Dinosaur Bear

A Blog about Stuff and Things

The Holidays Cometh and Broli Turns One

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Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear!

Tis’ the season in these parts.. and I guess in a fair number of parts. In light of that I’ll be focusing on the forthcoming holidays in this post – with an additional focus on a special first birthday in the Taco household.

If you are especially astute you’ll have noticed that I missed my Monday posting schedule this week. In fact, I’d reliably posted every Monday for 10 weeks straight, and that’s something I’m proud of (if not my fingers). Of course that likely isn’t going to continue due to issues of time and well, content. That said, I feel it’s important to acknowledge a long streak of a bloggy’ goodness. In celebration of that streak, let’s start with what Dinosaur Bear does best: talking about incredibly mundane things.

Now here I have to say that having a combination of a pig, polar bear, and multiple dinosaurs tends to make the day-to-day existence of life a bit more interesting.


That they are (unsurprisingly) fascinated by the same things we are only adds to the magic.


Who doesn’t like watching the inside of a car wash (at a Mister Car Wash, no less)?

They’ve also been maintaining contact with lots of their friends via a pen-pal network so large it trumps any letter writing group I’ve ever been a part of!


This particular letter came all the way from Indonesia!

Between the letters and magical wizardry such as the internet the Boys have managed to stay connected to friends and family, even from so far away!


The Boys being good boys and watching a live stream of their Uncle Daryl 1 graduate.

Now, this isn’t to say that everything is exciting. Indeed, we all still have our lazy days where we really just don’t want to get out of bed.


Some of us just express that desire to hide from the day a bit more differently than others.


Thankfully there is a magic potion in the world known as “coffee” that can get even the sleepiest of pigs out of their hiding place.


If it wasn’t obvious by now, the Taco household is coffee obsessed.


Just a teeny bit.

There have been many times where I’ve thought that the “Beer” category here on the blog should be swapped out for “Coffee,” but that would sort of be like having a category called “Everything” – or, in other words, quite useless. 🙂

Anyways, when we last spoke about daily life-things, as opposed to bombs and bears, I had mentioned the cornucopia of Thanksgiving leftovers we had. Turns out we still have some, or rather, we have gelatinous broth blubber.


It’s the top part of this concoction.

Not the most exciting thing, but even now nearly a month later our turkey keeps on giving. While the exciting food of November is mostly gone, we have added a few more fun food items to our repertoire, including such delicacies as roasted spaghetti squash seeds.


As well as a beet chips.


Pig Approved.™

These go particularly well with some of the various kinds of hummus we have been trying, for example: carrot.


In fact we’ve been having a lot of Pig Approved™ food lately, such as this yummy combo of asparagus, sweet potatoes, bell papers, veggie sausages, and hummus that SB combined with pita bread one night!


Another thing that we’ve been occupying our time with lately is candle-making. Well, that’s actually giving us far too much credit (though we did actually make candles once with Meem!). Rather we’ve been reforging (to use a “manly” Tristen word) our old candles into new ones.


Pigsten and Broli preparing the wicks.

The funny thing about that is that I’ve since learned a bit about remolding candles – namely that if you don’t cool them properly a massive sinkhole tends to form in the middle of the candle.


I’ve read about why this happens, but frankly for my neophyte candle “forging” self, the fix is a bit too complex. So we just have sinkhole candles. 😀 I figure it’s still better than wasting the excess wax from the old candles. Or, perhaps it isn’t science-based and is instead because I’m too inebriated from adult beverages while I play with molten wax?


Yes, joking about drinking while playing with fire aside, I got some of the Scotch that I spoke about last time!


Fun fact: I’ve held onto that Glencairn glass for 6 years and never had a use for it until now!

SB got it for me as a surprise. I was initially pretty hesitant to get a bottle due to cost, but I did some research online and found several “Scotch for Babbies” lists, then cross-referenced a large number of them to find 5 varieties of Scotch that were recommended on each list. Glenmorangie was one of them that appeared the most, so I added it to the top of my 5 Babby Scotch Whiskies.

Did I like it? Well, between Tristen and I the bottle is almost gone. So I am going to say that is a yes. I’ve not yet determined which variety of Scotch I’m going to try next, but given my affinity for this one I see this as the beginning of a long and expensive relationship between me and uisge-beatha na h-Alba. But, beer, have no fear, you are still my favorite. 😉


What does Tristen do when you say he can have “one can”? – he finds a big can.

Here I would normally segue into a bit about how the alcohol is good for the winter cold (since I guess it will actually be winter once I post this). Turns out that this year I can’t really make any such claim. As I type this it is currently sunny and around 65 degrees outside. Not really the kind of December I’ve been used to for most of my life. It’s also still well.. green here. I mean don’t get me wrong, a lot of the trees, etc. have turned brown (such as the one in front of our apartment) and this whole area isn’t that green in the first place, but by and large things are still green (for here). I think part of the weirdness is that I can look out of my windows and see palm trees, talk about a change since last year. Speaking of palm trees, I’ve got to see them being maintained and this too is also kind of weird. I understand what they are doing to the top and middle parts of the trees especially when they look like this:


However, why they “carve” or “shave” or “skin” the bottom part of the tree in the absence of the “spiky” bark  is foreign to me.


Yes, me being me I even looked up the explanation online and I still can’t entirely understand why you end up with that “fat” part at the bottom, though I did learn more about palm tree care in general, which I suppose is a good life skill to have?

While palm trees are definitely outside my knowledge zone, another plant we have all around us that I am much more comfortable with is the good ole’ cactus. Being that we (literally) live in a desert, this isn’t overly surprising. These bad boys are all over the place and come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. One of my personal favorites is this little dude:


He just grows all out by himself because he doesn’t want to be bothered – and with big spikes spines like he has I doubt he gets disturbed too often. We also have slightly less hostile berry bushes which are still generating berries even into December (much to a certain polar bear’s great joy).


Heck, if a berry bush isn’t impressive enough, we still have flowers coming up – such as this little fellow which I spotted the other day.


Fighting the good fight.

This is all to say that it’s been a very weird feeling to have the holidays be so close and yet to not feel like the holidays should be close, at all. Of course this is our new reality, so we’ll adjust, it’s just a very odd feeling at the moment! But, oddness or not, the holidays are almost here and so celebrate we shall!


Our holiday decorations have always been fairly low key. We have a Charlie Brown-sized tree, a Christmas cactus (not literally a Christmas cactus, but a cactus which serves as a Christmas tree), one strand of lights, and a few miscellaneous decorations. Most of this is because I am a Scrooge when it comes to holiday decorations (and proud of it). Still, that hasn’t stopped us from creating our own traditions from what we do have. For pretty much every year (except last year, which was due to extraneous circumstances) we do what most families do – which is the same thing over and over. 😀 One such tradition is the placement of the “Polar Peek Patrol” squad car we were gifted many years ago.


I think it’s technically an ornament, but given its weight and the small size of our tree we normally just sit it somewhere around the base of the tree. The Peek Patrol has a motion sensor and sets off its sirens when someone (Tristen) tries to get too close to the presents. In addition to the Polar Peek Patrol, there are other oddities in the ole’ Christmas box. One such acquisition is our pair of Christmas tree earmuffs.


As modeled by Tristen.

In years past these normally served as our own odd version of a tree-topper, but these year they are keeping our sombrero warm.


These earmuffs are one of those weird things where when we got them we really considered just donating them, but fate intervened and now they have been a running part of our holiday decorations for several years. For the past five years our holiday decorations have also included Thomas (I-V).


Whether Thomas V enjoys the holiday festivities or merely goes along with them as part of his plan for world domination is unknown (though he does seem to like his hat and squirrel friends). Beyond motion sensing devices, decorate sombreros, and cap-wearing pumpkins, we also have more normal decorations such as stockings. We have.. a lot of stockings.


While it’s hard to see the larger one that Tristen is sitting on and to get the scale of the smaller ones, we have 8 stockings which range in size from roughly 4.5″ to 43.5″ long. Yep. Lots of different sized people in this house – from a tiny brachiosaurus baby to a full grown T-Rex. While those stockings are more on the decorative side of things, Tristen would be frustrated if I didn’t also share my his collection of dinosaur-themed socks which also tend to get busted out around Christmas time.


