A 7 Ps Adventure

We have a favorite saying in our house that I learned from my first boss at Motorola, called the Seven Ps: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance. This weekend's adventure qualified as a 7 Ps breakdown.

A month or two ago Jamie had picked up a Hawk Watch International Pamphlet at the library. Hawks and eagles stop over in the Manzano Mts in Sept/Oct on their annual migration, and are supposed to be quite numerous. We've never been to the Manzano Mts, and it sounded like a nice drive and day trip with minimal hiking: perfect for me this late in pregnancy. So this Sunday morning we packed a picnic lunch and headed out. The first part of the drive was gorgeous, winding through the mountains in the Cibola Nat'l Forest, seeing yellow Aspens, etc etc. Then it turned into west Texas. Still not bad. We passed some little towns that literally looked like ghost towns. As we got closer to the Manzanos, we noticed they looked a little bare. Then they looked downright burnt. Jamie says he remembers hearing about a fire earlier this year. Uh oh. We find the park road that goes up the mountain and it was eerily deserted and completely unpaved. Very different from the well-used, well-maintained roads in the Sandias. As the road narrowed and deteriorated, I grew more and more apprehensive that my city car would have a bad day. Twice I had to get out and direct Jamie across bad patches in the road. One time I had gotten Jamie across and then turned my back to hear "Sha-BAM" as he bottomed out the back half of my car in the ditch. No telling what the Acura guys will find at my next oil change....

Anyway, after all that trouble, the park road was barricaded from further motorized or foot traffic with 4 miles left to the peak. The notices had been posted since July 2nd, saying the mountain was closed for the rest of the year due to the fire. Jamie couldn't resist inciting the 7 Ps. It was a wasteland. Burnt dead trees pose a significant risk for toppling and have to be cut down along trails and roads. And it was a windy day. So we hung out where we had to stop, ate our lunch, hunted for cool rocks and mushrooms and whatever birds we could find. To our luck, we did see a brown-flecked white falcon, but fat chance of getting a picture of one. We also saw some pretty mountain jays and squirrels and even a bunch of turkey vultures on the road back. They do look like turkeys, and they're HUGE.

At any rate, we were entertained. It was nice to get out of the house and have somewhere new to go. Let's just hope that this weekend's hike to take pictures in the Aspens is more successful.

A New Kind of Fun

I had a fabulous weekend. Why? Because I could do laundry, piles and piles of laundry, ALL weekend long and ALL in my own home. After two months, my washing machine is fixed! I could write an epic poem about what it took to get the part to fix it. No more bumming off of friends, next door neighbors, or schlepping clothes to the laundromat. Now I have my beautiful, huge washing machine fully reassembled, and I think I've run every type of cycle imaginable this weekend. I've washed clothes, towels, pillows, comforters.... I've sanitized, I've steamed, I've taken wet clothes and only had to move them 12 inches to get them in a dryer. I wanted to pop a bottle of champagne. Never again will I take a household appliance for granted. Nor will I bitch and moan about doing laundry. I'm blogging this seemingly mundane event so I don't forget this sense of euphoria.

A Student Once More

Ah, it's back to school for me as well. Not seriously, but I am taking a few fluff classes this fall.

On Tuesday nights I learn how to ice cakes. It's just a Wilton class, but it's taught at a local cake supply shop, so I have access to all kinds of tools and tricks of the trade. Like how you add a ton of TRANS FAT to your Crisco to really make your icing do what you want it to. So beware of that little fact, any of you who express excitement over sampling my cakes.... They should really have a health warning on them, like "You must be capable of burning an extra 1000 calories a week" or "Do not combine with nacho cheese consumption in the same week". If Obama knew what was in these cakes, he'd try to tax me. Anyway, I digress... Jordan is as excited as I am about my cake class. I get home after she's gone to bed, usually, but this past week she heard me come home and had a few questions for me:

"Mama, you go to cake school?"
"Yes, honey"
"Did you bring home a cake?"
"Yes, I brought home a cake this time" (last week we had a class cake, not individual ones, so she was most disappointed about that)
"Mama, did you already eat it all gone?"
"No Jordan!! I haven't even cut it!"

Hmmpff. Indignation. Why does she think me capable of such crimes??

