Tag: Santa Fe

Compare and Contrast

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Spring has really brought out the contrasts in the landscape here.

I suppose pretty much every place but designated wilderness areas are now a hopeless mix of the indigenous and the exotic, the civilized and the natural. Still, it amuses me to see the clusters of stately hybrid tulips glowing against the desert background of cholla and pinon.

We saw an ad the other day for Cholla Busters! They promised to come remove our cholla, never to trouble us again. David asked why someone would want to get rid of their cholla and I said, you know those people who mow the desert so the space around their house looks kind of like a lawn? Those people.

This morning on our jog I pointed one out to him – flat and open, not a cholla in sight. It creates an odd image, with the house as the only visual contrast. I’ll take my camera with me to snap a photo if you all want to see. The house is on our usual route, so it wouldn’t be any trouble.

Getting back to the morning run is paying off. No, I don’t like to exercise either. But I love those results! I enter my weight and body fat into a spreadsheet every morning (love my spreadsheets!) and I’m pleased to see the body fat is trending down. I’m now at pre-Christmas levels. I know some people argue you shouldn’t weigh every day or worry about the daily values. I chart my weekly averages, too, which does give a better perspective. I’m one of those people, though, that suffer from ignorance. In the years I didn’t weigh daily, I managed to gain 20 pounds. It was quite extraordinary, as if I’d gained it overnight.

That’s what I get for not paying attention.

So, it’s good for me to track the changes over time. The days when I get unhappy news, I’m very tempted not to enter those numbers. As if, if I don’t record that high weight, that obese category body fat percentage, it won’t really exist.

(If you’ve never measured your body fat, you’d be appalled at how easy it is to be in the “obese” category. And there’s nothing above it. You get Lean, Normal, Overfat and Obese. It can be quite daunting.)

But I make myself enter those high numbers so I can see how far I’ve come. Compared to those obnoxious highs, the lows start to look pretty exciting.

I suppose Spring brings out the contrasts in me, too.

Package Deal

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When we were house-shopping in Santa Fe last summer (which feels both forever ago and yesterday), our agent took us to a house on the other side of town.

It was a blatant attempt to upsell us. The asking price exceeded our upper limit by nearly $100K, though she assured us we could ask offer far less than that. Of course, she told us that same story on a couple of other houses, too, and when we did offer much less and they came back with indignant counters, our agent would sound all sad and act like we were crazy to think we could get it for that and the counter was actually an amazing deal.

I didn’t like her much.

Anyway, this house on the other side of town was fun to see. The selling agent met us there – which is also kind of a no-no – and really pushed us on the place. We had to have it, they said. A divorce sell, the house sat on a hillside facing the Sangre de Cristos. The view everyone in Santa Fe wants to have they told us. Never mind that the patio and hillside were so overgrown that you couldn’t actually see the mountains.

One room was a studio with 20-foot ceilings, which was neat, but not very useful if neither of us paints. With the odd shape, size and window-placement, it would have made a very unfriendly bedroom.

What with the stamped concrete, the high ceilings and open space, the house made for a dramatic showroom to entertain guests. It wasn’t much for living in. The real adobe walls (as opposed to the “Disney Adobe” of stucco frequently used) set off the massive and somewhat disturbing paintings that hung everywhere. Divorce paintings, perhaps.

The art, the selling agent told me, with a conspiratorial grin, could be negotiated into the purchase price.

And suddenly I realized who he thought I was.

Who buys the art with the house? Someone looking for their ready-made Santa Fe showplace. It’s like paying a designed to fill your bookshelves with attractive-looking spines, never mind the contents.

Art and books are usually personal things. You buy and keep them because you love them. You love them so much you want to have them right there within easy reach, or easy viewing, at every moment. Like all things, I suppose, at some point that becomes a business. How much will I pay someone to let me have it right nearby? The interesting thing is, it’s not the artist who wants to negotiate that price: it’s the middle man.

Right now, Penguin and Amazon are in a pissing match. As a result, Penguin’s new releases are not available on Kindle. Not just delayed, not for a different price. Just not at all. A couple of those releases are from authors I like to buy. I’d like to read those books. But the lion’s share of my reason for using the Kindle is to reduce the amount of space I devote to books. I want to have them, but I don’t want them on my already overtaxed shelves.

Which means, I won’t buy the hard copies.

The middle men want to make money from what we love. They will always offer us a deal, throw in a little something extra. The thing is, package deals always benefit the seller, rarely the buyer. Otherwise, the sellers wouldn’t love to do it so much.

