Dear Thomasville…

Once again I have been remiss in keeping up with my blog post but better late than never as they say. Life continues to stay busy here with traveling for work and getting our house settled. And now it appears that there will indeed be four seasons here as it has tuned cooler in the mornings (45-55) but no snow yet. Santa Fe continues to amaze us with bakeries and restaurants but we’re trying to slow down on some of that for obvious reasons.

Let’s see what neat places I’ve been lately…well I went to our site Los Luceros last weekend to watch them sheer the sheep for the winter (sheep wool is way dirtier than cotton let me tell you that). And at the same time, we tested out our horno by baking pizza in it. I also learned that the oven style originates from Africa and came over with the Spanish/Moors. And next weekend we will host a balloon festival (the big one in ABQ was two weeks ago but there was a lot of wind and rain so I don’t think they got to launch the balloons too often (here’s hoping we have good weather for our ascents).

Another visit was right in our backyard to the Cienguilla Petroglyphs. It’s a short hike up the hill and then you’re blown away by the amazing art from the 13th -17th century Kersan speaking pueblo people. Luckily we visited before the federal shutdown because this like so many parks around NM are federally run.

So I had to make another trip down to Las Cruces recently for a meeting and while I was there I stopped at one of our partner museums, New Mexico Farm and Ranch Museum. They have an amazing property with lots of living collections. The director Steve showed me around and I got to meet Rosie (above) and her fellow inhabitants. They also have crops and orchards on the property including pecans! So of course I had to get an up-close look of what a NM pecan looks like, kinda hard to tell much about it but apparently this is pecan rich area, who knew!

And then yesterday I attended our Fiesta of Cultures event at Coronado and the weather was fantastic (but wnidy). Some of the ambassador animals that visited for the day were these owls and “Hector” the turkey. My deputy Matt raises turkeys (and Bob White Quail believe it or not) and he brings the animals around for people to enjoy and he donates the turkey feathers to local Indigenous artisans who make blankets out of them, it’s amazing how delicate and yet warm these blankets must have been.

Well, it’s back to the grind of getting the house ready especially since my siblings are coming to visit next weekend and all the plans I had to visit Bandolier and Tent Rocks are now off the schedule, oh well, we’ll see them when things get back to “normal”