Ummm…T+5 and in a new life stage
posted in Alaska, New Mexico, The Move 2 |Okay, so I suck at updating. And, for the nth year in a row, I have hopelessly flubbed NaBloPoMo.
Sigh.
Maybe next year, eh?
So. We are now ensconced at a lovely little B&B in Ranchos de Big City (not to be confused with River Rancho, a suburb of Big City filled with McMansions crammed together cheek by jowl). As a result of this stay, we have become enamored of Ranchos de Big City, an area on the banks of Big River that is filled with huge old cottonwood trees, old ranchos of sprawling adobe structures sitting next to outrageously large new construction.
The streets are tiny. The properties are put together in huge blocks, so you might have a series of one-acre properties lining the street, with a series of one-acre properties behind them, reached by a common lane/driveway leading off the main street.
Interspersed here and there are irrigation ditches, which the local residents have used as hiking paths for years and years, to the point that the village of Ranchos de Big City finally gave way and made the ditches into official village hiking easements.
Following the irrigation ditch right next to the B&B, one finds: behind the house, horses in a corral; next, a pair of friendly llamas; then a newer adobe barn with yet more horses. On the far side of the ditch, you have: behind a lovely stick-and-wire privacy fence, a huge pond with a waterfall gurgling into it, filled with migrating geese; a field with more horses which is a destination for the migrating sandhill cranes; then some outbuildings which are home to some happy dogs with hoarse barks…
And on and on…
We love it. We would love to live here. Unfortunately, it’s outrageously expensive. But we would never have known of this area without the B&B, which caught OmegaDad’s attention by it’s name, which is quintessentially New Mexican.
Aside from that…
OmegaDad has started his new job. He has a corner office with big windows. He was greeted by seven neat stacks of files that his assistant said were items that needed his immediate attention. He also has an administrative assistant, which he finds somewhat befuddling; he is so used to doing everything for himself that she has to remind him that she’s there to help him, and she can actually do things for him…so he can wrangle those stacks of files into shape while letting her handle the day-to-day stuff.
The dotter and I have been exploring. We drop OmegaDad off at work, return to the B&B for (scrumptious) breakfast, head out for a hike somewhere we can let the dawg off his leash for a while, then drive around to scope out various properties OmegaDad and I have decided we might be interested in. Then we take a swim at the B&B’s indoor pool, schmooze with the utterly charming elderly proprietor for a while, then go pick up OmegaDad from work. (It will be nice when one of our cars arrives here, so the to-and-from-work schlepping ends.)
We now have a handle on a temporary, month-to-month furnished rental, so we can take some time looking at properties.
When we left Big City, Alaska, it was snowing. It took half an hour for the airplane to be de-iced before we took off. Our old Alaska town has has -5 temperatures already.
Here in Big City, New Mexico, it has been sunny and–at worst–down in the upper 30s at night. Everyone here complained the first few days we were here about how cold it was…we just sort of gave them old-fashioned looks and reminded them just where we had just come from. (And for the record, the huge storm that was all over the news? The OMG-it’s-the-end-of-the-world storm? Was on the north and west coast of Alaska, about 600 miles from Big City, Alaska. So, not only did we miss the storm by flying out of Alaska two days before it hit, we would have been just fine anyway, because it was like living in the Panhandle of Texas when a hurricane hits the Texas-Louisiana border. 
)