In addition to our foot-centric decorations/wearables, we also have a few other items which come out for the holidays. One of which is a Christmas hedgehog magnet:


Our Christmas magnet next to our Smokey Bear magnet – and yes, that magnet in the lower right is indeed a penis.

Another decoration is Lucy’s psychiatric booth, complete with sound that never gets heard because this thing is a black vortex for batteries.


Pigsten and Broli being the entrepreneurs they are have undercut Lucy by offering 4¢ sessions.

One new (and time-limited) decoration for this year is an actual living wreath that SB picked up from the farmer’s market.


The last time I had a living wreath was when I made one during my freshman or sophmore year of high-school when I was in a horticulture class. Believe it or not, to make an actual wreath was a fairly time consuming process, or maybe I just sucked at it, 50/50 chance. Anyways, we paid someone else for the trouble of making this wreath and its very nice. Each time you open the door you get a nice blast of pine-fresh scent. The only problem thus far has been keeping Valentino and Pig from eating various parts of it.

All and all that’s a pretty good run-down of our decorations. I like how it all came together this year.


Christmas lights are best enjoyed with some nog, and so far we’ve gone through two entire things of nog. This year we opted for something different and tried almond-based nog. The first one we tried was from Almond Breeze and it was almost indistinguishable from regular egg nog.


The second variety we tried was from Califia Farms and it definitely had more of a nutty taste to it, but it also had about 30% less sugar per serving, which might have had something to do with it.


I like and recommend both varieties. While not related to nog, I also have to add that pea milk is surprisingly good.


Yep, milk – from peas.

Beyond decorations, consuming liquid sugar-fat, and socks, the forthcoming holidays have also seen a slew of holiday cards both arriving to and being sent from the Taco household. Naturally the vast majority of these have been to/from the Boys as they are scores more popular than we are.


Valentino prepping a card for departure.


Tristen showcasing a recently received card.

One of the pluses is that since the Boys have friends all over the world we get to learn about all sorts of holiday traditions – and even better, partake in their holiday treats! This year the star package came from one of the Boys’ friends in the Netherlands. This holiday package included all sorts of treats and information relating to the Dutch figure/celebration of Sinterklaas.


Let’s face it, you won’t get anything this cool in the mail for Christmas.

Although the package was technically for all of the Boys, Tristen was very quick to lay claim to the giant chocolate “T.”


While initially reluctant, he did eventually agree to share the chocolate version of Sinterklaas with SB and I.


The first thing we ate from the package were some homemade Taaitaai cookies, which are a traditional Dutch treat for Sinterklaas which are fairly akin to gingerbread.


The cookies are in the shape of Sinterklaas and have a very spiced and honey-like flavor to them. We thought we tasted a bit of licorice but found out that there was no licorice in them, but that instead the taste was coming from a blend of the spices. We were initially worried that the cookies would be stale since they’d come all the way from the Netherlands and U.S. Customs had clearly opened the package, but fortunately for us they were still very yummy! They paired especially well with coffee.


Pig + cookies + coffee = this photo.

Another Boys-related bit of excitement in the lead up to the holidays was Broli’s first birthday! Yes, just over one year ago this little bitty brachiosaurus showed up in Reykjavík to live with us! There he became fast friends with Pigsten and quickly came to love all things green and vegetable. So, in celebration of his first birthday we treated him to a two-part celebration. The night before his birthday we had Brussels sprouts, veggie burgers, and avocados.


The day-of we picked up some salads from McAllister’s – complete with lots and lots of green stuff to eat!


If you were curious what Broli is wearing, it’s a tiny little “#1” cape that I made for him to wear. Originally I was going to try for a hat, but he is just so teeny that even a cape was an exercise in dexterity. If you were especially watchful, you might have noticed his little cape appearing earlier in the post!


Broli’s after-dinner treat was a combination of some kruidnoten and a chocolate Euro coin (which coincidentally was for 1 Euro 🙂 ).


Later on we partook of some “dinosaur-themed” drinks which were rightfully called “The Broli.”


Now, as you can probably guess Broli’s super small size meant that most of the salad, treats, and drinks went to us – though that was partially by design. 😛

While Broli doesn’t seem to fully understand the concept of a birthday, he definitely understood that something was going on and that he was getting all sorts of happy things. So he definitely enjoyed himself.

Once Broli was a big-ole’ 1 year old it wasn’t too much longer before we hit the “critical mass” of the holiday season. While not usually one to go out and be overly festive (see Scrooge commentary above) SB did convince me to go out one evening and check out some Christmas lights around town. Tristen was quick to claim the co-pilot seat with me and also to make me share my coffee with him – because of course we had to get some coffee for our Christmas light hunt (but hey it was decaf). 😛


SB had spotted a well-lit house earlier in the week, so we headed there first. This next photo isn’t especially good, but Tristen cracks me up in it.


The house was indeed quite a doozy – and it definitely had a preexisting reputation as there were quite a people there checking it out (we later found out that it had been featured in the paper).


Essentially their entire property aside from the driveway was covered in lights or Christmas-themed inflatables. If you look really closely next to the front door you’ll even spot an inflatable dinosaur!


“Manries.”

After that we headed to the central plaza to check out some of the lights and the large Christmas tree there.


The plaza was abuzz with people checking out the lights and visiting the nearby businesses (which include both a brewery and a comic book store), though not so abuzz that a certain T-Rex didn’t demand his own portrait with the tree. 🙂


It was a nice little outing with the family and was made even nicer by the fact that it wasn’t cold. Sure, the not-being-winter-like aspect of the holidays is weird, but I’m not saying that it doesn’t have its benefits especially when you want to walk around at night. 😀


When we got home we had some cinnamon rolls which was a good way of ending a nice night. Although I don’t have photos of the cinnamon rolls, later on that week we did (with his blessing) partake of Tristen’s giant “T” which turned out to be even bigger than we thought it would be. It was quite good.


That pretty much brings us up to the present. We now stand on the precipice of the holidays. We’re going to be staying home this year, so our holiday season currently looks like: time off together, Tristen’s birthday (not to be forgotten at risk of life and limb), and then a series of remote Christmases with the family. Like last year this is a little bit of an “unusual” holiday setup for us, but I don’t foresee it diminishing our holiday fun too much. 🙂

Barring unforeseen circumstances or productivity (both of which are always a possibility with the odd life of yours truly), I imagine that this will be Dinosaur Bear’s last post of 2018. Oh so much has changed since the first post of this year – and what a year it has been! SB and I frequently have moments where we forget that something we did – say, visiting Greenland – happened this year. Along with the (to us) unseasonable weather that probably plays into our disbelief that the holidays are almost upon us!

So, with that said, I’ll close by wishing all of you reading this Happy Holidays! I wish you the best in your end of the year celebrations and in the year to come. I also encourage you to be a Lawrence. A Lawrence hordes his nuts and gives no shits what other people think. Lawrence takes his work seriously and does his job well. Lawrence will be gorging on acorns during the holidays and Lawrence won’t care that Karen is judging him. Don’t be a Karen. Be a Lawrence.


Happy Holidays from all of us at Dinosaur Bear!

Until next time,
-Taco

Giving Thanks (2018)

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Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear!

Another year, another opportunity to give thanks. This is SB and I’s first Thanksgiving since returning to the U.S., though we still celebrated it while abroad so it doesn’t feel especially different. What does feel different this year is the weather. If you’re new to Dinosaur Bear or have a short memory (Taco understands) then you may not know that SB and I recently(ish) moved to warmer environs. As such, rather than the weather we were used to in say, Iceland or Boston, we now have this.


Indeed, the transition over to deep Fall has not been something that was made immediately obvious by the weather itself. For example, on the day I write this the high for tomorrow is 70 degrees. As a result we’ve lost a good deal (but not all) of the visual cues we were previously used to as Fall creeps onward. So, without much change in weather, the decorations started to shift from pumpkins (Thomases):


To Christmas:


Note, however, the continued presence of Thomas Eggs.

In case you were curious, neither of those are our decorations. We lack the motivation to do much decorating – and besides our doorman (Lawrence) has very strict standards for the entryway.


