Drenched Enchantment
We just got back from our trip to New Mexico. We only effectively had four days and that absolutely was not enough time to visit everyone that I wanted to, or to do all of the things that I wanted to. I relished the time I did get to spend there however!
This trip also served as the initial test run of the new Ford Fusion that Sirocco got. It's a hybrid vehicle, and only had about 30k miles on it. It seemed to work pretty well I thought. Though I seem to have a cursed touch when it comes to the brights, as they just don't seem to stay on for me. It's kind of nice driving a newer vehicle where you're not constantly worrying what might break on it. Getting back to driving my Truck is always a trip. Gotta remember that braking takes a lot longer.
Gah, speaking of my truck, I had a super scary thing happen to me a couple weeks back when I was on my way home on the interstate. It was a Sunday, and I was in the far-right lane when a truck to my immediate left started to turn into my lane! I panicked and instead of risking staying in that lane, I jerked my wheel to one side and ended up fortunately in an off ramp that was there. UNFORTUNATELY, this off ramp was not designed to be exited at 75 MPH, but was one of those ones that goes in a complete circle. So I hit my brakes, but to my horror, I realized I was not going to stop in time, and would run off of the road into a dirt embankment. Instead of doing that, I jerked my wheel the way I wanted to go and started to power slide. I could hear the wheels screeching, but my truck eventually started turning.
I got so so very lucky. My back wheels slipped barely into the dirt embankment, and had I slipped any further I probably would have rolled my truck several times. I was able to correct my steering shortly after that, and then it was over. I wasn't sure what direction I was going for a bit, nor did I really care. My adrenaline was so high at that point. I probably should have pulled over to collect myself. But I continued on. On my way home, I also just happened to be behind someone who rear-ended someone else at full speed at a red-light. I was a distance away, so there wasn't a risk to me there, but it certainly didn't help me cool my nerves.
I just keep re-playing what happened in my head and just can't get over how incredibly lucky that I am. I also wish that I had a dash cam to record the event. In any case, yeah, very glad that I was neither crushed by the semi nor rolled over into that embankment. If either of those things happened, I don't think they would have turned out okay for me.
Anyways, back to our trip!
Starting with Thursday... I got home from work and immediately started to fret about traveling. Did I pack all of the things that I needed? Who was going to water my plants? Hours turned into even more hours of not sleeping. Eventually I did get to sleep about an hour before we were due to leave. When I woke up, I was extraordinarily grumpy, but I did manage to get all of the stuff packed that I needed to hoping that we could just leave at 6pm. Unfortunately, we didn't hit the road until about 7pm, and we hit an awful lot of weather on our way in addition to needing to eat (which I needed to be reminded of, as I'm just as happy to plow through a full six hours of driving without stopping with no food.)
When we were about halfway there, I reminded the hare that he needed to call his mom to make sure she got vaccinated, as she was being hesitant about it. Unfortunately, she hadn't and so that put us in a pretty crappy situation where we had to decide if we were going to stay in Chimayo for the night as we'd originally planned. All of the evidence indicates that as vaccinated people, we are incredibly unlikely to spread the virus. So with that information we decided that we'd stay the night and see his family, but that we were going to keep our distance throughout the visit, and mask when in proximity to her just emphasize that this is a thing that she needs to do. It wasn't an easy decision, but kind of the middle ground between pretending that absolutely nothing is wrong, and just not visiting at all. I dunno if it worked. I hope it does because she has a lot of conditions that would be impacted if she were to catch the virus.
In any case, once we'd resolved to do that, we pressed forward to Chimayo. We ended up rolling in sometime after 2:30am. I was exhausted and thought sleep would come pretty readily to me, but I couldn't have been more wrong. I tossed and turned all night without a minute of sleep. I think it was a combination of an incredibly uncomfortable bed, as well as the extremely humid environment with all of the rain, and a swamp cooler. I need to remember to get a memory foam mattress topper to bring next time. Bed of Pain. Anyway, eventually I did nod off, but that wasn't until about 11am, and the result of that was that I didn't wake up until 7pm, which was absolutely not my intent... as I'd meant to flip my schedule completely. So that sucked. Nonetheless, I got up, and hung out for the remainder of the time. The hare's family and their antics are always amusing, especially around dinner time where I can't avert my eyes as they talk about all of the embarrassing things ever. Do I laugh at these macabre jokes, or not? Well they're all laughing, so why not? Dinner's always finished in stitches.
We also did Christmas-in-July at their house. I kind of felt bad because we hadn't brought anything to exchange, as I didn't know they were doing this. We got a nice comforter set, and his sister gave us some very nice Nambé-ware. His family tried to get us to stay another night but we decided to head to ABQ that night to spend the remainder of our nights at Miracle's house. Mercifully, he does have a memory-foam mattress. I still felt a little stifled by the humidity, but I did manage to fall asleep sometime around 7am, and woke up at 11am.
Saturday I was invited by my older brother to my Niece's birthday party. It was a low-key affair with not a lot of people I didn't know that it was going to be a pool party! Otherwise, I'd have brought my trunks. Ahh well. I gave her cash for her birthday because I didn't have time to plan much else. She's so kind and loving. Actually so is her older sister. And then I got to see my new Nephew... the last time I saw him, he was barely crawling, and now he's Mr. Destructo, getting into absolutely everything, and terrifying the everliving hell out of people as he takes tumbles against the concrete, comes dangerously close to touching hot grills, and nearly takes off his own toes with shovels. He reminded me why being around small kids stresses me the f out, and why I really don't think I'd be able to stand having kids of my own.
