The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
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.
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.
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.
We’ve been running around, running down our long to-do list. It’s amusing the things you find when moving.
This had to be from several moves ago. (sigh). One time recently I told you that I’d moved 25 times in my adult life and John was skeptical. One of these days I’m going to bore you with the entire litany. Just warning you. You can blame John’s skepticism when it happens.
And I found this. I guess it came from a game. It’s going to be my new talisman.
We are forever moving pick-up loads of random things to different houses. Anyone want an enormous, slightly dusty bean bag?
It doesn’t fit in our new house. I think my friend in Santa Fe is going to take it. I don’t know what we’d do without that pick-up (hire movers like normal people, probably).
And we’re buying things, and planting things…
We’ve been working on our rentals too. Rental #1 is getting a new roof. The whole city had hail damage awhile back, and ever since then roofers have been absolutely impossible to schedule. It took lots of calling, but I finally have someone lined up for this fall, which is the soonest they could schedule us. (Hey Robert, I don’t know if you still read this blog, but thanks for the roofer recommendation!)
Rental #2 is getting a bunch done. There were bad dog claw scratches in the sliding glass door, and the screen and glass company said they couldn’t just change out the glass and that we needed a whole new sliding glass door installed. (For mega $). Then the contractor, Calob, who is working on miscellaneous tasks at our new house (more on that later), went out there and scraped off the tint on the glass doors, and it’s as good as new. The scratches were only in the tinted film on the glass! He charged me $100 for carefully scraping the sticky stuff off with a blade, and saved me well over a thousand. I don’t even remember how much he saved me. Thousands! The screen and glass company’s quote was so ridiculous I didn’t even consider it.
Meanwhile at the same house, Sam, the brick and tile guy, is laying new tile (it was old carpet and peeling wood-look laminate).
This is the tile we had original bought to match existing tile in the Placitas house, but when it arrived, it turned out to be a very different dye lot and didn’t match the existing tile well enough to use. So we stored it, knowing we had a rental with floors that were going to need redone. Remember how we had a horrible time trying to decide on tile at the Placitas house? In the end, we gave up on tile, took everything up, and had Sam install brick. Brick flooring is very traditional and appreciated in that part of New Mexico. But in Albuquerque, tile is standard.
You remember Sam? He’s super nice, reasonably affordable, and does careful work. He’s also very, very sloooooooow. Remember the months and months my backyard patio brick took last year? This is his third big job for us. He promised me it would go quickly because the longer it takes, the longer it’s sitting empty without generating rental income. A few months of lost rent would cost more than what the tile job cost.
The same rental also had a broken toilet tank lid. The tenants had glued it back together. It’s always something. This is an easy fix, just need to find the right thing to order.
Rental #3 just needed a bit of landscaping done. If you ever want something to cause nightmares, read up on bindweed. It is absolutely impossible to deal with. It puts roots down many, many feet, and will run linearly underground for many, many more feet, and can regrow from just a speck of root somewhere, anywhere buried in your yard. For those of you from the Pacific Northwest – IT IS WORSE THAN BLACKBERRY VINES! It’s absolutely impossible to get rid of. We had it growing through the front window frame inside the house this spring. My tenants were sending photos and I couldn’t even understand what they were saying! I’ve heard of ants getting into a house, but not weeds!
Anyway, we still have bindweed out there, but at least we now also have cute little rosemary plants. Here we are planting them:
And laying the drip system.
And ooops! The pressure blew the heads right off. It’s a fountain!
Haha, someone’s getting wet trying to turn it off! Turn it off, turn it off! It’s spraying higher than the house.
We also replaced a dead evergreen out at the Placitas house.
We had originally dug the hole there for a different reason. Before giving up on the entire place, we had envisioned a tranquil pond with lilies and koi (ha. ha.) After giving up on that dream, John didn’t want to waste the effort (because if you have a hole you must fill it), so he bought two trees to plant there, one of which died, so then he bought a replacement tree. I’m reminded of the children’s song, “she swallowed the bird to catch the spider…she swallowed the spider to catch the fly…but I don’t know why, she swallowed the fly.”
While out there we noticed a neighbor’s house had burned!
I don’t know anything about it. Very sad. Except the last house that burned in that same neighborhood turned out to be owner arson. (Did John and I consider that? No…why would you think that? And did John or I ever consider using the grave-sized hole for our spouse’s body instead of evergreen trees? Now why would I even suggest that?) Just because that house has been a wee bit expensive and frustrating.
By the way, it failed its septic system inspection earlier this week. Did I tell you that? We weren’t surprised because of its age, but now we have to either get it fixed or a new one installed. Best case scenario it’s going to cost some money and delay closing. Hopefully our buyers won’t back out of the deal. If they do, it would be karma. Because we backed out of buying a house a couple of years ago for the exact same reason.
