As you may remember from previous tree posts, we had been trying to save our huge mesquite in the front yard. But after a year and a half in Tucson, we are more aware of the risks.
Although Tucson doesn’t often get the frequent, sustained high winds that we’ve always disliked in Albuquerque, it does still get occasional wind storms. Tucson also gets surprisingly powerful brief dust devils. I’m not sure if “dust devil” is the right term. I always thought of dust devils as being harmless. But these brief whirlwinds can blow off chunks of roofing and take down unstable trees and branches.
The key being the word “unstable.” The previous owners had cabled together a split in the tree. We’ve been told the cable brace is just a temporary measure. Sometimes trees can be bolted together as a more permanent solution, but we’ve since been told that mesquite are brittle and not good candidates for bolting.
For me the moment of insight came when I looked up one morning and it seemed like the split was visibly larger than it had been. It felt inevitable. John wrapped a chain around it for additional luck and we started getting quotes to take the tree out.
In addition to the split, one section of the multi-trunked tree leans far over the house. I wondered how they were going to remove it. The previous company, which we had hired to trim the tree last year, dropped a limb on the roof and broke a skylight. We didn’t hire them this time.
The morning of the removal, the crew and several pieces of large equipment showed up bright and early.
The tree was in bloom and looked particularly beautiful in the early morning light. It was very sad.
This big crane with the hook holds onto the sections of tree that are being cut so they don’t fall, and moves them safely into the street.
At first a guy in a bucket removed some lower branches. An operator in the cab of that crane moved the arm that held the bucket. The guy in the bucket could also do some fine tuned adjustments using controls on the bucket.
They got the big crane in position and strapped to a large limb.
When they put tension on those cables, the whole tree shook. Once they were sure the limb was being held by the crane, they sawed off the limb. https://youtu.be/RSBPTXtGXdE
Here they are taking out the middle third of the tree. https://youtu.be/9VeDFnx5JOA
After the midsection was removed, it was very obvious how much the remaining trunk leaned over the house.
If you don’t have the fortitude to watch an entire four and a half minute boring video, start about a minute in. https://youtu.be/dRLUO53Qhko
It was so weird to watch the tree float through the air.
I felt sad to have it gone. Our front yard looked empty and our house looked naked!
John went out right away and bought some pots and bougainvillea bushes.
And the next week he planted a desert willow where the mesquite was.
The desert willow is currently struggling (two weeks later), so we hope it pulls through. They generally do well here, it’s just shocked from the transplant. The bougainvillea are doing great.
While the crew was out removing the huge mesquite, we also had them take out a much smaller trash tree in the backyard. It was brittle and a large section of it had already fallen on our fence during the July storms last year.
The guy brought the tree down right on top of the wires, which alarmed me, but after flashing me a sheepish look, he nonchalantly pulled the tree off the wires and continued working. https://youtu.be/_rWLaVheTe8
Now that the mesquite is gone, our back patio is so much cleaner! We used to have little mesquite needles everywhere – in the yard, in the house, in the pool – pervasively everywhere, like dog fur but worse. John filled two huge leaf bags with mesquite litter just from the roof. Now we are making steady progress clearing out the needles from every crook and cranny on the property.
In April, Emily and her family came out to visit. They visited last year in April too, and it is becoming a highlight of our spring.
I’m so happy I have a pool heater. By the second half of April the air temperature is usually hot in middle of the day, but the night temperatures are still dipping quite low, and the pool water would be very cold if it weren’t for the heater.
The kids had so much fun in the pool every day!
Here comes Uncle John!
Last year we bought this children’s play set that nearly takes over the family room. It comes with tons of little plastic hollow balls, that Biska would crunch up with wild abandon if we let her. She did manage to crunch a few.
Biska did great, by the way. She’s very good with kids.
Family picture time!
John and Bryan took the older girls to a lot of fun activities in the afternoons, while the youngest slept. That gave Emily and I time to sit and talk and catch up. It was very nice.
Here they are at “Golf ‘N Stuff”, which is a children’s play venue just a few blocks from where we live.
