Desert Magnolia

As the biggest storm of year, 'a whopper!' by national weather standards, makes its way across the West and into the Midwest today, we find ourselves making a few wishes: 1. Please let it NOT impede Son's journey home. He needs (ok we need him) to be home in time for Christmas Eve. 2. Please let it wait, just 12 more hours, to superchill us. We love hanging out by a crackling fire, sipping cider, playing Scrabble and backgammon and super silly card games. Together. 3. Let it allow a white Christmas. A beautiful, peaceful, serene Norman Rockwell-ish holiday. That's all. Just three wishes.

Saturday afternoon. The mail comes, Hubby grabs it from the box, and, for some reason unknown to any of us, he opens the water bill then instead of when he pays bills at the end of the month. Water bills tend to be the same within each season, after all. Unless they're TWICE what they one before was. Which this one was. Really? WHY????? Well, 18,000 gallons more usage than the prior month. 18,000. That's a whole lotta water. Leaking somewhere. Many profanities escaped our mouths before we took several deep breaths and collected our wits. Which meant calling a leak detection service. On a Saturday. Which meant overtime. Or a premium. Or whatever they call it. But a LOT. A really nice man wearing a logo'd shirt and thermals and carrying a modern day divining rod found the leak. Fortunately, it was outside the house..but right outside Daughter's bedroom. And it was deep. 4 feet or so. Turns out the water main broke. And leaked. And leaked some more....

It's one of those weeks. A rule breaking week. One where I decide, around 1 p.m. on Wednesday, that Thursday morning for the weekly beverage treat of a chocolate steamer is far too far away. So I go an errand. A really important errand. Involving swinging by Satellite, finding a good parking spot (no easy feat since the UNM area, where Satellite resides, is nutso this time of day/year) and ordering up my new favorite almost perfect beverage. Mission accomplished. Sunbeam is shining across my desk, a promising pile of content for review awaits, and I realize that once again, it's the simple things. Always the simple things.

Yesterday they picked up the CPM machine. That bad boy worked many hours to keep Daughter's knee bending at ever increasing angles during the first days of her recovery. This morning the cryo/compression device went back. Of the two machines, this one was definitely her favorite as it helped minimize inflammation, provided cooling comfort and generally soothed the knee while it began its healing. The brace is the one piece of hardware remaining, and that has a week or so left in our house. Today, today is the first PT session. I predict an evening where Daughter is pleased to be on the path, and sore as we'd expect her to be after the initial therapy. Milestones. Baby milestones, but milestones nonetheless.

When I first saw Milagro Beanfield War many years ago, I viewed it as yet another great novel underserved during the screenwriting and production process. I was crabby about some omitted details, details I had found poignant and key to the story as I interpreted it. I was hypercritical of character development (or lack thereof in my opin), and felt less than enough time had been spent providing a basis for the viewer. In short, I didn't like it. Since I saw it for the first time, critiqued it to no end, and basically decided that what Redford did was a reflection of his Eastern seaboard roots vs deep immersion into the whole Northern New Mexico life/politics/Hispanic history/flavor, I've mellowed a bit. I've begun to shun most critiques (literary and cinematic) as just that -- opinions often rendered by those that critique rather than risk creative failure by actually writing or producing or directing a book or movie. That said, I'd like to alter my opinion ...

We never seem to run out of laundry to wash/dry/fold. Ever. And we even have a very diplomatic process in our house (precipitated some years back by the Son sandbagging me one Sunday afternoon with piles of unwashed clothes long after the entire weekend batch had been nicely folded and put away) -- everyone does their own. Oh, I pick up the slack and wash all the sheets and towels, but everyone is responsible for doing their own wearables. The day this process started began an era of laundry bliss. Everyone has total control of their wardrobe. If they run out of socks or undies or clean jeans, it's their own fault. If their closets are pristine, hung with fresh-smelling, wrinkle free clothes, they can take credit. For the most part, this system continues to work well. For the most part, but most systems occasionally falter, then regain equilibrium. See, sometimes I'm the one who gets behind. Never in the washing/drying part. Just in the folding part. I'm reall...

But I'm ok with that. How do I know this about myself? I recently bought these. I'm pretty sure you can't be buying and wearing these unless you're at least 25% hippie. Also, they're not my first pair. I have two others. Purchased within a year of each other. Brown, and black. But I bought them a really long time ago. And they never wear out. They're like the Volvo of shoes. Really, you can't tell that there's an entire DECADE of wear on them. So I got a little bored, went shopping, and found these bad boys. Apparently, that's how I roll.