Category: September 2019

Camping in the rain

We’ve been quite busy, but summer is almost over so we decided go on a quick, local camping trip before it’s too late. We headed up to Mt. Taylor; easy access, never crowded, and several trails to choose from.

It’s not pristine, remote wilderness. No cheerful brooks or stunning lakes, nothing spectacular. It’s just a multi-use national forest with cows, ATV’s, hunters, etc. Nothing exciting, but it’s close by and I like the open ponderosa forests.

The first afternoon we went on a short hike, although I had a possible migraine coming on so we didn’t hike too hard. More like a “wander around” than a “hike”. It was pretty though.

When we got back, the cows had discovered our van. It was a good thing we didn’t have our dogs with us, because cows and poodles don’t mix very well. And we probably would have had them off-leash because no one was out there. Or so we thought.

At first we sat under a tree to wait until the cows moved off. But they were in no hurry. Meanwhile, the weather was growing ominous.

Time to head back to the van, cows or no cows.

We figured we’d do our “big hike” the following morning. But we figured wrong.

On the way back down to Albuquerque we decided to stop at El Malpais and do a little bit of hiking in the lava fields. It wasn’t raining down there yet, although the weather was threatening.

The landscape there is fairly treacherous. You won’t want to get caught out here at night without proper gear, and I also didn’t want to get caught in a lightning storm. There’s no clear trail, just rock cairns that can be very difficult to spot in low light. (Here I am standing next to one of them.)

The ravines range from ankle-wrenching to potentially deadly.

Here I am, hiking along, la, la, la…uh…hmmm.

We went home that afternoon, having gotten in two small hikes, but without having managed anything strenuous. So we resolved to hike in the local Sandia foothills the next morning.

At 9:00 the next morning we were ready to go for our big hike but – more rain. What’s it doing raining in the morning in the desert?

We got out our rain gear and went anyway. This hike we can do from out our own front door. Our house is in that first section of houses right in the center of the picture

Here we are, almost to the top. Our goal was that little tree just to the left of the saddle.

Made it!

Here’s looking off the saddle to the east.

Attached to the tree was a cute little box with a notebook to record your arrival.

Time to head home – with more rain coming.

Coworkers

I’m really enjoying having more time to myself, but I miss my coworkers! So I decided to have them over recently.

One of my previous coworkers had moved to Virginia for a year, and has recently come back. So that was a great excuse to have coworkers over, because everyone wanted to see him again. I told him he HAD to come because he was the one everyone was coming to see, not me! And sure enough, I had better turnout then I’ve ever gotten. Everyone came!

Which was good because John and I made way too much food. A little too much food is ok – it’s better than not having enough! But we made SO MUCH too much food, it was practically embarrassing. Like, what, did we expect, 50 people?

I blame the new Costco card. John and I each wanted to buy a little of this and a little of that, and there’s no buying a little of anything at Costco. Also John and I had differing ideas on what to serve, so instead of hashing it out, we each did our own thing as if the other person wasn’t also cooking.

I had in mind some gluten-free and vegan side dishes and snacks. In fact, my invitation just said there would be snacks, and when they got there and saw the ridiculous amount of food, everyone said, “Snacks?! This is snacks?!”

In addition to all my carefully thought out vegan and special diet entrees, John imagined a backyard barbecue. And grill he did – hamburgers, brats, ribs – we had it all.

John and I often approach life like that – his way AND my way combined, rather than some pared down version of OUR way (think houses and remodels…lol).

Hopefully everyone had a nice time. I get fairly stressed out over these things. Not only do I struggle through them, I also second-guess myself afterwards. “Did I talk too much? Was it ok what I said? Was the profusion of food ridiculous? Were people bored?” Of course I know better. It was FINE. But knowing that it was fine and feeling that way are two different things.

I am, however, glad I did have people over. Keeping in touch with friends is important to me. It’s just easier one at at time 😉

New patient

The week following Labor Day was a tough one for me. I had a cold with a fever, which then triggered a 3-day migraine.

I also had an unfortunate run-in with a very unprofessional nurse practitioner. My appointment had nothing to do with the cold and migraine. It was a routine “new patient” appointment I had scheduled some months ago.