On another day they went to the Reid Park Zoo.
When John sent me these photos, I was confused, wondering, where is that lake? Water is an unusual feature in Tucson, but apparently there is a duck pond at Reid Park.
There is a carousel at Reid Park Zoo. Thea had some initial trepidation…
Once they got started, she realized she loved it and declared with excitement and amazed relief, “I’m not scared at all!”
Now that’s a happy face 🙂
Butterfly girls at the Reid Park Zoo
Another day, another carousel, this time at Trail Dust Town. This is also just a few blocks from our house.
Trail Dust Town has a western theme. This “spooky western” train ride had them completely entranced.
Snack time!
Jailbirds! I love that face.
We had tons of fun. And suddenly, all too soon, it was time for them to fly back home – with promises to come again next year!
By then I hope to have all the peanut butter cleaned up!
In April, John had to go out to Albuquerque for two weeks and I didn’t go because I had too much going on in Tucson. Originally he was going to take a 4-day weekend and drive back to Tucson for the long weekend before heading back to Albuquerque for the second week. But then he had meetings added to his schedule, and it didn’t make sense for him to drive that far for a shorter weekend. That’s when I suggested we meet halfway and go camping!
The area John ended up picking was much closer to Tucson than Albuquerque, but it was somewhere we had been meaning to check out; the Chiricahua mountains! That’s pronounced Cheer-uh-caw-wa, with the accent on the caw.
I know, I know, I should learn to write out pronunciation with the actual official way of designating the sounds. But not only would I have to learn the what symbols are for what sounds, I would also have to learn how to write all those marks over the vowels on my keyboard. And no one is paying me for this blog, so nope, not doing it. That’s the joy of being a volunteer. If my readers don’t like it, I can be like (shrug) Don’t read it then.
We met in Willcox, AZ, which was our turnoff from the freeway, and I followed him south into the Chiricahua. We turned onto washboard gravel roads and bumped along. After a few miles we passed a pretty little area with campsites.
But we kept going. We climbed and climbed. Pretty soon we were in a burned area, bleak and eroding. I was faithfully following behind John, eating his dust and wondering when the heck are we going to stop? Where the heck are we going?
I finally decided to just stop and hope that he notices, except there was nowhere to stop on the steep and windy road. Plus, John was a ways ahead of me, and I knew if I stopped, by the time he noticed he would be unable to turn around. What to do? We had no cell tower so I couldn’t just call him. I honked but he didn’t hear it. I started trying to drive with my turn signal on, but every time we went around a curve, it automatically clicked off again. I kept putting it back on. But it was hard for him to see me clearly in his rearview mirror due to all the dust the vehicles were kicking up.
John finally figured out I wanted us to pull over and we found a nice wide area to do do. Whew. I was so relieved to be stopped. But John misunderstood and thought I was just freaked out from having to drive the second vehicle. So he suggested we leave the pickup truck in the parking spot and go on together in the van. I climbed into the passenger seat, too dazed to argue.
We started going again, this time with me in the passenger seat, but I was no better. In fact, I was worse. I was actually more comfortable as the driver than as the passenger. I didn’t like the curves and the steep drop off, and I didn’t like the burned, bleak forest and signs of recent erosion.
Sometimes that happens to me when I’m overwhelmed. I don’t clearly understand what is wrong and what I need to happen to fix it. John made a very good guess – that I was tired of driving – but it turns out we were wrong. The problem was I didn’t want to be up there at all, but I wasn’t coherent enough to even realize it myself.
We reached a saddle (the top of a ridge but not the top of the mountain), and pulled over to decide what to do. It was crazy but I was still willing to go on. I do not like being the one to disrupt other people’s plans even when I’m miserable. And I often don’t recognize when it’s time to call it quits when I’m feeling overwhelmed. I find myself unable to make decisions, such as whether to go on or whether to go back. It was John who realized we needed to go back.
So back down the mountain we went, collecting the pickup truck on our way, and continuing down to the camping area we had passed on our way in. It was dispersed camping, not an actual official campground. There were no amenities except fire rings built by campers themselves. This was fine with us. Our van is fully contained and we don’t need any amenities.
