Category: February 2019

John always insists this driveway is not an issue, but I don’t think we should advertise these particular photos when trying to sell the house this spring, lol.

Starting at the top of the hill…

Heading down…

It’s a long way down.

This is just the top half.

Plus the bottom section too.

Whew, he’d be done if only we owned a motorcycle.

My brother Steven tells me that my sister-in-law, Adrienne, loves shoveling and they practically argue over who gets to shovel their (standard, suburban) driveway in Michigan.

Psst – you guys wanna buy a house?

My brother came to visit last week because he had a conference in Santa Fe.

He brought 4 of his students with him, and I fed them a sort-of-authentic homemade New Mexican dinner of posole (hominy, chicken, and green chile stew), calabacitas (summer squashes with green chiles, onion & oregano), tortillas, queso freso (fresh – not aged – cheese), jicama (root vegetable eaten raw, like a round, white carrot), black and pinto beans with garlic & thyme, and biscochitos (anise cookies).

After the conference was over, we all (John & I & Steven) took Friday off and went to Placitas to go hiking. The hike on Friday was windy and threatening snow, but we still had a good time.

After we got home, we talked about going into Albuquerque for Thai food, but then it started snowing.

And snowing.

And snowing.

The next morning was stunning.

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Then the sun came out.

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So we went hiking again!

We really enjoyed Steven’s visit and the snow he brought from Michigan! Come again soon! (It’s ok if you don’t bring the snow next time.)

Yesterday morning I met with my new boss, who is a very nice older guy (he has come back from retirement). The meeting went “well” by all appearances.

Unfortunately, we have very different approaches, and prioritize very differently. Our office is chronically understaffed, due mainly to very low wages and the extremely high cost of living in Santa Fe as compared to Albuquerque. In a chronic understaffed situation, appropriate prioritization of staff time can make or break a program.

I left the meeting with his list of pivots he wants us to make. Corners to cut, things to prioritize over what we had been prioritizing. His approach more highly prioritizes the metrics required by our regulator, and de-emphasizes actually finding pollution emissions. Metrics over what matters. I know that bosses have to work to the metrics. But it’s always demoralizing for staff who are putting up with low pay because they believe in what they do.

I called my team together to deliver our new marching orders. As we went through my list of our new boss’s requirement’s of my team, and got to the productivity quotas that I’m being required to impose on my already extremely hardworking team, I burst into tears. The quotas are based in ignorance of how hard my team works and how brilliant they are. And they are based in ignorance of all the other tasks my team has to complete. But most importantly, they are check-the-box exercises that will not do anything to stem the rampant disregard for the pollution limits in the permits for the oil and gas plants.

My team reassured me that they would have no trouble meeting the new quotas. They assured me that they can do the check-the-box exercises for the metrics and still have enough time to look at some of the real data, to do some actual substantive work, to find some actual emission violations. It was embarrassing to cry in front of them, and to have them reassure me. It’s supposed to be the other way around. I’m supposed to be encouraging and motivating them.

I had hoped to last a few more months. I may not even last a few more weeks, before I pack up my few personal items and walk out. I can guess who they would replace me with, and my team, who love me, will rebel. I console myself with the belief that my departure will be the impetus they need to go find better jobs. But the oil and gas industry will continue to rule the skies in New Mexico.

And me? I don’t know what I want to do next. I’m on my way to visit Laura, so maybe by the time I get back next week, I’ll have a more enlightened perspective. Stay tuned!

Sorry I haven’t been posting much lately. I’ve been a bit depressed, which happens to me in January and February. I’ve been feeling a lot better this week because my brother, Steven, is visiting. I haven’t seen very much of him yet, because he’s been going to a conference and I’ve been going to work. But it’s still nice to have someone around.

That was especially true this morning, when a very strange thing happened to me. I apparently had an attack of vertigo, but that’s not what I thought was happening at the time. At the time, I actually thought I could be dying. It didn’t feel remotely like dizziness. I thought I was having a stroke or aneurysm or a seizure.

I don’t know how to describe it other than to say my brain let go. It was like my brain was failing. Suddenly nothing was anything like it should have been. It was like things were floating in the wrong places, and time wasn’t going by at the usual speed, and my body wasn’t under my brain’s control, and my brain couldn’t make sense of the world.

I fell down, but not hard. It was almost like I got down, because I knew I couldn’t stay standing. I can’t actually remember how I ended up on the floor. My brain felt like it was losing it and shutting down. But I could still speak, and I was calling to Steven. “Steven! Steven! Steven! Steven!” I was quite frightened. He called back, “Where are you?” and I said, “My bedroom.” He ran in, and saw me laying on the floor. “What happened?!”

