Category: 2018

Why do people take pictures of their food? Maybe for the same reason we take landscape photos, or even photos of our friends and family. For me, that’s to remind myself of all the good things in life.

Here’s the dinner where we realized we didn’t have a can opener. This was about a month after moving in. How could I not have a can opener? How could I not know that I didn’t have a can opener? John got the garbanzo beans opened with a knife – without breaking the knife!

Here’s a really good one:

Here’s from last night:

This one’s from Christmas. Not as healthy. Not quite as brightly colored either 😉

In case you’re wondering, that’s red chili peanut brittle in the lower left, and green chili peanut brittle in the upper right. Because – New Mexico!

These photos are from an outing a few weeks back. (I’m still behind on my blog posts). We’re trying to get out a little every weekend and not just spend the whole weekend working. I’ve been somewhat discouraged this past month or so – which is really common for me in the middle of the winter. I really don’t like the dark and cold and ugly of winter and I don’t get out and exercise enough. (I recognize that not everywhere in the world is dark, cold, and ugly in the winter, but everywhere I’ve ever lived has been.)

Anyway we went to the Jackalope in Santa Fe, which was very cool. But what we also discovered is there are several other shops off the same parking lot, including – who knew! A glass blowing studio! I love watching them blow glass!

Here’s the entryway:

Look at all that glass!

Hot air balloons!

Here they are making things:

I couldn’t leave without buying something!

 

 

New commute route! That may not sound all that earthshaking, but commuting can have a big impact on quality of life. It’s something most of us two every weekday, at least twice. Lately I’ve needed to go home at lunchtime on several occasions, and I got to the point where I’d had it with my commute. I’m so lucky to have a fairly short commute, but the route I was taking was miserable and maddening, and I could not imagine doing that commute every day for the next who-knows-how-many years.

I have several commute options. There’s the fastest route – which involves crazy driving at high speeds and abrupt slowdowns and unexpected multi-lane changes. I tried that one a couple of times, but decided I wanted to live until retirement.

Then there’s the most direct route that I mostly have been taking. That one involves a slow, stop-and-go slog through a long commercial stretch. It consists of probably about 20 stoplights, with cars turning in and out of hundreds of commercial driveways along the way. This is the miserable one.

There are also a variety of cutting-through-neighborhood options, all of which are slow. They require a tedious number of right and left turns, and visibility is poor in the low light at night.

Finally, yesterday, I tried a last-ditch option; a curving, way-out-of-my-way rural route around the edges of town. It’s an old historic route, and the northern part, closer to the center of town, has scattered historic churches and buildings on large grounds. The southern section is rural.

It’s probably at least half-again as long as the direct route. But it was lovely. Low traffic and the beauty of rural New Mexico. I tried it again this morning and was 7 minutes late for work.  This new route is well worth getting up 7 minutes earlier!

My 13-year-old nephew is a second place winner (Junior Category) of the American Protégé International Piano & Strings Competition 2018, and will be performing at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall this spring!

I hope this link works for you:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kju1Gwq_vPWoCDnHZpXg1R95d82vlMMO/view?ts=5a7bc67a

The piece he is playing is by Rachmaninoff.

My friend is the medical director at a clinic in a small village in Kenya. Yesterday she posted an interesting account of what a typical day for her is like. Click here to read her post:

https://oneyearinkenya.blog/2018/02/06/expat-medical-director-and-part-time-landscaper/

John got a promotion (congrats, John!) so we took an hour between chores and remodeling to celebrate.

Last Friday I met some coworkers returning from lunch and they said they had been out for “drinking chocolate”. And I was like, “What’s that?” I thought it was special chocolate that you eat when you’re drinking wine or something, like tea biscuits are for eating while drinking tea. But no, turns out it’s a fancy way of saying hot chocolate for grown-ups.

Well, John loves hot chocolate! And he particularly likes Mexican hot chocolate which is spiced with cinnamon and sometimes other spices. My coworkers said there were many kinds of hot chocolate, with many kinds of spices. Sounded perfect!

You should click on this link even if you never plan to visit, the website itself is a work of art. https://www.kakawachocolates.com/

Here’s the place, it’s right next to the roundhouse (our State Capitol building).

Here’s the chalkboard menu with things you would never expect to be in hot chocolate.