Surprisingly, there were numerous sites available. This was particularly surprising because there was a little creek. Creeks in the desert are usually quite crowded. They are a rarity!
Plus, extra bonus, it was at the trailhead of very nice trail. It’s usually very difficult to find a place to van camp anywhere near a good trailhead.
We parked and walked around, surveying the sites looking for one that was set apart enough to be able to let Biska off her leash without her running into the next campground looking for playmates. Biska is an extremely friendly dog and will not mind her own business and leave people alone!
We found the perfect spot, bound on two sides by a U-curve of the road and on the third side by the little creek. Only one problem – we weren’t going to be able to get the van down there. The branches were way too low for our 9′ tall van.
We debated what to do. We didn’t have a tent or anything with us – we were dependent on the van. We finally decided to leave the van in the small pull-out area for the trailhead across the road. The van was only couple hundred feet from our campsite. We set up our chairs and hammock at the campsite and just walked to the van when we needed to.
Usually we had the parking area to ourselves anyway, or maybe shared with one vehicle. It turned out to be a rarely-used trail. It wasn’t like some trailheads that are grand central station all day long on the weekends.
And that’s how we got an excellent campsite, for free, on a creek, at a trailhead. Unbelievable!
Not only that, the weather was perfect. On the way out, we had high winds on the freeway. Our extra-tall van in particular (which I was driving), was getting hit hard by the wind, creating a difficult driving situation. I was afraid it was going to be miserable camping in all that wind. But the campsites in the Chiricahua were sheltered and we weren’t bothered at all by the winds blowing across the desert plains.
We hiked up the road, and hiked on the trail, and swung on the hammock and had an excellent weekend.
Here’s a mine entrance just up the road:
Views from hiking:
Biska did great – except she tries to eat crap she finds in the woods. I don’t know what all she was trying to eat, but I can guarantee you it’s not food. As we walked along, John and I deep in conversation about our upcoming remodel project, our discussion was frequently punctuated with “Biska! Don’t eat that! Yuck! No!”
At the end of the weekend I headed west back to Tucson and John went east back to Albuquerque, both of us battling the high winds all the way home. It was worth it.
It’s been over 2 years now and most of us do not want to read about or talk about the pandemic anymore. But I thought, for posterity (because this is just going to seem so weird in a few years) I’d talk about when I am and am not wearing a mask. It’s the universal conundrum.
Masks are a weirdly important fashion statement of who we are and what we believe. And as is the fate of all fashion statements, may suddenly be sliding from the in-thing to the old-thing, like skinny jeans. It’s an ever-changing area of confusion in our lives, making the act of leaving our homes just that much more complicated. In a way it doesn’t matter, yet it is also a decision that must be made. There is no default. You are either choosing to wear a mask, or you are choosing not to wear a mask. I would do the neutral thing, but there is no neutral.
Yesterday an acquaintance of mine, an elderly women with cancer, was telling us about her discomfort over this past weekend when the person next to her on the airplane wasn’t masking. It mattered to her, so she asked him to please wear his mask. He refused, saying she wasn’t the flight attendant, so she flagged down a flight attendant who then told him to wear his mask. He angrily complied and they rode together in uncomfortable animosity for the rest of the flight.
Then last night they lifted the mask mandate on public transportation.
I’ve been trying to use logic and common sense when I determine when to wear my mask. But it’s a social construct, and social decisions cannot be determined by logic. Nonetheless, I try.
Here, for what it’s worth, are my recent mask decisions. I did not wear a mask when talking to a contractor in my home. I figured it was just one person. Neither did I wear one when a couple of friends came over. Plus, we mostly sat outside.
I also did not wear a mask when a friend and I went to an enormous tile store because the place was cavernous and nearly empty. I did not wear a mask when I dropped a package off at the UPS store because my package was pre-paid and I was in there for literally less than a minute.
