…former mayor and current blogger Jim Baca can be heard wailing “nooooooooooooooo”.
Ok, I don’t know that for sure. It’s just the fiction writer coming out in me. :)
But Jim Baca is a pretty strong anti-Marty Chávez guy, so I wonder at his response to the ABQjournal article that Mayor Chávez won his court battle to run for a third term.
Developing.
I’ll be checking Only in New Mexico throughout the day.
Yes, Monday finds me back at my same gray walled office. Back to work, slogging through emails and working up my expense report.
All in all, the trip to Florida was a good one.
I’m glad to be home. It was a long haul on Saturday, hopping a couple planes and ultimately arriving almost two hours later than I was supposed to. But I made it and a really cute boy was waiting for me when I came down the stairs to baggage claim.
I didn’t sleep well on the trip, so was glad to sleep in my own little bed, and sleep I did. Woke up Sunday morning MUCH refreshed. The Good Man fussed over me and that helped get me right, too.
Back to “regular” work today. While making the drive in this morning, I was thinking about what made the Florida trip fun, and I hit on a thought.
I got to drive.
Now, don’t gave me that doggy head tilt look. Let me explain.
“Back in the day” living in New Mexico, one of my best stress relievers was to get in the car and drive. Not always with a destination, sometimes just driving, watching the white lines roll by.
Since I went to school in Las Cruces and my folks lived in Carlsbad, I had a LOT of hours in the middle of NOWHERE, hum of the tires as my companion.
I got a LOT of good thinking done during those drives.
Meditation. That’s really what it is.
Well now living here in a densely populated area, just getting in the car and going isn’t all that meditative. With all the traffic, it is stress inducing.
When I lived in Albuquerque, I could drive for a half hour in pretty much any direction and be OUT of the city, humming along at 75 mph, and letting the stress float away.
Here, I can drive a half hour and be ever more mired in humanity.
So I enjoyed the fact that, last week, I got some road time. The ride on I-4W to Clearwater Beach took about two and a half hours all in. It was a little densely populated around Tampa Bay and that stressed me, but had moments of a peaceful ride. It got really good when I got off I-4 and into the small roads winding through Clearwater and over all the causeways.
The trip to Cocoa Beach was only about an hour and was PERFECT for highway meditation. (see, I still can find NOTHING wrong with Cocoa Beach). SR-528E is pretty rural, away from people, not heavily trafficked on a weekday. The tolls do take a bit away from that trip, but even they are manageable. You get a rhythm of hitting the various toll plazas and you know they’ll be there (kind of like having to stop at a Border Patrol station…so it’s all good).
And during those two drives a lot of thinking got done. Some useful (i.e. where should I emphasize success criteria for my team this year), some not (i.e. why do so called “80’s” radio stations only play the cheesy “hits” like “Jump” (both Van Halen and Pointer sisters), and not the deeper cuts from bands like Depeche Mode or The Cure?).
Getting all that thinking done is healing. I find I’m in a better mood today than when I left. Like I’ve grown from my journey.
I sure wish I could more easily hit the open road from where I live to think things out.
Oh well, just another reason to miss my fair New Mexico.
Flying makes me thoughtful. Herewith, my thoughts from some seven hours in the air in which I also lost three time zones.
Oddly, today, this is a New Mexico blog written by a Californian visiting Florida.
GeoGRAPHIC!
Thoughts from the skies:
1) Noise cancelling headphones. Da bomb. How did I ever live without them? Best Christmas gift evar!
2) Traveling to warm vacation spots while Spring Break is in swing means you will be required to endure obnoxious teenagers. A LOT of obnoxious teenagers.
3) Exit row window seat. Yes. Leg room. View. Ability to move. Middle seat empty…even better.
4) Southwest’s new boarding process? May as well go back to plastic numbers because that’s basically what it is again. 1-30, 31-60, 61-90, blah, blah, blah…been there, done that. Only this time with letters!
5) Breakfast at home…always a good idea. Even more so when flying for the WHOLE day. Even if it is just tomato soup, it’s a good idea.
