Whatever, it’s raining. We got a good rain a day or so after my last story (written last weekend, but not posted until 7/24), and have gotten rain somewhere around town almost every day since. By late morning, the sky is filling with wonderful, promising cumulus nimbus and by afternoon, the sky is darkening to the north or southeast. Just about dinner, the thunder rolls and somewhere around town, the rain patters.
Driving around town, the roads are adorned with puddles, reflecting sunlight like so many small jewels.
And it’s amazing how quickly living things respond. Where the color palette was brown, brown and more brown not 2 weeks ago, suddenly and within 2 days of the first rain, the road edges and the yards that had been cut were turning green. After a few serious rains, even the fields are greening up. Suddenly the desert willow and the Mexican bird of paradise are standing up with fresh color. Even the raw, bare ground at our place is showing new life. I could see the change from the house. When I was walking the property the other day, I found a baby barrel cactus poking through the ground – with 2 tiny pink flower buds about to pop.
Today, I was working at the new house, caulking. The storm was approaching – I could hear the thunder getting closer. Because I was downstairs, I didn’t have a view of the sky to see lightning. They say you can tell how close the storm cell is by the length of time between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder. Well, by damn, that cell was right overhead because I actually heard the lightning and felt the thunder, and it almost knocked me off the ladder. It went from drip to downpour in an instant and continued to pour for about ½ hour. The storm moved off to the Burros and the sky showed blue for a bit. I went out to take some pictures of the water flow down the driveway and around the house so that we would have a really good idea of where we need to do water management. Went back to work. Next thing I knew it was thundering again, and once again, a downpour. I stopped and went upstairs to watch the rain patterns, feel the wind and listen to the sounds of the new house as it reacted to its baptism.
When this second storm moved off, I stopped and cleaned up for the day. I went out on the porch – imagine that, the side porch is roofed with beautiful douglas fir beams and ponderosa pine ceiling – and looked and listened to PA creek, now a real, roaring water flow below the house in the arroyo. Packed up and pulling out, I wondered what I’d find at Rocky Creek. Yes, there really is a Rocky Creek, hence the name of our road, and it crosses the road between our house and leaving. Sure enough, water was boiling up along the edges and flowing across the roadway. My dilemma: we’re always told not to drive across a flooded roadway if you can’t see the bottom. But I knew at least one large vehicle had crossed not too long before I left the house and I could clearly see tire tracks through the mud edging the water flow on the other side from where I was and going the other way. If I’d been in the Volvo, there’s no doubt: I would have turned around and gone back to caulking. But I was in the truck and I have 4x4, so what the hell. If he could, I could. So I did. It wasn’t even exciting. I guess that’s a good thing.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Oh, I wish that it would rain, Rain, RAIN!
Staring up at the sky. Nary a cloud. Not a wisp! Brilliant sunshine. Curses! Welcome in October, maybe even March. Not in July.
In July, this is what we want to see. Thunderheads! Pregnant gray-bottomed cumulus. Rain!
This is the time of year when the same is on everyone’s tongue. You hear it in the grocery, in line at the little theater, read it on every Facebook page. Rain!!
This must be the only part of the country where people pull off the road and get out of their vehicle when the first splatter hits the windshield. Faces upturned, breathing in the RAIN!!!
This year of drought, we pray for, dance for, beg for, and bargain for rain. Rain arrived July 3, a mere one-hundredth of an inch officially. Enough to create a degree of pandemonium and worry. Pandemonium because it rained and set everyone to hoping. Worry because that 1/100” might be enough to give some a belief that the grass was safe for fireworks and the forest would be the target for dry fire-causing lightning.
Monsoons! Yes? No? What constitutes monsoon, anyway. Whatever does, it isn’t – not yet. A few days later, it rained over there about an inch. The next day, it rained over here an inch and half. Not yet the overcast gray fortuning a real rain. We still celebrated. RAIN I posted on my Facebook page; friends posted back, “Smelled wonderful!”