I'm also signed up for a beginners' Photoshop class, and I just got home from my first session. It's taught at the community college, it's an informal class, and OMG!!! It's an exercise in patience!!! I know I'm an education snob. I haven't been in a classroom (either at work or at university) not comprised of engineers in over a decade. And this is obviously not an overly technical class, but a class for people who have hobbies that warrant some photo-editing knowledge. Which implies they know something about photos. (BIG assumption) And, it's a COMPUTER software class, implying that people taking it should how to use a COMPUTER. (An even bigger assumption) I thought I was going to pull my hair out. If I hadn't paid money, I would have walked out. I don't know how the instructor does it, he teaches this class all the time and I'm sure he has to deal with the same stupid crap every single time. Here's a few class highlights not in the syllabus:

- When you DOUBLE CLICK something, it does something different than if you just SINGLE clicked it
- Those downward arrows next to menu items are additional drop-down menus
- There's a difference between SAVE and SAVE AS (OMG...)
- In Photoshop, Ctrl-Z means undo, just like in every other windows-based application
- You have a LEFT and a RIGHT mouse button, and guess what, they do different $hit (tah-dah!)

I really, really am a snob.

Fall is in the Air

Fall has always been my favorite season; I love the cooler air, fall colors, football season, holidays (Halloween!!), and yes, even the return to school when I was a kid. I feel like I was robbed of autumn all of those years living in Texas: it doesn't really cool off, the leaves don't change color (unless brown counts), and school starts in mid-August.

But in the ABQ, we just had a weekend with highs in the low 70's, spent hours parked on the couch watching college football, planted huge mums and hacked back summertime plants, and cooked some favorite fall foods (pumpkin cake!!). I feel like I'm forcing an early autumn in my house, probably because I feel the clock ticking regarding the baby. I bought Halloween costumes in July. I ordered a Halloween count-down calendar last week. I'm making Christmas gift idea lists and am well underway with Christmas projects. I've even started thinking about what to cook for holiday dinners, where to put a Christmas tree in this house, and how I'm going to cut back on all that I want to do to accommodate a newborn. It's all very exciting. Last year, autumn consisted of 9 glorious days in France in November, and the other 3 months with a completely torn up house and all holidays spent on the road. It's nice that this year my favorite season coincides with nesting and welcoming a new baby, and can be spent doing my favorite thing: taking care of my family.

Is it just me???

So is it just me, or does anyone else think Williams Sonoma is somewhat ridiculous? Jamie and I bopped in there after an OB appt to kill time before picking up Jo from school. Now, I LOVE cooking stores, and Williams Sonoma's selection (and marketing) is top notch. But come on, $350 for a copper pot? $15 for a standard size jar of pasta sauce? A simple linen table runner for $95 (it's just a solid color!!!)?? The profit margin on this stuff must be at least 200-300%! And this is a very mainstream store, it's not like it's a small boutique-type place. I wasn't sure whether to be amused or offended. I think I'm mostly amused. And it's embarrassing because since everything looks so beautiful and their gourmet foods sound so delicious, you want to buy it and justify the cost. And there are other people in there buying stuff, so it all appears very normal. For the cost of a set of fancy copper (or even just stainless steel) pots, I could fly to Paris, crash at my friend Phuong's place, go nuts at Dehillerin, and come home with the same stuff for probably less money. Now that's shopping.

Anyway, I walked out of there with a $10 bottle of vanilla and a mental note of the ingredients in their $15 pumpkin-based pasta sauce. I'm going to attempt to bastardize that recipe tonight, and if it's good, I'll post it :-)

Belly Update

It's getting down to the wire, now. This pregnancy has gone by crazy fast, probably because we've been so busy this summer. I'll be 31 weeks this Friday, and have started going to the doctor every two weeks already. And I'm FAT!! ;-) I'm almost as big as I was when I had Jordan, but I feel bigger. Today Jamie and I went to the appointment together, and it was uncomfortable for me to drive afterwards because I felt like the baby was in the way when I was sitting in the car. So all of you mothers of one child that plan to have a second: look out! The size of that second baby might surprise you!

The single-digit week countdown has me a little stressed out. Here are all the things I plan to get done between now and then. We'll see how it goes.

