New Mexico sunshine

We're based in Santa Fe for a week of exploration and a weekend with our 11-year-old grandson Alex. It's a home exchange we're doing - with a couple visiting their grandchildren in Seattle. They're staying in our house, driving our car, enjoying time with their family. It's a practical way to travel.

Yesterday we visited Los Alamos and Bandelier National Monument, both about 45 minutes from the house. The Bradley Museum in Los Alamos does a colorful, informative, earnest job of explaining what the Los Alamos lab is currently up to. One of their responsibilities is to make sure our aging nuclear weapons are maintained and usable, now that we're not making any new ones. Lots of money going into that, which disturbs the progressive pacifist in me.

Bandelier is the site of numerous archeological sites and petroglyphs of the Ancient People who lived in the valley and in caves carved into volcanic stone on the valley walls.

The one-mile walk includes a series of stairs and walkways and ladders that take you right up into a few of the caves.

A deer walked across the path in front of us. The wind was soft and sighing. It wasn't crowded. The temperature was in the upper 60s. I could have stayed there a bunch longer. I'm glad we closed our day at this peaceful place.

Today we took the "High Road to Taos", stopping first at the Santuario de Chemayo. This area had long been known to the native people as a site for healing. Two hundred years ago a cross miraculously appeared to a villager, who built the Santuario. It's now the destination for thousands of pilgrims who come each year seeking miracles and healing.

Art and I arrived midway through the mass. The priest was low key and sincere. Parts of the service were in the original Greek, part was in English, and the final prayer was in Spanish. It was a lovely service even to me, a lapsed Catholic. I recalled the last time I was in a Catholic church was last November at St. Peter's in Rome. I liked this one better. It seemed much more in the spirit of simplicity and service, like St. Francis of Assisi, whom the brothers in this area follow.

We drove on to Taos and visited the Taos Pueblo, a national historic site. This pueblo has been inhabited for the last thousand years. The people I talked to, in their little shops situated in the old buildings, seemed reluctant to respond to my questions - except for the last woman, an artist, with whom I had an animated and candid conversation about Native American history and politics these days. We agreed there is power and greed at work everywhere.

Three small victories

It's been a stressful week, what with working and all. But I have had three good outcomes.

1. I'd been unable to blog using my iPad Version 1. I could touch the header line and type in there, but I couldn't get into the body. So I had to take a laptop when we were on the road if I wanted to blog. My tech-savvy niece Colleen told me I could send an email to my blog and have it published! There's a "Settings/Email and Mobile" option in Blogger. You enter an email address of "Your login dot (secret word you choose)@blogger.com". You designate whether you want blog entries to post immediately or whether you want to edit them first (obviously, I wouldn't on my iPad, since that's the problem). Then, when you send an email to the designated address, it gets transmitted into a blog entry, either posted or ready to edit and post.

I was delighted with this information. I've tested it and it works. I don't have a solution yet for uploading photos, but I suspect Colleen does, and when she reads this blog she may comment on how to do it so we all know.

2. Our furnace went out last week and the new one has had a couple of hiccups in the first few days that required a couple of under-warranty service calls. At one point the temperature in the house was 82 degrees and rising. It seems to be fine now - just in time for our home exchange guests, who will arrive tomorrow afternoon at about the same time as we pull into the driveway of their house in Santa Fe.

3. I figured out what I was doing on my work project. Finally got it together in my head. Today I spent a couple of hours on the project and got done what needed to happen before we leave. So I'll be able to enjoy Santa Fe without working! Yay!

Newbie again

I've accepted a part-time project for the massage franchise we have a quarter interest in. We're working on retaining all our clients as we acquire new ones. I'm the analyst calling the clients who've recently cancelled to see if there are patterns. We give them an incentive to call us back and talk to us. We'd like to provide such a good service that our clients don't want to leave.

I've put in about 16 hours this week. I'm making the usual newbie mistakes. I'm slow. I don't know the clients, or the employees. I don't know who knows what at the site. I've broken house rules about when to go online remotely. I've made a couple of blunders on the phone. It's nothing really new or unusual, these just-starting-out mistakes.

However, for the past nine months I haven't been in the business environment. I've been in the know in my activities. I have made my own rules or gone without.

It feels very weird to be a newbie again in the business world. I'm waking up early thinking about the phone calls. I'm stewing over how to make calls at a time when people won't be annoyed - that means not in the evenings and not on Sunday. I'd like to leave a voicemail with a brief explanation, the incentive, and my phone number. And I can do that on Monday, except that we're leaving on Tuesday for nine days in Santa Fe, and I'd really rather not be doing business when we're out of town. Oh, well. Life happens, I guess.

This is my choice, this part-time project. Now I remember, though, how it was in the working world for the last 20 years.

Hmmm.

Happy aftermath

My husband Art retired last May. He had worked for the electric company for over 40 years and his last job was line crew foreman - a thinking and supervising position, but also a lot of active physical labor. Art was accustomed to working hard. He had a couple of rotator cuff surgeries and then, last January, a surgery to remove the painful arthritic joint in his left thumb and replace it with a tendon from his forearm. He had no more pain, but his grip strength was diminished - so even if he hadn't retired, he wouldn't have been able to do his job any more. At present he collects long term disability (for another 15 months) as well as a pension.