However, I did wear a mask when I went to Trader Joe’s yesterday. Trader Joe’s is much smaller than the huge home decor warehouses and has many more people per square foot. I take a while, more than 15 minutes, to track down all the items on my list. Also, probably due to demographics, there is an unusually high rate of mask wearing in the specialty food stores like Trader Joe’s, Sprouts and Whole Foods. And I don’t want to be the asshole making everyone else uncomfortable.
I also note, when walking into a store, whether the employees are wearing masks. I have a high level of appreciation for anyone working with the public nowadays and I want to do my part to not make their jobs any worse. If they’re masking, they would probably appreciate it if I do too.
Except I forgot to wear my contact lenses and my mask was steaming up my glasses so badly that I could barely navigate the store. I found myself holding my breath as I hunted for each item on my list. Each second that I didn’t breathe gave me an extra second of sight before it all disappeared behind the fog.
It’s spring! Our air temperatures in mid-April are heading into the 90’s during the day, a 40 degree swing from the night temperatures. But even in the middle of the day I haven’t had to turn my air conditioning on yet because the house is still cool, because the adobe stays cool all day.
Keeping up with the temperature in the desert is always an exercise in chasing a moving target.
There are a few mosquitos are out! There’s not very many of them yet, and they are a mixture of two kinds. I’ve seen a few of the big, loud, slow northern kind that are most active in the evenings (the kind that most of you in the northern and western parts of the US are familiar with).
I’ve also seen a few of the small, nearly silent mosquitos that are a warmer climate mosquito. They are extremely aggressive and bite during the day. I believe they are Aedes aegypti. The Aedes varieties are small and striped and often called Tiger mosquitos. Those are the ones that tormented us last summer. Last year they came out briefly in April, disappeared during the dry months of May and June, and then were thick during the monsoon rains in July, August and September.
Some of you were asking about when the cacti bloom. It depends on which ones, and varies each year, but some are blooming now.
This ocotillo, pronounced o-co-tee-yo (no “L” sound) is across the street from my house.
A variety of trees are blooming (and others bloomed earlier in the year). These are around the corner from my house.
The rest of these cacti photos are from my yard.
There’s been a lot of wildlife too. I’ve been regularly seeing coyotes walking down the street in broad daylight. And the wild pigs have been wandering around. These guys stink! A javelina is not actually a pig, it’s a peccary, but most locals colloquially call them pigs. Like coyotes, they live in and around the arroyos and frequently wander the neighborhoods surrounding the arroyos.
A neighbor of mine said she recently saw the pigs while walking her dog late in the evening. And sure enough, our security camera picked one up around 11:00 one night. https://youtu.be/oOHPyAbUBfE
I had an out-of-state friend visiting the week of the pig visit – we didn’t realize (until John noticed recently from stored security videos) that pigs had passed by in the night. If we had known, we could have stayed up late one night to enjoy the evening with the javelina.
I’ll write more about our fun visit from my friend soon. But first I want to finish a follow-up post about the pineapple guava tree project from last month. I’m always running 2-3 weeks behind with this blog, no matter what I do! But I jumped ahead with this post, because I wanted to get my mid-April spring post published in mid-April, not sometime next month. By May it will be summer!
I often get together with a small group of friends on Sunday mornings. We go for a walk, come back and meditate for about 20 minutes on a topic, and then have a discussion. We alternate whose house, and one morning in late March we met in a very nice area in central Tucson.
When I drove down there, I discovered bicyclists everywhere! Roads were blocked off and traffic cops were directing traffic. Turns out there was a local bicycling event happening.
It wasn’t a serious race – people were riding on all kinds of contraptions, some in costumes. What fun!
I made it through the festivities and to my friend’s house with no problem and we all set out walking toward the activities. This area of town has tons of character and makes an excellent place to walk even without a local festival going on.
I was like, wow, this is cool, where am I?
Here come the bikes!
I’ve always thought there would be nothing better than having a balcony overlooking street events.
The guys up on the balcony were friendly and chatting with my friends as we stood in the street, right in the way of the bicyclists. But the mood was casual, no one was racing.