In any case, it was nice to catch up with those who were there. We left eventually to go pick up our friend Stefan who has been having a really rough time in life in general. I aimed to give him a reprieve from that, and we spent the rest of the night just hanging out together and doing some LAN gaming with Harp and Miracle. It was a fun time, and I really wish I could be this close to all of my friends like this all of the time. The night of gaming and junk food wound down eventually, and I had to take Stefan back. We had some serious discussions about his plans to get out of his current living situation, and his anxiety and depression. I tried to be as encouraging as I know how to be. I have confidence that he'll be able to pick himself up, but I do worry about him. At some point along the way, we were being tailed by someone who I assumed didn't like my driving. I was going slow on the Big-I interchange, and she sped up next to me and gave me a thumbs up?! It was flippin' weird. 3am drivers, who knows. I dropped him off, said 'hi' to Ben, and then drove back without much incident. I was asleep by 4am.
At 8:30am I was woken up by the sound of explosions from an episode of Stargate that Miracle happened to be watching. That was rather amusing, it may have manifest in my dreams but I can't quite remember. In any case, I was up, and we decided to go to Vic's Daily Café for breakfast. Unfortunately when we rolled up, they were closed for the 4th of July. We went to nearby Milly's instead and only *just* beat the crowd before Cavalry [sic] Chapel let out its herd. Had a chicken fried steak breakfast that was definitely not as good as Vic's, but it did fill me up. I also got a Baklava triangle, and a club sandwich for the voracious hare who'd stayed grumpily in bed, then we set off.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in Santa Fe where we drove to meet Sirocco's childhood friend who happens to work in epidemiology. The pandemic had hit him like a brick of course, so it was interesting to hang out and listen to him go over what his pandemic experience had been like, and just how screwed over we might be going forward. Notably, it really taxed his interest in the field, and he's starting to look very far afield away from epidemiology- how about water? That's definitely not going to be a huge upcoming political problem as all of our freshwater sources seem to be drying up. [/sarcasm] We did most of our hanging out at Santa Fe Brewing company. I had a Mocha Stout which was nice, and chocolatey and delicious. The atmosphere was absolutely fantastic. Couldn't have had a better afternoon I'd say. We also went to a little dingy game shop. They were having a special on Blu-Ray movies, so I bought four of them. A couple Star Trek movies, Inception, and Lincoln. It was fun reminiscing over old favorites like Perfect Dark. Ahh memories. Eventually we wrapped things up at about 7pm.
On our way back, I had to organize my dad and my older brother so that we could meet together to watch the City of Rio Rancho municipal fireworks show. They just opened a new park in which to do it. It took a lot of finagling, but eventually we all ended up in the same place. My dad seemed to be in good spirits, but he'd mentioned that he's probably moving out of his girlfriend's house as things were just not working out. This is rather unfortunate. I just couldn't imagine pushing 60, and still bouncing in and out of the uncertainty in a relationship. He's worked hard, but does't have a lot to retire on. I have an awful feeling that he's going to be working well into his seventies. If he does that, all I can do is to hope that he stays happy.
The fireworks were fine, just like any fireworks show really. We said our goodbyes, and then Sirocco and I drove to Whataburger to grab some grub, then headed back to Miracle's house for our last night there.
I finally got a full eight hours of sleep that night, waking up 10am. We showered, got our things together, packed it in the car, and then set off for one more trip to Albuquerque to visit my aunt Brita. I always forget how idiotic and conservative my uncle is, but was quickly reminded when we noticed a thin blue line flag draping down from the center console of his truck. Whatever. He's actually a cool guy, building cars, structures, and welding things as he does. Just... can't ever engage him in politics. In any case, I'm there to see my aunt, and she suggests that we go to lunch without my uncle. Thank goodness.
She always has a lot to talk about. Mostly wants to talk about family gossip. I guess my cousin Otto finally got in touch with her after they'd been feuding for a few years. That was nice to see, though he wrote her a five-page letter, which I thought was a little strange and concerning. Is he trying to make amends before he does something drastic? My attempts to contact him were unsuccessful. I hope he's doing alright. Definitely something that I'll keep trying.
It was a good lunch to end on in any case, couple things that got my hopes up, and the plate of enchiladas was damn good too.
We got on the road back to Denver. I hadn't mentioned my mom up to this point because she had decided to go to Abiquiu Lake even though she knew I was going to be in town. I briefly toyed with the idea if taking a detour to visit, but given that Sirocco had to work the next day, and the weather was being uncooperative, we decided against it. In Las Vegas, the torrential rain was so bad that we had to pull off to the side of the road to wait for the cloudburst to pass. We weren't the only ones. We were there for about thirty minutes. The rest of the trip was uneventful.
We got home, unpacked our things, hung out for a while, and then eventually we went to bed.
All in all it was a very successful trip.
Got lots of comments about my facial hair lmao. I'd never grown a moustache before, and my beard is as long as it has ever been. My hair is also about as long as it was when I was in college. I don't know how much longer I'm going to keep this pandemic look up. It's all such a pain to take care of.