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Santa Fe, NM – Day 21: Check Surroundings For Safety or Big Robot, Little Dog

Eighty Foot Tall Robot

Today’s Roadside America picture is of an 80-foot-tall robot that shares a parking lot with a giant spider and a huge wolf here in Santa Fe. It only added a couple miles to my morning run to Dunkin.

After finishing my breakfast and coffee, it was time to head south to the town that Bugs Bunny keeps making wrong turns in, Albuquerque, to visit the Revlimiter Factory to get some nifty custom gauges installed. Adam will install the gauge faces for you for an extra fee, but you have to remove them from the car and mail them to him. Instead of mailing my cluster to Adam, I brought the whole car to him. I disassembled what seems like the entire dashboard of the car with his guidance so we could get the gauge cluster out of the car. Adam then gloved up like a surgeon to swap out the actual faces. We then tag-teamed the reinstallation and assembly of the dash.

I was so busy “fan girling” about being at the epicenter of Revlimiterness that I forgot to take any pictures. Adam actually moved the famous Sharka out onto the driveway, under a tree no less, so that I could pull into the garage. Mona, the transforming ND RF, was parked in one garage bay over. Anyway, the pics below happened once I got back to Santa Fe.

I had one last request of Adam. Some people get Tom Matano, a founding father of the Miata, to sign their trunk lid. Hah, that’s nothing. I got Mr. Revlimiter to sign my trunk lid, right on his sticker. And I got to meet Mabel the wonder dog too, and she loves me. I got the sticker to prove it.

Santa Fe, NM – Day 20: “I Made Rice!”

Gates of Santa Fe 3


Gates of Santa Fe 3 
Tonight was dinner in, and Sally cooked us up some shrimp etouffee. It was supposed to be something else but came as a last-minute addition because there was a nice deal at Smith’s for raw shrimp at $4.99 a pound. This also means she got to try out a microwave rice cooker her friend Kevin recommended.

Ever since she has lived in Santa Fe, she has not been able to get her rice fully cooked. The center always ended up crunchy, and if it was cooked more, the rice would be mushy. She is blaming it on the 7,000′ elevation, but it also might be the lack of moisture in the desert air.

The cooker came with instructions that laid out how much water and how long to cook it for several different types of rice. I was also optimized for an 800-watt microwave, so she had to cook it at 80% power in her 1,000-watt oven. When she tasted the rice, she proudly shouted, “I Made Rice!” Quickly followed by, “There’ll be no living with Kevin now.”

Bonus Roadside America photo:

Life-size Brontosaurus Family

Santa Fe, NM – Day 19: Baby It’s Cold Outside

Shop Here


 
This morning we woke to colder than normal May weather in Santa Fe, the temps were in the mid 30’s. My morning drive to get a Dunkin’ coffee was shrouded in fog. The temperature barely moved, and if anything, they decreased close to freezing. Then it started raining lightly on and off, and there might have been a flurry or two in there as well.

Because we didn’t walk much in Hammond, and yesterday in Santa Fe we barely walked a 1/4 mile before it started to drip from the sky and we turned tail for home, we decided to go walking/shopping at the semi-filled Santa Fe Place Mall. We were still shopping for shoes for Sally, and she did find a pair at another Shoe Show or Shoe Town or Show Something.

Wanting more, we headed over to the almost really empty Fashion Outlets of Santa Fe to the Merrill store. It advertised “Buy One, Get One 1/2 Price.” I was sort of shopping for shoes too since I donated the Skechers Step-Ins because the tread pattern was a magnet for small rocks that I had to pick out every time I walked in them. She found a pair that was on clearance that started at $50 and was marked down to $25. I, of course, found a pair of Jungle Mocs that I used to wear back in my ASCO days and loved, at the full price of $99.

Naturally they take the 50% off of the cheapest shoes, so Sally got out of there at a measly $12.50 while I spent nearly a C-note. When I tried to reason with her that maybe she should give me $12.50 seeing as I bought that pair of expensive shoes, I sort of earned it. What if I didn’t buy shoes? She shut me up with, “I’d just buy a second pair.” Sigh.

Santa Fe, NM – Day 18: All Hail Blue Miatas

The Blues Brothers

This morning I headed over to O’Reilly’s and bought a new set of wipers for the Tucson: 26″ driver’s side and 16″ passenger. As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed a bright blue Miata. Oooh, an NC Winning Blue. I just had to park next to it and fire off a couple of pics.

We had scattered rain both in Hammond and on the trip home, and the wipers on Santa Fe Sally’s Tucson are the original ones from June of 2023. It is not like they wore out; not a lot of swipes when you live in the desert, but that same desert dries them out. All that is to say, they didn’t so much as clear the windshield as smear it.

She is due to get that windshield replaced on Friday, and they offered to change her wiper blades while they are at it for an extra $75, and she thought she would let them do it. While that sounded like a lot to me, a frequent refrain from the elder me, it is about right. Because of the weather predicted for this area the rest of the week, I told her that if she intended for me to be driving her around in Tucson, she was out of luck. I, for some reason, like to be able to see things while behind the wheel.

All Hail The Miata

It has been raining on and off with differing intensities all day. But we have also had 2 instances of hail today. The first was green olive-sized (no pimento), and the second shorter bout was just pea-sized. Neither incident was bad enough to cause any damage to the car, the top is new taut canvas, and the vinyl wrap probably added a little extra layer of protection.

Fresh Powder

Looks like the 1-2″ of yesterday was joined by at least 3″ more overnight and this morning. So other than dusting the snow off the cars and shoveling snow, I have been hibernating. I’ve been watching episodes of The West Wing and then following it by listening to The West Wing Weekly podcast’s recap of that very show. I’ve watched up to the 19th episode of season 3, or 63 episodes, I still have a little more to go, eighty-nine…

What’s next? A hundred and twenty-one episodes of LOST. Or maybe the 217 episodes of The X-Files? Really, that many? I’ll probably just watch the 40 of them that I saved when I pared it down to one’s I’d rewatch more than once.

Flapping Flag Poles

It snowed this morning and then a little more in the afternoon. What was worse than the snow was the winds. They gusted to over 50 MPH and it actually dislodged the decorative seasonal flag pole on the front porch post. Ripped the 2 wood screws right out and dumped the flag and pole on the ground.

The small American flag on another post was still attached, but it stripped the gear area that held it up at a 45° angle so it drooped to less than horizontal. I think I’ll get another mount for the American flag and maybe just leave the seasonal flag one off and just donate those flags to Goodwill.

They are calling for some more snow tomorrow morning and then looking out in the future, it seems this may be our last snow of the season. Fingers Crossed.

Yesterday I got my first of two free oil changes on the New Miata. It had a whopping 2500 miles on the odometer. Here is a photo of the car sitting outside the dealer’s service area.

No Snow…Tires

I put the snow tires on the car back in early November and never really had a chance to use them for their intended purpose. There was one snow “storm” in January that dropped an inch on the ground and then we got lots of ice so we just never went anywhere until the ice was gone.

A warm sunny spring started yesterday afternoon, it continued today and will supposedly continue for the next couple days before typical Portland weather returns. The sunny low 70s will run until Tuesday and then the normal cloudy/rainy upper 50s return. This afternoon I took the snow tires off the Mini and put the regular touring all-seasons back on.