Category: September 2018

The crazy things I say to my dogs

The crazy things I say to my dogs:

“Who’s puking? Don’t eat it!”

“Aaak! Don’t drag your butt on my rug!”

“Stop eating shit! Shit is not food.”

“I don’t play ball when I’m on the toilet.”

“Hush, my frying pan is not the doorbell.”

“Gross! Don’t put your ball in my food.”

“I’m not getting up yet, I just gotta pee. It’s still dark out, go back to sleep.”

“I swear, I really don’t know where your ball is. You find it.”

“If you don’t chill out, you’re going to lick it right off!”

“Aak, what are you eating? There’s nothing to eat there.”

“Don’t pee on her head!”

“Were you digging my rug? You’re digging my rug, aren’t you? Don’t dig my rug.”

“Oh my god, I can’t breathe, who WAS that?”

Perspective

Perspective for when I get too discouraged with all our property issues. I don’t know what the story is behind this house.

There appears to have been a fire.

But it’s more complicated than that, because there’s remains of an unfinished remodel.

It either burned in middle of a remodel project (yeah, I can TOTALLY imagine that happening), or it burned and they started to try to restore it but soon gave up. Either way, it’s sad.

This is in one of the most expensive suburbs of Albuquerque, in the far northeast heights at the edge of the mountains; large lots, expensive homes, with views of the mountains and the city lights.

https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/12512-Modesto-Ave-NE,-Albuquerque,-NM-87122_rb/?fromHomePage=true&shouldFireSellPageImplicitClaimGA=false&fromHomePageTab=buy

The photos don’t make sense – there’s an extra structure that’s not included in the listing. Maybe it was once a guesthouse. I see the remains of a swimming pool. 

Here’s the price listings. It appears that several owners have been tangled up in its history:

An internet description from 2015 says, “This is a magnificent house located in the prestigious North Albuquerque Acres area. With multiple living areas inside and out, spacious bed rooms, multiple office areas, and a beautiful pool and casita area, this home will offer luxurious living and working for the family.”

And yet, it sold for $60,000 less than what was already a very low price for that size of a house (4,380 sq. ft.) in such a good area.

Another (possibly current) listing says, “…once a showplace, then a construction site, now an abandoned project in need of rescue. Last seen gutted with new staircase design, fresh drywall, new roof & plumbing, electric, HVAC in progress…now seen damaged by the elements and calling for a restart. ”

Tragic – they put a new roof on and new utilities and then just left it exposed to rot. And I thought we lost money on our remodels – oh my gosh.

There was no mention of fire (although it looks like there was least a small one) – but it’s definitely a more complicated story than a simple fire.

More googling suggests it was put into an LLC, and the registered agent (who is probably the owner, but might be the owner’s lawyer) is located in Los Vegas, Nevada. Why am I not surprised?

A project gone really wrong. Let that be a lesson to all of us! This is what will happen if we don’t finish the f-ing remodel project!

At any rate, we won’t be buying that one.

Recycling games

There used to be a recycling center very near John’s house, but they recently shut down. His rural garbage collector doesn’t recycle. Meanwhile at my townhouse, I have standard city garbage and recycling. In fact, I have a very cute pink recycling bucket (available for free, by request).

John figured he could send me home with his recycling to put in my cute pink bucket. I was like – no way! Not happening!

He must of thought I was being quite obstinate. But he didn’t know how much effort I had already put into ripping boxes into small enough bits to fit into the cute pink bin.

Nor did he appreciate how very much cardboard I am storing. I’m already an entire year behind on ripping up cardboard into little bits and shoving it piece by piece into the cute little bin. This is why I didn’t want more recycling dumped into my garage!

I can’t even currently open my garage door. I think of it as an ineffective booby trap for would be thieves. Take that, assholes! Cascading cardboard! And here you were hoping for an unlocked car.

Buy hey – speaking of cars not in garages – what’s that there in the background behind the bins? A truck in my driveway! Oh yeah, John bought me a new truck! We can take the boxes to the recycling with the new truck! I don’t have to rip it all into little tiny bits anymore! Sorry, John, I guess you can bring me your recycling after all. BRING IT ON!

