Love In The Asylum

Once again I've been caught out by the end of summer. I don't know why it's so shocking - it's not like it hasn't happened every September since, oh, the dawn of time. And yet. It feels like in the space of a week we've gone from 'OMG it is so hot my face is going to melt off my head' to cold, grey, and damp. I actually started wearing a jacket today for the first time, and I finally broke down and ordered a pair of winter gloves (fingerless gloves could cut it in Palo Alto, but we're a lot higher up, and it gets cold as balls in December and January. After last winter, I definitely learned my lesson).

I've only got a few more weeks of daylight left, I think, and then it'll be coming home from work in the dark. Not terribly looking forward to that, although I think they've almost got the pedestrian bridge across the street finished up. But fortunately I'm getting pretty close to getting my license - maybe within a month, I've been driving in traffic a lot lately, I just want to get a little more comfortable with changing lanes and remembering when I can turn without having to check with my dad. Should have a car before winter hits, for sure. And then I get to learn how to deal with people who go all to pieces on the road every time it looks like it might snow.

Everything smells like green chile, which is the surest sign that autumn is here. I don't even like green chile, but it's a comforting kind of smell. Pretty soon balloons will be landing in our parking lot.

(and work is getting crazy, but what else is new? At least the view out the window is nice this time of year)

We went to the Glow this weekend!

Meant to go on Friday, but we were utterly rained out - made it all the way to the girlfriend's house before we realized they were probably going to cancel it, and ended up just going for sushi instead. But our passes were good for the whole week, so we tried again last night and it was awesome. I really missed the balloon fiesta while I was in California. I don't crew, and I never want to get up early enough to go to mass ascension, and it mucks traffic up all over town the whole week, but, idk. There is something familiarly pleasant in knowing that I can get up in the morning to a balloon accidentally landing in the yard. And the special shapes glow is the best. I saw an octopus balloon (that one was my favorite), and the Creamland Cow, and two bees with a baby bee, and a really lovely butterfly, and I got a trading card for the Spiderpig balloon. Fun times.

I also got a haircut this weekend, but no pictures of that. You can't really tell the difference anyway, I only got three or four inches taken off. But it feels a lot better!

Guess whose state is totally on fire? THIS GIRL'S, THAT'S RIGHT.

When I left this morning, it was mostly clear - a little hazy around the horizon, but that's all. But around 3.30 my boss at the engineering firm called me over to the empty room across the hall and HOLY SHIT WHERE DID THE MOUNTAINS GO. I'm not even exaggerating; the skyline was just a solid wall of smoke until it turned into clouds. The visibility is better now that I'm back at my dad's house, but it's still pretty gross and we're avoiding going outside at all costs.

As of now, we're not in any actual danger aside from the poor air quality, and neither are my mom and the boyfriend, although they had a couple of scares last week down their way and the entire Bosque is closed for the immediate future. We're just at the epicenter for all the smoke from three different wildfires, of which the largest is the Los Alamos Fire.

This is crazy even by NM standards. The news reports I've seen are saying now that it's bigger than the devastating fire they had in 2000, which I still remember. It's already burned more than 60000 acres, and it's not even remotely contained - right now they are trying to keep it from spreading into the canyons in the ski areas up there. Los Alamos was evacuated last night - that's at least 12000 people currently displaced, although as far as I can tell the fire hasn't encroached too badly into the residential areas yet. Still.

This article from MSNBC about the fire danger to nuclear material at Los Alamos labs seems to be mostly scare-mongering, at least. None of the guys at work seemed all that worried, and that's what they do for a living, so I guess they would know. Actually, one of the guys in the office today was there because normally he works at LANL and he couldn't go up there. So I think we probably won't all turn into mutants any time soon, which is good since I don't look good in skin-tight leather and unstable molecules.

Like I said, as if the massive fire in Los Alamos weren't enough, there's a second fire in Bandolier, and a third in Lincoln County that has burned about 15000 acres so far. Plus, of course, we're still getting some of the smoke from the fire in Arizona. I know wildfires are pretty much par for the course in June, but this is getting ridiculous.

And people are still arguing over whether or not there should be a fireworks ban this weekend. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.

Three Things (The Exciting New Summer Edition!):

1. With graduation behind me, California and I have parted ways for the immediate future. I will miss you, Palo Alto, with your beautiful weather and your public transportation and your proximity to San Francisco and of course, your insanely expensive everything. For the time being, I'm back in New Mexico - I decided earlier in the year that I wanted to live a little closer to my family while I'm getting started on the real grown-up career thing, and it's not like I dislike it here, even if I miss San Francisco a lot already. My dad is letting me stay with him (rent-free, although I did offer to do all the cooking again) until I find a job, and then hopefully I'll get my own place in Albuquerque. I don't know, the whole thing is kind of terrifying and mind-boggling still.

