Opinions – Page 131 – Oh Fair New Mexico

I’ve Got A Secret

In one of those weird things that sticks with you over the years…

I remember that some dear friends of our family always subscribed to New Mexico Magazine. We’d go visit their beautiful adobe home in the Valley, and when the adult conversation would bore me, I’d pick up that magazine and flip through the pages.

New Mexico Magazine gave me a view on my home state that was much different than what I knew. I’d stare and stare at those amazing full color photographs of Native American jewelry, or locations around the state, or blue sky and clouds.

It was like my New Mexico, only better. I used to devour that magazine cover to cover.

When I became an adult, I started subscribing to New Mexico Magazine for myself. After my move to California, the magazine helped me get through pangs of homesickness. I’d dog ear pages of photos and articles that made me happy.

New Mexico Magazine has been a fixture in my life as long as I can remember. Today, I know something that the kid sitting on the floor in a beautiful adobe home in the Valley didn’t know.

I’ve been keeping a secret. I didn’t want to say too much in case it didn’t work out.

Now the secret can be told. I have permission to share my Very Big News:

I wrote three articles that have been accepted for publication in New Mexico Magazine.

Let me just pause here before I pass out.

Ok, I’m back.

The first article is slated for the June issue. Due out soon!

The other two are planned for the September/October timeframe. Since the magazine is undergoing some changes to the editorial staff, it’s a bit up in the air. I hope to know more soon.

All gratitude to Associate Editor Ashley Biggers (@ambiggers on Twitter) for opening the conversation and working with me through this process. She has a talent for developing writers, and I’m grateful for her patience.

I’m already working on a couple more ideas for upcoming articles. There is so much to know and explore about New Mexico that I’m excited to share.

This is a pretty big honor for a little girl from New Mexico.

Join me now in an epic rendition of the Happy Dance!

To properly celebrate, I wore my Fat Babies to work today. New Mexico in da hoouuuse!

Image from Yippee Farms

Love Your Librarian

There was this lady named Erna Fergusson who opened up the world for me.

Erna was a New Mexican, one of our best. She was born and grew up in Glorieta and later spent time in Washington DC when her father was a Congressman. Erna was a worldly woman dedicated to capturing in writing much of the history and tradition of the indigenous people of both New Mexico and Latin America. She was a teacher and later helped found the Albuquerque Historical Society.

In 1966, the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Library System opened up a library branch bearing Erna’s name.

A few years later, here’s where I come in. My maternal grandmother, herself a schoolteacher, taught me how to read at a pretty young age. I took to reading like the proverbial duck to water.

My mom, also an avid reader, brought me to the library named for Erna Fergusson and showed me how to check out books. The world was suddenly my oyster! The scent of library glue, the perfect little rubber stamps and the shelves and shelves of books…well I was hooked. Obsessed, really.

I’ve always had a special place in my heart for both libraries and librarians.

Where I live now, I have access to one of the largest library systems around, and I’m in utter literary bliss. I’m constantly amazed by the obscure and not-so-obscure items in find in the collection.

A couple weeks ago right here on this blog, I professed my love (again) for another of my favorite New Mexicans, Max Evans.That same day, I checked into my library’s catalog to see if they had any of Max’s books that I hadn’t read.

Sure enough, they had a copy of One-Eyed Sky, a collection of three Max Evans stories. Well, I ordered it up to be sent to me via interlibrary loan. It took a couple days, and the same day I checked it out, with much anticipation, I opened the cover and was greeted by a sight that made me nostalgic:

It may be a little hard to see, but I added a red arrow that points to a rubber stamped date of Nov 30 ’64.

All of the stamps prior to that don’t have the year included, but one can assume 1964 and earlier. The book has a copyright date of 1963, but I figured I’d get a later printing of the book from the library. Nope. This is a first edition and it’s still in my library and still in good shape.

Behind the paper due date page was this:

Then I just went all squishy inside. I always did love that pocket they used to glue inside the front of books along with the card for the librarian to stamp that lets you know the day the book is due back. Can’t you just imagine the librarian typing up the title on both pocket and card, filing it neatly in alphabetical order while adding Max’s stories to the library collection? Then the series of librarians who dutifully stamped that card while checking it out to eager readers (like me!) over the past forty-eight years.

Well, it all made me kind of misty eyed. There’s ol’ Max, our Max, a fixture in the Bay Area library all these years. I read that book cover to cover, devouring every word and got to the last page feeling nothing but gratitude.

Just makes me want to say thanks to that one librarian, and all the rest as well, for giving me the world.

Photos by Karen Fayeth, taken with the Camera+ app on an iPhone4.

There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute

Yesterday at work, I printed a Very Important Document to the shared color printer down the hall. As my company is as cheap as possible, we’re not to use the color printer except for VERY Important Documents, so this was a very big deal.

As I waited for the dulcet tones of the finicky color printer processing my job, a message popped up on my screen. The printer manager was reporting that the “Waste Receptacle is Full”

Um. Ok. I didn’t know printers came with their own waste receptacle, but fine.