By the way – first frost of the season this morning.

 

A truck instead of a house – for now

What? Yep, John and I don’t buy cars very often. We have an 11-year-old Mini Cooper and a 16-year-old Jeep and that’s how it’s been for a long while. Houses on the other hand…

It seems fairly inevitable that we’re eventually going to buy another house. The one I’m living in is only 950 sqft and doesn’t meet John’s desires for a rural area and decent garage/shop space. The one John’s living in doesn’t meet my wishlist for being down out of the wind, and somewhat near a decent grocery store.

But we’ve hit some snags. First of all, both my son and my parents are going to be purchasing houses soon, and I’m on point for providing consulting time and some financial contributions. So I’m now monitoring both the Boise and the Ann Arbor housing markets as well as the entire state of New Mexico. (And sometimes California because someday Laura and I…ok never mind that for now.)

In addition to having a somewhat different set of criteria, John and I also don’t have a clear understanding of where to buy a house. The prices in the neighborhood right near my job look like this:

That’s everything on the market right now in that area – no filters on that search. In case you’re wondering, yep, 2.9M does indeed mean $2,900,000. And the 9.95M? How could anything be worth nearly ten million dollars in New Mexico? I wonder what famous person owns it. looks like this:

The cheapest one in the entire neighborhood, at $525,000, looks like this. Uh-hu. Does that look like it’s worth over half-million to you?

And that doesn’t even account for John’s desire for rural living. If we head a few miles east into the foothills, the prices look like this:

This one for 4.9 million is really pretty:

So back to reality…we bought a used truck! Last month was my birthday, so I asked John for a crappy old truck for my birthday – because we have rentals and are constantly needing to move things. Washer & dryer from one rental to a different rental. Dishwasher from Santa Fe to one of the rentals. Furniture, from Placitas to Santa Fe. Drywall, bricks, tile, shelving; from Home Depot to all the houses. Junk to the dump!

John said he had planned to buy me an Apple watch. My friend got an Apple watch for her birthday and likes it. But I need to haul junk to the dump. It wasn’t hard to convince him. And he didn’t buy a crappy truck either. It’s a great truck! Thank you, John!

The stats are: 2008 Nissan Frontier, 120,000 miles. Runs great, looks great!

It looks black in a couple of the pictures, but it’s actually a very nice dark blue.

It has an extended cab with doors that open like French doors, and little fold-up seats in the back. (In case of an emergency, like a hitchhiking leprechaun.)

We’ve only had it a couple of days and we’ve already taken a big load of crap to the dump, as well as bought drywall for my garage. Drywall comes in huge sheets that barely fit into a pickup and definitely don’t fit in a Jeep.

A guy named Sal put up the drywall for me today. Sal’s a lot faster than Sam the brick guy.

I wanted drywall before I put up shelving, and I want shelving so I can move more stuff from the house in Placitas to the house Santa fe.

In the end it always has to do with houses, lol.

A dog morning

These dogs are like children! After bouncing off the walls at 5:30 on Saturday AND Sunday morning, now, as I drag out of bed on Monday morning, they do not even open one eye to glare at me.

Both mornings this weekend began with Kira’s tail beating in rhythmic excitement against the side of the bed. That’s what happens when you get old. The “thunk, thunk, thunk” of the bed in the early morning are puppy tails, and the subsequent groans issuing from the bed are not joyous.
John reached down and struggled to open the doggie door without actually getting out of bed. I groused at him – It’s still 5-something in the morning! On a Sunday! They don’t need out that early! But it’s grand central station around the doggie door, two feet from the bed.