Now, that is not to say that we’ve been entirely devoid of cooler, more Fall/Winter-like weather. Most nights are cold here, being a desert and all, and I know it’s gotten down into the 20s a couple of times at night. During the day we even had some snow – though I thoroughly stress the word some in that statement. Yeah, compared to our previous years, I don’t think we’re in for much if this is what it is going to look like on “snow days.”


You can see the tree featured in this post to the left.

Naturally that didn’t stop a certain polar bear from embracing the snow during the short period it was falling and before it nearly instantaneously melted.


Still, given SB and I’s tendency to break weather records when we move I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up having to put my foot in my mouth over those last few statements.

But aside from the changing seasons (if not weather) life was flowing pretty much as usual in the lead up to Thanksgiving 2018. We’re pretty settled in at this point, and have gotten used to our new acquisitions – namely Phil, who we can “cast” things to without having cable, as seen below during the primaries.


We’ve also continued to explore more of our new city with Felicia, with the Boys vying for the coveted shotgun seat during each outing.


“Exploring” also means getting exposed to new places to shop and get food, with the bulk of our current groceries coming from Albertsons.


Those big funny looking things are “jackfruit” and we recently tried it for the first time. It was interesting.

We’ve even revisited an old favorite, Papa Murphy’s, which we hadn’t had in probably 5 or 6 years after being obsessed with the place circa 2009/2010.


If you were wondering why the gap, it’s because there were no locations near us.

Needless to say exploration has extended to new beer, and while we initially stuck to the bigger stores we have recently added a local liquor store to our shopping list.


Interestingly enough, beer hasn’t been my major “adult beverage” focal point lately. Instead I’ve been doing more research into Scotch as it’s something I’d like to learn more about after some positive experience with it in Scotland. Sadly, even “newbie” Scotches tend to be above our price range, so for now I look and read and wait for SB to get me some for Christmas. 😛


A “less adult beverage” that I have recently returned to drinking is V8, particularly low-sodium V8 these days as the regular stuff might as well be a cylindrical piece of salt in a can. My Dad drank a lot of it when I was younger and so I have lots of memories of drinking it between my Budweiser-stealing escapades of yesteryear. What’s nice about V8 is that you can (literally) spice it up in a lot of different ways. A recent favorite of mine has been to combine some jalapeno sauce and garlic powder into the V8.


It’s just asking to have alcohol put in it, but I can’t shouldn’t drink alcohol all the time.

Beyond V8 we’ve continued to embrace actually being able to afford things again, with some Ben & Jerry‘s “pint slices” (i.e. sandwiches) and seasonal cereal offerings, such as Gingerbread Spice.


Lest you think everything we eat comes prepackaged, we can’t afford quite that much, so we also make roughly 6/7 of our meals. For instance, homemade seitan and mushroom tortilla pizza rather than Papa Murphy’s.


The 7th non-home meal is generally our Friday nights, which while we’ve drastically downgraded them over the past few years to nearly universal “stay-in” evenings, they still include something special we get from the store, etc. Another tradition that has cropped up several times over the years and which returned full swing in Iceland and now here is our “pancake/waffle” Sundays.


These involve yours truly making pancakes or waffles (depending on the mood) for the family – though recently I have been forced at claw-point to use nothing other than Kodiak Cake mix. 🙂 Seeing the cold brew coffee next to the waffle reminded me of something neat that happened with my coffee that day. When I poured the cold brew into the almond creamer it formed a really cool pattern that looked like a snow-covered patch of woods against the sky.


With the compression and my failure to adequately capture it (and I tried, many times – arguably more to do with me than the camera) you’ll likely have to just use your imagination and trust me. However, if you want to try to see it then look to the middle part of the class (where the coffee and cream are mixing) and imagine that as leafless trees in winter which are covered by snow. Then progress downward until you get to the snow covered ground (bottom of the glass). It was cool in person, no idea how it will translate to a compressed and size-reduced photo.

That same day we were also playing around with our phones a bit as they had recently received a camera update. I was quick to return to playing with my hamburger bro friend:


In addition I found a little Shiba Inu (or at least I think that is what it is) you can “drop” into the photo that will move around, etc.


I also started messing around with the light angles and found that the sun friend could work well in such conditions.


SB found some animated stickers you could add to photos. These are a bit more basic than the 3D animated objects I was playing with, but they are still neat.


Tristen is most definitely not sure he agrees.

The biggest aspect of the camera update was the release of the “Night Sight” mode for the phone. This was something I was pretty excited about, especially since even without a night mode my new phone was still scores better than my old one. Now that I’ve had a chance to play around with Night Sight mode, I have to say that I’m both impressed and ignorant all at once. I’m ignorant in that the focus mechanisms of Night Sight are still foreign to me.


I’m also still learning how to deal with direct light sources in a dark room.


But I’m also impressed by the phone’s ability to generate imagery even in the near complete absence of light. Take this photo for example:


While grainy and having the appearance of an early 2000s internet creepypasta, this photo was taken in our bathroom with no light. As in, I closed the door and there were no lights on. If I were to have posted this photo from my old phone (which I can’t do since I sold it) it would have just been a giant black rectangle on your screen. I realize that might seem like malarky, but there was truly no light in that photo – ok you got me, there’s almost always light, but I mean “no light” in the normal usage of the term. It was friggin’ dark and the camera still captured something. I was impressed, especially since this is a tiny camera in a phone.

Now, on a completely unrelated note our shower cleaner in that last photo made me thing of an oh so lovely experience I had before Thanksgiving: cleaning our dishwasher. Here I have to say that me and our dishwasher are quite familiar with each other. When we first moved in that thing was nasty. I’m talking food clogged in the vents, black stuff in the bottom, hairs (yes hairs) clinging to the inside of the door, you name it, it probably featured it. Honestly it looked like the thing had never been cleaned. It was weirdly in contrast to the other appliances which seemed very clean. The oven, for example, was probably the cleanest oven I’ve ever seen in an apartment. But this dishwasher, whew, it was filthy.

So I went about cleaning it with specific dishwasher cleaning agents, inspecific cleaning agents, cleaning agents that probably assured my eventual mutation into something nonhuman, and physical tools like a screwdriver. Yep, when you are taking a screwdriver to the crap inside your dishwasher you know you are leading the good life. Now, to its credit, I will say that despite being disgusting the dishwasher at least worked – unlike our refrigerator which died within two weeks (though to the landlord’s credit they replaced it with a new one the same day). Or, perhaps “work” is too strong of a word, the dishwasher “functioned” – I think that’s more accurate. It left loads of black stuff (more on that in a moment) and also it leaked. A lot. While I wasn’t about to ask the landlord to come clean the dishwasher (though it was filthy enough I probably should have) I was more than willing to make them come fix the leak.

Fortunately for them I generally try to repair/fix anything in my apartment up until the point it costs money. Sometimes SB’s gets a bit exasperated by my endeavors to fix things when we pay someone to do that for us, but I generally view such repairs as a learning opportunity for when I own my own things (as an example I haven’t paid anyone to fix anything electronic for me in 12 years). So, when the dishwasher started leaking and the refrigerator started to die, I did my own research and disassembly to try to at least figure out what the problem was, if not fix it. While I have a pretty good idea what the problem was with the fridge, I’ll never know as they took it and gave us a new one. The dishwasher, however, I figured out exactly what the issue was and thankfully the maintenance guy followed my suggestions (unlike the asshat at our place in Boston who was continuously ass-blasted about a mistake he made and took it out on me) and fixed it in less than 10 minutes. I’m not saying he needed me, I’m saying that I gave him info that took out the entire troubleshooting process and expedited things – and in the meantime I learned how to fix it myself if I ever own a dishwasher that breaks in the same manner. Further, when poking around under the dishwasher I learned that the entire thing was woefully off balance and probably had been since the day it was installed. So I fixed that with some basic tools and elbow-grease and now our dishwasher no longer sets lopsided in the cabinet (which was causing its own issues).

Anyways, way off track there. Though the dishwasher had been repetitively cleaned, had its leak fixed, and had been balanced, it was still leaving small bits of black stuff which looked suspiciously like mold or mildew. Having cleaned underneath the thing and having had it apart for various stages of deep cleaning, I knew that there was one more place left to clean – the drain. Now you’re probably wondering why I waited so long to clean the drain when it’s generally one of the first things recommended. Honestly I was hoping to avoid it because the drain cover used non-standard screws and I knew it would be a pain in the ass to get off, and, sure enough, it was. And…

..sweet merciful God almighty the drain was one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen.