I walked to the printer and following the directions on its tiny LED screen. I opened the right flap. I pulled out “tray B”, and emptied tray B of a gooey black tarlike substance, replaced tray B, closed the flap, and heard the printer begin to warm up.

Ah, here we go. My beautiful full color document is just moments away!

“Printer warming up….”

So I waited. And waited. I wondered if I should wrap a sweater around the poor thing because it was clearly really cold if it needed twenty minutes to warm up. I mean, it’s hot like the bowels of hell hot inside our HVAC impaired office, but this little color printer must have a metabolism issue.

When it was finally reporting it had imbibed a hot toddy and was raring to go, I listened again for the sounds of the machine working, filled with happy anticipation.

Another message popped up on my screen. This time is said “Toner is low. Please replace.”

*sigh*

Fine.

Back I went to the machine and again followed the directions on screen. I lifted the main assembly, figured out which toner compartment was low, dropped several blocks of wax toner into the slot, thus using up the last of the supply, and closed the lid.

While the machine drank another hot toddy and shivered its way back to health, I took the empty box over to the group admin so she could order more.

Finally, the printer shuddered and shook and petulantly spit out my document.

This morning I needed to scan a document. Well that requires the big multiplex copier, printer, scanner, fax, coffee maker, photo booth, lube oil and filter change machine in the breakroom and shared by the whole floor.

I figured I was safe…this was just a scan. No toner or paper or other consumables would be required on this one! Scan, send. Easy peasy!

Nope.

I walk to the printer, lay my document in the feeder and immediately a message pops up on the screen.

“Scans may not be clear due to dirt on the lens. Please follow the directions below.”

So I followed the directions and I opened and shut doors and flaps, and found a little wiping tool and I slid it down the lens and then I cleaned the whole damn thing up and shut the doors and flaps and waited the twenty minutes and finally got my freaking scan.

The machines. They know. Evidently no one else on the floor will give them TLC, but I will. They line up and come to me for blessings, ministrations and tending to their wounds.

I’m Mother Teresa of Xeroxistan.

Image is a still from the fabulous movie Office Space.

Off To A Slow Start

Here we are at Monday again and I’m making a rather slow moving entrée back into the world after a rock-star fun sort of weekend.

I imbibed just about one too many San Francisco Cable Car drinks at the Fairmont hotel and felt very retro with martini glass in hand. A Cable Car is the sort of beverage that tastes so good and then drops you on your arse.

Meaning, I loved every bit of that ride.

Since I’ve most certainly streamlined a few brain cells right on out of the ol’ noggin, I’ll use my friends at Unconscious Mutterings as a place to start this blogging week off right.

Without further ado, this week’s list of free association words:

________________________

Trumpet ::

That reminds me of that old joke blues musicians tell….

“What’s the range on a trumpet?”
“Oh, about two hundred yards.
“Two hundred yards? What are you talking about?!”
“You know, when I throw it over the piano, past the accordion, through the banjo…”

Love ::

What I felt for the world after I’d drained my second Cable Car beverage.

Routine ::

It was nice to break up my dull work-a-day routine (that has me worn down to a nub) for a weekend of jolly debauchery.

It was much needed.

Infringe ::

I may have infringed on The Good Man’s personal space when sleeping off both a wine tasting and a Fairmont cocktail party. I do tend to snore…and spread out, whilst in my cups.

Thankfully he was doing much the same. It was all good.

Misgivings ::

Ah misgivings. What I had the next morning upon remembering that my middle aged self can’t rebound like I used to. The sun screamed in the windows, the reflux shouted in my esophagus, and I found a bruise on my arm that I can’t recall how I obtained.

So I was a bit low the next day. At breakfast, with my hair falling down in my eyes, as Roger Miller would say, I was unsure I was gonna make it through the day. Two eggs over easy with sausage and a pot of coffee and suddenly the day started looking a lot better.

Then I took a nap.

Establish ::

And so, upon leaving the Fairmont, I had to establish just what a classy broad I am by setting my brand new glass “environmentally friendly” water bottle on the floor while I fiddled with my bag. I accidentally nudged the bottle, knocking it over. Once it hit the polished marble floor it shattered.

Reeeeal classy.

Stupefy ::

Like liquefy. Only stupider. Or something.

Constipate ::

Not even going to touch this one with a ten foot pole.

Conjure ::

And so after the most fun I’ve had in a good long while, this morning I had to conjure up the ability to go back to work. It was all gray cubicle walls and “did you get that cost savings report done yet?”

I sat at my nondescript desk with no Cable Car in hand and sighed the sigh of the responsible grownup I am for forty (plus) hours a week, planning my next adventure.

Miscellaneous ::

And thus ends the latest of my miscellaneous posts about miscellany.

(Isn’t that lovely? I yearn like a lovesick schoolgirl just looking at it.)

I wasn’t the only one having way too much fun at the Fairmont…this greeted me in the restroom off the lobby. Hell even I wasn’t having this much fun….