I’ve walked by this building many times and hadn’t noticed the primary colors dripping down the gray wall. I don’t think it’s new because the building has been boarded up at the ground floor for a couple of years now, so maybe the light was just right.

They moved the Sopranos poster under the motorcycle in Lindy’s which made both more interesting, and I gave Sophia a grunge look which seemed fitting for her inquisitive look.

 

 

The sunrise with the clouds and snow on the Sandias was wonderful this morning. The clouds at sunset matched the tree line, creating an illusion of mountains on the western horizon.

The wind was terrible today. I was really happy that the weather was so beautiful yesterday for the wedding and yard work. We spent the afternoon at Tristan’s visiting with a math student from Nigeria and being entertained by Tristan’s cats and birds. When I got home at 5:30, I had a message from the neighbor that the roof was blowing off my parent’s old house, so I spent the rest of the evening taking down some of the aluminum and tin roofing the wind had loosened and securing the rest so it will stay in place until I can get it all taken off.  Since most of the roofing on that part of the house is aluminum, I’ve been planning to remove it and take it to recycling, but I haven’t had the energy to get out in the cold and do it. Now that it’s warming up, maybe I’ll start on it this weekend.

With chainsaw in hand, I can cause almost as much destruction as a tornado. I felled eight trees and dug out as many bushes in Tristan and David’s back yard this afternoon. I wanted to hire a tree company to take down the trees and chip them up, but after two weeks of failing to get one of them out to give us an estimate, I decided to cut them down myself. Now we need to find someone to chip them up for us. I thought the tree guys would be needing work, but apparently the tree cutting business is so good there is no need to bother to return calls.

I went to Annie’s wedding this morning. There were many beautifully tattooed people in attendance. They wedding was in her parent’s back yard, and the weather was great; however, the sun was a little harsh. The ceremony was really quite nice.

When I got home tonight, Stretch was pestering a wolf spider, so once I got Stretch away from it, I couldn’t resist photographing it. It is really quite colorful when photographed with a combination of a flashlight and ring flash.

Stretch is watching something from the table. He’s wide-eyed, and has is nub slightly bushed. What he’s looking at, I can’t tell. There are no other kitties, nothing that I can see; but he looks over the counter and follows something with his eyes, then he look under the counter and then over the counter again. It’s a little creepy, because whatever he sees he won’t turn his back on it. I turned him to show him some food I dished out for him, and he immediately turned back to watch the phantom that I can’t see.

 

I got some new flowers on the way home tonight. I love the color on this one.

 

The Lobo Men basketball team won another round in the NCAA playoffs this afternoon. I don’t really follow basketball, but several people in the office do, so a couple of staff set up laptops in one of our conference rooms and watched the game on the big screen while they worked on maps and web pages. Other staff had the score updates rolling across the tops of their screens, so it was hard to miss the game this afternoon.

In Plain Sight is filming on our block tomorrow morning, so they are going to have the streets closed around the office. A site manager came in this afternoon and asked for permission to use the front of our building and the reception area to do some special scenes using a small crew next week. I didn’t see any problem with it as long as they don’t damage the building.

I dropped by the pharmacy to pick up some pseudoephedrine for allergies and there were two women in front of me. I noticed they were taking a long time. When the clerk had finished ringing up the first woman, she made three trips between the register and the consulting area to move more than a dozen bottles of medications to the consulting area so the pharmacist could explain them to the woman and bag them for her.  The second woman picked up nearly as many prescriptions. I thought to myself how it’s sad that people have to have so many prescriptions. I feel fortunate that I am not currently taking any prescription drugs. I only take an over-the-counter drug daily to control acid reflux, a couple of supplements, pseudoephedrine and ibuprofen occasionally, and drink super strong, black coffee.

 

Our little 5-in-1 dwarf plum tree is always the first to bloom, and inevitably it’s always the first victim of frost. I believe we planted that tree about 10 years ago and have never got fruit from it. One year we carefully covered it every night, and by beginning of May there was fruit set on it. We thought we were going to get plums, but around the middle of May we had a very hard frost that killed all our fruit and several roses. I don’t know how people who farmed this property early last century, before “global warming”, survived.

 

Diné and Rosencrantz were trying out kitty ear warmers for Laurie and Tristan this afternoon.  Rosencrantz got tried of me photographing him and covered his face. Kitties are an endless source of entertainment.

 

 

Tristan’s Valentine’s tarantula is a great model.

 

 

 

There was about a half inch of snow on the ground this morning. I went out to see if the crocus were opening in the morning sun, despite the snow, but they remained closed until almost noon. By the time they decided to open all the snow had melted; however, it was warm enough for the bees to be out working the crocus — the first bees I’d seen this season.

I got caught up on my French homework before I started cooking a big batch of NM gumbo this afternoon. While I was cooking t

he rice, browning the meats and thawing the vegetables, I managed to get a week ahead on my French homework. Now that’s what I call cooking!

The number system the French use is base 60, which is based on the Babylonian number system. There are no single names for the numbers 70, 80 and 90 in French. Seventy is soixante-dix (60+10), eighty is quatre-vingts (4×20), and ninety is quatre-vingts-dix (4×20+10). You add the numbers 10 through 19 to 60 to get from 70 to 79, then you add the numbers 1 through 9 to 4×20 to get from 80 to 89 and finally you add 10 through 19 to 4×20 to get from 90 to 99. One-hundred is “cent”.  The numbers make sense seeing them on paper, but listening to people rattle off numbers in the exercises and trying to write them down made my head spin.

Stretch was laying on the window sill sunning himself this afternoon. I went out to see if there was water in the ditch and talked to one of our neighbors for a few minutes, then when I came back inside Stretch was sitting on the window sill with the strong light shining through the window almost env

eloping him.