Category: July 2019

For dinner

Posole!

Yes, it’s actually that red. Actually, it’s redder than that even. No, it’s not food coloring, that’s red chil-aaaay!

John and I were finally able to find organic hominy, at both Sprouts and Albertsons. The key turned out to be to look for it in dried form rather than canned. The dried is more time consuming to use – it needs soaked overnight prior to cooking. In New Mexico hominy is often called posole when it’s in dried form, the same as the name of the dish that’s commonly made from it. Posole is also spelled Pozole, such as in Mexico.

Both canned hominy and dried posole are made by treating the corn with lime to remove the outer shell of the kernel. The lime is then rinsed off and the posole is air dried and packaged for sale. Or it can be ground coarsely to make grits or ground fine for masa.

Here’s a rough recipe for what I made tonight, sorry I wasn’t following a recipe and I didn’t measure anything, so amounts are just a guess:

  • 12 oz dried white corn posole, soaked overnight, drained, rinsed
  • 1 onion, coarsely chopped
  • 3 garlic cloves
  • 1 whole bay leaf
  • Red chile flakes (to taste). I only used about a teaspoon, but I have an unusually hot local batch of it.
  • About a tablespoon of dried oregano
  • About a quarter pound of chorizo
  • Salt to taste (a fair amount)

Put in crock pot with water, cook all day, adding water as needed. You can substitute chicken or pork for the chorizo, or leave it out altogether. Vegetarian posole is also excellent. I also often put green chile in it (this being New Mexico) but I didn’t this time.

The last time I made it I used chicken and green chiles instead of chorizo and red chiles, so it was a boring beige color. It was just as good though! And even hotter.

Are we or aren’t we?

This past week has been nail-biting and patience-challenging.

A month ago, in early June, we packed up my Santa Fe stuff and loaded it into a pod and got the townhome ready to rent.

We hadn’t wanted to book the pod pick-up ahead of time because we weren’t sure how long it would take us to get it loaded. But then when we did get it loaded and went to schedule the pod pick-up, they were booked 3 weeks out! I knew they would be booked up for a few days, but I didn’t anticipate my stuff would be sitting locked in a pod in the Santa Fe driveway for 3 weeks!

Our pod pick-up day wasn’t scheduled until July 8. Well, that gave me plenty of time to advertise the townhome and get renters lined up to move in. I set their lease to start on July 9.

The pod company is supposed to email and call the evening before pick-up day with the “service window” so you know when to expect them the next day. But the evening of July 7, I didn’t get my service window notification. I called them in the morning to find out when they were coming and they said they had to reschedule me to the next day. Reschedule! The new occupants are moving into the townhome and the pod was in the way!

The townhome only has a one-car garage and a narrow driveway. The pod completely fills the driveway and blocks the garage. How could my tenants even move in? I frantically texted my new tenant, asking when her moving truck (or pod) was scheduled to arrive. She said not to worry; her truck wasn’t coming until the morning of July 11. Whew!

But then later that day I got an email saying the pick-up and delivery of the pod had been rescheduled again – to July 10. Ok, that’s still in time for my tenants. But the evening of July 9, I once again didn’t get my service window notification. Uh-oh, in my experience, no service window notification means no service!

I called first thing the morning of the 10th, explaining that it’s been 3 days and the new occupants need to move in! They assured me that even though my online account didn’t show a service window, that I actually had a service window from 7 AM to 10 AM. Ok, well, thanks for the warning (it was already 8:00 by then).

Except the pod still didn’t come. By noon on the 10th I was really sweating it. What were my tenants going to do if the schedule was pushed out again? By that time, I had called this company so many times that I knew my way around their phone tree (don’t select “I want to know my service window” because that just sends you into an automated recital of the same things you can see online, which in my case did not include a service window!)

Then my pod finally, suddenly, arrived!

But meanwhile, we had another problem. On the morning of the 9th, our house sale appeared to fall apart. We were doing everything we could on our end, but ultimately the buyer has to be comfortable; it’s a big decision. John and I have once or twice backed out of a purchase ourselves (and not regretted it).