There was even a Mariachi band. Local events help me to not miss Albuquerque, because the culture here in Tucson is similar.
Here’s the link if the embedded video doesn’t work for you, https://youtu.be/Bb09LIc15XQ
What? In Tucson we have earnest conversations with cacti all the time.
It was fun to walk through the festival atmosphere, and then back through the barrio.
On one hand, I would love to see this house restored to its former glory. On the other hand, when out-of-state money comes pouring into an older neighborhood (as is currently happening) there is a type of authenticity that is lost. Not to mention the social implications for the displaced local residents.
So many different southwest styles. From a distance this next one might look like the roof is terra cotta tiles, but that is actually a metal roof.
The walls are adobe brick with a thin outer layer of pigmented mud, leaving the brick texture showing, but giving it a more uniform color than my house (with nothing on the bricks at all).
This next one is more like what I had been used to in New Mexico.
If you look at the windows you can see how thick those walls are. It blocks the direct sunlight from getting in, keeping the house shaded. And the thermal mass of the thick adobe walls keeps the house a more consistent temperature from night to day, when air temperatures swing drastically in the desert, helping to keep the house cool during the day.
After our great walk, we retreated to my friend’s peaceful backyard.
Here’s the link, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-need-better-diagnostic-tests-for-autism-in-women/ and for those of you who struggle with links in this blog, I’m going to reprint the entire article. Credit to Zhara Astra, Scientific American, April 2022. “Zhara Astra is a screenwriter, producer and a professor at Arizona State University where she teaches a course she created on Understanding Neurodivergent Women.”
Although I didn’t write this article, I could have. Except, unlike Zhara, I haven’t pursued a diagnosis. After coaching autistic adults for over 20 years now, I know all too well how frustrating and likely fruitless it would be.
We Need Better Diagnostic Tests for Autism in Women
Diagnostic criteria are developed using white boys and men, failing to serve many neurodivergent girls and women, By Zhara Astra on April 7, 2022
“You don’t look autistic.”
This is what people say when I first tell them I’m on the spectrum. But I do look autistic. The problem is that people, especially medical professionals, don’t know what to look for when it comes to identifying and diagnosing autism in women and girls.
I am a professor, a screenwriter, producer, mother and a woman who has autism. The challenges I have had in getting my diagnosis lead me to believe that we have to develop a more accurate standard autism test and better diagnostic criteria specifically for women and girls. This test and these criteria need to be co-created by autistic women and psychologists who understand how autism manifests differently in women and girls.
I was undoubtedly different, but because my traits were more subtle than what we typically consider a person with autism to have, and because I had become accustomed to masking these quirks (girls with autism and ADHD are masterful at doing this), no one suspected I was on the spectrum.
It wasn’t until 2020, when I was in my 30s and researching autism for my son, that I began to suspect I was on the spectrum. There began my troubles. It took me a year to find a psychologist who offered testing for adults, who had an understanding of women with autism, and who wouldn’t charge me $5,000 or more for an assessment, since my insurance wouldn’t cover the testing.
Most places I called were clueless when it came to diagnosing adult women. These psychologists had little experience diagnosing girls as well. After a year of searching for a competent, available and affordable psychologist, I finally found one and got a diagnosis of autism in 2021. I was told I had Asperger’s syndrome, but that since the release of the DSM 5, the term had been swept into the general definition of “autism spectrum disorder.”
Because of the narrow and gendered diagnostic criteria, we’re instead often told by the doctors that we have a menstrual-related mood disorder or anxiety, as I was told, or we’re slapped with some other grossly inaccurate label. All through history, women have been mislabeled as hysterical, when I think many were likely just neurodivergent and trying to fit into a neurotypical world.
Because of these false labels and the lack of testing, we have historically been overlooked, misdiagnosed or undiagnosed entirely. Many of us end up self-diagnosing later in life, after years of wondering why we feel so out of place in this world and in our own bodies.
Anxiety and depression are very common in neurodivergent women, especially those who remain undiagnosed. Women with autism are three to four times more likely to attempt suicide than neurotypical women. Comorbidities are very common in autistic women as well and can dramatically enhance the risk. Research indicates that women with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have an even higher chance of trying to commit suicide.
