Let’s Put Some Miles on the Car!

We decided to try a lease rather than purchase this time around and signed up for 60,000 miles for the three years of the lease. That comes out to about 20,000 year, right? Well, we came home with the car last July, and nine months later the odometer registers 11, 449 miles. In the last five days I put 949 miles on it.

It all started Friday when Hellen, Sheila, and I went to a cactus show and sale in Albuquerque. We spent Friday night chasing down Pappadeaux’s and then spent considerable time figuring out how to get into their parking lot. Turns out we spent lots of time looking for openings in parking lots that would let us in and then out onto the highway and streets. City planners seem to like one opening into large parking lots. We would head in a logical direction thinking surely there would be an opening in the curb, only to find a landscaped strip, so we would drive around again only to find another dead end. And this was all over town.

But I digress. After overdosing on shrimp, we checked out a mall, which was no big deal, until we happened upon the Brookstone store which had  this really cool state of the art vibrating/massage chair, and I took its 15 minute test run. Wow. If I had had an extra $3400, I would have hauled it home in a New York minute.

We were up bright and early Saturday for the first day of the cactus show and sale at the Albuquerque Garden Center, but not before first eating at the Owl Café, an Albuquerque landmark. We had to kill time until the cactus show and sale opened, so we shopped Wal-Mart. That’s what everyone travels to Albuquerque to do, right? But I needed a big bag of cat food, and we checked out their plants, and found that not all Wal-Mart garden centers are created equal. They have plants we don’t get.  At the cactus show Hellen and I bought some cactus and Sheila enjoyed looking. People who think cactus is nothing more than prickly pear need to check out one of these shows. Colten always says there is no point in shopping cactus any more, that I surely have them all. Not even close. So I course I found some to add to my collection.

Hellen, cactus grower extraordinaire Woody Minnich, and Sheila at the cactus show.

After we were through there, we skipped lunch, having filled up at the Owl Café on breakfast and were saving room for a big dinner that night, and checked out some local nurseries and other shops. When we had hit all the shops we wanted and racked up more miles wandering in the parking lots, we went to the show and saw “MIrror, MIrror” with Julia Roberts. It was a bit slow-paced but worth the price of the ticket. The seven dwarfs were fun. We saw it at a 24-screen theater, which meant the building needed a large snack bar for all those patrons. Well, it was set up much like the parking lots. We nearly didn’t find our way through it to make it to the restroom signs that we could see but couldn’t get to.

We ate breakfast at the Owl Café, but its landmark neon details show up better at night.

Then it was on to Vintage, a new upscale restaurant where Sheila’s niece, Christy, who also helped designed the place,  is  manager. After that we had time to kill and drove out to Sandia Casino, where we admired the architecture and  dabbled in gambling', using a promotional gimmick which allows you to play with $25 credit for your one dollar. which was harmless enough fun since after our credit was gone, on which we didn’t win anything, we left.

Sunday we hit the cactus sale again, and yes, I found a few more specimens I didn’t have. After that we drove to visit with Christy and see her newly remodeled house, and then drove to Old Town, many miles on the other side of Albuquerque, to eat at La Placita, to which we also had a family tie, this time to Hellen’s uncle. We shopped there before heading home.

Normally the route taken to Albuquerque, or even Santa Fe, is to Santa Rosa and to I-40. This time we drove from Ft. Sumner to Vaughn, Encino, Willard, Estancia, and Moriarty before having to drive on I-40, which is always heavily trafficked and gives me claustrophobia when I get sandwiched between the trucks. The way we went may be a bit longer, but, oh so worth it. We had the road to ourselves and the view was nice.

So that was the trip to New Mexico. Then Tuesday we made the drive to Odessa to watch the Mules play regional golf at Ratliff Ranch Links. They had a good day Monday, but Tuesday didn’t go quite so well. They had a good time, learned some lessons about golf, and built lots of character, so it was worth the trip.

The Muleshoe golf team is Matt Dickerson, Eli Leal, Beau Avila, and Colten. Mateo Castillo is also on the team but had already left by the time I gathered them all up for a picture.

My behind is always numb after these road trips, and it does add the miles to our mileage limit, but we didn’t bring that car home for it to sit in the garage. It needs to be tooling about doing what it was built to do, and I am certainly not one to want an unhappy car…

So time will tell. I haven’t decided where to go next.

Nature’s First Green Really is Gold

Now don’t panic-I’m not putting you through an English lesson on poetry-and we could look at this one on several levels, but Robert Frost said it best when he wrote “Nature’s first green is gold/Her hardest hue to hold.” We drove down to the Texas Hill Country for our Spring Break respite and were rewarded with all shades of green to compliment the emerging wildflowers.

 

I love the bluebonnets and all the other colors of the rainbow that come out in the Spring, but I think it is the crisp, bright greens that I notice first. Up here the mesquite trees with their bright yellow green are what stand out against the brown of everything else as they leaf out. Down south the mesquites are joined by other trees and lush bright green grass as a backdrop for all the color of the flowers.

And it is all so seductive! The temptation is to take a picture as you cruise over the top of every hill, turn every corner, as it seems that every new patch of flowers is even better than the last. So, naturally, I take too many pictures and could bore you silly with all of them. But I have picked some of my favorites to share with you.