- take a cake decorating class (I start tonight!)
- take a beginner Photoshop class (mid-September)
- go to the race track (horses)
- go to Manzano Mts during eagle/hawk migration
- hike the 10K trail to take family pics in the yellow Aspens
- go to Balloon Fiesta for a launch and a glow
- go to McCall's Pumpkin Patch
- have a Halloween party
- go Trick or Treating with Jo
- fix my washing machine (ugh!!!!!)
- finish the pregnancy part of the baby's scrapbook
- decide on a first AND middle name for this kid

Labor Day Travels

It's funny how when you don't work, you still get really excited about your spouse's holidays. I mean, according to Jamie, everyday is the weekend for me :-) But this weekend, Jamie had to burn up some flex time, so a 3-day holiday weekend turned into a 5-day weekend, and it was just too good to waste. We decided at the last minute to go to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands, and get some more use out of our National Parks Pass.

Day One - Carlsbad Caverns

Carlsbad is only about 4 1/2 hrs from the ABQ, but man oh man is it a boring drive. There isn't much to look at until you get to Roswell; there, Jordan could point out all of the aliens and tell us what color they were. We were a little apprehensive over what Jo would think of the caves: would she be scared? Bored? Cold? Immediately upon being told we were going to a cave, she started asking about trolls. So I tried to nip that in the bud by saying no more trolls lived in these caves. When we got there, she brought it up a few more times, but she never got scared. Jamie carried her in the backpack the whole way down, and she had a good time. She liked the lights and the tunnels and the drip drip drips. However, there was this one cave formation that looked just like a gnome, and I couldn't let it go. So I told her it was a troll that a witch had turned to stone. She really liked that story, but of course started asking where the witch was. Once we got to the bottom, she wanted to walk, and she did almost the whole mile plus loop on her own. She's a trooper.

We planned the visit so we could stay for the bat egress from the caves. After 14 years in Austin, I have never seen the bats fly out from the Congress Bridge. So I was going to be really disappointed to miss the cave bats. They came out about 7:15 and it was really neat. They spiral out counter-clockwise and you can hear their wings. They say about 300K-400K bats live in that cave, so it's a decent size colony. But you can't photograph or video them there at the amplitheater. I guess it messes with the bats. They said cell phone transmissions really confuse them too. So I took a pic on the road back up to the parking lot.

Day 2 - Living Desert Zoo (Carlsbad) and White Sands

The Living Desert Zoo doesn't look like much, but we'd heard it was cool, and we did enjoy it. It's small, but the critters are pretty easy to spot. It was a gorgeous morning and everything smelled like desert. Their star attraction was a black bear that paints, but we never could find her in her enclosure. Or any of the big cats. There was another family there with 3 little boys, and Jordan was probably more interested in them than anything else. She did a lot of running around, which wore her out for the car trip to Alamagordo.

The drive to Alamagordo is awesome. You go through the Sacramento Mts, up about 9000 ft, and then back down. I keep saying that New Mexico may make me a car trip convert. We'll see. Once in town, we killed time by eating a late lunch/early dinner and watching some college ball at the hotel. It was a full moon night, and the plan was to go to White Sands in time to do some sledding, get pictures, watch the sunset, and stay for the moonrise. Wow, was it worth it. This has got to be one of the neatest spots in New Mexico. You just can't imagine how WHITE the sand is, and how fine. Of course, it's not technically sand (it's Gypsum), but still. And it packs tightly, so the dunes are hard, not shifty. This was by far Jordan's favorite part of the trip. She loved playing in sand, she loved the sledding, and she and Jamie played nonstop until it got dark. Poor Jamie, he must have been exhausted from running up the hills, often toting Jo, and shoving the sled back down again.

Once the moon was up, and about ready to disappear behind clouds, we left. Sadly, it was too cloudy for decent stargazing. But we ended the night in style with a late dinner consisting of raspberry milkshake (Jamie) and mondo brownie sundae (me and Jo). Awesome.

Day 3 - the drive home

I don't usually consider the drive home as part of a trip, but this was an interesting drive. I drove, and in route I saw two tarantulas crossing the highway (I think I smooshed one...), two huge hawks that were white with spots (one was just standing on the side of the road), several roadkill coyotes, and a big lava field (Valley of Fires or something like that). Oh, and I hit a bird. All in all, a fun road trip, and no telling when we'll get to go again.