Now it is Monday. My alarm went off at 6:00. My brain struggles to orient. Monday. Not a single dog appears. I leaned over and opened the doggie door. Nothing. I got up at 6:10. The dogs didn’t stir, didn’t even so much as roll over. I opened the back door to let in the cool morning air. Kira might have looked at me as I walked past. Or maybe I was imagining it.
I went into the kitchen and turned on the bright overhead light. Not even a yawn or stretch from the dogs. I opened the refrigerator. I ran the microwave. Ding-diddle-link-ding! Nothing. I walked right up to the coach where the girls were sleeping to retrieve my computer. They didn’t move. I crawled back to bed with my computer and my coffee.
Sometime later, around 6:30, I see Rosie trot by; she seems to be looking for John. Not finding him, she settles back down on the bedroom rug and goes back to sleep. Kira and Kai are still happily zonked. And no one has used the doggie door yet.
By the time I was dressed and ready to leave for my morning jog, Kia was leisurely stretching, rubbing his face on the rug, and starting to wonder about his breakfast. Kira, the only dog who is young enough to keep up with my slow jog, was still asleep on the couch – or at least pretending to be. Fine. This morning I feel like jogging alone.

Darren’s visit

Originally we were going to take the camper van to Idaho and meet Darren in the mountains east of Boise. But the smoke map looked like this:

So he reluctantly agreed to fly down here and go camping in New Mexico instead. He stipulated he wanted big trees, lakes, creeks, and NO CACTUS!

Ok Darren, you got it.

John being the civil engineer.

Problem is, that water has to come from somewhere.

Here’s John and Darren, working to get Darren’s tent set up before the summer afternoon rains come (which in New Mexico we inexplicably call monsoon rains, even though – hello, this is not southeast Asia).

Kira says, “We’re here! We’re here! Time to play ball!”

Complete blue sky in one direction.

But it’s looking pretty ominous the other direction.

Uhhh…maybe it’s time to retreat into the van for awhile.

We went on several good hikes.

Where we saw lots of signs of wildlife. Bear scat, coyote scat, deer and elk scat, and what is this?

Wow, did a bear do that? Here’s John pretending he’s a bear (for scale for the photo).

We saw the same marks on a number of trees.

So much for this poor little tree.

Whatever it was, it had some reach.

Wait, what’s that? Oh. Just one of the dogs. 

Darren

Kira

The aspen was just barely starting to turn yellow in a few places. 

         

Yep, what the man ordered.

Those are Idaho-worthy mountains and lakes, right here in New Mexico.

But we paid for it, lol! We didn’t mind the rain too much at first.

But then it started hailing. That’s my WTF face.

But all told, we had a great time camping.

On the way to the airport we stopped at the biopark.

Look at these funny flowers – they are asymmetrical.

Why does John always take photos of me when I’m staring at my phone? Or maybe I’m always…nah. He just picks times when I won’t notice he’s taking a picture, so I can’t tell him to stop it.

Thanks for coming down, Darren!

Chupacabra? Jackalope?

When I went outside to go jogging one morning this week, I discovered dozens of holes dug all over my front yard.

If it had been one or two – or even three or four – I would have figured a local cat or dog. But dozens? The whole front part of the yard was pockmarked.

What could it have been, and what in the world was it looking for?

John has a night cam set up in Placitas – where we have bobcats and coyotes and bears. But he never gets any pictures of anything other than the occasional bunny. I should borrow the night cam. It appears that the nighttime wildlife in suburban Santa Fe is more intriguing than middle of nowhere New Mexico.

Cheat Code

“Teach a learning algorithm to fish, and it might just drain the lake.”

Cute little article with ominous implications:

https://www.wired.com/story/when-bots-teach-themselves-to-cheat/

We thought we were going camping yesterday

I bounded out of bed – first day of vacation! I got my coffee and checked my phone and…drat. Fraud alert. My bank had texted and emailed about a recent credit card charge. “Was this you? Please reply, ‘YES’ or ‘NO’.”

The charge was for $1.00 from Amazon web services. It could have been anything. Could have been us, sure. Or not. Am I an Amazon customer? Of course I am. Who isn’t? Amazon practically rules the world. Do I use Amazon web services? Might they have made a monthly small charge for something? Possibly.

Do I even care about $1? Yes, actually, because it’s not uncommon for a compromised credit card to be used for a very small amount to test it, before crooks try something larger.