All I can say is, I would never buy the art with the house.

Flourishing

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It’s amazing the results you can get, when you give something what it needs.

The trick is, figuring out what that is.

This little Madagascar Palm is our Exhibit A for flourishing in our new environment. The picture on the left is one I took this morning and the one on the right was from last summer. Yes, I did repot it into a much bigger planter (which was free with Bunny Bucks from Jackalope – woo hoo! love this town!), but the palm demanded repotting within a few weeks of our moving here, it was growing so large, so fast.

I should also mention that the picture on the right is pretty much how that palm looked for something like 15 years. I kid you not. In the early years of our relationship, when we had practically no money, David and I would take road trips for spring break. We’d head to the desert Southwest to get as warm as possible as quickly as possible. Often we’d end up somewhere in Nevada where the casinos provided very cheap lodging. (Harrah’s in Laughlin for $19 per night – ah, sweet nostalgia.)

We would also buy cactus.

It sounds funny now. I don’t know why we liked to buy cactus. Except that they were unusual plants that we didn’t see in Laramie. And they were inexpensive and fun. We bought quite a few over the years and most died. The Madagascar Palm hung on, but now I suspect it was kind of in stasis. The palm version of cryogenic freezing, in hopes of being awakened in a better future.

Several people made interesting comments on my last post, about changing the physicality of writing when you get stuck.

Keena said she does as Marin suggested, and actually does move to paper and writing out longhand. Marin mentioned a writer who always writes longhand because it slows him down, causing him to be more careful. This is a diametrically opposite approach to the “fast draft” or “shitty first draft” method that many writers like to use today.

I suppose the point is that sometimes you have to mix it up. Try new things and see how they work.

You never know what might make you really flourish.

Muddying the Waters

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We’re in this precarious season of freeze and thaw.

It’s a lovely thing, because it feels like Spring already. If we were in Wyoming, with all the snow that’s fallen, we wouldn’t be looking for it to thaw for months. In Santa Fe, the days warm up with gentle kindness, the birds swoop about singing with excitement and the road gets muddy as hell.

I’m talking deep ruts. That freeze at night.

But, aside from a filthy mailbox, it isn’t really that bad. I’m curious to see if I’ll have to wash the mailbox or if the Spring rains will take care of that. I’ve never washed a mailbox in my life.

I printed out my novel, Obsidian, yesterday. I can’t believe I haven’t used “Obsidian” as a label before, since I’ve prattled about it ceaselessly on this blog. What does it mean? Maybe just that I know the title could change (even though I think it’s a really good one). Now that Allison is hashing out her book deal, they’re discussing how to change her title. She doesn’t seem to mind, since Laurell K. Hamilton already stole the title she really wanted.

At any rate, I printed the whole thing out to send to a sci fi/fantasy author friend who (with incredible generosity) offered to read it and help me bypass the slush piles of a few people she thinks might like it.

It’s a huge stack of paper. Heavy.

It surprised me that I hadn’t printed out the whole thing before. And it put me in mind of the days way back when I first set my writerly goals. I was working with the concepts of visualizing what I wanted, but wasn’t sure what I was going to write. I knew, too, that I needed to be specific. (Be careful what you wish for!) So I visualized a manuscript, a stack of paper full of good writing.

When I printed out the final full manuscript of Wyoming Trucks to send to my editor at UNM Press, I experienced a moment of deja vu to see it looked exactly as I’d envisioned.

But with Obisidian, though I’ve sent out the full manuscript, I’ve always sent it electronically. Where paper, the post office and the mailbox used to be such a major part of my writing life — and least the sending it out into the world part — now it’s really all via email. Which is great in many ways: cheaper, faster, more green, less resource-intensive.

It’s also less weighty.

I saw this article yesterday, via the New York Times Science tweet. There have been a number of similar studies lately verifying this phenomenon of our brains, that what we think does have a physical effect on the world. This one is particularly interesting because they found that subjects assigned greater importance to things that were heavier.

You scoff? Go read the article. I’ll wait.

Isn’t that interesting? And you’re thinking the same thing I am, right: ebooks.

After all of the bruhaha over the Amazon/MacMillan tussle over how much ebooks are worth, I wonder about how our animal brains value something that has no weight. That, in some ways, has no physical existence. The publishers insist that a book shouldn’t be worth less because it’s not printed on paper. But all of us know that creating a document electronically and sending it via the ether is cheaper. No matter how you spin it, all of us who no longer budget for paper, toner and postage can tell you that.