Our agent was quite sure the sale was not going to go through. She was so sure that she sent us the paperwork that we’d need to relist the house for sale again at the end of the week.

Meanwhile, back when I still thought we were closing on the 17th, I had hired a moving company to move all our furniture and decor out of the Placitas house on the 11th. Now my agent was telling me not to move it because she wanted it in there for when the sale fell through and we had to put the house back on the market.

Unless of course we actually did manage to close on the 17th, in which case we would need to have moved our belongings out of there. What to do? Were we going to close or not? If I cancelled on my movers, I would be out of luck. They didn’t have any more open time slots before the 17th, in the event that we actually closed on the sale. It’s nearly impossible to get decent movers on short notice this time of year.

And the last time I just “hired some guys” to help me move some stuff out of that house in Placitas, I caught them shoving my boxes down the stairs and catching them at the bottom (yes, seriously). They laid a ladder down on the stairs, hoping the boxes would roll down the rungs. Except not. The first guy would give a box a big shove at the top, watch it bounce down the stairs, and the other guy would pick it up at the bottom. They had quite an assembly line going until I told them to cut it out!

John doesn’t ever like to hire help anyway; it was all I could do to insist on the professional movers for this final set of furniture. After hurting my back a couple of weeks ago, I was determined not to move it all ourselves!

We were told we should hear back from our buyer the morning of the 11th, the same morning that we had reserved movers. So I had the movers start by unloading the Santa Fe pod, and delayed the decision about whether to move the Placitas furniture as long as I could. But finally, by mid-morning my movers were done unloading the Santa Fe pod in Albuquerque and ready to go up to Placitas and get everything from out there. So I called my agent and told her I was going ahead and moving our stuff out. And we’d just have to hope the house is actually selling.

The movers were great! Here they are, expertly backing a huge trailer up the long, long, steep driveway. It opens up to plenty of turning room at the top, but it is very narrow on the way up.

They did a very good job, carefully wrapping everything up and not marking the walls as they moved things out. Look at that beautiful, empty garage. (Sigh.) That’s the one in Placitas.

The garage in our new house is now completely full to the ceiling with junk (a fraction of which I actually want).

My house is in almost as bad of shape.

I suddenly have 2 houses worth of stuff piled in one, very modest-sized house. It’s a total zoo. I’m continuing to give stuff away, and I’m trying to unpack in as organized and efficient manner as possible (which is slowing me down considerably).

Since our garage is totally packed full, our truck, camper van, boat and two cars are piled up in the driveway and spilling into the street. Between that and the huge pod in front of the house, we look like everyone’s favorite neighbors, if you know what I mean.

But for the first time in a few years, all our stuff is in one place – well, not counting the two storage units, lol.

We are currently thinking we will close on the 17th, but we are not celebrating yet. It’s 3 long days from now and anything could happen. Stay tuned!

Santa Fe is done!

I forgot to hit the “publish” button on this post when I wrote this, so it’s a couple of days out of date. But here it is.

We have a young couple moving into the Santa Fe townhome. They are very excited – it is so hard to find anything in decent condition in Santa Fe for anything like a normal rent price.

We got the last of our junk out of the Santa Fe garage. One final trip to the donation place (which, by the way, supports Big Brothers Big Sisters).

We donated an entire pick-up truck load, including the dogs’ beloved bean bag.

Don’t tell the dogs! It was just too big for our new house. Someday they’ll have a small couch in the TV-dog-man-cave, and they can watch TV with John in the evening and life will be fine. But John has not had any time for TV recently, and we don’t have our furniture yet. Soon. Soon. (I hope.)

The Eagle Crest house is the only one left that still needs rented. Sam is almost done with the tile and I’ll be advertising it soon.

Internet-ordained ministers

I don’t usually mention politics, but this article caught my attention, because John and I were married by an internet-ordained minister.

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/13/739043318/tennessee-lawmakers-aim-to-ban-weddings-by-internet-ordained-ministers

According to the article, Tennessee’s attempt to ban weddings officiated by internet-ordained ministers is a means to target LGBTQ marriages because those marriages often use internet-ordained ministers.

However, John and I used an internet-ordained minister because we decided we’d rather be married by a friend in our own backyard than by a church official we hardly knew.