6) Comfy pants = happy traveler. The ones that are like two sizes too big and I just don’t care.
7) Pocket full of tissues is a good thing. Especially in allergy season. Those little square napkins that come with your drink don’t cut it. It was a last minute thought but proved to be the best decision all day.
8) Who is Southwest kidding with these “100 calorie” snack packs. Give me eight! I don’t care, I’m HUNGRY! Turns out tomato soup wasn’t enough to last all day. It got me to…oh, San Antonio then I wanted some real eats.
9) Why don’t you get the whole can of soda on the plane anymore?
And finally…
10) Just so you know…Ethel Merman has been reincarnated as a toddler. Yes, a solid hour of singing with the pitch and tone of a three year old and the gusto of Ethel herself. At one point the child hit a “Laaaaaaaaaa” and held it there. Which brings us back to #1.
Noise cancelling headphones. *Highly* recommended.
I’m sure the young man who planned on mugging 83 year old Bernie Garcia thought it was going to be an easy take. A little old lady pumping gas outside a store in Santa Fe.
But the one thing he didn’t count on was the lady’s tenacity.
As Bernie pumped gas, a whippersnapper leapt out of a car and grabbed at her purse.
From the article:
“With a gas pump nozzle in one hand and her purse in the other, Garcia refused to give in to the male assailant’s effort to yank her purse away— this in spite of her being dragged on her side during the struggle.”
“What happened next was a tug of war between a man in his 20s and an 83-year-old woman who stands 5 feet 4 and weighs 125 pounds.”
“He grabbed my left arm and went for my purse,” Garcia recalled. “He started pulling on it, but couldn’t get it off me because (the strap) was winded twice around my arm.”
She wanted to bop him with the gas nozzle but couldn’t manage it so she sprayed gasoline on him instead.
A bystander pulled up as this was happening and yelled at the kid who he ran off, jumped into a car (that had been stolen in Española earlier that day) and took off.
Police responded quick and the three guys in the car were arrested.
Meanwhile, Ms. Bernie Garcia, my hat is off to you. I don’t know if I could have been that clear headed in the same situation.
“It happened so fast, and I just fought, even though I was scared,” she said. “I just wanted to slap him in the face.”
He deserves at least that.
I always say you gotta watch out for the little ones. Little, but scrappy.
Source: ABQJournal
I happen to be one of those kinda folks that often pays attention to minutiae in my daily life. I find it both exciting and aggravating that I’m like that.
But it’s never boring.
Take for example, this weekend. I wrote letters to my two godkids then walked over to the blue post box near my place to mail them.
As I walked, I pondered how utterly cool it is that I can write some words on a piece of paper, seal it shut, put a sticker on the front, and through the power of humans and machines in about two to three days it will make it all the way to Las Cruces, New Mexico. To my friend’s house on the outskirts of town. My words will travel 1200 miles and a human will put them into a metal box on a rural road.
Wow!
Ok, I realize the US Mail has been around for a long time and it was probably, like a gazillion times more amazing back in the days when some guy rode a horse for DAYS to get a letter to someone in a remote location…like, er, Las Cruces. But still, the fact that it usually just works so effortlessly is really, really cool.
Even cooler, I recently got a package from a friend in London. How far out is that? I mean, I got a package from someone in a time zone eight hours ahead of mine. When I go to work he’s going home for the day. And he sent me a book, and it came halfway around the globe (ok, not *quite* that far, don’t go getting all literal on me while I’m blowing my own mind). Sure, that was UPS that made it so, but still.
Wow!
I know the interwebs make communication more instant, but there is still something really cool about a written letter or a package from a friend.
It’s been great to watch my two godkids grow up and come into their own. Through their written letters I learn a lot about their personalities, the people they are becoming. I could get that talking to them on the phone, but it’s fascinating what they choose to write about.
Makes me proud. And I love writing them back, too.
Thanks to the simple magic of the USPS, my relationship with my godkids grows by each postmarked letter, line by line.
Hey Mr. Postman? Thanks for that!