Certainly the publishers add value, through selection and refinement of the work. As do the agents who bring it to the publishers. And the booksellers who bring it to the readers. I noticed that, in all of the opinions flying around, most were from the publishers, agents and booksellers. A couple mentioned the readers. Almost no authors have spoken up. An oppressed people, we.

But, if we’re to look at the core value, what people pay for is the story. Which has always been intangible. Which might be why the author’s contribution to the equation tends to weigh less heavily.

I’m thinking, though, for important submissions I might invest in paper. Thick stuff with a formal feel.

I might have to wash the mailbox.

Eldorado on Ice

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This was yesterday.

We hung this suet feeder on the portal post, because a ladder-backed woodpecker had taken a liking to this spot and was hammering away at it. The Wild Birds Unlimited folks thought he might like this suet. He hasn’t been back, that I’ve seen, which is also a solution. But for two days in a row now, this flock of little birds descends on the suet like flies. We think they might be bushtits. They appear suddenly, feast for a few minutes and disappear again. Spooky, too, which is why I had to take this picture through glass.

It kind of reminds me of the twitter/blog bruhaha over the iPad, Amazon and Macmillan. Jackie Kessler, who’s a lovely person and who writes really fun books, has a good summary on her blog, if you want to catch up. I think it’s just the latest fat-rich tidbit and people are getting quickly hysterical over what will likely be nothing, but what do I know?

We had fog last night, so when we walked this morning, the moisture had condensed all over everything and left it frosted. Fog still hung heavy in the valley.

It’s funny to me to see the cholla cactus covered in frost, but they don’t seem to mind.

Maybe I’m saving words to finish the novella today, because I’m mostly just wanting to share photos from our walk.

These are worth thousands of words anyway, aren’t they?

After this, we went to eat breakfast. As we left, the hostess said “Thanks for starting your day with us!” It’s a new neighborhood place and David says they’re still trying to find their way to be part of our community.

But I thought it was funny, because my day already felt so full.

Taking the Long-Cut

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There’s a surprising amount of road rage in Santa Fe.

Surprising because there really isn’t that much traffic and, at about 70,000, the city isn’t large. But people drive fast and they honk and they curse.

Yesterday, a man in a glossy white pickup on the interstate behind me became so enraged that I wasn’t passing fast enough in the left lane, pulled around me to the right and wedged into the barely there space between me and the car I was passing. He rolled down his window to slip me off, to ensure I could see, since he had tinted windows.

I thought: he’s had practice at this.

I confess that it distressed me. People who know me well know that I am not a slow driver or an oblivious one. On the one hand I’d say that all he did was anger himself and ruin his own day, but as I watched him zoom up to the next left-lane lagger and ruthlessly tail them into submission, I knew that he also bit a little chunk of happiness out of my day.

One of the guys I’ve been working with in downtown Santa Fe on this project we’re doing for my day job, lives in the same rural community that I do. It’s a 15 minute drive to the Plaza from here and you can pretty much take either the interstate or the two lane that parallels it, Old Las Vegas Highway. You can take Old Las Vegas Highway to Old Pecos Trail to Old Santa Fe Trail and it spits you out right into the Plaza.

On a blizzardy day, wondering which was the better bet, I asked this guy which route he’d taken, if he’d come down the interstate or Old Santa Fe. Right — I meant to say Old Las Vegas, but I got mixed up and can you blame me?

He said, “Oh I refuse to go down Old Pecos.” Shaking his head in disgust, he added, “I take St. Francis in.”

This is the next exit down and a big four-lane divided road. I understood that he was telling me he doesn’t like the slow winding of Old Pecos. And there are slow drivers on it. Tourists, too. You can see above how it curves in narrow twists between the adobe houses. This is where Old Pecos ends and Old Santa Fe merges in and takes over.

(When I stopped on my way home yesterday, to take this picture, a man came out of the house to see what I was doing. I said, oh, I just want to take a picture of Old Pecos and he shouted back, actually Old Pecos is behind you and now this is Old Santa Fe. I just gave him a cheery wave.)

The thing is, I love to drive down Old Pecos. Even after it ends. I love the winding and the adobe and the wooden signs. I don’t care that the drivers go slowly.

(Okay, this one day, a woman driving an enormous SUV with Texas plates drove very slowly and pulled into not one, not two, but three different little entrances, stopped partway, and backed out again. None of us could pass her, of course, cf. narrow streets. By the third aborted attempt I lost my patience. Not that she ever knew it.)