Bummer. I hit the “NO” button, knowing that this now means a phone call with my bank, and a disabled credit card until they eventually send me a new one, at which point I’ll have to update everything with the new number.

My bank’s advice was to call Amazon and ask them specifically what it was for. I thought that was about as naive as saying, “Call Brazil to check if you dropped your watch downtown.” As if there’s one number that quickly gets a cheerful “Amazon” on the line. As if I could make it through a phone tree without knowing an account number or anything about the mystery charge.

I had a vacation to go to! I told them to stop the card and I’d deal with it later. Now I have a useless card and will need to get another. I had to do that already recently, so the currently compromised number was actually a new one that I haven’t even updated in most places. It’s like changing your address twice in a row in one month, before you even had a chance to send out change-of-address notices the first time.

But just to make sure, I did call John. Maybe he had gotten bored and ordered a $1 streaming movie or something (I was still in Santa Fe – the traffic was a snarl on Friday night so I figured driving would be easier in the morning). He did not fess up to any pay-per-view charges, but he did note that it was raining.

Raining? Typically I can hear rain hammering my skylights, but it was softly drizzling. Drizzle! Drizzle never happens in New Mexico! We have intense sun, which is sometimes, in the summer, is followed by dramatic thunderstorms late in the day. But drizzle? We’re supposed to be going camping!

I was also supposed to be going on my morning jog. But I was suspicious that I might be getting a migraine. That’s one of my tough calls every day. Usually I can’t tell first thing in the morning whether I’ll be getting a migraine that day or not. But if I am, I really shouldn’t go jogging, because it will make the migraine significantly worse. So every morning it’s a guessing game – can I go jogging or am I likely to be getting a migraine? Talk about discouraging me from exercising! It’s hard enough to get myself out the door to exercise without there being a very real chance it could make an oncoming migraine way worse.

I decided that drizzle + potential migraine = I shouldn’t go jogging that morning. Which turned out to be the right decision, because it did turn out to be a migraine day.

Then Darren, who was flying out to go camping with us, sent me a text. “Engine trouble on ignition.” What? Apparently they started the thing up and one of the engines didn’t start. He said there was a heavy smell of fuel in the cabin, and they all disembarked. He got to wait several hours at the airport while they fixed his plane.

Meanwhile, John and I had both noticed a funny smell around our camping van. I hadn’t said anything about it, because everything smells wrong to me when I’m getting a migraine. I had already accused the kitchen of smelling like dog puke. But John had also noticed the odd smell around the van. His first guess was packrats in the engine compartment. And yep, he found packrat nests in the engine compartments of both the van and the Jeep. Oh, the joys of desert life.

But in addition to packrats, it turns out the battery was hot and off-gassing! Our battery had been overheating when the engine wasn’t even on! It could have spontaneously caught fire some day when he was at work, ignited our one lone pine tree on the entire property, which happens to be wedged tight between the van and the house, and burned the entire house down!

Actually I would probably have been more upset about the loss of the camping van than the loss of the house, but I am trying to have a better attitude about this house, so I didn’t say that. I’m also fairly fond of our one lone pine tree.

When John turned the van on, and smoke (or sulfuric acid laden steam) started pouring out. By the time we had discovered the dangerous battery issue, it was already late afternoon and there ways no way we could go camping that day. John went to go buy a new battery and we figured we’d go camping the next day.

This is the second time recently that we’ve taken time off from work for a vacation, and failed to actually leave on our intended day. I guess that’s why it’s good to have more than a long weekend off sometimes. Because life is complicated and doesn’t always turn out as planned.

It’s beautiful out this morning. No more drizzle. You probably don’t even believe there was drizzle, and I didn’t take any photos of it to prove it. These photos are from this morning.

On this particular morning I love this house. And that’s the truth. Some days I love it, and some days I hate it. I do not have a relaxed and consistent perspective about this house. This morning there’s no wind; it’s peaceful and beautiful.

But never mind that now – we’re going camping!