House Stuff - The Wall

When we bought the house it was gorgeous on the inside but the outside was a little lacking. Like a lot of houses here it was just plopped down on desert which looks like a lunar landscape. Many houses have courtyards with high view blocking walls and many have low walls you can sit and still see over. It gives a little bit of privacy and integrates the house into the landscape a little more. We wanted a low wall we could see over so we could see rabbits and coyotes and the horses. I want to do some gardening which is a challenge here with mice, kangaroo rats, rabbits, jackrabbits, horses, coyotes etc etc. Walls won't keep everything out but at least are a deterrent. Everything is hungry here and looking for shelter. Here are some before photos of the house when we bought it in December.

You can see it was flat flat flat with nothing on it. Boring. Even the side courtyard had dirt flat up to the stucco. I set about contouring the whole thing to get some variation, create rain collecting swales and create planting areas. I am pretty good at getting a "big idea" in my head and then setting about doing it changing things as I go along. I may start something and realize the natural land requires something a little different. Once I kind of figured out where stuff should be and where the views were I started thinking about a wall. I did NOT want a boring half-circle like everybody else has or a boxy squarish space. I wanted organic and flowing.

Here is what I ended up doing...the first shot shows the side courtyard...I bermed up the dirt and made a planting bed, made a rock swale and path.

This was before the color coat was put on the wall. I shows the new view from the front with the flagstone patio almost done.

A bird enjoying the bird/rabbit room of the courtyard...

I have to take some better photos but this gives you an idea. I added a flagstone patio. I contoured the land so I could make an upper and lower area. The wall has a lot of nice curves in it so I could create the bench "sunset viewing" room, the rabbit room (holes in the bottom that rabbits and scaled quail and everyone uses...) doubles as a bird room and out the front the wall has a gap where a sculpture will go so we can still see the ground which is where the action is! The built in bench is nice, the flagstone  turned out well (difficult and I will never do it again) and around the corner is where the straw bales for veggie gardening are but it will be a chicken area next spring! The wall is higher on that side since the neighbor's house is closest on that side and the wind comes from that direction a lot. We also had a shade structure built but that is another post. Now I get to dig some more to make the dry river a little deeper..make an overflow pipe for it, buy and move more rock (river rock), have the sculpture built, plant plants, figure out how to irrigate, and I started working. At least the job only goes until August and gardening can go through November! So that's a quick update on house stuff! Not so lunar anymore and once I get some plants in it'll be much better! Here is a rugosa rose I planted today.

Horses can reach over and get a drink or eat the quail block (or I can feed them Dobbins treats from on the bench)

Stuff in progress...

Solar install Again this time in NM

We decided to have a Solar Power System put on this house.  I looked into it and it made sense.  I wanted to do it myself but the permitting process here is laborious and ridiculous.  I also wanted it to be all “official” so there aren’t any problems 10 years from now when we go to sell the house. I basically knew what I wanted since I did this before in our San German, Puerto Rico house.  We did not need battery backup here because the power is so reliable and clean.  I decided on a 2.75KW Grid Tie system with Enphase M215 Micro inverters.  11 pannels and 11 inverters ballast mounted at 10 degrees. Micro inverters are basically as cheap as central inverters are now and with this being the 4^th generation of them I think they will be reliable.  I also didn't want a central inverter humming loudly in the garage.  The inverters we used are M215.  They peak at 225 Watts each.  Now if you’re paying attention you will say “you have 2750W in panels but only 2475 for the inverters”.  That is correct and I will lose some power because the inverters will clip the peak power.  This all becomes a wash for various reasons but the main reason is that the panels are at a 10 degree angle and thus will never be optimal.

“Why 10 degrees” you ask?  Because that makes installation much much simpler.  This is a ballast mount system and as you can see in the picture without panels that these tinny aluminum frames are just held down by small garden paving blocks.  That means very simple install and no penetrating the roof.  Ideally I wanted a 30 – 35 degree mounted system.  That is our Latitude and would have provided the maximum yearly harvest without adjusting the panels twice a year.  

The install was very fast and simple.  Basically two guys for 6 hours and an electrician for 2 hours.  That was it.  It really doesn’t get much easier.  But then comes all the inspections!  5 of them!  It was a headache for 3 of them where someone had to be home and the inspectors wouldn’t give a time when they were coming out.  That really is unacceptable and I felt like it was even worse than in Puerto Rico.

It took three months from start to finish but only one short day that any work was done.  It cost $11,000 but I will get back 40% in tax credits so the net cost to us is $6500.  It will be a 6 – 8 year payback based on savings however, it can be looked at as an immediate payback based on the value of our house going up at least $6500 right now.  With the crazy sun hours we have here our system is making around 18 – 19 KWH each day!  That is slightly more than we are using.

2016 is going to be tough for Solar installers as the tax credits go away along with rising grid connection fees for solar customers.  If you in NM now is the time to install solar!