In practicality, I don’t see how Tennessee could succeed in this. They might be able to require some additional form of licensing for those officiating weddings, but there’s no way they can require them to be religious. And who’s to say what constitutes a religion? Any one of us could start a religion, and probably make it sound less bizarre than most of the world religions we currently have.

Hmmm, that could be my new next calling…

Explora with Larrisa

Our first outing was to Explora, which is a children’s science museum. I think she liked it, and I enjoyed it too, although I got a migraine afterwards. My migraines are sensitive to large echoey indoor spaces. I thought it would be quiet enough – being a museum. But it’s hard to predict. I usually do fine with indoor concerts, but I don’t do well with indoor malls, aquariums, pools and gymnasiums. So it’s more about the type of noise than the actual volume.

I’ve been mentioning my migraines lately, but actually I’m doing way better than in the past. Lately my migraines have been discrete events a week or more apart, and I can usually tell what triggered them. But for some years there, they were nearly continual and it was hard to tell where one started and the other one ended. It’s amazing to have many migraine-free days. It makes me wonder how I ever used to manage!

In this first exhibit, the goal is to build tracks on the wall for marbles. You have to get them lined up just right so the marbles stay on the tracks. Also if it’s too steep and the marbles go too fast they’ll leap off the track.

This next one is a magnet. She built a bridge across between the magnets with the marbles.

It’s a nice big open space (which is why it was echoey)

Here she is learning about plumbing at an outdoor water exhibit.

She’s controlling this suspended model airplane with hand and foot controls.

I had to google the quote because I don’t read Spanish very well, but apparently it means, “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” I doubt Henry Ford said it in Spanish.

Enormous legos. Those would have been fun to have as a kid!

We were mostly indoors, but it looks like I took most of the pictures outdoors. I particularly like this one.

Suicidal motorcyclist

I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s legal in New Mexico to ride a motorcycle without a helmet.

This guy also doesn’t have a windshield. A rock kicked up from a nearby car could easily hit him in the forehead and kill him. This is a 75 mph freeway!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, as we passed him I looked over and he had his phone out and he was texting! Texting!

Perhaps he was writing about the approaching storm that was already starting to spit raindrops?

Or maybe he was writing his obituary.

4th of July Odyssey

Sometimes our camping trips end up more like reconnaissance missions than relaxing time spent outdoors.  If the place we thought looked perfect on the map turns out to be very much non-perfect, then we go to Plan B. But Plan B, being less researched and somewhat ad hoc, is only somewhat likely to pan out. Plan C, even less so…and so on until you’ve spent your entire vacation driving around on horrible dirt roads looking for somewhere, anywhere, to camp.

This reminds me of one of my favorite children’s books “The Bear’s Picnic” by Stan and Jan Berenstain (which, I just noticed, was published just a few days before I was born. Ok fine, google it, in case you didn’t already know my age.)

In this amusing book, each picnic spot was either too crowded or too buggy or something, and the daddy bear dragged the family all over the countryside trying to find the perfect picnic spot. When they finally found the perfect spot, they got rained out and ended up back home.

John, does this sound familiar? At all maybe?

We left on Friday morning, our van full of food and three eager dogs, and drove up to Colorado. That’s a red flag for me right to start with. I’m not a fan of southern Colorado. I prefer the mountains of New Mexico (or California, or Oregon, or Washington, or even the deserts of Arizona and Utah). I keep telling myself not to be prejudiced, but have we EVER had a good trip to southern Colorado? I’m not thinking so. I did enjoy a trip up to northern Colorado back when Darren was going to college up there, but that’s quite far from where we live.

A complicating factor is we’re still getting used to van camping. We used to be backpackers. Finding a good backpacking route is definitely an art. But it turns out finding a good van camping spot is not any easier.

The first place we aimed for, nearish to Durango, looked promising. I’m actually the one who picked it out, after having vetoed John’s first choice due to excessive lengths of difficult roads. The spot I picked offered a variety of forest service roads and small creeks in the region, suggesting available at-large camping. There was also a designated campground in case we got desperate.

It was beautiful out there!