The local newspaper delivery service has been mistakingly delivering a daily paper to our house. I called to explain the error, but the paper is still arriving. So I’ve been taking a look at it, because hey, we have it, but it’s been very discouraging. And I don’t mean the national news (we all know how terrifying that is). I mean the local news.
Every day there’s stories about women and children being murdered in various kinds of domestic disputes and abuse. Today’s headline was about a sex trafficking operation within 5 miles from my house.
One one hand, I feel like I shouldn’t be ignorant of this. On the other hand, I can’t hardly stand reading about it. Maybe once I’m settled I can think of some way to help the community a little. This state struggles in so many ways.
Meanwhile, the latest headline – 27% fewer cars stolen than the year before! But Albuquerque is still “the number one hot spot for stolen vehicles per capita in the country.” Good to be number 1 in something. Stolen cars isn’t as tragic as the domestic abuse and trafficking, but it all adds up to a bleak picture.
Speaking of cars, here is a somewhat more lighthearted image of the crazy life in New Mexico. I took this photo of a car stalled in the left hand turn lane at a large intersection. Before abandoning their stalled car right in the middle of the road, they took the time to put up their front windshield sunshade. It is summer in the desert after all. And you wouldn’t want an uncomfortably hot abandoned car blocking the intersection now would you?
These are great! https://themonsterproject.org/monstergalleryun/
I don’t usually repost if I don’t have anything much to say about it, but I thought you’d like these monsters. John found them.
The project had children draw monsters and then had professional artists use their ideas and elaborate on them.
The site took awhile to load with my lousy internet, but it was worth the wait. I just went and did something else, forgot about it, came back and…hey cool! Monster art! It actually loaded better on my phone.
I finally got most of them to load on my computer, here’s screenshots of several of my favorites. (credit, https://themonsterproject.org/monstergalleryun/)
This next one totally looks like someone I used to know. She was prettier though, lol.
I wish I could get all of them as screen savers!
Interacting with people I don’t know is challenging for me. I push myself to do it because strangers can become clients, or tenants, or employers or employees, or best of all – good friends.
So as far as potential goes, today was stellar! But now I’m tired.
It all started this morning, with a soft knock at the door. I rarely answer the door when I don’t know who it is, but I thought it was Calob, who is working for me doing some house repair and upgrades. So I quickly stuck the dogs in another room and opened the door. I was surprised to find a woman about my age. She introduced herself as one of my new neighbors out for her morning walk. Excellent! I invited her in and we chatted briefly and exchanged contact information and she went on her way.
Half an hour later I was second guessing myself and thinking I hadn’t been nice enough or welcoming enough (because I’m introverted, and also awkward, and also had been caught by surprise). So I texted her and said that I’d enjoy walking with her some morning. But she didn’t reply, so now I’m second guessing myself again.
Then at 11:00 I was scheduled to meet my new Little Sister from the Big Brothers Big Sister’s program. I got to meet her, and her grandma and her little brother. Her grandmother, Tammy, told me proudly that she and Larrisa’s half brother are 100% Navajo, and Larrisa (that’s how she spells it) is 3/4 Navajo and 1/4 Mexican.
Larrisa told me she is 10 years old and going into 5th grade because she started school a year late and NEVER FLUNKED ANYTHING! She was very clear about that. Larrisa is a little bit big for her age, so I hope she doesn’t get teased or looked down on at school for being bigger than the other little girls, and being a year older probably isn’t helping.
I really liked her right away – Larrisa is a happy, outgoing 10-year-old. I really liked her grandma, Tammy, also. Tammy is quiet and thoughtful. When we were on the elevator together Tammy confided that she wasn’t comfortable in elevators, and I told her I didn’t like flying. And Tammy said once when she visited California she spent the whole time worrying that there would be an earthquake. And it’s true, I did notice when I moved back to New Mexico, that when the wind hit the house and made it creak suddenly, I felt a brief flash of relief as I realized I wasn’t in California anymore. Just wind here, not earthquakes. I never thought I was bothered by earthquakes, but they’re just one more subtle thing that adds to the complexity of living in California. Larrisa doesn’t appear to be afraid of anything, and I hope she stays that way.
I also met her little 5-year-old half brother. For a second I thought he was a little girl, because in their culture little boys wear their hair long. Funny how we use these arbitrary things to signal gender. Luckily I hadn’t said anything before they introduced me to him. I didn’t fully understand his name, which was an unfamiliar name to me, and now I don’t remember it. But Larrisa can teach me later. Her little brother has a speech impediment, and they told me he might have autism. I told them my grown-up son has the same thing.