We may look like “the mom next door,” but our inner world tells a different story: a change in plans, a high-pitched sound, a blast of pungent perfume, or a stray label in a sweater, and we’re suddenly struggling to avoid a meltdown.
It’s exhausting and if you don’t have the privilege of understanding why you feel this way, then it can be maddening. Knowing you have autism (along with other comorbid neurodivergences) and that you’re prone to anxiety, depression and burnout can help suffering women get access to the treatment and support they may need.
But better diagnostic criteria are just the beginning. We also need more programs, like group therapy and support groups for women who are diagnosed with autism in adulthood. Training teachers, doctors and psychologists on what to look for in girls and women and how to accommodate us should also become the new standard.
Understanding autism in girls is also a matter of safety, as these girls are three times more likely to be sexually abused. We tend to be more trusting and naïve, because we are often very direct and straightforward and expect other people to be the same. Recognizing ill intentions and ulterior motives in others can be difficult for us. This can make us more vulnerable and susceptible to abuse.
Every person deserves the opportunity to succeed and rise to their greatness, including women with autism. As more girls and women recognize they are neurodivergent, having accurate testing and the accommodations means we have a better chance to do our best.”
Thank you Zhara, for writing about this in such a clear, simple, and straightforward manner!
Also, in response to a comment on her LinkedIn page, Zhara says, “My next article will address transgender and non-binary people. We discuss this in my class, but it didn’t make it in this article because it deserves an entire article dedicated to just that. But basically in my research I discovered that in brain scans (which is what I first used to affirm my own autism)—transgender women’s brains reflect the brains of women assigned female at birth, and non-binary brains showed a combination of both. This is huge in affirming the transgender human experience and needs to be more widely discussed. I also found that transgender people are 3-6x more likely to be autistic, but many reported being overlooked because the focus from parents, doctors, and educators was predominantly on their gender. I’m hoping to conduct more research on this in the future!”
I am looking forward to that next article! Unfortunately Zhara teaches up in Tempe at ASU rather than down here in Tucson at UA, otherwise I’d be banging on her office door looking for my new best friend.
You know how in a dream you’re walking along and something’s happening and all of a sudden it just switches, and you’re somewhere else and it gets increasingly surreal? Yeah – so that happened to us the other night.
John and I were taking a short evening walk, just before sunset. We headed in a slightly different direction than normal and suddenly we were in a western town.
It was sort of fun, but sort of very bizarre. Like, where are we? How did this happen?
Ok I admit, the telephone booth is cute. Not so sure about the rest of it though.
It was sort of creepy. I mean, is this really still ok? “wah lee laundry”? Seriously?
When John came back on a different day with Biska, she was scared of the tiger statue.
Here comes a little train.
It looked like people were having fun, but I found the whole thing to be sort of unsettling, like when a dream is heading in the wrong direction.
Turns out this bizarre place is called Trail Dust Town. Of all the things to be within walking distance from my house.
I think if I had known a western town was within walking distance, and we had gone there deliberately, it would not have seemed so bizarre to me.
I’ve been recently meditating on the concept of the “unexpected” and how I react to the unexpected. Sometimes with delight, sometimes disappointment, sometimes fear, and sometimes dream-like confusion. Where are we and why is there a wagon?
From what I can tell (and I am not the expert so take this story with a grain of salt), it all started sometime last year with a spending bill in front of Congress. Congress asked a few questions about how some of the money would be used. And somebody, somewhere way high up, some manager or director of some agency that oversees some other agencies, made a bonehead decision not to comply with the request. The information that Congress was asking for would be released soon enough in an annual report (that nobody bothers to read anyway), so this genius figured it wasn’t worth the staff time and nuisance to ensure that Congress got direct and immediate answers to their questions. Congress could wait for the annual report.