The first forest service road turned out to be too tight up against the creek, leaving extremely small spaces for camping. John and I wouldn’t have minded ourselves, but we would either have had to keep the dogs tied up or be constantly calling the dogs away from the road. The creek was also high & fast. I imagined my little dogs alternately swept away by the creek or hit on the road, which was chock full of Jeeps and ATV’s.

And the “campground” at the trailhead was just an open, grassy, muddy field (full of trailers and tents and vehicles of all sorts flung about all over like another Burning Man).

The second road we chose was up away from the creek, which we assumed would also mean a lot less people. So we rattled and bounced up yet another dusty, washboard road, to discover that we assumed wrong.

We almost got our van stuck up a road we really shouldn’t have been on with the van. The teenage drivers of the ATV’s waited patiently while we awkwardly got turned around. I don’t think they even bothered to roll their eyes.

But we saw an enormous brown bear! So that was something at least.

Realizing the entire area was overrun by people and vehicles, we retreated down into northern New Mexico and headed into a nearby small section of Carson national forest just east of Navajo Lake, where we’ve never been. The map showed plenty of little dirt roads, so we figured we could just camp at the end of one of them.

Turns out there were tanks at the end of every single road out there. (I assumed they had something to do with the oil and gas industry, which is a huge industry in New Mexico, but who knows what was in all those tanks.) It would have probably been ok if we went ahead and camped out there near one of the tanks at the end of one of those roads. I doubt anyone would have cared, but who wants to camp at a tank?

It was now getting very late in the day and we had a critical decision to make. Do we try yet again? If so, where? Or do we just go home?

We decided to head to the closest national forest possible, which was back into Colorado, just north of Chromo, south of Pagosa Springs. We figured we could make it there by just before dark. We headed up our hastily chosen forest road and took the very first pull-out available just as it was turning dark. Success at last! After 12 hours of driving we had finally found a spot to spend the night.

The next morning I had to get up early to treat the migraine that was brought on by all the rough road driving the day before. I took meds at 5:30 and again at 6:30, and managed to fall back to sleep, which was very lucky and greatly increased my chances of getting ahead of the migraine. The meds don’t cure the migraine, but if taken early enough, they allow me to continue with my day.

I was in reasonably high spirits. The night had been quiet, the morning was warm and sunny, I had slept in and I had the migraine under control. I was looking forward to later in the day, when we planned to drive 4 miles up the road to a trailhead we had seen marked on a sign at the entrance of the forest road. Meanwhile, since I was still treating the migraine, we figured we’d start by just taking a short morning walk around.

I thought it was beautiful, but John was out of sorts. Maybe it was because in our exhaustion the night before, he had backed the van into a tree limb while getting us parked, creating a dent at the top of the van. We have a back-up camera, but those don’t work 9 feet off the ground. It was my fault – I was supposed to be spotting for him. But, like the back-up camera, I failed to look up that high.

For whatever reason, he wasn’t enjoying our morning walk. He said he didn’t like the area. The final straw for him was when we got back to our campsite intent on breakfast and discovered that some people decided to use our camping spot as parking for their ATV trailers!

So off we went, in search of another camping spot.

Once again, we headed back down into New Mexico. We debated and debated, with the van pulled over on the side of the road. We peered at paper maps we had brought and tried hard to get our phones to load google maps with scant cell tower. Should we head toward a wilderness area where the ATV’s can’t go? Except there’d also be no place for us to camp with the van other than in the trailhead parking lot. Or should we try some other national forest land (again) and hope for fewer ATV’s this time?

We decided to try in the vicinity of a campground by a small lake (uh yeah, no, lakes = bad idea on the July 4 weekend, I know). Predictably, the area was completely overrun by jeeps and ATV’s. Also biting flies. I cannot stand biting flies. I’m generally tolerant of mosquitos and other outdoor insects. But biting flies are very rare back home in the Sierra Nevada – Cascade ranges and I never developed a tolerant attitude about them. I associate black flies with the Rockies and east of the Rockies, and I also associate them with overcrowded areas with lots of people and livestock.

