Color Guard in leather preparing to honor their fallen friend at San Ysidro Church in Corrales.
Category: Corrales
Digging Ditches
I dug over 60 meters (about 180 feet) of ditches yesterday afternoon to make irrigating more efficient — we can irrigate every other Tuesday if there is water in the ditch. The areas that need to be watered most are furthest from the main canal, so the new ditches I dug will route the ditch water more directly to the end of the property that needs to be watered, by-passing the other areas. In past years, I’ve had real problems with only getting water about halfway to where I needed it before someone else took the water.
We have a larger variety of tulips blooming now — the tulips are not planted in areas that get irrigated (I water them with a drip system) so they are happy to bloom. The dry air doesn’t seem to bother them too much, but the hard frost makes them droop in the early morning hours until the sun warms them up, and they open again.
Running Car Total
Three Mazdas and a Ford pickup make up our new running car total. Friday was quite an eventful day in automotive adventures for the Price family. The adventure started on Thursday when Ro was late meeting me for lunch at Phở 79. While I was waiting, the owner of Phở 79 asked me if Tristan needed a car. I said “For a matter of fact she does. What do you have in mind?” He told me he had another Mazda RX-8 for sale, and thought I might be interested. Tristan met me and Laurie at Phở 79 that evening, we test drove the car, and loved it, of course. We discussed the car over our dinner of crayfish and other Vietnamese dishes, and then we worked out a deal on the car after dinner.
Laurie and I spent early Friday morning picking up our Ford F100 from the shop, and paying for the RX-8. I went to work and Laurie went to school, then we spent all Friday afternoon taking care of the taxes, title and registration — we are now a three Mazda family.
Infidel Lumberjack
Since we are having branches that have been piling up around the property for the past couple of years chipped, I finally got around to cutting down an old, diseased peach tree that we are not going to irrigate this season because of water restrictions. I was going to cut down the tree with a chainsaw, but the chain come off sawing on the first branch. Since it’s a real pain to put the chain back on the chainsaw, I got a bow saw and discovered I could saw through the branches very quickly, and had the tree cut down by hand in 30 minutes — not much longer than it would have taken me to put the chain back on the chainsaw once I gathered up all the tools and got the chain back on and adjusted properly. Whenever I cut down trees, I can’t help thinking about Monty Python’s “Lumberjack Song.”
Laurie put the finishing touches on the catio, including trying to clean the calcium carbonate from water seeping out of the swamp cooler over the years. She was really cute scraping on the glass. The last photo shows the finished catio. The large box leaning against the bonsai shelves has my darkroom sink in it.
Trees in the Mist
When we left early in the morning there was a mist that gave the trees a ghostly look. As we headed out to Paradise Hills, the mist turned into a thick fog, which is quite rare for the Albuquerque area. When we got to Paradise Hills, a couple hundred feet above the Rio Grande Valley, the sun was making its first appearance above the fog blanketed the valley below.
Coffee Art
After photographing the sunrise filtering through the dust and mist the other morning, I was inspired to accidentally create a work of coffee art on edge of the counter.
Catio Concrete
It’s not really concrete, but a cement top coat used for refinishing concrete surfaces. The refinishing cement is really intended for fairly smooth slabs, but the slab in the catio is very rough concrete, so getting a really smooth top coat didn’t happen.
A lone leaf decided it needed to break in the new cement floor, since I have the cats locked out of the catio while the cement cures. In the second photo, there are three dominant shades of gray. I mixed the first batch of cement following the instructions exactly, and the mixture ended up being too thick, so while it poured out of the bucket, it started setting up almost immediately, making it difficult to spread, and almost impossible to smooth as per the instructions (it’s the darkest shade of gray along the back wall).
I made the second batch soupier than the first, but I got it a little too soupy, so it spread thinner than I wanted it to (lighter shade of gray in the middle). On the third batch I got the mixture figured out so it spread well at the thickness I needed, and I was able to get it a little smoother (middle shade of gray in the foreground). I used the same mixture for the the next 8 batches needed to cover the entire slab. I also ended up spreading and smoothing the cement on my hands and knees with a hand trowel. Our air is so dry here, that even the wetter mixtures started setting up as soon as I poured them out of the bucket, making it difficult to spread with the 18 inch-wide cement spreader the instructions suggested I use.
While I was photographing the new floor, I noticed my little chainsaw and level on a bonsai shelf made a nice composition. The last two photos are the candles we have behind the couch in the sunroom unlit and lit.
The Black Widow
“And here, my prize, the Black Widow. Isn’t she lovely?…And so deadly. Her kiss is fifteen times as poisonous as that of the rattlesnake. You see her venom is highly neurotoxic, which is to say that it attacks the central nervous system causing intense pain, profuse sweating, difficulty in breathing, loss of consciousness, violent convulsions and, finally…Death. You know what I think I love the most about her is her inborn need to dominate, possess. In fact, immediately after the consummation of her marriage to the smaller and weaker male of the species she kills and eats him…(laugh) oh, she is delicious…And I hope he was!”
Those words are part of Vincent Price’s introduction to “The Black Widow” on Alice Cooper’s 1975 album “Welcome to My Nightmare”.
While I was working on the gray water system this afternoon, I found a black widow where they like to be — in wet, humid areas — like the underside of the cover for the distribution hub for the gray water system. She seemed a little stunned by her sudden exposure to the sunlight, and allowed me to do several photos of her underside from different angles; but then I got too close and she scampered under some of the mulch. While I was cleaning out the pipes, she ran out on the cover to dry herself after I apparently got her wet. She allowed me to do several macro shots from a top view while she was drying out; therefore, the series gives you a detailed look at Vincent’s prize “The Black Widow”.
Up, Up and Away
While hot air balloons are a common sight every fall in the Albuquerque area, this balloon flying over the house at sunrise on a very cold February morning was a surprise. Although, with the temperature inversions common to the area, the temperature might have been warmer 200 feet above me where the balloon was than where I was standing photographing it.
RX-8 on Ice
We had a light snow most of the day, which left a dusting of snow on top of a hardened layer of thin ice that was not much fun to scrape off the windshield and windows. After 40 minutes on the road, I stopped at the post office in Corrales to pick up the mail, and noticed that the ice and snow stuck on the hood was only a little wind-streaked.
Off Center & Not Even 