We’re still waiting. Still staring. Still praying-dancing-begging-bargaining. Everyone has too much of something this year – too much heat, too much flooding, too much rain. We’re on the not-enough-not-yet side of the scale.
Hopes up again today. Clouds built from early morning. By mid-morning, it was gray and overcast without a sunbeam in sight. Through the day, clouds moved overhead, thickening, threatening. At 4 pm, a spot of blue over yonder. By 7:30, a gorgeous sunset
Critter Tails
We have an overabundance of rabbits this year. Of both varieties: cottontail and jack. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t see 2 or 4 or 5. Often in pairs.
Last year was so green. When there’s more food one year, there are more babies the next. Works with squirrels, and apparently works with rabbits. We’ve started counting jacks and cottontails as we go from here to our new house. They are usually by the side of the roads because that’s where the green is. New grass isn’t easy to reach in the high weeds of uncut fields. But where the edges of roads are mown, the grass is coming in. Even without rain, there is a green haze. So there are the rabbits. In a way, it’s sad that there’s always the lag time between an abundance of food and an abundance of eaters. And usually by the time the eaters are there, the food is not. As in this year!
On to puppy-dog tails. We have a 6:30 am routine, Nutmeg and I. I feed her, and she eats. To be a little more specific, I pick up her bowl, rinse it out and fill it with fresh food and a little water, put it on the floor and get my hand out of the way fast. She is sometimes crunching before the bowl settles on the floor. You’d think we starve this dog! This morning, 6:30 as usual, I picked up the bowl. I turned on the radio. I rinsed out the bowl. My ears tuned into to some story on NPR. I put the bowl on the floor. The bowl was full of fresh water. Not fresh food. Nutmeg looked in the bowl, looked around on the floor and looked up at me. I never knew that WTF was in her vocabulary. Believe me, I corrected that mistake, but fast!
House progress
There are walls. There is a roof, though not yet shingled. There is a beautiful, brick-red concrete floor. It even has zias lined in it! There is a front porch roof that is ceilinged with clear ponderosa pine over douglas fir beams. The front porch framing and the back deck and side porch framing is waiting for decking. This week, they start framing the first floor interior.
I’ve been put to work. The framing has to be caulked (or foamed). So I spent hours on Saturday and Sunday with a caulk gun and a case of DAP, caulking the lower level where the frame plates meet the block foundation wall. Believe me, I’m not doing this because it’s fun to crawl around on the floor running caulk beads along the joints. The Build Green New Mexico and the passive house approach call for a “tight house” and that includes preventing all thermal bridging. So I’m just getting started. All of the framing needs to be either caulked or foamed on the inside. All of the seams in the sheeting (OSB) has to be taped on the outside. That’s how you get from one to the other in this picture.
In July, this is what we want to see. Thunderheads! Pregnant gray-bottomed cumulus. Rain!
This is the time of year when the same is on everyone’s tongue. You hear it in the grocery, in line at the little theater, read it on every Facebook page. Rain!!
This must be the only part of the country where people pull off the road and get out of their vehicle when the first splatter hits the windshield. Faces upturned, breathing in the RAIN!!!
This year of drought, we pray for, dance for, beg for, and bargain for rain. Rain arrived July 3, a mere one-hundredth of an inch officially. Enough to create a degree of pandemonium and worry. Pandemonium because it rained and set everyone to hoping. Worry because that 1/100” might be enough to give some a belief that the grass was safe for fireworks and the forest would be the target for dry fire-causing lightning.
Monsoons! Yes? No? What constitutes monsoon, anyway. Whatever does, it isn’t – not yet. A few days later, it rained over there about an inch. The next day, it rained over here an inch and half. Not yet the overcast gray fortuning a real rain. We still celebrated. RAIN I posted on my Facebook page; friends posted back, “Smelled wonderful!”