Not only did it smell rancid, some of that.. “waste” was so old it had turned into freaking titanium and chemically forged itself into the plastic cover. This, coupled with the food from the 1920s stuck in the upper vent, all but confirmed by presumption that the dishwasher had simply never been cleaned. It took me 45 minutes to clean that. I used Lime Away, vinegar, toilet cleaner (yes I know how bad that stuff is, but when your dishwasher looks like the aftermath of Passchendaele then you’ll understand), and things like good ole’ soap and hot water and a knife. Yes, a freaking knife, because some of that stuff you could not scrub off: you had to engage it in mortal combat because it was alive.


Anyways, after nearly an hour of struggle and near-death experiences I was finally able to start a cleaning cycle on the dishwasher. We only use it about 1 or 2 times per week, but when new strains of typhus are growing in there and plague doctors are gathering outside your house you need to deal with it.

Now, having shared that lovely bit of imagery, that seems like the perfect time to segue into Thanksgiving and food! 😀

SB and I had decided to do Thanksgiving with just us and the Boys this year, so we had complete control over the menu – or so we thought! While were musing what to do for the main course, SB found out that her work gave out turkeys for Thanksgiving! She had been able to start just in time to sign up for one, so she did (not that Tristen would have accepted any other outcome). Turns out that this was a full 15lb turkey… for two people. 😛


One happy boi.

For reference that’s 3-3.5x the size of our usual birds. However, not a group to waste much of anything, we quickly began formulating our plan of attack on Turkey (while Tristen and Valentino gnawed on the frozen carcass). I decided that we’d go with slow cooking it in some beer!


Oddly enough the beer we had on hand was from the two breweries we visited in Ireland!

Since we had 4 big cans of Guinness that was the logical choice to cook with.. and drink. 🙂


Tristen claimed a can for himself as he assumed the “supervisor” position on the bar where he overlooked the toils of the filthy peasantry beneath him.


Valentino, for his part, was very anxious to help out with the homemade cranberry-plumb-ginger sauce!


Pig alternated between checking the yams (yam-yams for the ham-hams) in the oven and fiercely guarding the sweet potato rolls we’d gotten.


And I do mean fiercely guarding.


None shall pass.

To Tristen’s credit, he did join his brothers in assisting us, but mostly only when he thought he could sneak a bite of the “ricken” (turkey).


Tristen also kept SB company while we cast the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade broadcast (long after it was over, we were in no rush to wake up that day, lol) to Phil. The highlight of the parade for us is always Sinclair, (no not that Sinclair.. well, sort of that Sinclair, more like that Sinclair’s older sibling) and this year was no exception!


The turkey ended up taking about 45 minutes longer to cook than I had anticipated, which I think is excusable considering my lack of experience cooking anything more than 5lbs in the past. More importantly, it turned out really good.


The seasoning and Guinness worked really well together. It was a good centerpiece for our 2018 Thanksgiving meal.


Our dishes this year included: the aforementioned seasoned Guinness turkey, homemade cranberry-plumb-ginger sauce, sweet potato pecan puree, southwest style green beans (with, interestingly enough, vegan bacon and also some local green chile!), and sweet potato rolls.


For desert we had a pumpkin-pecan-cranberry pie. Yes, pumpkins, pecans, and cranberries – all in one pie (and the second of such amazing pumpkin pie variations in just one month).


Photo is a little blurry as I cropped it out of a larger one and compressed it, but I think you can see the deliciousness.

Our Thanksgiving evening also included a mini Adventure Time marathon – and with us any Adventure Time day is a good day. 🙂


Afterward, well… afterward I think this photo of Valentino and Pig is best indicator of how we all felt. 😀


But, as is usual for Thanksgiving, the pompousness was only just beginning. With only the tiniest of dents in our turkey, we went on to have leftovers for several days – and the turkey lasted even longer (it’s only like half gone as I type this). The first thing the turkey got turned into was a cheesy green chile turkey tortilla soup.


It was, in SB’s words “amazing” – which is saying something since it was also quite spicy and SB’s heat tolerance is much lower than mine. We turned the turkey skeleton/corpse and fatty-bits into a yummy broth which we will use for various other recipes, mostly recently maple-chile turkey chili. But yeah, the moral of story is that a 15lb turkey lasts us a long while.

In the days after Thanksgiving (Black Friday off, woo!) we largely just spent time together. SB did go out a bit on Black Friday, and then I went out for a bit when SB locked her keys in the car and I had to walk all the way to Target to bring her the spare keys. If you’re wondering why I didn’t take a Taxi/Uber/Lyft, well it was quitting time on Black Friday, that’s why – so there was a triple surge going on. On my walk (which was 15 miles) I was attacked by rattlesnakes, coyotes, and rabid roadrunners. When I finally arrived, haggard and near death, SB berated me for taking so long.

The plus side of SB’s outing is that she found some local sodas to try, so we tried two of those over the weekend.


But, aside from a massive (for us turkey), beer, wine, yummy food, Adventure Time, and 150 mile forced marches (for me, not SB – she got to just sit) our Thanksgiving and the following weekend was pretty uneventful, which is exactly how I like it!

So, with the story of our 2018 Thanksgiving told, I’d like to share a few things I am thankful for.

I am thankful for SB, Tristen, Valentino, Pig, Clifford, Pigsten, and Broli – as well as all the other buddies. I am thankful for all our plant friends – speaking of which the barley bros are doing very well.


I am thankful for Phil, for my Playstation, for my computer headset, my 12 year old iPod, my 13 year old slippers, and wool socks. I am thankful that I am no longer a law student. I am thankful I have people looking out for me in the legal profession (even if we don’t always see eye to eye). I am thankful for all my “Secondary Cast of Characters” family. I am thankful that I will soon have (non-terrible, though still not great, freedoms) insurance again. I am thankful for earplugs. I am thankful for the developers who made Red Dead Redemption 2. I am thankful that I did not go hungry on Thanksgiving or any other day. I am thankful we had a second key I could carry for 1500 miles across the desert to SB. I am thankful for Dr. Doom. I am thankful for reusable water bottles and for the fact that I have water easily accessible to me.

I am also incredibly thankful for all the animal friends in the world. To say that they are often the highlight of my day is no exaggeration.


I am especially thankful for Alfred – who made a late November appearance!

Except chiggers. Chiggers can die in fire. Also poison ivy plants, those too.

I am thankful for many things, far more than I can list here – but as a closing note I’d like to once again, say thanks to Meem for helping me start this blog (over 6 years ago) in the first place. Without her you’d all never be able to listen to me whine about things – and what a sad, sad world that would be. 😛

Until next time,
-Taco

9th Anniversary Festivities (Plus a NM Update)

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Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear!

[Administrative Note: This is the first post I am writing after a recent slew of back-end updates and changes here at Dinosaur Bear. One part of the update was to change how internal links work on the blog, so if you notice some links on this post (or others) not working correctly, please let me know in the comments for the relevant post! Also, if anything else seems wonky it might just be a work in progress sort of deal as I am playing with a lot of behind-the-scenes gadgets that are either newly installed or new to me.]

So, aside from that phone post, when we last left off SB and I had just departed from our ABQ Adventure with Meem. Prior to that we were in the process of settling into our new home. This post picks up with a bit of an update on our NM lives, as well as celebrates our 9th Anniversary Festivities! I originally intended for this post to come out at the end of the string of posts I have already written (five posts waiting in the hangar as of me writing this), but I ended up producing a lot more content than I anticipated so I’m inserting this one in front of two already written posts for timeliness purposes.

Anyways, as to the continued process of us settling in, we’ve made quite a bit of progress and I think the apartment is pretty much settled at this point! We’ve gotten everything organized and put away and have made all the new acquisitions we’ll need. We even downsized a bit more than we already had, which is something SB and I are really trying to keep doing (which can be difficult when you need to reacquire basic things like a table). Pigsten for his part did not downsize, but he did organize!


In fact he helped me clean his entire rock collection (plus a few seashells) because they needed a good scrubbin’ (especially one, ehm.. slightly radioactive one whose origins will be revealed in a future post!) – and then we placed them all in his brand new Rock Box!


