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Date: Dec. 30, 2006
Tags: None
.jpg) Albuquerque, New Mexico Digging Out Again
It is snowing again in Albuquerque! We were surprised and thrilled when we unexpectedly received six to eight inches about three weeks ago. Now we are in awe. We are into our third day of snow with a record-breaking thirteen inches in the city. My friends in Edgewood and Tijeras are getting much more.
I had no intention to write about the weather again. Once per year is enough. We who live in Albuquerque thought our last snowfall was worthy of conversation. We could not have anticipated what has been happening these past three days. Albuquerque is having snowfall as if it were the ski resort areas of Taos, Angel Fire, or even Santa Fe. Right now, the city looks and feels like wintertime Baltimore, DC, or New York. No one I talk to, including my neighbor who has lived here for more than forty years can remember ever receiving this much snow at one time.
Church services are cancelled for tomorrow, our two major Interstate Highways are intermittently closed, and travelers by road and air are stuck in and just outside of Albuquerque. It is strange to watch my husband and our neighbors digging out, taking turns, sharing the one snow shovel someone unearthed from the depths of a garage.
We are a hospitable city. The government made arrangements to open up shelters to accommodate many of those stranded. However, having had to wait out a snow storm of smaller proportion in Tucumcari, just a step away from Albuquerque, four years ago, February, after driving all the way across the country from the east coast, I understand the impatience to get going.
In addition, I am having a party tommorow, New Year’s Eve. I am planning a delightful time for 40 people and I want them to turn up; so I am hoping it will not snow tonight and that the sun will shine fiercely enough tomorrow to melt the snow from the streets. We always have to bear in mind the likelihood of icy streets when our desert climate night temperatures fall. We need to have dry roads especially in the evenings.
It is inconceivable that it should snow again tomorrow. This is Albuquerque, after all. We are always thankful for moisture, but we need our sunshine. We cannot tolerate having gray skies for one whole day, let alone three.
Eloise Gift
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A lbuquerque, New Mexico Real Estate
A Winter Wonderland
Yesterday, folk were cross-country skiing in Albuquerque. Today, just half hour away up on Sandia Peak, they are skiing down the slopes.
I am at home this morning - all scheduled events cancelled since yesterday morning through tonight. Since we are so close to the Christmas and New Year holidays, essentially all business events to the end of the year have been cancelled.
The following email is typical of the notes I have received within the last twenty-four hours.
Hi everyone,
Hope you have a very Merry Christmas and New Year!!! The snow looks like a picture....beautiful.
The meeting for tonight is cancelled due to the weather, slick roads and traffic...we want you to be safe. Also, next week is cancelled for the after Christmas melt down. We will see you January.
Yesterday, I was scheduled to attend a luncheon at 11:30 a.m. in Estancia, Moriarty (if you remember, that is on the other side of the mountain). Monday night, my husband told me, "You won't be going to Estancia tomorrow." He was right. Even though the sky was overcast, I could see the mountains when I woke up and even a hint of glow behind them, but by 10:30 a gravelly hail was beginning to fall as I left home. “It won’t stick.” I told myself.
By 11:00 a.m., Albuquerque, was blanketed in white. We were in a winter wonderland --no mountains, no sky, just a fairy-tale world of white, like a stage or movie setting for a tale of enchantment. For all I could tell, the whole world was similarly transformed.
In the stores, clerks began wondering out loud about getting home safely later in the day, anticipating lower temperatures and icy roads. An obvious newcomer, not dressed for the weather, contemplating getting to his car outside the grocery store declared with a broad grin, "What's going on? I thought I had come to the desert. What's with this snow storm?" I thought to myself, "Welcome to the desert!"
I was hardly better dressed for the weather than the newcomer. I was wearing a coat, but not one suitable for wet weather, and had left my umbrella in the car. As I dashed back to my car trying to dodge the snow puffs, I sported a plastic grocery bag bonnet. Like many others in Albuquerque, I usually don't pay attention to forecast of bad weather, and we never believe it will be as bad as predicted.
Out here in the desert we are subject to sudden extremes — extreme winds, extreme rainfall, extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme snow. These extremes are always brief, however, and already, most of yesterday’s snow is melted from my south-facing front lawn. By tomorrow, we are likely to be wondering if it really happened.
The snow has been beautiful and thrilling. I felt like a child playing, as I drove around, taking advantage of business cancellations to do last minute personal chores. This morning, a friend in Edgewood, also on the other side of the mountain not far from Moriarty but only about thirty-five minutes away from Albuquerque, emailed to say they had received 12 inches of snow and it was still falling. It is beautiful, she wrote, but I am unable to get out of my driveway.
I couldn't resist taking pictures. I want to preserve the mood and the sentiments. If you think snow is beautiful falling on oak and grass, you should see it on piñon, sage, and rosemary. I love living here. In any season of the year, in any weather, "Albuquerque is beautiful, a true land of enchantment.
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Albuquerque, New Mexico Real Estate
Person of the Year--You and I
In 2006, Albuquerque, the city in which I reside, was voted one of the best cities in which to do business, one of the best places to live and raise a family, and now this—I have been honored as Person of the Year. So have you!
Time magazine voted all of us web users, Person of the Year. (Albuquerque Journal, http://www.abqjournal.com). If you are reading this article, it makes me (the writer) and you (the reader) winners. I created content that is available only on the World Wide Web, and you are using that content. That makes us citizens of the “new digital democracy” and therefore, winners.
If you are over the age of forty and are able to navigate the information highway, you have every reason to feel particularly honored and proud of your achievement. You are using technology that was not available to you in school during your childhood. You had to cover a lot of ground in a short time—terrain that many of your peers failed to or refused to negotiate.
The road to becoming a Time magazine “Person of the Year” required not only an academic, but a psychological leap. My friend, a hospital nurse in the mid 1980’s, chose to resign her position rather than learn to use a computer. She explained that she feared the use of computers for administrative purposes would lead to lack of face-to-face interaction and destroy interpersonal relationships.
You and I did not fear technology. We made the leap, and I will let you be the judge of whether our Web experiences have hurt or improved our relationships
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I recall the period when I thought building a web page was rocket science until with the help of a colleague, and online support, I created my very first page on a school LAN as a teaching aid for third grade students. Emboldened, I undertook a more ambitious project with the aid of Writing HTML, http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/lessons.html, just one of the myriad sites dedicated to teaching code, knowledge of which is no longer necessary for building a web page. i created a web site for sharing information with teachers. (Now available at http://www.eloisegift.com/TeachingSpanish.htm)
My next challenge was to write blogs. The million dollar question was, “What is a blog?” The word was new, a creation of the technology age, introduced into our vocabulary like so many others by the need to describe new concepts and ideas.
This is a blog. I am blogging about Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” award. That means I am writing and publishing my views on the topic on the World Wide Web. If I were actually speaking, I would be “blabbing.” Will anyone read my views? I have no idea. I write simply because I feel like it.
In the past, I may have written this on a typewriter or in a notebook. I would have had a limited audience unless I could have afforded to publish it myself or convince a publisher that it was worth the expenditure for publication. With the World Wide Web, you and the rest of the world make up my audience, and publication cost is minimal. Taking advantage of this relatively new gift of technology has made us winners--at least in the eyes of Time.
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