We’re still waiting. Still staring. Still praying-dancing-begging-bargaining. Everyone has too much of something this year – too much heat, too much flooding, too much rain. We’re on the not-enough-not-yet side of the scale.
Hopes up again today. Clouds built from early morning. By mid-morning, it was gray and overcast without a sunbeam in sight. Through the day, clouds moved overhead, thickening, threatening. At 4 pm, a spot of blue over yonder. By 7:30, a gorgeous sunset
Critter Tails
We have an overabundance of rabbits this year. Of both varieties: cottontail and jack. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t see 2 or 4 or 5. Often in pairs.
Last year was so green. When there’s more food one year, there are more babies the next. Works with squirrels, and apparently works with rabbits. We’ve started counting jacks and cottontails as we go from here to our new house. They are usually by the side of the roads because that’s where the green is. New grass isn’t easy to reach in the high weeds of uncut fields. But where the edges of roads are mown, the grass is coming in. Even without rain, there is a green haze. So there are the rabbits. In a way, it’s sad that there’s always the lag time between an abundance of food and an abundance of eaters. And usually by the time the eaters are there, the food is not. As in this year!
On to puppy-dog tails. We have a 6:30 am routine, Nutmeg and I. I feed her, and she eats. To be a little more specific, I pick up her bowl, rinse it out and fill it with fresh food and a little water, put it on the floor and get my hand out of the way fast. She is sometimes crunching before the bowl settles on the floor. You’d think we starve this dog! This morning, 6:30 as usual, I picked up the bowl. I turned on the radio. I rinsed out the bowl. My ears tuned into to some story on NPR. I put the bowl on the floor. The bowl was full of fresh water. Not fresh food. Nutmeg looked in the bowl, looked around on the floor and looked up at me. I never knew that WTF was in her vocabulary. Believe me, I corrected that mistake, but fast!
House progress
There are walls. There is a roof, though not yet shingled. There is a beautiful, brick-red concrete floor. It even has zias lined in it! There is a front porch roof that is ceilinged with clear ponderosa pine over douglas fir beams. The front porch framing and the back deck and side porch framing is waiting for decking. This week, they start framing the first floor interior.
I’ve been put to work. The framing has to be caulked (or foamed). So I spent hours on Saturday and Sunday with a caulk gun and a case of DAP, caulking the lower level where the frame plates meet the block foundation wall. Believe me, I’m not doing this because it’s fun to crawl around on the floor running caulk beads along the joints. The Build Green New Mexico and the passive house approach call for a “tight house” and that includes preventing all thermal bridging. So I’m just getting started. All of the framing needs to be either caulked or foamed on the inside. All of the seams in the sheeting (OSB) has to be taped on the outside. That’s how you get from one to the other in this picture. If you need me any afternoon after work for the next couple of weeks, you know where to find me.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
A Community on Fire
Our community is on fire, but not the kind of fire that has plagued NM and AZ of late. Instead, we are burning with a sense of accomplishment and thanks. Over the past two weeks, the community came together over a shared concern about fireworks and the dangers for real and devastating fire. An epidemic of chutzpah started with a little exposure to the fire professionals of the town and county in several community meetings, and it was communicated through various email lists of homeowner associations and neighborhood watch groups; it became a real contagion when the fireworks tents went up in Walmart and Food Basket parking lots, causing community members to picket and raise the alarm. Finally, chutzpah went viral when the mayor, the town council and the town’s attorney took a stand against fireworks of any kind, in defiance of state law that allows municipalities to regulate only certain types of fireworks.
To give a little more context, although the names Wallow, Horseshoe and most recently, Los Alamos don’t need context – they are the context – the state of NM allows sales of all sorts of fireworks from sparklers to “rockets bursting in air.” Even the governor has limited ability to impact the sales of fireworks; she can only ban them on state lands. Municipalities are limited to banning certain types. But in the terrible state of dryness across the southwest, any type of firework is a threat – wildfire is nondiscriminatory that way.
