Projects

Jake dreams of making fine furniture and I wanted a cool looking outdoor table, so we teamed up on our first furniture making project to make a table for the porch with a tiled top! The tiles are talavera tiles from Mexico. This is not a fine piece of furniture, but we do think it turned out pretty well for an outdoor table. In fact we were so inspired that we went back to the tile store to pick out tiles for 2 side tables that we will make out of the leftover piece of plywood.

Also at the tile store were ceramic knobs decorated with all sorts of designs. We bought a bunch of those to put on the drawers in the kitchen. The kitchen cabinets and drawers had no knobs. It was a nice sleek look, but the cabinets aren't all that new and it is much easier to pull the drawers out now that they have knobs! One set of drawers has a flower theme, another vegetables, and a third butterflies, birds and fish.

Morning Walk at Hyde State Park

This morning we drove about ten miles up the road into the mountains to Hyde State Park for a walk. There is a real forest up there at the slightly higher elevation. Lots of Ponderosa pine and aspen and short shrubby oaks and rocky mountain maple. There is a nice path system and our 4 mile path looped down and around the hills. There were lots of familiar wildflowers, although probably different species than back east - false solomon's seal, sundrops, wild clematis, scarlet penstemon, pussytoes. And some new flowers like the bright red scarlet gilia, also called skyrockets!

The Birds

The baby robins have fledged and left without so much as a goodbye cheep. One day there were two, the next day one, and once we got out of bed yesterday morning the nest was empty. I've seen mom and dad searching the yard for insects still, but I haven't seen the fledglings again. I guess we can now take the nest down and clean off the porch. There are a lot of what look like small cherry pits lying around.

Other yard birds include hummingbirds, towhees, goldfinches, chickadees and house finches.

Arroyo

Last week in the cool of the evening we went for a walk up the arroyo, the dry creek bed, across the street from the house. There are houses along much of the way, but down in the creekbed it feels a little wild. Where the few streets pass over you have to either walk through culverts or scramble up the bank and back down. Although we have not seen any water in our section of the arroyo, it was clear that sometimes there is a great deal of water upstream at least. There are some fairly major erosion control structures along the way and the culverts are large.

More Updates on Life in Santa Fe

Now that the house and weather are accounted for, a few of the highlights since arriving here. On Friday night we celebrated our first week by going out for a nice dinner in town to the Anasazi Inn. It features noveau southwestern food, and was indeed quite good. Jake’s appetizer was a “cannelloni” with the shell made of thin strips of avocado wrapped around local goat cheese in a sauce of gazpacho. My main course was halibut over maitake mushrooms and fava beans and Jake’s featured lamb and – morels again! Shades of Europe.

On Saturday, we went for the really traditional Santa Fe food and entertainment. In the morning we went to the Farmer’s market and got lots of great local produce. As a supplement to breakfast we tried a foccaccia bread filled with apples and rhubarb. Next time I’m getting the breakfast burrito though filled with egg, fried potatoes and green chilies. Then we went down to the plaza later in the morning and caught the Gay Pride parade while eating a “Frito Pie”. This is a bag of fritos cut open with chili ladeled into it topped with cheese and optional jalapenos. Delicious! They sell these at the Five and Dime on the plaza and sometimes from a cart.

In the evening we went to the Santa Fe Rodeo. This was my first rodeo, and it was a blast. Events included bull riding and bareback bronco riding, calf roping, team calf roping, barrel racing and mutton busting. The rodeo starts with mutton busting. This is little kids, like 3- 6 years old I’m guessing based on size, that attempt to cling to a sheep. They all wore helmets and had huge grins after falling off, and the sheep seemed pretty patient with it all.

The bull riding was pretty frightening with the first rider falling off quickly and the bull seeming to be determined to gore him, but all was fine in the end. Very few cowboys managed to stay on the allotted 6 seconds and these were all professionals, many of whom are in the top 15 in the world apparently.

The bronco riding was different than I expected with the riders leaning back almost parallel to the horse and their legs having to stay in front of the cinch to get points. Most of them were also thrown off before 6 seconds were up.

The skill required for calf roping and barrel riding were most impressive, but the calf roping was generally unsuccessful. Guess the calves were running faster than usual that night. For the barrel riding, the women had to race around 3 barrels and back across the finish line in close to 17 seconds to win.