The small wooden box on top is his original box – you can see how much his collection has grown!

Pigsten got a bit dirty while going through his collection – as did Broli. In fact all the Boys had gotten a bit dirty from all our recent traveling, that or they just were messy eaters in all the excitement of new food (*cough* Valentino *cough*).


So, with much ado, all the Boys got a long-overdue bath.


Valentino was, as usual, incredibly excited for bath time (in fact I often think he purposefully gets dirty to expedite the bath process).


Pig was also really chill about it as bath time is a nice zen time for him. However, after the bath is over he gets a little… uh.. excited?


Now, the one boy who always gives us a fit about bathing is – you guessed it – Tristen (if you thought Pigsten or Broli they are easy-peasy).


Tristen “sitting” on the surface of the water rather than bathing.

He bites and roars and claws and thrashes and, eventually, gives in and just lets it happen.


Part of why he hates it so much is because bathing removes his precious “manries” (e.g. dirt, grease, and other manly things) but also because I think he gets cold afterward. The good news on that front is that since the weather has been pretty amazing here the Boys all got to do the majority of their drying outside rather than just sit in front of a fan for hours.


In other Boys-related news, they have continued to amass a large number of online friends and pen-pals, so many in fact that every couple of weeks it seems like they are getting mail!


Valentino showcasing a postcard they got – with Rosita being her typical model self.

They definitely get more good mail than I do that’s for sure. I get bills, information from the bar (I’ll let you guess what kind of bar), and that’s about it. Also bills. On the friends note, the Boys have even made some local friends, such as this T-Rex lamp Tristen found when I was meeting a professional associate for coffee, this is not Tristen’s first T-Rex lamp friend either!


I think Tristen has struggled a bit with the move – not because he doesn’t like it here (in fact he much prefers it here to say… Iceland in winter), but really because he is like me any change makes him anxious. So we’ve been keeping him pretty busy with activities (and also bribes, they work well with that Boy – read on for one such bribe). Despite normally being a “Dad’s boy” he has even ran some errands with SB lately.


Though that might have more to do with Co-Pilot status in Felicia than it does Mom time. Speaking of being odd parents, we recently acquired this year’s Thomas, Thomas V!


Yes its crazy to think about the fact that we’ve had five reincarnations of Thomas now. Thomas has proven to us that he is not limited by the usual aspects of mortality or linear existence. He has been small, had his own security guard, been large, and is now white.


We decided to mix it up with a different style of Thomas this year (and SB didn’t even have to lug him back from Bónus on foot either!) and picked up a white one, or rather the seeds that Thomas I, II, III, and IV implanted in our brains commanded us subconsciously to pick this Thomas to be Thomas V. I hold no illusions of control over the Thomas Empire.


Thomas chillin’ on the balcony.

Oh, you may be wondering about our other plants – you know, the ones that aren’t part of a massive cosmos-devouring Pumpkin God. They are doing well too. The Barley Bros and Bonsai Buddy Jr. are getting along quite nicely in their new spot in the office.


And yes, I open the blinds for them, it’s just that sometimes the sunshine turns the office into an inferno. As proof of their well-being here is a later photo (with open blinds) where you can see how big the Barley Bros are getting.


If you need a primer on what makes two Barley plants in New Mexico somewhat extraordinary then read this post again, that post also mentions the unfortunate “death” of Little Friend. The good news is that our cacti are doing well, especially Little Friend who could really only go up from his “deceased” status.


It’s hard to tell from that photo but he is actively growing! He seems quite at home in New Mexico.

Pancho continues to be huge, Nacho struggled a bit with his repotting and I had to do some surgery on him, same for Quixote (which really surprised us). However, they are all stable now and Pig is doing lots of “cacti yoga” with them to help them heal.


That Pig-healin’ must be seeping into all the plants in the house, because even the office plants seem to benefit from it.


The Barley Bros now dwarf Bonsai Buddy Jr.

Oh, and if you were curious (you weren’t, but that’s an easy way for me to change course), yes – we did buy both the stand and the bench just for the plants. I’m talking like $65 spent on these plants while we eat canned beans. 😀 Priorities dear reader, priorities.

Speaking of expenses, we made another large expense as part of our “settling” process – we got a TV. Yes, aside from Felicia the TV was the biggest expense we’ve had in.. well.. about five years. If you’ve read Dinosaur Bear for a while you’ll know that we parted with our beloved former TV, Philip, prior to leaving Boston. Philip was, in his day, a nice TV. He was a 2008 model but we purchased him in 2009 with the ole’ “Last Year’s Model” discount from Sam’s Club. In fact we purchased him on June 17th at 3:33pm using my Dad and Stepmom’s Business Account at Sam’s Club. Yes, I kept the receipt, Philip was my child. We then put Philip’s MASSIVE box into the back of SB’s Lumina (where it did not fit), tied it up with rope, and then slowly drove back to our apartment while consumed with terror that it would fall out of the car, etc. Philip was 47″ – a big TV for 2009. Philip was also expensive, even with the discount and all the research I had done (and if you know me, you’ll know I do an obsessive amount of research before spending anything above probably $100 – SB says that I sometimes do a little too much research, in fact 😛 ). Some people gave me crap for buying Philip when SB and I made very little money, some people’s opinions didn’t matter. 🙂

Philip was, more importantly, a good TV. He was SB and I’s first big purchase, and aside from getting sick once (a Dr. came and fixed him up – thankfully he was still in warranty), he was a solid performer. Philip was the last of his species to be made in the United States, and we moved him and his big box three times (Philip was also very heavy compared to current-gen TVs). However, when it came time to leave Boston behind we decided we needed to sell Philip for space purposes. Fortunately Philip went to a good home, and while it rained on the day he went to his new home (thankfully I’d kept all his packaging) because even God was sad, we got him on his way with no issues and I honestly got a pretty good price for him.

We had a second smaller TV that my Dad and Stepmom had gotten for us (a first-gen smart TV from Vizio) but we sold that around the same time as Philip. After that we had no TV for about 14 months – and while we didn’t really miss broadcast television that much, we did miss Philip and watching Adventure Time and Jeopardy together. So, with Tristen basically eating us alive over the lack of a TV, I started doing research into current-gen TVs after we’d settled into our apartment. After a lot of research and some bargain hunting and actual haggling (yes, legitimate old-school haggling) that took nearly 25% off the list price, we purchased a new TV.

Meet “Phil” 😀


Phil, despite being larger than Philip, weighs way less. Phil is also a smart TV, whereas Philip was not, so we’re still getting used to a TV that we can interface with (Phil uses Android TV and we have Android Phones – so they can make digital babies). I would also be remiss if I didn’t inform you that Phil is fiercely guarded by a one Tristen, T-Rex.


Tristen originally wanted to set Phil up so that the Google Assistant only listened to him, but we vetoed that proposition. Since Phil is a Smart TV and easily links up with our phones and computers, one of the first things we did was “cast” a bunch of photos of the Boys to him and watch YouTube.


During our first big evening with Phil SB went out to Church’s Chicken (much to Tristen’s euphoric jubilation) and we watched YouTube videos of Jenna Marbles’s dogs while enjoying our fried chicken.


We don’t have broadcast TV (i.e. no cable) and we aren’t going to get it. It costs too much and streaming is much more cost-effective for us (I, for one, don’t really watch anything and what SB watches is stuff like YouTube or Netflix). As such we don’t get any sports, etc. but we do have Adventure Time – though we get those on DVDs (not even Blurays, just DVDs – because it’s a cartoon, lol) and we didn’t have a DVD player when we first got Phil (a fact Tristen later used to his bargaining advantage).

Despite our fried chicken TV fest, SB and I haven’t been eating much meat lately and no longer keep any in the house aside from events like Church’s “Ricken” night. That said, despite less meat we’ve honestly branched out our diets more than we had in Iceland (though that was largely due to cost, in fairness) including some yummy frozen watermelon-mint treats SB made us.


It’s also fall, meaning pumpkin-craziness is in the air (something Iceland did not share, in fact SB’s friend had to bring us Pumpkin Spice all the way from the U.S.)


So, in addition to the usual pumpkin stuff (which is  to say coffee, always coffee) SB also made us some pumpkin fudge which had no added sugar and was AMAZINGLY good!