I’m always complaining that John never takes pictures of me except when I’m in my hiking clothes, all hot and sweaty. So here’s me in front of the kiva at Kakawa.

We also tried to take selfies. We aren’t very good at them. It looks like I’m photo-bombing!

I had to try a sage and goat cheese truffle, because, who ever heard of such a thing? It was excellent!!

No one ever takes photos of their food after they’re done, only before they start. The cups were tiny, but it was very rich. All gone!

Random punch-tin on the wall (very common in New Mexico). In this case, in Valentines Day theme.

I bought this card, isn’t it beautiful?

We had an inspector going out to a fractionalization plant in Gallup, and a couple of us tagged along to see what we could learn. At a fractionalization plant, they separate the gas into different components.

This particular plant is mostly not operating, which is why we thought it would be a good one to tour for learning purposes. It was easier than dealing with one in full operation, which would be very loud and smelly.

One interesting thing about this plant is that the flare was a few hundred yards away on reservation land. I don’t know the story behind that, but I assume that was done on purpose because the regulations are often more lenient on reservations. (And the flare is where you have most of your emissions). It’s the tall skinny thing in the dirt square at the top of this google maps screenshot:

I wasn’t allowed to take personal photos of the plant itself while on tour, unfortunately, because those would have been quite interesting. But they let me have a selfie in the conference room. Here I am with all my PPE (personal protection equipment) ready to go on the tour.

Hard hat, eye protection, steel-toed boots and flame retardant coveralls. I look like a total dork.

I don’t mind testing buggy software, but I get grumpy when it’s erroring so badly that I cannot even get far enough to do the activity I’m supposed to be testing. Guys, I’m not the programmer. I’m the end user customer, and this software isn’t working.

But that’s not the worst of it. A few months back, IT accidentally put a bunch of real people’s emails (employees of the oil and gas companies we regulate) into our test environment. Meaning when we’re testing this buggy software, we could well be triggering automated messages to our own customers, who would not know they are bogus test emails.

Our consultant said not to worry, they rigged it so emails would only go to our internal addresses, and nothing would be sent to external emails. So I tested that, and unfortunately I was able to trigger a test email to go to an external gmail account that I own. So yep, we could be emailing real customers and not even know it (until they call me asking, “what’s this and what do I need to do?”)

So I went into the software and figured out how to put a big disclaimer at the top of all the automated emails, “THIS IS A TEST ACCOUNT. PLEASE IGNORE THIS EMAIL”

Which is klugey in my opinion.

Meanwhile I’m still getting nightly failure notices, since December 20th. Except a few days ago I started getting two of them. Two identical failure notices both arriving at 2 AM. Progress maybe?

Things are more real when they come to you during the course of your daily life, rather than hearing or reading about it in the news. For example, my job is to help implement New Mexico’s environmental laws, specifically air quality laws limiting dangerous emissions. The State laws need to coordinate with the Federal laws, and at the state level we are often required to implement Federal environmental laws. When Federal environmental laws change, it directly impacts what I do at work.

Therefore, I am able to tell you from first-hand experience, that the current Federal administration is gutting our environmental protection. And the people who are going to suffer (in the case of air quality in New Mexico) are the poor-rural, and anyone with asthma or other breathing difficulties. And those who are going to benefit are the oil and gas companies, which are for the most part not owned by New Mexicans.

In other news (that I heard directly and not from the news) a friend of mine (a close friend of my daughter) recently huddled in a downstairs bathroom with her baby and a little bit of food, water and diapers, and waited to die. Others in Hawaii called loved ones to say goodbye before they died.

Apparently this did hit the news, but didn’t make a splash because no one actually died. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_alert)

It is too bad, by the way, that the employee who sent out the wrong text was disciplined and forced to resign. As a huge fan of root cause analysis and human factors engineering, I believe that kind of accidental error is the fault of the system, not the individual.

But the fact that this young friend of ours had to hide in a bathroom and face her mortality (and that of her husband and child) impacted me. Because I know them. Because they, and an untold number of others, really could have died. Because it appears that pretty much any form of government (democracy or not) can end up with emotionally unbalanced leaders. Including us.

Which is why we need robust systems with processes in place, so we don’t all die at the hands of one or two misguided individuals who somehow ended up with the power to eliminate all of our lives.