Congress doesn’t like being blown off (who does?) so they didn’t appropriate the money. Trickle down, trickle down, trickle down some more and eventually, one small tiny itty little bit of that spending bill was no longer going to make it into my husband’s inbox where it was originally intended to go. Not only was he personally going to be underfunded, but his entire 3-year project, which was about halfway completed, had to be halted. And everyone he had hired to play a role in the project had to go find something better to do with their time. Which they did.
It was painful listening to him call them all last fall and explain that the money didn’t come through, all the while knowing that it still could come through. But they couldn’t depend on it; they had to go find something else to do. John could have easily gotten onto another project himself, but instead, he decided to drop to half time this spring in order to remodel our house.
Several months passed. John signed up for his part-time schedule to start and a couple of weeks later…you can guess what happened next. Congress released the money, approximately 6 months late. The entire fiscal year’s worth of money. The fiscal year started back last fall, so John doesn’t have an entire year left to use it. He does not get to push out his original deadlines. John now has 6 months to complete a year’s worth of work. And all the other scientists and engineers that he had previously lined up to help have already found other projects and are no longer available. This is no way to fund science.
It’s also no way to complete a remodel. I’m going to have to go back to interviewing general contractors. We’ve never had a general contractor that we liked, but maybe we could get lucky this time? We would have to get really lucky though, because in this market it’s going to be nearly impossible. Not only is real estate booming (putting a lot of demand on contractors), there’s also a labor shortage. I have no idea how we’re going to get this house remodeled now.
Some things I can probably handle without a general contractor. I can probably find a crew to take our enormous tree out before it falls on the house. Hopefully before the monsoons start.
We had originally hoped to keep the tree, but after witnessing multiple neighborhood trees come crashing down during last year’s monsoon winds and earth-liquifying flooding, we no longer have any confidence in this tree’s root system or the cables wrapped around it holding it together.
I can probably also find a crew to clean and seal the adobe, also hopefully before the monsoons start. But I haven’t tried, only having discovered the need recently, so I don’t know how hard it will be. Obviously it’s a specialty item, which can make finding tradesmen more difficult.
And I really have to get the master bedroom sliding glass door replaced because water flows in during a strong rain and the wall and floor are already water damaged. I really want this done before the monsoons.
This appears to be some sort of metal lath under plaster, which is apparently how they used to do things. Being from the Pacific NW, I tend to find rust alarming. It probably doesn’t matter too much that the lath is rusting, except of course the plaster is falling off. If you look closely, you can see the orangish adobe brick behind it.
Look at that, I have the Italian villa, crumbling plaster vibe going on already, whoo-hoo! No need to fake it, I’ve got a genuine bit of authentic history right in my own bedroom. We don’t even have to make that bucket-list trip to Italy now! I can enjoy the ambiance of crumbling plaster from the comfort of home, anytime I want. (Urg.)
John is in Albuquerque and hasn’t seen this. When he reads this post and sees these pictures he’s going to be like, WTF? What did you do? But all I did was remove a small section of trim and lift the damaged carpet slightly to expose what was going on. That’s one of my lesser-loved superpowers: exposing issues that no one wants to deal with. I put it all back, ok? You can’t hardly tell. It’s hidden under the rug. But now we know.
This other rotted trim is on the exterior, thank goodness, but is still not what you want to see anywhere, inside or out:
“Eww” is right. Yuck. Yes, I assume that’s termites. How did this house pass a pest inspection?
For that matter, how did we pass a roof inspection without anyone mentioning there basically isn’t one? And how did we get a full home inspection without even figuring out it’s an adobe house? We did at least manage to figure out that there was no place in the kitchen for a refrigerator (“Very unusual” the inspector noted.)
Hopefully we can still get some critical items done. But there’s no way I’m going to get the kitchen remodeled anytime soon at this rate.
Oh and one final comment – remember when I made fun of that tacky, “peeling plaster” wallpaper in yesterday’s post? I’m now getting peeling plaster wallpaper advertisements in my junk email.
The internet is scary. It’s almost embarrassing to imagine that the algorithms think I want to buy that. As if I care what algorithms think! Except…it does matter what the algorithms think. But probably not about wallpaper.