Southern New Mexico and Arizona Trip

Jeff had a few days of vacation he needed to use and honestly, although I would love to go diving, I cannot imagine enjoying a "tropical" vacation at this point. I am afraid I would take a long plane ride only to get off and not enjoy the humidity, the bad food, the garbage and stray animals. When you vacation you don't really see all that stuff but after 7 years of it I am not ready to return. At least not to the Caribbean. We decided to head south and off to Tucson. It was a whirlwind trip that involved a lot of driving without all that much time in any one place. We found some places we want to return to and others we will skip. Definitely was nice to have a change of scenery.

First stop was White Sands. We drove 4 1/2 hours or so to Alamagordo, NM stopping at Elephant Butte (big lake/dam) and in Truth or Consequences (town name is more interesting than the town but we had a nice lunch). White Sands is amazing! Even though it had rained it was just a weirdly bright and strange area of gypsum dunes. Despite the overcast, cloudy day it was still very bright but probably not as white as usual. I was hoping for a sunset (cloudy) or sunrise the next morning (cloudy) but it was not to be. These were not interesting clouds. We headed off to a Space Museum and then headed out of town toward Tucson.

It took about 5 1/2 hours of driving for us to get there. There were interesting mountains on all sides with interesting rock formations and vegetation. When we got closer to Arizona the landscape changed and there were the giant Saguaro cactus and organ pipe cactus everywhere. No one was on the road and the roads were wonderful the entire way - such a pleasure! We didn't reserve hotels ahead of time so we had to figure out where to stay. This proved to be kind of a bummer since we hadn't really figured out what we wanted to do or where it was. Thankfully Tucson is small like Albuquerque and nothing was far away. I absolutely do not like hotels and don't sleep well. They are all overpriced (it is a bed for christs sake) but the difference between an $89 hotel and a $115 one is worth it. The Alamagordo one is not to be repeated. There was one in Tucson too close to the hi way and one we did like best of all of them except for some kind of annoying fan or ventilation system that was always on. We slept the best we could and did day excursions. On the first night we ate at a nice seafood place and plotted our couple days. We had visions of doing all sorts of stuff but Tucson has a surprising amount of stuff to do. Our hit list included a mine tour of the Asarco Mine, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, the Tohono Chul Gardens. A church was close to the mine and I am a sucker for the creepy statues and displays you find in churches and I appreciate the architecture. We managed to do only these things and other stuff on the list have to wait.

We went to the mine on day one but it was too muddy for them to take the tour up the roads. We went to the Tohono Chul Gardens instead for a couple hours. The gardens were nice and I got a few ideas for our courtyard. Next we went to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum for the rest of the day. You can spend HOURS at the place. It is a zoo-garden-aquarium (sort of) and it is extremely well done. Exhibits are thoughtful and natural...we had a nice lunch with a prickly-pear margarita...wandering for hours looking at super cool cactus and animals and  and and....

I was stuffed from lunch so Jeff got a light dinner and we were off to a different hotel. Once we found that we settled in. Went to the jacuzzi then to bed. The next morning was the mine tour which was amazing in all it's destructiveness. They had a nice museum and a nice tour. It is a huge open pit mine. It was pretty amazing what they go through to extract a little bit of copper from tons of rock. They actually seem to do a decent job of recycling water and restoring habitat but it is still a hugely destructive operation like most human activities. It was very interesting. We had to skip the space museums on this trip since we were headed back. We stopped at the Mission San Xavier del Bac which is an 18th century adobe Baroque church. It was beautiful and had all the creepy crap I like about churches...elongated fingers, fake bodies in glass, creepy candles and "offerings" little bowls of water...etc. Copper rock and barrel cactus at Asarco mine.

 All these carvings look like wood but are adobe.

We decided to head to Bisbee because we had heard the name mentioned in novels and elsewhere. It was not at all what we expected. It turns out that March is the high season in Arizona. There was some odd music thing in town and no where to stay so we had lunch, cruised the town quickly and since the mine tour there was fully booked we headed home. We saw a lot of stuff but didn't see a lot of what there is to do. I would consider flying to Tucson next time so we could actually do more or maybe drive the northern route to Sedona or take more time. There were space museums, observatories, museums (including photography museums) and botanical gardens. I would definitely be better planned next time since now we know how long a drive it is. All in all we had a nice time and it was a different kind of vacation for us!

How Our Lives are Different - One Year in New Mexico (and away from Puerto Rico)

Wow - it has been a year already! We are settling into our new home, making friends, exploring our new home and basking in the glow of everything that is NOT Puerto Rico. Do we miss some things? Yes. We miss diving a couple times a week. We miss caving during the dry season. We kind of miss trying to surf. We miss the avocados. We miss some friends. For the most part though it is just a RELIEF to be out of that place! Here are some ways our lives have changed.