It had a really good texture and was way less sweet than usual fudge (which I find to be too much anymore) and went really well with our pumpkin coffee! 🙂


Fudge + coffee/tea + snuggle-time = a very good night indeed!


The Boys are all big fans of pumpkin anything, though they are generally pretty easy to please, especially in regards to coffee. Lately we’ve been on a big almond creamer kick with our coffee.


Pig loves him some almonds, so he often sneaks extra coffee while his brothers are distracted.


For my part I’ve been celebrating beer that doesn’t cost a small fortune by buying, well, a lot of it. 😀


I’ve picked up more 12 packs in the past couple of months than I had in over a year and a half.


Hamburger bro courtesy of my Pixel 3.

SB has also been exploring some more wine – again because of how much better the prices are here.


And because a lot of alcohol isn’t enough to make you sleepy (lol) we recently picked up some deliciously good “Relax” coffee. Yes, I realize how backward that sounds, but its decaf coffee blended with lavender and chamomile and it is freaking good.


I’ve been trying it with Kava to see if it helps me sleep, and while results have varied, it’s a nice alternative to melatonin (which I have honestly been taking for far too long but at a certain point you just gotta’ sleep). The good news on the sleepy-time front is that Fall has brought with it much cooler (but not cold) temperatures, so we’ve been able to turn off the A/C (except for the very end of October) and enjoy the fresh air (which I tend to sleep better with). Of course Fall isn’t super prevalent here and it doesn’t even begin to compare with Fall in New England. However, as luck would have it we do have one tree out in front of our apartment that does change – and when I say one I mean one, the rests are various succulents and palms.


Interestingly enough, we got to see the tree slowly change from right to left – which was really neat. When it first started it went fast, so fast in fact that SB and I woke up one day were like “Wow, the tree, uh, changed!” After the first 1/3 or so it slowed way down, but it continued to only work from right to left – the left side never moved inward. Pig kept a close eye on the tree as it changed, likely in search of any grubs eating the leaves.


If you look closely you’ll spot a Pig-leg.

Since the Fall weather has been wonderful aside from a couple of rainy days we’ve used the weather as an opportunity to get outdoors. One of the first places we checked out was the Veterans Memorial Park which we had driven by the very first day we arrived here. While the Park is dedicated to New Mexican Veterans broadly, it has a special focus on the Bataan Death March of WWII because of the disproportionate number of New Mexicans who were forced into the march (where ~5,650 to 18,000 prisoners of war died).


The above statue, “Heroes of Bataan” is dedicated to both the U.S. and Filipino soldiers who were part of the march, and the space in front of them features footprints of actual survivors of the march.


What I did not know prior to visiting the park was that New Mexico had the highest per capita prisoner of war rate with the Japanese after the U.S. and Filipino forces surrendered in 1942 (and were subsequently forced into the death march).


They had a sign which shows how many New Mexicans from each county ended up as a POW in the Philippines which gives you a visual idea of just how many there were from a comparatively low population state.


In addition to WWII there are monuments and memorials to essentially every major conflict going all the way back to the Revolutionary War in the park (though obviously New Mexico has no known connections to that war for obvious reasons). One of the most visually noticeable memorials is for Vietnam, largely because of the Bell UH-1 Iroquois  (or as I know them, the “Huey”) they have above the memorial.


You can get right up underneath it, which is really neat (though some asshat vandalized it in 2016, because a surefire way to be a cool person is to vandalize war memorials – fortunately all the damage was fixed).


Pigsten and Broli really liked the park, though Pigsten likes just about anyplace with a lot of rocks.


One of my favorite parts of the park was a stone tablet engraved with “The Battling Bastards of Bataan” by Frank Hewlett – which details the circumstances of Bataan.


We’re the Battling Bastards of Bataan,
No Mama, No Papa, No Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,
No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces,
And nobody gives a damn!

While sad, I found it quite profound.

While the park has been our only real outing (aside from a yet-to-be-released adventure), that hasn’t stopped us from getting excited about one of the best parts of Fall – Halloween!


Halloween decorations designed to lure trick-or-treaters to their doom, or to give them candy, either-or.

Halloween has been a favorite holiday of mine for a long time, but since SB and I’s anniversary occurs at roughly the same time, that just makes it even better! Thomas V (like all his siblings before him) came to live with us in the weeks preceding Halloween and so he was, of course, excited as well.


In fact the last week of October is generally a pretty exciting time around the Taco household – and while SB and I have a long history of not actually getting to spend much time together on our anniversary, this year we did! I think the Boys were pretty excited about that, either that or the fact that they did their civic duty and voted early (or because they bought a lottery ticket, which alas, won us nothing).


Or, perhaps they were just excited because of Halloween treats. Like most people, we don’t restrict our treats to Halloween and instead we trickle them in in advance, kind of like this glorious Mummy Cake Pop!


Or Valentino’s army of zombie gummy bears!


I don’t know if they were really zombies or not, but it fits the theme.

Or maybe it was just because we got even more beer.


Or, perhaps in the case of Pigsten it was because he continued to acquire rocks.


Or, even still, maybe it was because it was bat week!?


Look at that smug, smilin’, silly boi!

Ok the bat week thing was probably mostly me, I love bats. While the good spirits of the Boys may have been the result of many things, I can say for sure that Tristen’s recent bout of blissful joy is the result of his recent acquisition: a Playstation 4.


Not just any Playstation 4 either, a Playstation 4 Pro with Red Dead Redemption 2 included (Red Dead Redemption 1 is one of my Top 3 all time favorite games, and so by proxy one of Tristen’s as well). Tristen was so excited about “his” new Playstation that I struggle to properly define it with words. To say he had waited for a Playstation 4 for a long time is not an exaggeration. He has wanted one for about five years now. Yes, despite having had a Playstation 3 from the first day he came to live with us (my PS3 was a beast and lasted from 2006 until I sold in 2017 – it was still working fine when I sold it too) he just had to have the Playstation 4. But he was consistently denied for years. Finally, as a reward for becoming lawlyurs we placed a pre-order for the PS4 Pro RDR2 Bundle while we were in ABQ, a pre-order which Amazon completely screwed up to the point we cancelled it and instead got it from Best Buy (my first purchase from Best Buy in probably 9 years). The upside of that is that because we pre-ordered it we were able to go do a “Midnight Release” (technically at 9pm) on the day before RDR2 actually released – a first in my entire life of gaming. So we got our PS4 Pro and RDR2 before most people could even get RDR2 at all – “manries” as Tristen would say.


As Phil is Sony, and the Playstation 4 Pro is made by Sony, the two of them got on real nice, real quick – in fact they recognized each other before I even powered on the PS4 for the first time, which was kind of freaky.

The one downside is that we found out that our shelf area in our TV stand doesn’t give the PS4 Pro enough fresh air and so it sounded like a jet-engine during 4K gameplay. It was so loud I even opened the Playstation up to make sure the fan was ok (and found out that you can’t go very deep into the PS4 without spending a lot more time than I wanted to).


Turns out the PS4 was just fine, it was just getting hot in the small space. So I changed the setup a bit, got the PS4 a vertical stand, and how it “hides” behind Phil and makes very little noise. So, a new TV and my first console purchase since the Playstation 2 in 2000 (I’ve owned consoles since, but those were gifted to me), plus our new phones, has resulted in quite the technological upgrade around the house in the past month.

Needless to say with all this going on there’s been a good deal of excitement lately (and some frustrating and annoying stuff, but that’s not for this post) – with some side items, such as the Boston Red Sox winning the 2018 Word Series just adding to the fun!


Tristen showing off his Boston pride.

With all that fun we slid into our actual anniversary in high spirits and with comparatively low stress to some previous years. As mentioned, we ALL got to spend time together this year, which was super nice – even our extended “buddy” family (such as our OG Gangsta Bear Friends) came out for our family party.


As part of our anniversary celebration we made a delicious homemade pizza, and may have snacked on some of those remaining zombie gummy bears in the process. 🙂


The real treat, however, was the dark-chocolate-espresso-pumpkin-pie I made. Yes, a dark chocolate, espresso, pumpkin pie.


Tristen, the ever diligent guardian of all things pie and beer.