Anyway, although it was beautiful, but we couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

By this point we had given up and decided to head home. Rather than retrace our steps, we decided to continue east on 64 to Tres Peidres and then south on 285 to 25 and home. We hadn’t been driving very long when suddenly John slowed and peered at one of those all-important, dark brown forest service road signs.

“What?” I asked.

“I was just wondering what was up there, but I couldn’t really see the sign.”

“Well, we can go back and read the sign.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You were trying to read the sign, you might as well go back and read it.”

“You want me to turn the van around?”

“You don’t have to; but you were trying to read the sign. Either we’re reading signs or we’re not reading signs, there’s no point in sort-of reading signs.”

Which is how we ended up finding that perfect picnic spot.

It seemed like a quiet little road, so we thought we’d stop and walk around a little bit.

On our walk we noticed an old track off the forest road, which looked drivable as long as it didn’t rain. John ran back down the road to collect the van and bring it up while the dogs and I waited in the shade.

It was perfect! Lovely! No one out there but us!

But by this time it was hot and my migraine had started to come back. So we got settled in, took a short walk, and determined to do a big hike the next morning. (No matter how bad a trip gets, I always have the goal of getting in at least one good long hike.)

But the next morning was cloudy. John and I looked at each other in disbelief. It’s never cloudy in the morning in the desert. We’ll get afternoon thundershowers, but not morning drizzle. Also John had checked the weather before we left, and we were expecting dry weather until Sunday afternoon. John confidently announced the clouds would quickly burn off, and we left for our long hike.

About 20 minutes into our “big hike”, we adjusted our course to essentially circle the van rather than get too far from it. After another 20 minutes, as we circled back even closer toward the van, John casually suggested we “pick up the pace a little bit.” Two minutes after that, we were sprinting the final few yards to the van as the rain came down.

We were parked out on an undesignated track and our main concern was not getting the van stuck in the rapidly-forming mud. We stashed our stuff, closed the roof vent, and headed out, this time no discussion required. We had barely gotten onto the paved highway when it started pouring. Five minutes later, the road was covered in an inch of water. Five more minutes and it was hailing. We were on the road again.

We will go back there. One thing we noticed on our short, rained-out hike was a large area perfect for tent camping, only about half hour walk from the road. So if any of my siblings with little kids would like to do an easy backpacking trip with us, this would make a good one.

When it’s not raining.

If I haven’t just inadvertently convinced you to never go camping. Ever.

And…we’re back

My blog was down! It was displaying a “fatal error” message. And when I tried to go to my login screen where I post, the same “fatal error” was displaying there too! I couldn’t even log in.

It apparently went down late in the day on July 3rd. Which is so typical of IT, to push some sort of major upgrade and break things immediately prior to a long holiday weekend.  I was blissfully camping however, (or actually, not so blissfully, but more on that later), and I didn’t know about it being down for a few days. When I discovered it on my return, I started googling everywhere, trying to figure out why it was down (and how to fix it). I saw a bunch of angry comments in the WordPress support section from people who spent their entire 4th of July trying frantically to get their websites back up.

My blog is just a hobby, but I understood how they felt, because I used to feel that way about my coaching website when that was my sole means of income. My coaching website was, surprisingly, still up, and I don’t know why because both my blog and my coaching site run on the same system. The mysteries of IT.

Anyway, I was able to research enough to figure out that I couldn’t fix it from WordPress; I had to fix it from my host site, even though it was a WordPress plug-in update that broke it.  The internet instructions were way, way over my head, but knowing that I had to contact my website host was the key. I got onto webchat with them, and they were able to download the newest version of whatever-whatever, so the recently updated plug-in wouldn’t crash my whole dang site.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry, I don’t really either.  But when the guy on chat asked me if I wanted him to bla-bla-bla 7.1 bla-bla-bla, I remembered that same number from my internet research (it’s a version of something I guess), so I’m like, “Yes.” All confident-like.  Yep, do that 7.1 thing to my website and life will be good again.

So he did, and not only did it fix the blog, it also didn’t break my coaching site (sorry to be such a pessimist, but the coaching site was working and I could just imagine fixing my blog only to inadvertently take down the coaching site. Because in my experience, that’s how IT works).  But as of right now (knock on wood) they are both working.