The meeting facilitator had a variety of ice breaker games for us, like having to draw each other’s faces without looking down at our sheet of paper, so we couldn’t see what we were doing. We didn’t like that one!
We also wrote down each other’s names, phone numbers and birthdays on a little card so we’d have it. When Larrisa wrote down mine on her little card, her writing started out smaller and got larger. So from a distance the dominate piece of information is my birth year in GREAT BIG numbers. Nineteen…long long time ago! Turns out I guess I’m sensitive about my age!
There was one game where we were supposed to draw a house together, taking turns each making a line. I let Larrisa tell me where to draw my lines and I thought it turned out really neat. The door was a triangle, and the window was a half circle with triangular shaped split panes. I should have taken a picture of it.
Speaking of pictures, I was given permission by Tammy and Larrisa to post pictures online! So I can post pictures of our outings (just no last names and contact info, which I don’t post here about anyone, anyway). Here’s Larrisa and I, standing against a wall in a conference room in an awkward, we-just-met pose.
And one with grandma Tammy, and little brother:
I don’t know why I’m looking off to the left in both pictures. I’m having an aspie moment I guess. Classic staring up into the corner when thinking or uncomfortable.
Anyway, Larrisa and I have our first event scheduled for this Friday and I’m really looking forward to it!
If that were not enough new people for one day, I then spent all afternoon showing the Santa Fe house to prospective tenants. I don’t have it rented yet, so I’ll have to do that again another day. But whew, done with meeting people for today! It was a good day though.
We have finally, finally, given up and hired help with moving. In general, John prefers we do stuff ourselves when we can, while I will more often want to hire help.
The advantages of the DIY approach is it’s cheaper, and John likes to be able to do it his way (the right way), on his timeframe. And he doesn’t like the process of hiring and overseeing help, and he definitely doesn’t like fixing it when someone else does it wrong.
On the other hand, I delegate as much as I can. I don’t mind the process of hiring and overseeing help. And I like to get things done faster than we can do them if we’re doing everything ourselves. And I believe in hiring local help and putting some money into the local economy. And I think it makes sense to hire people who are good at what they do, because we’re amateurs at everything except our own professions. I think it’s more effective and efficient to spend our time doing the things we’re good at, and let someone else do the things they specialize in. I also think John undervalues his time.
Plus, I just think we’re working way too hard. John has a lot more energy than I do, but even he has not been himself for a few months now. It’s like our first year in California when John was in a very difficult new job and we were doing a major remodel.
Finally over this weekend I hurt my back dragging around some new trees, trying to decide exactly how to place them.
They’re going on our back slope to screen the neighbor’s house.
My back is slowly getting better, but I could hardly walk on Sunday. So Monday morning I hired a moving company to do the rest because I’m not doing anymore lifting.
We have about half of the moving left to do. So far we have the boxes from Placitas moved in, the washer & dryer from Santa Fe moved in, and some furniture. And we’ve loaded the POD in Santa Fe and it’s up there waiting for the POD company to drive it down to Albuquerque.
What’s left to do is unload the POD, plus move all the furniture and decorations that are staging the house in Placitas. The POD doesn’t arrive until July 8 (because we didn’t know how long it would take us to load it, so we didn’t schedule soon enough and now they are booked and we have to wait).
We don’t want to remove the furniture from the Placitas house until it clears inspections (which should happen by the end of this week unless we need to redo the septic system). Once we’ve cleared inspections, we’ll be fairly certain that the sale will go through.
So in the end, I have movers scheduled for July 11. It will be nice to have everything in one place, and finally be done with moving. This is the longest and most drawn out moving process I’ve ever done. We started this project in April.
Meanwhile, as of yesterday, I am advertising the Santa Fe townhome for rent. I’ve had lots of inquiries, and will be going up there later this afternoon to show it to several interested parties.
We still have some give-away items in the garage up in Santa Fe, and I have some coworkers from my old job coming over at the same time to look through the stuff in the garage. So that’s all going to be way too many people and too much confusion for my comfort level, but hopefully it all goes well, and my coworkers find some stuff they like and I find a good tenant.
My tree has yellow leaves! And it is not yet fall. We had a long, cold, wintery spring and summer has barely started! What to do?! I googled birch tree with yellow leaves.
The first entry was:
“Yellowing leaves on your birch tree in summer suggest that the soil isn’t draining properly. … Work compost into the soil near the roots and check your watering to ensure you’re not providing too much and creating a puddle around your birch.”
A puddle! A puddle? What’s a puddle? That word brings back vague memories from my childhood and my children’s childhood. Yes, there were once some things called puddles in my life. It’s such a funny word. Puddle. Puddle. There are definitely no puddles within probably several miles of my birch tree. It could be many, many miles of puddle-less terrane. The nearest puddle is probably somewhere in Texas.