As is usual for me I didn’t follow any recipe, I just took my own modified pumpkin pie variant (which is much lower in sugar, not flavor) and added in dark chocolate covered espresso beans and some shavings. It turned out very good.


We paired our pizza and pie with an Adventure Time marathon courtesy of the PS4’s disk drive and Phil – a nice treat since we hadn’t been able to watch Adventure Time in over a year! Naturally, despite the kid-friendly nature of pizza, pie, and cartoons we did also partake in ample amounts of adult beverages. While beer was to be expected, SB just so happened to accidentally on purpose have a giant box of wine arrive on our anniversary. 😉


We’d never done any mail-order wine before, but SB had (oddly enough) gotten a wine coupon from an eSATA computer cable I had bought (weird place to find a wine coupon, I know) which meant that the wine was only around $6 a bottle – good by any standards, let alone our budget-minded standards. So that night we had both beer and wine and in a rare event I had even more wine than beer!


While it was a relatively “calm” anniversary for year 9 (especially compared to some past years, which have included such fun events as a car breaking down in the middle of the highway), it was just the kind of anniversary I like: homemade dinner, homemade dessert, SB, the Boys, cartoons, and more alcohol than we can drink! 🙂

The next morning we worked off our pizza, pie, and booze with some time at the gym and some yoga.


We also enjoyed some of the new kinds of a coffee (mushroom based!) that we have been testing out.


Tristen with his morning joe and another postcard!

We continued to munch on the pizza and pie for the next several days (and the booze lasted even longer than that, surprisingly 😛 ). All in all it was a great few weeks in the Taco household. New friends, new electronics, new alcohol, new cartoons, new games, family outings, cleaner Boys (though Tristen wouldn’t agree with that being a good thing), and another year of SB and I’s silliness in the books. 🙂

All of this while Fall continues on around us. And I do love me some Fall, almost as much as I love my family. 😀


The culmination of the tree’s Autumn voyage.

So, there you have it – a decent update on our life in NM and the settling in process as well as a recap of our anniversary/Halloween festivities. While there have been some frustrating things going on in our lives as well, I didn’t want to focus on those in the is post, and instead I wanted to share some of the fun and (little) adventures that we’ve been having. Next week I’ll continue to focus on the “lighter side” with a fun post I’ve been thinking about writing for some time now – so check your inboxes next Monday for another round of Dinosaur Bear.


This isn’t what Fall looked like where I grew up – but I could get used to it. 🙂

Until next time,
-Taco

The ABQ Adventure – Part II

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Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear,

This post is both a substantive and chronological sequel to the first ABQ Adventure – and, on a larger scale – the culmination of what has been a very, very long process. Whereas the first ABQ Adventure was about taking the bar exam (itself the end of a long process) and – more importantly – Breaking Bad, the second ABQ Adventure was for the purpose of officially becoming a lawyer – and also Breaking Bad. Now I’ve been doing lawyerly things for a while, but up until recently was not an actual lawyer in a legal sense (and you know, the legal sense is kind of important insofar as lawyerdom is concerned).

However, while I could easily write an entire post about that, I’m instead going to mostly focus on the Adventure part of the ABQ adventure, as said adventure was not only SB and I’s first road-trip as residents of New Mexico (though not technically our first NM road-trip in general), but was also my first time seeing Meem after she left on her own adventure. So, rather than boring legal stuff – which, lets be real, is boring – I’m going to focus on the more exciting aspects of The ABQ Adventure – Part II.

At that time we hadn’t yet purchased Felicia, so we were still in Felipe (Rental 1 of 2), so it was with Felipe that we headed for ABQ on a fine Saturday morning. Our plan was to meet Meem at the Sunport and we also wanted to have as much time with her as possible, so we headed out earlier than slowpokes like SB and I might have otherwise been. The good news is that the weather was fantastic!


This road-trip was a big contributor to SB’s enjoyment of the Ford Foci/Focuses/Fuckuses and ultimately our later purchase of Felicia, so that was another important aspect of the trip. It was also our first time seeing the “interior” of New Mexico, with famous places such as Truth or Consequences and Hatch (as well as less-famous-but-fun-to-say places such as Radium Springs and Elephant Butte).


All-in-all the interior drive was scenically about what we were expecting, which was fine by me, as stuff like this is what I live for:


On a more logistical note, Meem’s flight was delayed – and since we’d had a delay getting out ourselves we ended up timing our arrival at the airport almost perfectly with Meem being ready to get picked up. As in, she had just walked outside when we arrived. We probably couldn’t do that again.

After a nice lunch at El Patio De Albuquerque we settled into our hotel, made the “plebs” carry us up a mini-fridge, and discussed some very important matters such as when we would be returning to the Standard Diner and it’s A-maze-zing Vodka Gimlets. The answer was that night, of course.


After a year of building them up in our heads, Meem and I were not disappointed, the Gimlet was as good as we remembered. So good in fact that I (yes me) drank no beer and instead just Gimlets. SB, who was not with us for Part I, opted for a Mojito which was also awesome. Thus, its the bartender, the Standard Diner has a godly bartender. Best drinks of our trip, by far.

I was also pleased that the decorations of the Standard have kept to the theme, and SB even appreciated some of the same signs that I had 14 months prior:


The next day we continued revisiting some of Meem and I’s favorite ABQ places by returning to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. This time we didn’t watch the dancing, but we did have more of their really good food (and also bought more things from the gift shop). For our lunch we tried “Kool Aid Friend Pickles” which really didn’t have much Kool Aid flavor (aside from a few bites) but which had a really nice balance to them – odd but worth trying!


Meem inadvertently (or not 😛 ) had the same thing she had last time: the Tewa Taco – an “Indian Taco” which was FREAKING MASSIVE, while I had some salmon prepared with only pre-contact ingredients, and SB opted for the chicken and waffles (blue corn and chile syrup style!) – much to Tristen’s (and Pigsten’s) delight!


After getting full bellies and lighter wallets (SB and Meem got jewelry while I got nothing because I am unloved 😛 ) we headed out to the Petroglyph National Monument for some exploration (and also NPS Passport Stamps, always stamps – though I failed miserably and my stamp got screwed up, but I still have it). In order to understand why there’s a national monument named after petroglyphs, you first must know what a petroglyph is. Per the ever knowledgeable and generally reliable (sorry Professors, you know its true) Wikipedia: “Petroglyphs are images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art.” The more you know. After the visitor center we went to the Boca Negra (“Black Mouth”) Canyon area where we started hiking upward in search of petroglyphs.


There are lots and lots (I’m talking hundreds) of petroglyphs in the area, most dating to between 1300 and 1600. The petroglyphs range from “easily identifiable” to something which only the creator and their friends/descendants would know the meaning of – which is half the magic in my opinion. Animals are a frequent sighting:


Pigsten and Broli for scale.

Of the animals one of my personal favorites was El Pato, can you spot him?


Some of the petroglyphs appeared to tell stories, though interpreting them after the fact is quite difficult, even for experts!


Many of the petroglyphs were a mixture of animals and symbols, which makes a lot of sense in the context of the culture.


Not all of them were easy to see (and indeed we missed the vast majority of them I do believe), not only because of physical location, but also because some of them only “reveal” themselves under certain lighting (e.g. sun phase) conditions. Per an informative sign, elders even claim that many petroglyphs “choose” who they reveal themselves to, way cool! Of course the physical side of things is also a factor, namely that – especially in that NM sun – the rocky and uneven climb up makes it easy to miss smaller details.


Pigsten and Broli surveying the surrounding landscape.

In addition to animals and symbols, some of the petroglyphs feature humans/humanoids – notably the well known Kokopelli.


It’s really very impressive that most of the glyphs are even visible at all. Not only are there centuries of exposure to the elements to consider, but also the most dangerous thing of all: idiot humans. Because people suck, a lot of the petrogylphs had been vandalized by outright destruction or by the addition of (crappy) modern carvings, such as some moron’s cliché “Moron Loves Moroness” inside a heart with an arrow in it.


A petroglyph showing signs of vandalism.

However, a lot of them were thankfully still in (comparatively) good shape and at the top of the Boca Negra trail there was even the remnants of a small hunters’ or herders’ camp.


Pigsten, Broli, and Little Man at the top of Boca Negra!