The rodeo offered featured lots of other entertainment. A local singer gave a decent rendition of the country western song about what she would do to her boyfriend’s pickup truck if he ever cheated on her but did not do so well leading the National Anthem. A group of women riders representing the Cheyenne Frontier Days did an amazing display of horsemanship with fancy patterns like the equivalent of a marching band on horseback at 35 mph. And a family with two boys ages maybe 8 and 16 performed. The 8 year old did trick riding including double vaults over his running pony, the 16 year old is the world’s best trick roper, both on the ground and on horseback performing really amazing roping displays, and the dad shot balloons with a 45 while running by on horseback.

On the homefront, the robin family has 3 babies keeping them very active!

Santa Fe Weather

A huge rain and hail storm has just passed by with probably more rain than Santa Fe has seen in several months. Rainfall here though is extremely localized. We could have gotten rain here and a mile down the road will be perfectly dry. In flatter areas and from the hilltops you can see rain showers traveling.

Generally clouds have been building up in the afternoon and then evaporate again by nightfall. In June, Santa Fe had 0.04 inches of rain, so just because there are clouds does not mean that there is rain! Then there is the phenomenon of virgas – rain that falls but evaporates before reaching the ground. Despite clouds, I don’t think the humidity has ever reached above 50% and most of the time it is less than 30%.

The sun shines very brightly, but if you are in the shade it feels cool. Temperatures have been in the low 90s during the day and mid 50s at night. In the sun, it feels hot, but sweat evaporates. Because of this, you have to be very careful to drink a lot of water. I always feel like July and August are truly the hottest months of summer, so we’ll see if this great high altitude weather lasts!

Santa Fe Aesthetic

We live in a territorial style house. The outside walls are covered in pinkish-brown stucco the color of the rocks on the surrounding hills. The roof lies flat, hidden behind walls that rise slightly above the roof line. There are no gutters, only channels that drain what little rainwater falls into rain barrels or the rocky ground. Inside the walls are supported by massive raw logs of pine with decorative cornices at each end. The floors are covered in Saltillo tiles, reddish brown glazed tiles with thick stripes of reddish brown grout between them. Many of the rooms have skylights that brighten the interior in addition to windows, and the living room and study have French doors that lead outside to patios. We generally throw open all the doors to the cool morning air and close them late morning to conserve the coolness if it’s a warm day.

The décor is very different from an eastern house as well. Tiles with southwestern motifs are set into the walls in some places, and the doors are painted a bright turquoise green. Little arched niches in the walls now hold Jake’s kachina collection and some pottery. The living room has a rounded kiva fireplace with a strip of turquoise tiles along the mantel.

Outside fences called coyote fences provide privacy from the neighbors. The coyote fences are just 2-3” logs still with bark on them wired together. The first plant you notice arriving at the house is the grey-blue leaved chemisa, a native shrub that bears yellow flowers. Chemisa lines the roadsides around here, and it is a lovely plant for landscaping. Our house has quite a few trees planted. Aspens with their white bark contrast nicely with some dark green spruce trees and with the stucco color of the house. Another small tree with silvery colored foliage common around the house is unfortunately the invasive Russian olive. There are also many sprouts of Siberian elm that I will have to try to dig out.

The backyard is irrigated and, a taste of home, a wisteria vine winds its way up a corner of the porch and along the porch roof. Even here wisteria needs severe pruning and a pile of cut vines now resides between a shed and the coyote fence waiting to be bundled for trash pickup. A spiny Pyracantha covers another wall. The beds along the house and stone retaining wall contain a few flowers - daylilies, beardtongue, bearded iris, Russian sage and some hollyhocks. A coyote fence by the hottub is covered in a huge silver lace vine that I have not gotten a chance to cut back yet and it is growing into a neighboring pine tree.

To the north of the house a tall hill rises and includes a little more backyard, but with no irrigation. Up there are cedar and pine trees and two kinds of cacti, a type of prickly pear and a cholla cactus. The cholla have beautiful purple flowers at the ends of their stubby branches during part of the year.

Within the historic district of Santa Fe, which ends just a few blocks from our road, all the houses and buildings have to be stucco, and it does lend a charming appearance to the town. Apparently downtown Santa Fe used to have quite a few regular “American” or old west looking buildings but some government officials decided it would be better for tourism to go with stucco.

Last night we visited a brand new house built on the hills overlooking town. The couple that owns it designed it. The kitchen featured a large island covered in dark blue tiles with side countertops sheathed in copper. The ceilings were paneled in different woods in every room – cedar planks in one and maybe birch or small cherry with the bark still on in another. The outdoor area was divided into three “rooms” all with beautiful views over the mountains and town. But overall the style was still territorial with adobe colored walls, a flat roof and wood beams.