The second internet entry was:
“The most common reason for yellowing leaves on a young birch is heat and water stress. The leaves turn completely yellow and drop to the ground. This is a natural reaction of the tree to help reduce stress in the summer.”
Ok, well, I’ll buy that. Except it’s not a “young” birch tree. It’s a fully mature, very valuable (to me) birch tree. This is my critical tree, it’s the one that blocks the house behind ours from gazing into our backyard!
Do I now know anything more than I knew before I googled? No. My tree is stressed. Duh. It could be getting too much water (unlikely). Or not enough water (much more likely). It’s probably too hot (undoubtably). All of which I could basically already guess.
Now I’m going out with the hose to see if I can create a puddle on a rocky slope in the desert.
The discouraging news this morning is that in a recent report, New Mexico ranked last of all the states in child well-being. We’re down there with Louisiana and Mississippi. https://www.sfreporter.com/news/2019/06/17/still-at-the-bottom/
…As it did in 2018, New Mexico ranked 50th in the education domain, but this year the state fell to 50th in the family and community domain, dropping from 49th. The state ranked the same this year as last in the other two domains, economic security (49th) and health (48th).” (https://www.aecf.org/m/databook/2019KC_newsrelease_NM.pdf)
Hopefully our new administration will help by approving policies and funding to start trying to reverse the trend. We have some tech industry here, Sandia and Intel, which put some money into the region, but I don’t think that either company does much for the greater community, that I’m aware of, outside of providing salaries to their own workers.
So we end up with a “have & have not” dichotomy; an island of science and tech workers in a sea of local poverty. Santa Fe is even more extreme – a smaller island of extremely wealthy second-home celebrities and tourists confined to a few prestigious square miles within a very, very poor and rural region.
Meanwhile, I’ve been putting a lot of consideration into what volunteer activity to take on now that I don’t have a full-time job. I spent several months looking into options, so that by the time I actually quit my job, I had pretty much already decided on the Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) program.
This is a nationwide program that matches adult volunteers (the “Big”) with a child (the “Little”). The children enrolled in the program are disadvantaged in some way, but are in stable living situations. The role of the Big is to just be a friend.
So I’m very excited to announce that my application has just been approved and I’ve been matched with my new Little. I will spend a few hours each month with my Little, taking her on outings, such as to the park to play ball, or to a children’s museum, or various age-appropriate community events. It’s up to the Big and the Little to decide what to do for an outing (subject to the parent/guardian’s approval of course).
After applying to the program, I was given several hours of training. It’s a structured program with rules about what we can and can’t do as well as suggestions and guidance about what to expect.
After the training course, I came back the next week for an extensive interview. The interview was 2 hours long and included an assessment of my appropriateness for the program (similar to a job interview), as well as a survey of my interests. They also conducted a background check and interviewed my references.
Then BBBS worked on finding me a good match based on my interests and the interests of the Littles available. Once they found a potential match, they first talked to the Little and her parents/guardians. After the Little and her parents/guardians approved me, BBBS then me to talk to me about the potential Little they had identified. At the end of that discussion, I was asked whether or not I wanted to make a commitment.
They require Bigs to make the commitment prior to actually meeting their potential Little. That’s because they don’t want the Big to back out after the meeting, because the Little could end up feeling personally rejected. So I made the commitment last week when they called me, and I’m looking forward to meeting my new Little.
My new Little’s name is Larissa, and I’ll meet her for the first time later this week. Unfortunately I won’t be able to post pictures of her (nothing identifying) but I can tell you a little bit about her. She’s 10 years old and Native American. She lives with her grandparents and her 5-year-old brother.
They matched us because we are both active and outdoorsy. Larissa’s grandmother said she is a “tomboy” which the BBBS representative put in air quotes because it is a little bit of a gender biased term, as if girls can’t enjoy outdoor activities and still be feminine. But it’s a practical term – I knew immediately what she meant!
It sounds to me like a good match. Our common interests include animals (pets), bike riding, hiking, the zoo, card & board games, cooking, photography, parks, Explora (a local science museum), and community events. Some other things that she listed that I hadn’t listed include sports, motorcycles, electronics, and computers. And she plays the Ukulele at school! She sounds like a very interesting child!
I’ve also been assigned a Match Support Specialist, whose name is Denae. She is a BBBS employee who will be my contact whenever I have any questions or concerns. I am required to stay in regular contact with Denae, so she knows what activities we are doing and how well the match is going.
I will meet Larissa for the first time next week at the BBBS offices. Then we’ll be ready to start our outings. I’m already looking into what sorts of things Albuquerque has for kids. It seems like there’s a lot of fun things we can do!