I'd like to buy a month of 48 hour days, please, Alex...

The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile was in town! :(They didn't pick me to sing the Oscar Mayer Wiener Song:(


I'm going to have to break this past week down into chapters. I can't believe I'm still alive and not incarcerated, hospitalized or have my picture up in the post office.

I can't even remember where life begins after my last installment of the blog....Gees! OK, let's try a randomly chosen starting point, for no other reason than it's the one that first springs to mind. That would be what I did 10 minutes ago--clearing out my email boxes. That's not too helpful or interesting, is it? OK, let's try: Seeing a tarantula in the wild!! Woo hoo! Now THERE'S a starting point, and it was only 4 hours ago!

My neighbor Donna and I were in pursuit of foodstuffs that we felt like eating vs. what we each had in the fridge to eat, so off to town we went. We were gonna go 4Wheelin' in the CPRJeep afterwards. We gnosh, shop and head for the hills. We ended up in an arroyo. A very big arroyo. With very large rocks, sand, clay and all the usual suspects scurrying around said geological specimens. I was in search of some river-washed tree trunks to use in the building of the house. (VERY NM tradtional. READ: Scavenging is a competitive sport down here.) We go bopping around, bouncing over rocks and spinning through sand, past a dead horse :(, a huge owl and not much else.

As we're tradtional-ing (READ: scavenging) I was tieing down some small diameter tree branches to use as lantillas (lan-tea-yuhs), long sticks across patio beams to provide shading on said patio, on top of the Jeep when Donna, who's about 200 feet away yells: "Julie! A tarantula!" SWEET! I head over her way and, bless her little Marylander heart, she was right! Look at the pics if you doubt her--or me.



We made it out with four lantillas and a pretty good spot to nab some larger tree trunks later when I find some way to transport them.

Before Donna called to go eat I had only been in the trailer for about 2 hrs. after having spent the night in town at the La Mirada B&B. This is where the story gets to the tied up ending of what had been a week of unraveling. I think I'll stop now. This next part is gonna take some unknotting. Check back in a coupla days to see if I've managed to make the early escapades of the week somewhat coherent.

Moonrise over the Manzanos from back porch at Donna's house, half a mile west of me and my closest neighbor.

Manana, baby!