THE LOST ARCHIVES OF A HOUSE:

So...the thing to tell you is that I got a little mini vacation thanks to the good news about the interview. Chad, who lives in Santa Fe, NM is about to start a job at a book store this week, and I learned of said interview first thing Tuesday morning, and so it struck us both that this past week would be the last "free" week for us. Ergo, I dropped everything (which, since I had to twiddle my thumbs until the interview, was actually dropping nothing) and hopped in my under-used and still ever so eager Forester and drove to Santa Fe. As you may or may not know, I've been to Santa Fe before -- briefly with Lex and Leslie on our first road trip -- but never with Chad on the insider track. I now know where to get the best tamale, tapas, or anole pinon pancakes, the best place to go if you need a pinata or to see some prairie dogs, the best pawn shop to find old Native American crafted turquoise jewelry, and the best place to drive to if your dad loans you his Sea-Foam green mint-condition Mercedes Convertible (the ski basin)...I now also know why there's all that hype about desert sunsets (if you've ever ordered a universe-sized scoop of rainbow sherbet and then spilled it all over the clouds, then you know what a Santa Fe sunset looks like and why it's called "God Sky") and just exactly how the locals get rid of Old Man Gloom every year -- they spend a week in festival and burn a gigantic effigy (named Zozobra) at the stake. (We didn't actually see this for reasons about to become clear. But just learning about it was cool.)

If it sounds action-packed, it's because it was. We had a few days total to see the sights, because we also took off for Chad's childhood home, located on a mesa in the middle of nowhere, about an hour and a half or so from Santa Fe. About three decades ago his parents bought a bunch of acres of *rural* New Mexico land, built a house from scratch and lived off the land, from building fences and keeping horses, pigs, and fowl, to farming for food and raising two kids. Eventually they built another home on the land, and as life ran its course, they were able to move to Santa Fe (so a very intelligent Chad could get an education better-suited to his future) and revamp the second home entirely (while renting the first to a reclusive but shockingly normal Ohio State Lottery winner in need of cutting down his expenses). It's now complete with such things as a gigantic TV and pool table -- but it's still in the middle of nowhere on top of a mesa, and thereby gorgeous and uncorrupted. There are petroglyphs carved into rocks, ball cacti that hitch themselves to your flip-flops, furniture that his grandfather made by hand, and water that reeks of sulphur when you first turn on the tap. It rained off and on for the time we were there, but the first night it cleared up enough such that you could see EVERY STAR IN THE SKY, from the Milky Way to Mars, and on to meteor showers -- not just little points of light that shoot across your field of vision, but burning balls that trundle, effervesce, and spit, the kind of shimmery stuff you only see when a small child makes a wish about a whale's friendship on the Disney Channel.

It was beautiful and exhausting -- the whole trip -- and I learned as much about Chad's history (his parents have some fantastic stories about life on the Mesa -- and just some fantastic stories in general) as anything.

I apologize for being out of radio contact -- my cell phone didn't work on the Mesa, and I was in general pretty engrossed...but grateful for a last hurrah that I could actually enjoy knowing that work is on the way.