We recently hired a company to install solatubes in our ceiling. Solatubes are a specific brand of solar tubes, and are like skylights except they concentrate the sunlight. Solar tubes are smaller than skylights but brighter. We had them installed in Albuquerque a few years ago, and like them a lot.
The Tucson house has a low ceiling, with only a few small windows, so it’s not as light and bright as we’d like.
It would be prohibitively difficult to add windows. At first I imagined the challenge was just the difficulty in finding the right kind of brick to trim the windows to match the original ones. But then we discovered that our exterior walls were solid burnt-adobe brick. The brick wasn’t just a decorative facing, the brick was the wall. Even if we put a header in, it would not be a minor project to start knocking holes into a structural adobe brick wall.
There’s only one place I can envision putting in a window – along the front of the house, looking into the living room where we currently have an outdoor statue niche (shown here when the house was staged for sale; we don’t have a statue in there ourselves.)
The statue niche includes an electric outlet in order to light the statue at night. It definitely adds a southwest element of character, but I’m really not a statue person and would rather have a window. I’m hoping we can replace the tile with a custom piece of window glass.
Currently we’re just using it as an electrical outlet to power a little fountain (cue major eye roll) it’s super dorky looking right now.
With that being our only likely option for additional windows, we decided we were going to have to add light from above. We were slightly hesitant to cut into our nice wood ceilings. But we decided light is more important than wood.
Here’s the installer cutting into our ceiling:
Voila! Sunshine! Don’t worry, it doesn’t glare on the wall like that once the filters are in place.
In this next picture you can see he has the flashing in.
Wait a minute. No, that’s not an optical illusion. There’s the ceiling – all 5 inches of it – and there’s the sky. Where’s the roof? There’s no roof!
We knew there wasn’t much gap between our ceiling and our flat roof, but we didn’t realize there wasn’t any gap at all. All we have is about half an inch of roofing material tarred directly onto the top side of our wood ceiling.
That’s it. Our ceiling IS our roof. John says it’s like living under a wood deck.
Talk about poor R-value! No wonder it costs so much to heat in the winter. Our heat is all going out the non-existent roof! At least the ceiling is made from thick hunks of wood.
One time years ago I had a house that had two roofs. I wanted a venting bathroom fan installed and discovered a second roof was built on top of the first one. And I don’t mean just some additional roofing material. I mean an entire second roof was framed about a foot above the still-intact first roof. So I guess it’s my karma. I had two roofs, and now I have none.
With our ceiling being our roof, that means there’s no place to add insulation. We will probably add a foam roof, which is expensive but will provide some insulation.
After getting over the surprise around the construction of our non-roof, we were very appreciative of our beautiful new portholes to the sky.
You may be wondering, like we were, if there’s no gap between the ceiling and the roof, because they are one and the same, where do the electrical lines go? They appear to have been laid down on top of the wood and under the tar layer, just sandwiched in there.
Holes have been drilled through the thick wood ceiling to bring the electrical in from on top of the house. So we might have to pull up that top layer of roofing material and drill through our ceiling to do any rewiring.
On the inside there’s wood trim in places that suggest it may have been installed to hide wires.
You also may be wondering where everything else goes, like venting and pipes? There’s a dropped ceiling running down the hallway for the heating/AC ductwork. Otherwise almost everything is exposed on top of the roof…or, err…top of the ceiling I should say. We have ducting and gas lines running all over up there, completely exposed.
I actually don’t know yet how the water and sewer lines run. The hallway walls are stick frame, and so are most of the interior walls radiating from the hallway to the exterior walls, so presumably that helps. It’s mostly just the exterior walls that are solid adobe brick. In the kitchen we have both a sink and a dishwasher along an exterior adobe wall. I assume the pipes are just hidden behind the cabinets, but we will find out. Clearly there will be more interesting discoveries ahead as we work on this house.
They always say to expect the unexpected when you’re remodeling, but I didn’t expect to discover we unknowingly bought a genuine adobe house or…our ceiling is our roof.
Well, that sure was an enlightening lighting project!
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