mixed mutt. (I had no idea how to punctuate that, so I didn’t). The purebreds spend their days perched on the finest (and largest) pillows possible.

But the mixed mutt (aka Kira) is a nut case. A mutt-nut. Or maybe just a normal dog. She fetches the ball in the dirt, the rolls in the dirt, and she runs inside and shakes the dirt in my kitchen.

Have you ever stayed the night at someone’s house and there’s so much cat hair, or so much smoke smell, or mildew smell or whatever, that when you get home you have to wash all your clothes, even the ones you didn’t wear? Yeah. Well, that just happened to me at my own house in Placitas. Except it was construction dust and the smell of something off-gassing from the oils and sealants on the new floors – and plain old desert dirt.

I suggested to John that we might want to start planning some landscaping, and he couldn’t wrap his brain around even talking about it yet, because we are still so far behind with the remodel. But then we had the dogs in Placitas for a couple of days, and suddenly he’s talking about landscaping. Uh huh. See?

And it’s no better in Santa Fe. One day I got home and my bedroom floor looked like this. Seriously. How is that even possible? That’s my bedroom!

Well, here’s what the backyard looks like in Santa Fe. Kira rolls in that.

In Placitas we are happy John has finished the courtyard gates, but the yard itself is just rubble.

Many of you saw our yard in California when we were done landscaping. It turned out so well; I really miss it. It’s hard to have to start all over again. At least this time we know not to put the pond where the crazy mutt dog can get into it. Because that was her favorite trick. She’d jump all the way into the deepest section of water, come dashing in the doggie door, and shake pond water and mud all over the living room!

Here’s where the smaller, desert-appropriate pond will be someday. (This is outside the fenced section of yard – so the dogs can’t get to it.)

Right now it sorta looks like we’re planning on burying somebody but couldn’t manage to dig deep enough in the caliche. (Caliche…a hardened natural cement of calcium carbonate that binds other materials—such as gravel, sand, clay, and silt. It occurs worldwide, in aridisol and mollisol soil orders—generally in arid or semiarid regions, including in central and western Australia, in the Kalahari Desert, in the High Plains of the western USA, in the Sonoran Desert and Mojave Desert, and in Eastern Saudi Arabia Al-Hasa. Caliche is also known as hardpan, calcrete, kankar (in India), or duricrust. The term caliche is Spanish and is originally from the Latin calx, meaning lime. – credit: Wikipedia)

Also in case you’re wondering, is that fog down there in the valley in the distance? No, I wish. That’s more dirt – blowing dirt. We’re getting high winds at the moment.

I’m not sure if that link works, but don’t worry if it doesn’t, it’s only the insanely desolate howling of the wind.

Speaking of desolate, here is the desolately empty outdoor plant section at Lowes. It’s not yet time for planting.

But even if it was spring, we wouldn’t be ready. We need to design the layout, get the rubble removed, irrigation installed, topsoil installed…and John doesn’t want to hire help, and I just can’t see how it will ever happen. It’s very discouraging.

So for now I’m going to focus on the yard in Santa Fe, because that’s the one I can make progress on without John needing to be involved. I’m going to brick over the cement pad, and also expand the size of the patio. I’m hiring the same guy as did the interior brick floors in the Placitas house. He does good work, but is extremely slow. I will have to practice patience.

We went to the brick supplier to pick out brick this morning.

This is down south of Albuquerque, and quite a trek from Santa Fe, but a lot more cost effective than just letting a full-service landscaping company do it all. Hiring our slow guy (who’s actually quite talented) and buying the materials ourselves directly from the suppliers, cuts our total bill by 50% or more. So I was able to splurge the extra two hundred bucks for real brick instead of pavers.

I’ve decided not to redo the mediocre irrigation system, just due to the expense. I’m going to try to make the sort-of system work ok for now (hopefully with John’s help). And then I’m going to add tons of flowering plants. It’s the desert, but there are a lot of low-water plants that flower. I am hanging onto the comfort of the vision of a riot of colors by late spring – or at least by summer, which is when we get most of our rain.

Some of you remember the transformation of the smallish backyard in Albuquerque – it only took 5 years! This is the “before” shot. Look at all those smiling, young faces! Our friends, and John and Laura. This was taken 10 years ago – can you believe it’s been that long?

And look at the neighbor windows looking directly into the backyard. That always bugged me, and I was always careful after that not to buy a house with that flaw again. Even the rentals we bought this summer don’t have neighbor’s windows looking that directly into the backyards.