2. I semi-accidentally came out to my dad during our road trip home from California. I swear I was not planning to do this! I had wanted to leave it alone until some ill-defined point in the future (maybe when I was actually dating someone?), but...he provided me as good a conversational in as I was probably ever going to get, and I thought, why not now? And explained to him that while I might be bringing home boyfriends for him to meet and/or intimidate, I might also be bringing home people who aren't boyfriends. He was actually pretty cool about it - he basically said that he didn't care whether I dated guys or girls as long as I didn't date jerks. Honestly, I don't think he was terribly surprised. Which is good, because if he had taken it badly that would have been an incredibly awkward 300 miles. And now I am out to both my parents with pretty much no drama at all.

3. I possibly have a job! Doing tech writing for one of my dad's clients, some kind of engineering company. It's only a temp - they need someone for about a month to assist their primary writer with a big project, or getting caught up on their backlog or something - but it's a full-time position for a really good hourly rate, and it would a) keep me busy and earning money while I look for something a little more permanent and b) get me a little more experience and possibly some contacts in the field. So pretty neat! My dad's taking me down there tomorrow afternoon to talk to some people, we'll see how it goes.

3a. Aside from the job interview thing, my most ambitious plans for this weekend are still getting caught up on Doctor Who (omg so far behind I fail) and starting a new quest chain in DDO. I'm going to enjoy my brief post-grad opportunity to be lazy and useless for as long as it lasts.

On the one hand, New Mexico just elected its first female governor.

On other hand...New Mexico just elected an anti-choice, anti-immigration, anti-gay rights, pro-death penalty Republican governor. That should make the next four to eight years fun.

*sigh* Someone remind me why I want to move back there when I graduate?

1. Go to Google and type, "You know you're from (your city or state) when..."
2. Cut and paste the list.
3. Bold the items that apply to you.

You know you're from New Mexico when...

( You know the response to the question 'red or green?' )

Ugh, what a day.

The town's water main (apparently we only have one?) broke in the middle of the night last night, so when I woke up we had no running water. We did have drinking water, since we use a water cooler (decadent, yes, but you'd invest too if your arsenic levels were this high), but drinking water and no toilet is not the greatest combination ever. I ended up at my grandma's all afternoon, scrubbing showers and washing window blinds and putting curtains up and just generally getting sweaty and filthy. Since we still didn't have water at 4.00 when I got home, my dad vetoed cooking dinner on the grounds that we wouldn't be able to do dishes afterwards, so we went for take-out instead. Unfortunately all the fast-food/take-out places near us were closed, because the water was out for the whole town, and he didn't want to go into a sit-down restaurant without being able to take a shower. So we ended up driving for an hour through rush-hour traffic to get fried chicken in Albuquerque.

We finally got our water back a few minutes ago (about 16 hours after it went out - nice job, Bernalillo). And I am sticky and headachey and grumpy and exhausted, so I am going to take a damn shower and curl up with Jeeves and Wooster and just...not think for a while. Possibly I will just go to bed altogether.

In-class writing exercise from Thursday:

It's a big house, bigger than ours anyway, three bedrooms, a living room, a den, a kitchen that at Christmas always smells of anise and ancho chiles. Even with the stones raked smooth in the place of grass the yard spills over with life - the peach tree and the apple tree on the side of the road, and a stone-walled vegetable garden hugging the garage wall, with rosebushes and daffodils growing in red-bricked circles to fill the gap.

Across the street, between the brown-painted wooden fence and the noise of the main street, is the bank, nestled in hummocks of grass and cottonwood trees that families for five blocks around use as a makeshift park. A neighbor's yard butts the back and shares the crossroads, an old woman who invites us in on Saturdays to sit surrounded by ancient knicknacks and yellowing photographs and hear stories told in heavily-accented English while we sip tea and nibble German chocolate bars.

To the east, it's a clear view straight to the mountains, the high knobbled ridge glazed watermeleon-pink by the setting sun.


Every story I tell, no matter the reason, comes back to the mountains eventually.

This was going to be a post about why CoE wasn't good television even if you ignore Day Four and why RTD is a adolescent douchenozzle, because I am still filled with bitterness and fan-rage, but...I don't really have the energy to get back into that discussion right now. So have a pretty picture instead!

Not taken by me, obviously: I found it on Flickr, and it's one of the pictures from the Rail Runner contest the state had last year. But this is the view of the mountains you can see from the train that goes past my house. I love the Sandias.

Dear New Mexico: what the hell is up with all this rain? I don't know if you got the memo, but it is NOT JULY YET. Thunderstorms belong in mid-July, not June! And this is just getting ridiculous.

Five minutes after my mom and I left the house yesterday to walk over to Michael's and go shopping, it started POURING - and of course neither of us had jackets or umbrellas. We got pretty thoroughly soaked before we ducked into Panda Express to wait it out, since rain never lasts that long out here. After we made it to Michael's (new hemp cord for stringing my necklace and some neat charms for making hairsticks next week) we stopped by Barnes and Noble to check out the new books - two seconds after we left, it started raining again. Not as hard as before, but we were still pretty well damp by the time we got home. And now it's been raining on and off all day today, with occasional Big Dramatic Thunder. Earlier in the afternoon it was storming hard enough that it kept knocking out the lights/cable, but thankfully that seems to be over.

Man, this is not on, New Mexico. You need to shape up!