I’ve had a heck of a time trying to find a doctor in Albuquerque. Previously (after some trial and error) I had found a decent doctor in Santa Fe. But I can’t go to her anymore because she was part of a clinic that only serves state employees. So when I quit my job, I lost my doctor.

You would think it would be easy enough to find a new doctor, but it’s been a disaster. It took me months to manage to get scheduled with this really terrible nurse practitioner. Luckily, the clinic realized his behavior was WAY, WAY OUT OF LINE, and they were apologetic and switched me to a different, much better nurse practitioner.

I would give you a blow-by-blow of what happened, but first of all, I don’t want to relive it. Secondly, you wouldn’t believe it anyway. You know when reality is so ridiculous that you hesitate to tell the truth because the truth is so outrageous that you know everyone is going to think you’re being biased and exaggerating? It was like that. Jaw-dropping unbelievable.

All I did was ask (politely) if maybe we could talk for a minute about my health history before we immediately change my prescriptions (since I was a brand new patient) and he completely lost his cool. He didn’t want his judgment questioned and he handled it very explosively. It was very unnerving, to say the least.

The replacement nurse practitioner seemed good, but now I’m feeling adverse to doing any of the follow-up testing I’m supposed to be doing because I don’t want to have anything to do with the medical establishment right now. Of course that’s not just because of this recent incident.

Anyone who has a long history of vague, chronic, hard-to-diagnose things like migraines has experienced disrespectful treatment by the medical establishment. Much better to go in with a broken arm or something they know how to fix.

There’s nothing really wrong with me; I just need all the various kinds of tests and things they recommend for people who are…uh…over 50. And the more adverse I am to going in, the less likely I’ll catch early anything that turns out to actually be wrong as I age.

I would give a lot for a really good doctor. And that’s another reason why Albuquerque is a challenge. Some areas of the country have many more doctors of much higher quality than we do here. I assume it’s because doctors can, to a great extent, choose where they want to live. And they can afford expensive places with lots of amenities like San Francisco, Boston, and Denver.

Who deliberately moves to Albuquerque? Ok, I did. But in 2005 I was single and had just quit my day job to make a go at supporting myself freelance. I couldn’t afford to stay where I was, just north of LA. I was trying to find a sunny place where I could live on $2,000 a month (before taxes, no benefits). I did not have the resources doctors have. If I had been a doctor, I would have simply gone straight down the coast to San Diego!

I googled physicians per capita by state, and discovered that New Mexico, although bad, isn’t even the worst. We have a doctor shortage problem in all the rural areas of this country and our aging demographics are likely to make it quite a bit worse, quite soon.

So if you’re lucky enough to have a good doctor, drop them a note or let them know you appreciate it!

September Starts

I’m at least two weeks behind on this blog, so to recap quickly:

In August we went to Tucson and I loved the pool, and you’re probably tired of hearing about that. So I promise to quit talking about it. Actually, I’m totally not going to promise that.

Then Labor Day weekend we spent doing the final “basic move-in tasks”, meaning, we’re definitely not done with everything yet, but we’ve finished what I consider to be the bare minimum to feel like we do actually live here (finally, it’s only been since May).

I haven’t unpacked the garage yet:

And we still have a few uncompleted construction projects. Here’s the new back door from the master bedroom almost installed:

And here’s the new hot tub John got me for my birthday. (It’s still on it’s side, which was how we got it through the gate.) It just needs the packaging removed, righted, filled up, and plugged in!

I am going to love that hot tub!

On the roof

John was up on the roof checking out a potential leak, so I decided to take advantage of the ladder and see what it’s like up there.

Some of our neighbors have views of the city lights, and have built decks on their flat roofs to take advantage of their views.

We don’t exactly have views, but I thought it was nice up there.

Unfortunately it’s fairly criss-crossed with gas lines. Apparently natural gas was added at some point after construction.

Probably not really worth building a deck, but always fun to consider ideas, right?

Offsetting our carbon footprint

It started with this article, https://www.quakerearthcare.org/article/quaker-popoffsets

The premise of the article was to figure out the most efficient way individuals could offset their carbon (CO2) footprint. The article comes to the conclusion that one of the most efficient methods of reducing future carbon is to help provide contraception for women who want it but cannot access it.