In our community, there are several local vendors who contract for and sell fireworks from a company called TNT. Ironic name…or probably, just good marketing. When those tents went up and the vendors were stocking to open, the community stood up. There was quite a bit of pressure brought to bear on the vendors. People walked the street corners with picket signs, garnering a modicum of police protection and a lot of public support. Calls were made to Walmart, locally managed but obviously not locally owned, and to Food Basket, which is locally owned. Believably, the local owners of Food Basket agreed with the concerns. Unbelievably, it sounded as though the Walmart manager, also in agreement, convinced “corporate” to support the community.
The vendors were in a bit of a pickle. At least one vendor under contract to TNT was a church using the sales as a fundraiser for the church mission. Another interesting irony in the saga: pray for rain but sell the rockets. The cautionary and appropriate thing to do would be not to sell. But the vendors would be hurtin’ financially, because they were under contract. Both community members and the Mayor of Silver City contacted TNT, who agreed to let the vendors out of their contracts. Not one rocket, not one sparkler for sale within 60 miles. All those who decried the over-riding greed for profit had to notice: not one, not two, but three profit-driven companies stood down in the face of community and political pressure.
It’s true that people could go to Deming and buy enough fireworks to set all 3 million acres of the Gila National Forest on fire, but perhaps they saw the light of a different reason. So it was a quiet July 4th with dark skies not starred, not spangled, not booming; no ohhs, no ahhs, no dogs hiding under beds in sheer terror. As the fever of chutzpah cooled, it was replaced by a probably short-lived flare-up of common sense.
We’re proud of our mayor. We’re proud of our town council and our town’s attorney. And we’re especially proud of our community who stood up together. Just ask anyone.
To give a little more context, although the names Wallow, Horseshoe and most recently, Los Alamos don’t need context – they are the context – the state of NM allows sales of all sorts of fireworks from sparklers to “rockets bursting in air.” Even the governor has limited ability to impact the sales of fireworks; she can only ban them on state lands. Municipalities are limited to banning certain types. But in the terrible state of dryness across the southwest, any type of firework is a threat – wildfire is nondiscriminatory that way.
In our community, there are several local vendors who contract for and sell fireworks from a company called TNT. Ironic name…or probably, just good marketing. When those tents went up and the vendors were stocking to open, the community stood up. There was quite a bit of pressure brought to bear on the vendors. People walked the street corners with picket signs, garnering a modicum of police protection and a lot of public support. Calls were made to Walmart, locally managed but obviously not locally owned, and to Food Basket, which is locally owned. Believably, the local owners of Food Basket agreed with the concerns. Unbelievably, it sounded as though the Walmart manager, also in agreement, convinced “corporate” to support the community.
The vendors were in a bit of a pickle. At least one vendor under contract to TNT was a church using the sales as a fundraiser for the church mission. Another interesting irony in the saga: pray for rain but sell the rockets. The cautionary and appropriate thing to do would be not to sell. But the vendors would be hurtin’ financially, because they were under contract. Both community members and the Mayor of Silver City contacted TNT, who agreed to let the vendors out of their contracts. Not one rocket, not one sparkler for sale within 60 miles. All those who decried the over-riding greed for profit had to notice: not one, not two, but three profit-driven companies stood down in the face of community and political pressure.
It’s true that people could go to Deming and buy enough fireworks to set all 3 million acres of the Gila National Forest on fire, but perhaps they saw the light of a different reason. So it was a quiet July 4th with dark skies not starred, not spangled, not booming; no ohhs, no ahhs, no dogs hiding under beds in sheer terror. As the fever of chutzpah cooled, it was replaced by a probably short-lived flare-up of common sense.
We’re proud of our mayor. We’re proud of our town council and our town’s attorney. And we’re especially proud of our community who stood up together. Just ask anyone.
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