I said, “Call Emily.” (Our sister, Emily, is a doctor.) He said, “Shouldn’t I call 911?” And I said, “No, I’d rather die at home.” But by that time I was beginning to suspect I wasn’t actually dying. Then he said, “Shouldn’t I call John?” And I said, “No, what could he do? Call Emily.” And I reiterated that I did not want to go to the hospital. By the time she called us back, about 5 minutes later, I was up walking around and felt totally fine (although a bit shook up).

Then I drove Steven to his conference, and now I’m at work. I feel pretty much normal, although I do feel like I might have a migraine coming on. Emily has been checking in on me by text. It’s good to have family around. John is in an all-day meeting without access to his cell phone, but I’m hoping he can get a chance to call me at lunchtime. If not, I’ll see him tonight. We are all taking tomorrow off, and hope to take Steven hiking, even though another snowstorm is coming.

This interesting article about the tradition of hot chicken in Nashville made John and I want to go for a visit. I’ve never been to that part of the country.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/04/the-family-business-that-put-nashville-hot-chicken-on-the-map

Darren got a tattoo!

I’m not there, so this is the only picture I have 🙂

I have managed, for now, to talk myself out of smearing hand lotion all over toilet paper. Mainly by dragging my near-delirious self out of bed and (miraculously) finding a thermometer and verifying that I do have a fever.

At a touch over 101 it’s not high enough to text my sister-doctor to see if she calls 911 for me (because I’d never call 911 myself. I’d be dead before I’d willingly go to an emergency room with a migraine or a bad cold.)

But my temp is high enough to convince myself that I should not be doing anything more risky or unusual than posting a semi-incoherent blog post. No lotion-toilet-paper experiments.

I did finally leave work at noon. I shouldn’t have been there for the last two days, but what the hell. And since arriving home, I have successfully resisted chiming in as the work emails come in on my phone, leaving my team to deal with them as they will.

I have managed to struggle through one magazine these past 6 hours since I’ve come home, although I doubt I’ll retain any of what I read. I tried to find a light book to read, but I have none.

I’m actually surprised I have any books at all that I haven’t read, because there was a time in my life when I only owned books I had already read. But now I have a few unread books. Mostly thick, hardcover books set in obscure foreign countries.

I have one about Solzhenitsyn. And no, of course I didn’t actually know how to spell that; I seem to retain enough thought power to google the spelling of Solzhenitsyn, but not enough thought power to read such a book. Nor am I up to reading the one that’s half in Spanish. Nor the one set in Istanbul. Turns out I have at least two unread books set in Istanbul. Why is that? Nor the one about the women Muslim resistance in Africa. Then there’s Osaka immediately before WWII. That’d be a light read.

I’m blaming the fact that I read “highbrow” magazines. My advice is to myself is: if you insist on reading that kind of magazine, don’t read the literature reviews. Because the only time I ever have time to read a book is when I have a migraine, or a fever of 101, at which point, I need a dumb book. Not a well-reviewed book.

If you haven’t figured it out already, the lotion-on-toilet-paper musing came up because I have, several hours ago, run out of my preferred tissue “with lotion” and my nose is rubbed raw. There is a grocery store quite close by, but I’m currently likely to enjoy a grocery store trip about as much as I would a trip to the ER. So that’s not happening.

Anyway, if I left the house, the first person who saw me would probably call 911, possibly for my sake, but also possibly for their own. The attack of the aging reddish-blond zombie women.

It’s been a rough fucking month. I haven’t been this sick in a long time. It started on New Years Day, with the worst migraine in forever, with John stuck out in Placitas, so I just holed up alone in my room with ice on the inside of the windows and waited it out for 2 days.

Then a bad cold starting on our trip to Tucson, with a migraine kicking in about the time I got back, leading to two days missed work in a row. I never miss that much work.

It’s not that I’m all that stoic, but I have migraines all the time. I can’t miss work just because I don’t feel good, or I’d be unemployable. So I usually stay at work until the point where I’m in danger of doing stupid shit, or sounding drunk, and then I go home and don’t let myself reply to emails.

I suppose I should learn how to watch TV. But I don’t know what to watch, or even how to turn it on. I believe you can also watch TV on laptops, but I don’t know how to do that either. John wrote me instructions for the TV in the living room, but I’ve never attempted to turn it on by myself.

You think I exaggerate. One year, many years ago, when John was (as usual) on a week-long business trip, I attempted to turn on the olympics. I literally could not figure out how to make the olympics show up on my TV. I ended up at the neighbor’s house watching with them, but their frigid central air conditioning (and similarly frigid attitude) soon drove me home.

I’m aware that our Tweeter-In-Chief plans to deliver a speech half an hour from now. But I am already miserable enough; I do not need to listen to someone who is clearly stupider than I am, regardless of my inability to figure out how to work the TV, and even with a 101 degree fever. Someone should configure his TV so he can’t figure out how to turn it on. This could potentially save the world.

Anyway, I could probably figure out how to make the speech come in on my computer. But maybe I’ll just read that book about Osaka in WWII instead. May we not soon be there.