More Recuperation - At Home

I'm back from San Angelo.  It turns out my trip timing was excellent.  I left the Albuquerque area on Wednesday and had lovely, albeit windy weather for the drive to San Angelo.  In reading the local newspaper after I got back, it turns out the Albuquerque area had just enough moisture plus freezin temperatures to turn a major highway interchange into a skating rink.  About 20 cars ended up wrecking, including several police cruisers who were responding to the accidents.  Nobody was badly hurt so that was a good thing.

I came back on Saturday and had lovely weather for long distance driving.  On Sunday, a cold front moved through with resulting high winds.  Today, portions of the state got snow - including areas that I drove through on Saturday.  Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, driving through eastern New Mexico and western Texas can be mind numbingly boring at times.  For example, large parts of west Texas (north and west of Big Spring) are devoted to cotton... as seen here.

The brown parts of the photos are fields of harvested cotton.  For fans of the movie Places in the Heart, cotton is no longer harvested using crews of field hands.  Instead farmers have large (and hugely expensive) machines that have one person sitting up in a cab and driving down the rows.  Much more efficient.  As you can see, the fields go on for MILES.  In the right-hand photo, the small area on the extreme right hand side of the picture are mature trees surrounding a farm house. 

After the cotton is harvested, it is pressed into large rectangular shape generally the size of a large travel trailer.  These are later loaded onto trucks and moved to communal cotton gins located around the area.  Usually the gins are just called things like Co-op Gin of (insert nearest community).  One of the better named gins is the one located at Punkin Center.  Note:  to my knowledge there are no pumpkins/punkins at Punkin Center.  Just lots more cotton - the field just behind the sign looks like it's waiting to be harvested.  That's not snow on the ground, just open cotton bolls.

In addition to cotton and cattle, there are numerous places in both west Texas and eastern New Mexico where there's lots of drilling for natural gas.  So you see lots of these devices, they're called pumpjacks (I think).  All day long they go up and they go down.  Rather hypnotic in their own way.

Also, as mentioned before, there are some weird place names in west Texas.  On the south side of Sterling City is Bodcaw Draw.  (Reminder to self, must remember to do some research on what the heck is a bodcaw?)

Trips can be fun.  But it's also good to be home, especially knowing that the Sandia Mountains east of town got snow today.  Hooray for not having to drive through it!

Papillon

Thanksgiving Visit

I'm spending Thanksgiving with my mom.  She used to come & visit me, but thanks to a number of things including increasing frailty as she gets older, I've been visiting her for the past several years.

The problem is that there is no easy way to get from the Albuquerque area to San Angelo, TX.  You can fly to San Angelo, if you don't mind spending hours & hours in airports during various layovers in Houston or Dallas.  Or you can fly to Midland, rent a car & drive for a couple of hours.  Unfortunately, what used to be a late afternoon flight was moved by Southwest to a mid-evening flight - leaving the traveler to drive the couple of hours in the dark (literally and sometimes figuratively).

Thanks to my getting a new(er) car earlier this year to replace my 20 year old truck, I've been driving over the hills and through the prairies - for about 9 to 10 hours.  Which is what I did yesterday.

At first it's fun to see the scenery change.  The evergreen trees in the Sandias changing to the evergreen shrubs changing to the grass punctuated at first by lots of cholla (cactus) to occasional cholla to very little cholla and mostly grass.  However, after about 5 hours, it starts to get VERY old.  This photo was taken in Lincoln County, NM - looking west from the highway.

I was glad I was doing the speed limit when I drove through Vaughn.  By the side of the road sat the police.  In a pickup truck.  And not just ANY pickup truck.  Imagine said pickup with a kick-ass paint scheme of blue and black.  Plus the fact it was a pickup that apparently had been taking steroids for a considerable period of time because it was very big and very intimidating.  The windows were tinted so I couldn't see if the occupant matched the truck for size & intimidation. 

I keep meaning to stop in Vaughn.  As I've driven through I've noticed a diner - one of those old-fashioned kind with lots of chrome on the outside.  It looks very 1950's.  I may stop on the way back to Albuquerque for a snack.  I'll keep you posted if I do.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Papillon

Recuperation

No, I've not been sick.  I've been recuperating from the November edition of the Albuquerque Main Library's $3-a-bag book sale.

Don't get me wrong.  I love books.  I love getting books for $3 a bag.  It 's just VERY tiring schlepping all those books around.  There are times I wish I'd gotten a lighter weight hobby.  But no.

On a positive note, the best way to recuperate from the book sale is to lay on the couch and read one of the books.  So tough to do (tongue firmly in cheek)!  The cat likes it too, since my lap is handy for naps for him.

Note:  some time ago I mentioned this book sale to a coworker.  She looked at me and said in all seriousness, "I hope you got some good books in your bags."  I looked at her stunned when I realized she thought that a '$3-a-bag book sale' meant you went to the library, paid $3 and the library staff handed you a random bag of books.  Um, in a word, no.  I explained to her that this was not a literary version of buying a pig in a poke.  You either bring your own bag or use one of the brown paper, grocery-style bags they provide and then you look through the thousands of books they have out on tables.  You get to select any books that take your fancy and then pay the nice ladies at the cash registers.

Happy reading!
Papillon

Fall Color

As I mentioned in an earlier post, most of the fall color we get in New Mexico is yellow.  Here's a lovely leaf that landed in my front yard.

When I bought my house, I decided to enliven things by planting several red leaf plum (fruit-less) trees.  Their leaves don't change colors.  I'm always amused when they drop off the trees.  Initially they don't seem to do it one or two or three leaves at a time.  Instead, it seems they have all their leaves one day and the next - 50% of them are on the ground.  The rest then do the one or two at a time.

So far we've had mild fall weather.  I hope that stays true for the rest of the season!

Papillon

Autumn is Here

I realize that the official start of autumn was not quite a month ago.  But here in New Mexico, we've had a two month run of very nice weather.  Warm but not hot days.  Cool but not cold nights.  That all ended this week.  There's definitely now a chill in the air.

A couple of streets over one of the houses has a row of Lombardy poplars in their backyard.  In late September, those poplars participated in an encounter with a hot air balloon.  (Note:  the balloon hung up for only about a minute and then pulled free.  It pendulum-ed once or twice but then went on for a safe landing.  The tree suffered a minor bit of damage in the form of a small amount of branch coming loose.)

However, the trees are definitely turning.  Unlike some parts of the USA, most of the native trees here turn yellow.  So, instead of the smorgasboard of colors you'd see in the Northeast, here it's like looking at a wide stretch of bright gold.  Not quite the variety, but very pretty nevertheless.

Here are the neighbors trees in all their autumnal glory.

Papillon