The weather was overcast for most of the visit, which sometimes wreaked havoc with the best light for optimum color, but sometimes it created a nice contrast, like I think it did for this picture.

How about Texas longhorns (not the orange kind, however-Whoop!) in Texas bluebonnets?

Most everyone who makes a bluebonnet trip feels compelled to plop the kids down in a good stand of blue for the obligatory bluebonnet picture. We didn’t have any kids to inflict this ritual on, so Mari got to pose for us. And let me tell you, posing a baby is a piece of cake compared to coaxing this dog into just the right spot, facing just the right way, standing just so for her portrait. After this shot, she wandered off to explore and took an unexpected swim when she slid down the bank into this stock tank trying to get a drink of water.

Note the white bluebonnet in the center. Texas A&M has developed a maroon bluebonnet, but I had not seen a white one before.

I didn’t really want the fire hydrant in the picture, but it blends in quite nicely since it is painted blue and red to match the flowers, and I have to think the color scheme was no accident.

Redbuds were also pretty on this trip. This one was in a yard, but the wild ones are equally colorful.

 

The yuccas were also in bloom. These are called Spanish bayonets, I think, and they are huge and add a nice contrast to the colors in the wildflowers.

Wisteria was blooming all over the place, too, like this one in Johnson City and this big one that had taken over the treetops.

Just as Frost reminds us at the end of the poem that “Nothing gold can stay,” be it the innocence and beauty of one’s youth or the bright green of Spring, savor the color while you can. Its gold is fleeting. Timing is everything.

 

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost, 1923

My Valentine’s Day Rocked!

No, really. My valentine was an all day road trip to gather rocks for my latest landscaping project.

My husband has this knack for coming up with appropriate gifts for me. For example, after I received my fist Painted Pony from my friend Hellen, Bill gave me a second one, and I thought, hey, I can collect these! Now I have 48.  One Christmas I was graced with a new sharpshooter shovel. Yeah, that may seem like one step away from the utilitarian vacuum cleaner gift, but I was tickled to get my new shovel! One Mother’s Day he gave me a new nursery wagon for carting supplies as I do my landscaping. Opium perfume and body powder are old standards I always enjoy unwrapping, and jewelry shows up frequently as well. Then there was the surprise trip to Las Vegas to enjoy the Elton John/Billy Joel Piano Man concert.

So he was right on target again this year when he presented me with a typed invitation to spend Valentine’s Day with him traveling to the Coleman area for rocks and trying out two as yet unsampled eating places to eat lunch and supper.

We left at 7:30 after seeing Colten off to school and  made it to Sweetwater in time to check out Allen Family Style Meals for lunch; I recommend their excellent fried chicken. We drove into our friend Ed’s place about 1:30.

Ed has been generous to share his rocks with me for about fifteen years now.  Work and pleasure took us past Ed’s rock-littered ranch as we drove to the Austin area for various pursuits, and when I started working on my rock garden in earnest, Bill suggested I stop and introduce myself and see if the landowner would let me have some of his many rocks. So I did. Ed, of course, thought I had lost my mind and was truly baffled that anyone would seek out rocks on purpose when he had so many they were a nuisance. “You really don’t have any rocks up there?” he asked in disbelief. I assured him all we had were ugly caliche rocks that had to be dug up and his were pretty and right there mostly on top of the ground for the taking. So he agreed that he indeed had plenty to share and that I could have all I wanted. So Bill and I came back later and traded a box of Barrett Produce potatoes for a trailer load of rocks. What a deal!

Through the years there were other rock trips, and we became friends with Ed and his wife Ruth. A few years ago Ruth passed on, Ed married Dee, and while I had just about all the rocks I needed by then, we still stopped to check on Ed and see how things were going from time to time.

So now that another project had popped into my head, Bill saw that it was inevitable that I would be bugging him to make another rock haul, hence the great idea for our day together hand-picking and importing rocks to Muleshoe. I love to tell people that- after all anything imported and done by hand sounds more exclusive than mass-produced or simply bought, right?

Mari went with us, but wasn’t as excited about her adventure as I was. She nosed around while we gathered just the right rocks for what I had in mind.

I said that most of Ed’s rocks are above ground, and most of them are, but there are always a few really good ones just peeking out that I can tell have potential. The catch is that there is always more rock under the ground than meets the eye, and sometimes there is more digging involved than Bill would have liked. But we persevered and popped out some nice specimens, and in one instance uprooted a tarantula who was agreeable and wandered off. Sometimes it is obvious the rock is still firmly attached to Mother Earth, and I begrudgingly have to pass it by.

Bill also knew I would want some big ones, so he hooked up a wench that made it easy to load by pulling it over a ramp of sorts.

We had a good load by 4 o’clock, not as full a trailer as some of our other trips, but I had what I needed, and we decided to call it a day. After a visit with Ed, we headed for home. We made it to Snyder in time for supper and took the business exit to visit The Shack, as we had passed their billboard on the highway many times. We ordered their chicken-fried steak specialty for our rare second helping of fried food for the day.

And after a pleasant drive listening to Willie’s Road House and familiar stuff from the 50s and 80s, we made it home by 10:00, just in time for bed. it had been a long day, but a nice one. And a great valentine.

Now if I can just get the weather to cooperate, I have rocks to unload and admire while I get my exercise landscaping a new area. When it is done and things green up around it, I will show it off to you. Stay tuned.