Since retiring, Art has worked a Sudoku and the crossword puzzle every morning. He's worked in the yard in good weather. He's read. He's been on ten trips with me. But except for one day last month when he climbed a tree to saw off some dead branches, Art's level of physical activity has been pretty low. It just hasn't come up in his life. And since his appetite has always been excellent, he's put on some weight, which isn't real great for arthritis in other joints.

When I suggested we do a Habitat build in Louisiana, he was amenable. "It's on your bucket list after all," he said. He packed his work boots and his work jeans and his oldest t-shirts. And in Louisiana, he worked hard physical labor for four days. He was on the roof, sawing and hammering. He was lifting sheets of plywood and anchoring them. The construction foreman would say to him, "Do you know how to do this?" Sometimes Art would say no and the foreman would show him how and he would do it. He learned a lot up there on the roof, and apparently he did his usual hard work, because more than one person told me, "He's an animal up there." Here are a couple of pictures of Art I posted previously from last week.

On the plane coming home, I asked Art if he'd be interested in working for Habitat at a local affiliate in our area (Seattle). He said yes. So yesterday I went online and learned the East King County affiliate is working on a group of houses in two locations. They have full volunteer crews on Saturdays, but they need people on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Since we're not working, we can do that together. We'll be signing up to work once a week when we're in town. Our first day is Thursday, April 7.

Today is Art's 68th birthday. We went to exercise class this morning. He wore a t-shirt that says "How the hell did I get this old?" Everyone wished him a happy birthday. I suspect one of the great gifts, though, is his knowledge that he can still build, still be useful, and that there are projects out there that need him. He may be retired from paid work, but not from the opportunity to work more and be of service.

What's also cool is that yesterday we got a letter from Elderhostel telling us that our entire trip expenses are tax deductible - half of the fee is a donation to Elderhostel for administration and the other half is unreimbursed expenses for a volunteer activity. Even our airfare and car rental can be deducted. I had no idea. Guess it will make future out-of-town builds more feasible!

Last day in Louisiana

We took a two-hour swamp tour before lunch and our drive back to the Houston airport.

Duck blind built by our guide and towed into the middle of the swamp.

Young alligator in the sun. He watched us as we motored quietly by.

Nesting pair of yellow-crested somethings.

I'd never seen a swamp. It was quite different from what I'd expected, and beautiful.

Habitat Build - Day 4

For a group of "old guys", the ten men in our Road Scholar group got a lot done this week. My husband Art came back to the motel room each night "beat", but a shower and a short nap brightened him up. This is the most exercise he's gotten since he retired last May. He told me yesterday that he would be interested in doing other Habitat builds. So we'll be looking to volunteer in our home area. And who knows? A visit to Mongolia is on Art's bucket list, and I found out yesterday there's a Habitat build there in June of this year. Probably not enough time to save up for it, but it sure is an interesting possibility.

Lauren led the women today at the second site, and Joe led the men on the house. Both of them full of energy and patience - a credit to the Habitat organization in Lafayette.

Our Road Scholar Habitat builders.

Our little group of builders, "Sisterhood of the Bent Nails".

This has been a week! I'm grateful for a healthy body in reasonable physical condition - for our stamina, our motivation, our persistence in the warm Louisiana sunshine, our recognition of each other's strengths and limitations. By today we were working as a team: hammering, nailing, sawing, loading and unloading the pickup with plywood and lumber and tools.

I had a couple of thoughts. I'd love to find a Habitat build in a new place and invite our grown children to join us in a family built. But I think, even more fun, would be to do a build with my blogging community. Maybe someplace in the central US?

I'll be doing this again, for sure. Check one more item off my bucket list.

Dinner tonight at another dance hall. I ordered grilled catfish, which came with cole slaw, jumbalaya, and bread pudding for dessert. Art and I tried dancing the Cajun two step with a tiny bit of success. The band tonight was an accordian, a guitar, drums and a fiddle.

Tomorrow morning we load up the car, go with the group on a swamp tour and then lunch. We'll leave directly after that for our 200-mile drive to the airport in Houston. We'll be home tomorrow night.

Habitat Build - Day 3

Our crew of five women built three more work tables today. We were familiar with the process so the work went faster. But the weather was warmer - it got to about 82 - and we spent more time in the sun, so it seemed like harder work. Still, we all collaborated so we were more efficient. Meanwhile, the men installed about half the roof on the site house.

I asked how people get Habitat houses. Lauren said the people have to be working and they have to be in a living situation that they need to get out of - like numerous people living in one small place, or a slum landlord. They put in several hundred hours of sweat equity and then get a zero-interest mortgage which is often about the same amount as the rent they were paying.

Back at the motel, we had a guest storyteller and fiddler. He told us how the Cajuns of Louisiana got here - beginning with 1601 when a group of sharecroppers in France were promised land in Nova Scotia if they'd leave France and settle there. Once settled, they lived in Nova Scotia for about 150 years until political pressure from the British forced them out. It's a long story! Between sections of his narrative, the storyteller played the fiddle for us, demonstrating how the music of 400 years ago gradually changed into the styles of today.

We had dinner at a dance hall and Art and I got to try out the Cajun waltz we learned last night. Fun!

I am surprised at my stamina. I take an exercise class three days a week, and I go to the gym a couple of times a week to work on balance with the bosu ball, and I take yoga one night a week. For some reason I didn't get that all those things would make this project easier. Sometimes I'm a slow learner.