ROADS
OMG the roads here are clean, pothole-free, well marked, and free of DDA's (dead domestic animals). One of the main reasons we moved was the heartbreak of seeing mistreated dead injured dying animals ALL THE TIME.  There are no water fountains from broken pipes...no people pulled over dumping shit over the side of the slope or in turnouts...no giant speaker cars blasting super loud advertisements or "music" at all hours. The lights are all in working order and people stop at them. No ping pong moves, red rover or sling shot moves. People let you in and know how to merge. The speeds are pretty scary though - 75 on the highway! Merging onto the highway and powering up is kind of like the Star Ship Enterprise going into warp!

This was the road to our house in Moca - the way things are done there is to put a stick in the hole with glitter streamers and a feed sac. It'll stay that way for months if not years! Cars with speakers and or microphones would drive around screeching "oro oro oro" and I guess people ran out to sell their gold OR the screaming told you the car had baked goods in the trunk etc etc. OR in the case of a funeral something was being blurted out with wailing people walking for a mile behind the thing.

Another difference is NO FOUNTAINS in the road. In PR water lines were all exposed PVC pipe an they made fountains when people ran over them, tried hooking into them to steal water or broke them just for fun. Water here and all the utilities in Placitas are underground. You don't see any of it and they come for free and tell you where stuff is if you want to dig.

FOOD

Food was terrible in Puerto Rico and very expensive. There were no choices and nothing was fresh. Restaurants were horrid and filthy. Roadside stands burned chemical laden pallets to cook over and there were no bathrooms or running water for the cooks. Yuck. The guy at the San Sebastian farmers market had his avocados in a cage because everyone picked up and squeezed all of them and then didn't buy them - no one would then buy a dented avocado. Restaurants were all paper or foam clamshells with plastic utensils. Imagine paying 25 bucks for a fried fish and "salad" (iceberg lettuce with a single slice of not ripe tomato and thousand island dressing slathered on it) and having plastic utensils and eating it on an always sticky and gross table. Ah, "island life" is pretty filthy.

You couldn't find anything. You had to go to lots of stores to do a single shopping trip. I couldn't find more than 8 cans of cat food because no one bought cat food - they threw their left over rice and beans on the ground.

Food here is not as great as in Seattle but it is more than acceptable. We can find fresh fish, Indian food, great breakfast spots, Mexican food, New Mexican food (green chili everything) and other ethnic stuff. We are still discovering places. Everywhere has real plates and utensils. Everywhere they bring water and bread without you waiting or asking for it. Service is fast and efficient. We haven't had anything screwed up and everyone gets their food at the same time. Supermarkets vary and even the worst here is far better than the best there. Lots of vegetarian selections, tons of fresh produce, so many kinds of bread you just stare at them. Every store has just about everything.

NOISE
What noise? We hear lots of birds, coyotes, a train (real - not just a car fake out). It is so quiet at night all you hear is your heart, snoring partner or content kitties! We haven't heard any one or anything on a microphone! No religious crap blasting out over the countryside or car turnout. No "promise parties" or parandas going all hours of the night. No head spinning pentacostal rantings on super loud microphones. Nope. Quiet.

Religious folks yelling through the rejas at people getting them to come to the gate and be converted I guess.

GETTING STUFF DONE
OMG all it takes is a phone call. You don't need a birth certificate, social security card, marriage certificate, etc etc to do things. You don't wait in lines all day or for more than a person even. You call on the phone and things get done pretty darned fast and are done correctly the first time. My driver's license the first time in Puerto Rico was around 15 hours and a couple days and I had to prove I had a head, arms and legs! Here my license is for 8 years or something and it took 10 minutes. It came in the mail in a couple weeks. They send reminders for car licensing which can be done on line.

Do you have eyes, arms and legs oh and a head? You can drive in Puerto Rico. And parking? Most people park nose in, none of this park in reverse crap.

GARBAGE
In Puerto Rico this photo says it all. We stopped the car and looked with binoculars at a new waterfall we hadn't seen before. Sadly it was a waterfall of garbage the neighborhood just shoved over the cliff.  Here if there is any garbage on a trail it is a single piece and we can spot it easily and pick it up. Garbage stays in garbage cans that actually get picked up before they are full. No banging of garbage cans at 4a.m. in the morning, no dogs knocking them over because they are starved and looking for food. They come at a reasonable hour. Everything goes in the can. There aren't animals all over trying to dig through stuff.

ODDS AND ENDS
No fart cars, no cars stacked high with scrap metal or bananas or grass. No cars on the highway going 20 with animals tied to the trailer hitch. No one wandering around with a machete or scuffing on the side of the road like the Walking Dead. Shopping carts are all in the shopping cart holder. You can walk into banks and not have to go one at a time and get buzzed in. You don't get ignored at government agencies or stores or any where! There isn't a constant assault on the senses of smells, noise and horrific visual stuff. Nope - things are just so much better and it is so much more relaxed here.

A lot of this is starting to seem humorous now that we don't have to put up with it. Also though we can't believe we DID put up with it for 7 years. Are we sorry we moved to Puerto Rico? No - we had wonderful experiences there. Are we happy we moved away? Absolutely! Having lived there has given us an immense appreciation for a lot of things we took for granted. We are very pleased to be living in a beautiful place that functions.