No Agua, Large vacuum leak & Other Random Chaos

April 13, 2013April 13, 2013 Timothy Price6 Comments

Since I am up past midnight, I thought I’d be clever and go out and see if I could get irrigation water since the ditch rider just turned it in to our ditch for the week. All the water was already taken. The farmers above us probably leave their gates down so when the ditch rider turns the water in, the farmers upstream of us will be sure to get it. The license plate on this old Corvair says it all!

For those of you who are old enough, and have good memories, the Corvair was on par with the Devil in Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at any Speed” published in 1965. The only reason I remember it is because we had one of “The Sporty Corvair-The One-Car Accident” as per Nader’s title of Chapter One in “Unsafe at any Speed”. The Covair is long gone, but our evil, water guzzling plants remain, and the Conservancy is making Corrales farmers fight for water, leaving us with “No Agua” for three weeks at a time.

The “Check Engine Light” came on in our Mazda Speed 3 this afternon. I stopped and reseated the gas cap and checked the oil, and everything seemed ok. We had just filled the car with gas, so I suspected the gas cap didn’t get seated well enough. I took the car by Auto Zone and they got the code for me which gave use an error that there was a “Large Vacuum Leak” meaning the gas cap didn’t seat properly.

As I was walking back to my car after class, a young couple were playing guitars by the statue of “Mexican dancers” on the mall between Popejoy Hall and Johnson Gym. I noticed the young man was playing a flamenco guitar with pegs instead of machine heads to secure and tune the strings. Tuning pegs are rarely seen on guitars these days, so I asked the young man about his guitar. He said he got it from John Truitt and that is was made in Albuquerque by a local luthier in the 1970’s. That was really cool to learn, because I’ve known Truitt for many years, and he is like Mr. Music — you can give Truitt anything with a string on it and he’ll produce great music on it.

When I pulled into the parking lot at work, the was a young woman photographing a man and his daughter. I pointed out other locations in the downtown area that were good for portraits. They were friendly and cheerful and it made me happy to see they were having lots of fun with their photo shoot.

Sarah, who’s in French 385 with Lauie and I, and French 302 with Laurie, organized a fun night at Wilson Middle School with four or five other students for their senior project in Communications. It was really well attended, we had to park a block from the school, the food was good and the kids looked like they were having a lot of fun participating in art, science, poetry, etc. The 5th photo is of her team calling out numbers for a raffle.

On my way home from getting the engine light checked, a crew was filming at the Corrales gas station, so I pulled over and got a few shots. I have no idea what movie or show they were filming.

Laurie pointed out the spider in the last photo after she got home. It looks like spider season is coming on, so the macro lens is coming out.

Hit by a Bus

March 23, 2013 Timothy Price11 Comments

It’s probably better to get run over by a rhinoceros than a city bus. Yesterday morning a driver ran a red light at 3rd & Gold, and was broadsided by a city bus. The occupants of the car were taken to the hospital, the bike on the front of the bus was smashed up and a passenger on the bus had minor injuries. These are the city bus investigators at the scene.

Tonight’s sunset through the trees by the Corrales park was quite colorful tonight.

Old and Low

March 14, 2013 Timothy Price8 Comments

I barely caught this old car restored as a lowrider as it drove past on Route 66 in downtown Albuquerque this afternoon. One of the nice things about living in the desert is that we see a lot of classic cars on the road.

Wild Ride

February 6, 2013 Timothy Price4 Comments

Taxi 127 was driving pretty wild tonight — maybe the passenger was in labor or something. Continuing my new, scenic routes to and from my new parking spot, I wanted to photograph this door for the past couple of nights, but there were some rough looking characters hanging around in front of the door, and I didn’t want to see what their reactions would be to me either asking them to move, or be in the photo since I couldn’t really see what they were involved in. The installation of sheets on the wall in the pocket park I photographed last night turned out to be quite colorful in the daylight.

New Point of View

February 2, 2013 Timothy Price6 Comments

We lost our parking spots again, so now I’m parking in the block north of Gold and south of Central between 2nd and 3rd Streets. The parking spot gives me a new point of view, and now I am going in and leaving by the front door — an entrance and exit I haven’t made for almost 15 years.

1959 Pontiac Catalina

December 20, 2012 Timothy Price3 Comments

A storm rolled through today, dropping the temperature signficantly. The Sandias were mostly covered in clouds this morning, while the clouds were breaking up to the north over the Jemez. By noon, when I photographed the 1959 Pontiac Catalina parked on the street, the clouds had been cleared out by a cold, biting wind.

After falling in trenches in the dark and tripping over piles dirt for the past three weeks, PNM finally connected power to the new pole Hammack Electric set for our electrical service upgrade, and installed a new meter on the pole. That allowed them to remove the meter from the well and disconnect the power lines to the pole at the well, as well. So the first phase is done, which moved the meter from the well to the new service pole. The next phase will be connecting the house to the sub-panel Hammack installed on the west side of the house, and then we can have the power disconnected from the pole that currently feeds the house, have all the overhead power lines to the house removed, and take down two power poles. In the end we will have consolidated two electrical services into one, and provided enough power for a new HVAC system, which needs more power than we had, requiring the service upgrade. Hammack won’t be able to connect the house to the new service until January, so we will now wait until late spring or early summer before we have the new HVAC installed. We started on the service upgrade back in September, but figuring out how best to do the upgrade and getting all the permits took until the end of November. Hammack set the new pole the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, then dug tenches to the well and sub-panel, ran the wires, the following Tuesday, but the had to leave the trenches open for the inspectors, and PNM. Now that the new service is on-line, and the trenches are filled in, we should be able to walk to and from the cars without twisting our ankles or getting our shoes full of dirt. However, Laurie said that having gotten used to negotiating trenches and piles of dirt, she twisted her ankle and got her shoes full of dirt on the freshly backfilled trenches tonight.