“The cost of offsetting CO2 by traditional methods (planting trees, investing in renewables, retrofitting industrial plants, etc.) usually runs in the range of $5 to $20 per ton. Calculations suggest that as little as $2 invested in family planning can offset a ton of carbon.“

Not everyone is going to be comfortable with the family planning option, but if not, you can always offset your carbon footprint by donating to a tree-planting charity or some other carbon offset method instead. For a ranking of CO2 reduction strategies see, https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

The first step in offsetting your own carbon is to calculate your carbon footprint. The Quaker Earthcare article suggests several calculators for estimating your own carbon footprint. I used this one, https://www3.epa.gov/carbon-footprint-calculator/

For me, the key was to not get too hung up about the fact that I was unable to provide exact numbers. For example, I don’t know what my gas and electric bills are averaged over a year because we’ve only been in this new house since April. And our previous house, in Placitas, was all-electric with solar panels.

I estimated our annual heating gas bill by doubling the amount of the bill at our much smaller townhome in Santa Fe. Obviously, that’s very general, because Santa Fe is 10 degrees colder than Albuquerque in the winter, and because my townhome had in-floor, hot-water radiant heat and our new house has a gas furnace and a gas fireplace. But I figured that if I assumed double the townhouse usage, it would be a conservative (high) estimate.

For our car mileage, I estimated off the top of my head, and then I asked John to estimate. His estimates were a bit higher than mine, so I went with his to be conservative.

Total for our household came to 43,773 lbs (21.88 tons) combined, for the two of us. This is a lot lower than the 20 tons per person that the article said was the US average. Google also puts the use carbon footprint at 21 tons per person. 2-person households are more efficient than individual households, although our estimate is also lower than the 30 tons per household that the EPA website said is the US average. So perhaps I under estimated ours.

Our biggest underestimate that I could think of is that the EPA calculator does not include plane flights. Using this calculator, https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new, our frequent Albuquerque-to-Oakland flights use about half a ton each, round trip. John flies to California almost every month, and DC a few times a year, and I fly about 3 times a year. So I’m going to add 8 tons to our earlier 22 tons, to get 30 tons between the two of us.

One thing I did like about the EPA calculator is that it showed the effect of various conservation measures that you may be considering implementing, for example, if you replaced your car with one that gets better gas mileage. Unfortunately, it did not provide a way to calculate the difference if you replaced a car with an electric car. Eventually we intend to replace the Mini Cooper with an electric car, hopefully next year.

The EPA website also did not provide a way to estimate the additional carbon that will come from our intention to replace our evaporative cooler with refrigerated air next year. That will save water but use additional electricity. I could probably estimate that using other calculators, but I didn’t try.

It also doesn’t include the manufacture and delivery of all the stuff I buy all the time. I buy stuff practically everyday. For example, just today I’ve purchased:

  • A book for Larrisa called “Just Ask” by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor
  • A coffee canister
  • A few clothing items from Uniqlo, which is a Japanese clothing company. Their clothes are simple, reasonably good quality and inexpensive. (If you decide to order from them, be careful to check the size chart, because they run small.)
  • And today John bought at Home Depot: lumber, stain, paint, tubing, grout, stakes, nails, screws, sandpaper, and I don’t even know what-all. (I wish they had a rewards program because a lot of our income goes to that store.)

Who knows what went into the manufacture and shipping of those items, and all the hundreds and thousands of other items we buy every year. So our real carbon footprint has to be a lot more than that EPA website estimated. But for now, assuming the estimate of 30 tons of CO2 per year for the two of us is a reasonable estimate, then how do I go about offsetting it?

According to the article, it could be offset by only $3 per ton. It’s hard for me to believe that $90 would actually offset the entire carbon footprint for both of us for a year. That is an extremely small amount of our yearly budget. But I decided to go ahead with the project and follow the instructions as written.

It was a little confusing to donate to this website.

There’s a nice clear “donate” button on the right, but I was initially unsure if donating there would provide support to the Quaker Earthcare Witness program, or whether that would provide money to the agencies that provide contraception. It turns out that you can use the same form to donate to either one or both.

For the earth.