Yesterday I stopped to take this photo, because I knew I wanted to talk about this. Our early morning meeting had been unpleasant in several ways. People are facing difficult decisions. I still smarted from getting the finger. So, since I was already pointed that way, I drove back on Old Santa Fe Trail. I thought I’d see where it went.

It wound back through the hills, past lovely houses and ended up back on Old Las Vegas, way far down, and just before the turn I need to make to get to our community.

It soothed me.

I know I can’t run away from conflict. But I must admit, it felt good to be where the aggressive people weren’t, if only for a short drive.

My Old Wyoming Home

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Assumptions are a funny thing.

Never mind the old saw about “assume” makes an ass of u and me. What assuming does is blind you to what’s really there. When a person assumes they know something, it stops them from considering any other options.

So, it was a funny thing: David’s previous boss asked him to spend a few days in Laramie over Christmas break to train a new guy in David’s old job. David and I cogitated on this — because of the holiday pattern this year, the first week of January would be best. But for David to fly up there — driving would really suck that time of year — stay in a hotel for a week, including meals out, would be pretty expensive. We wondered what she was thinking. And no, I didn’t want to go with him. A week in Laramie at the beginning of January? To bring out another old saw: been there, done that. Hope to never do it again.

Turns out, she was assuming we’d be driving up to David’s hometown of Buffalo for Christmas and could just stop in Laramie for a few days. Never mind that this would be an 11-12 hour drive for us now. On nasty winter roads. And that my family isn’t there. She thinks we’d do that because that’s what she would do. I think it’s hard for people back in Wyoming to understand that we don’t miss it at all.

I think sometimes that David’s family believes our move is my influence. That I’ve finally, after nearly 19 years together, wrested him away. I think they make an assumption about who I am and what I want. David’s family is large and very tight. In many ways, even after so many years, I remain an outsider. I don’t think they know that it’s been me who’s pushed him to maintain close contact with his family all this time.

And that, because I love him and want the very best for him, that I helped him find a way to get some distance.

I love this picture of David and me, because it captures so much of what we are together. David picked me because I would be this to him: someone who wanted to journey also. And we’re having a wonderful time on this new adventure of ours.

I’m sure we’ll touch base back in ol’Wyo sometime. Just not quite yet.

Birds in Reverse

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We saw a robin yesterday. The first robin of Fall, as it were.

No, I know this isn’t a robin. I took the picture to show David this unusual bird that visited the feeder and so that we could identify it. We decided she’s a black-headed grosbeak.

It’s a funny thing, being on the southern end of the Front Range now, because the birds appear in reverse order.

When we arrived, it was all about the hummingbirds, thrashers, bluebirds, jays and towhees. Now the humingbirds have all gone, even the last couple of intrepid ones that stayed to milk the feeder and the butterfly bushes as long as possible.

Then the jerichoes arrived. They stayed a few days and moved along.

Now the robins.

I know it’s unlikely, but I feel like these are birds that have left Laramie when the first snows hit. They’ve migrated down the Front Range, just as we did. They stop here to fuel up on their way to Mexico or farther.

Hi and bye.

A Time to Every Purpose, Heaven or No

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It’s coming up on that time of year.

No, not Christmas, despite the rumored store displays. Fortunately I haven’t been to a Target or like store recently, so I haven’t been bombarded yet. I’m a strict holiday-orderist (yes, I just made that up). All holidays in their proper order. No Christmas activity of any kind until after Thanksgiving. No Thanksgiving discussions until after Halloween, All Saints Day, Day of the Dead.

Part of moving to a new place is learning the new rhythms.

It’s been odd to me that I haven’t wanted to get the Halloween decs out yet. Some of that is where my focus is, on finishing this revision. I haven’t done a number of things I normally spend my time doing. And being out of my normal patterns, feeling like this is a vacation house and not my usual life at all.

But a huge part of it is the weather, too. The leaves are starting to turn on a few trees now, but we haven’t hard a hard freeze. Certainly no snow. David and I are out on the patio in the evenings, having cocktails and watching the sunset, which would just NOT have happened in Laramie.

So, part of me — the Denver girl who had to wear a parka over her hula dancer costume one year (I wised up and picked WARM costumes after that) and the Laramie girl who associates high chilled winds whipping dead leaves around with Halloween — thinks it’s still summertime. After all, the flowers are still blooming.

But now I’m starting to feel it. Like a whisper in the air. The veil is thinning. The restless dead are teeming in the wings.

The coyotes yipping at night could be the first yelps of the Hunt.