The Petroglyph National Monument itself is a large area (7,532 acres) but we only explored one small part of it due to time constraints – and also heat, I can’t lie. 🙂 However, the one area we did explore was still really neat. In this next photo you can see the “mound” all these photos came from, there are some people on there for scale. It might not look like much, but its more of a climb than you would think!


If climbing isn’t your thing, there are also some flat (insofar as “flat” counts when ABQ is already at 5,312′) trails where you can still enjoy the area, and if you are lucky you may even see some desert critters (I did!).


Pigsten and Broli on the dusty trail!

Petroglyph National Monument was not something Meem and I had done during Part I, so we followed up to something new for all of us with another thing that was new to all of us: heading up the Sandia Mountains! Now, we did not climb the mountains – at least not in the traditional sense. We instead opted for the way mo’ lazy-people-friendly Sandia Peak Tramway. This Tram, which holds the title of longest aerial tramway in the entire U.S., gains you 3,819 feet in about 15 minutes (way, way faster than hiking).


What was nice about the tram is that it’s a trip that just keeps on giving. The ride is divided between three spans (one of which is the third longest in the world) and each time you think you’re getting the best views, they just keep getting better.


In fact these were easily the best views of the Sandia Mountains I’ve ever been fortunate enough to have! Though I guess in fairness I’ve only seen them three times. 🙂


I guess this is a good time to explain the “Sandia” part of the Sandia Mountains. Sandía means “watermelon” in Spanish, and it’s said that during sunset the red/pink color of the mountains make them look like the color of watermelon! I definitely agree, having now had the chance to see them during sunset on more than a few occasions. We had also chosen our tram time based on sunset, so we got to see the “watermelon” up close and personal! The Sandia Mountains are also quite “green” – especially compared to some other ranges in New Mexico, and by that I mean they have quite a few trees.


All in all they make for a wonderfully picturesque ride up to the crestline on the tram.


As a side note, if you were alive in 1955 and remember the crash of TWA Flight 260 – or are just an aviation enthusiast – the tram goes over the “TWA Canyon” area where you can still see some of the wreckage on a bright/clear day.

Once at the top platform and off your tram, you can turn around and take in a magnificent view of the mountains and Albuquerque beyond them.


The upper platform of Sandia Peak sits at 10,378′ a full 5066′ higher than the baseline ABQ altitude (like I said, we weren’t up for the hike 😛 ). On the back side of the tram area are some ski-slopes – though the snow hadn’t quite arrived just yet.


Pigsten and Broli were big fans of the multi-colored ski lift chairs!


After some time at the top, the temperature started quickly dropping and we knew it was almost sunset time!


Pretty much any spot at the top offered up wonderful views, but me being me I bopped around constantly trying to find the best spot.


While I was meandering around I got a couple of really nice shots with both the sunset and the most recently departed tram.


Eventually I settled on a spot and before too long the sun was setting behind some quite distant mountains.


Then it started getting quite chilly (it was already much colder on the crestline even when the sun was up) but on the plus side the moon started to show itself as well.


A photo from the “back” side of the crestline – with the moon visible (for reference Santa Fe is located a bit to the left – and about 45 miles away from this photo point).

After we had descended the mountain – via a “flight” as the tram company called it, we went to dinner where I got another kind of “flight” – the beer kind. 😛


The next day we explored parts of Old Town ABQ, where we had lunch at the Church Street Cafe, where the service was pretty bad but the food was good, plus they had giant cacti out front, so props for that.


SB got to check out the San Felipe de Neri Church she wanted to see – and which was a new site for Meem and I as well.


We also explored some of ABQ’s art scene – from the insanely priced galleries where you’d need to mortgage your home, to the more subtle and reasonable galleries were we actually made a few purchases.


We also had dinner in old town, where we tried some watermelon-flavored drinks and also beer (big surprise on that second one).


Broli trying ever-so-valiantly to get the greens.

The next day was my “Become a Lawyer” (or technically, “Swearing-in”) event, which involved getting up earlier than I would have liked and spending a lot of time waiting in line to do ceremonial things. There really wasn’t anything wrong with the ceremony, I mean yeah, it was long – but I don’t think it was unusually long or tedious, it was just the nature of the beast. I just.. wasn’t really feeling too excited about it, I guess? It’s kind of weird to consider just how much freaking effort and time had gone into that moment (a process which began in 2012) and yet I was just sort of “I dunno lol” about it. Perhaps that is my incessant ability to not appreciate my achievements or, perhaps, it was a disillusionment with that career pathway, or, perhaps even more abstractly, a growing sense of uncertainty about my life in general. It could be many things, but what is – for most people – the pinnacle of that pathway, the day of jubilation, was for me a day of “whew, is this over yet?” Mayhaps I’m ungrateful? Though that seems like a stretch considering the borderline ludicrous amount of effort I’d put into getting there (not to mention how much I’ve whined on this very blog – oh the humanity – so much QQ in vain if that is true!). Whatever the case was, I was far more excited to get back to spending time with Meem and SB than I was to mark-off ceremonial check-boxes. Plus Pigsten was in my suit (as usual) and he was getting hungry and starting to nibble on me.

Fortunately, SB had decided the night before that she wanted to go to Twisters (more commonly – despite the later’s fictional status – known as Los Pollos Hermanos, from the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul Universe).


Meem and I had been to Twisters during our Breaking Bad Tour (during Part I) but we were more than happy to return with SB as their food was actually pretty good for what it is. We hit it at a good time as we were essentially the only people in the place aside from some locals who left shortly after us and another couple of BB/BCS fans who came in while we were there (I guess all the other new lawyers didn’t want to go to a fast food place to celebrate?). Of course Pigsten and Broli also made an appearance.


After our lunch (where SB also got an “Indian Taco” – once again huge) we headed off in search of a few other BB/BCS-related places. Some of which, such as “A1 Car Wash” (real life: Mister Car Wash) Meem and I had already seen on our previous tour. However, after SB got to see Walter White’s House (real life: a house) we headed up into the Sandia foothills to find Hank & Marie’s house (real life: also a house) which Meem and I did not see last time as the RV (a 1968 Fleetwood Bounder) couldn’t easily get up into the hills where it is located. After some confusion with Google maps we made it up to the house – which is located in a very nice neighborhood!


We weren’t even the only one there to take a photo, which was kind of surprising considering we were the only ones at the far more popular White House (of Walter White, not Cheeto). After that we headed back to the hotel so Meem could take a nap and Tristen and I could continue to obsess over whether to buy a Playstation 4 Pro after Tristen’s myriad attempts to get Grandma Reem to buy it for him had failed. Rain also rolled in, and it was really a storm! I think it ended up raining for pretty much the rest of the night so we ended up just eating at the hotel in a place called Forque (which is featured in BCS per Meem, as SB and I are a season behind).

The next day the sun came back out, but it was also our last morning together.


View from our 19th floor hotel room + more BB/BCS trivia: the parking garage in the center of the photo was featured heavily in a BB episode which I won’t discuss here lest I spoil anything for any reader who has yet to see the series!

Since we had to get Meem to the airport and ourselves home we opted to go for room service – MUCH to ole’ Tristen’s pleasure. The boy LOVES him some room service, even if the food sucks, it’s the experience he enjoys.


The food ended up being pretty good, or at least I thought so. Valentino stole half my lox bagel, which was the one downside.

After breakfast we all got around and took Meem back to the Sunport so she could venture back to LA. For our part we hit the road again to head back home. On the way we did stop at a really neat rest area called “Walking Sands” (we’d actually stopped at this same spot when going the opposite direction but I didn’t take photos) which featured some neat wooden picnic… hut things.


It also featured some great views of the area, which would lead me to agree with the rest area’s comparatively good 4.3/5.0 rating on Google (most rest areas don’t fare so well – if they have a Google page at all).


Since the area was plastered with “DANGER: BEWARE OF RATTLESNAKES” signs I opted to stick to the boardwalks, but I did find a neat sign with all sorts of distances from that spot.


I thought the L.A. one was especially neat – considering Meem’s destination!

After our “Walking Sands” pit stop we continued back to our own home and returned to all sorts of far less exciting things related to our recent move and upcoming endeavors (such as going to Texas to buy Felicia, which was exciting, we just didn’t know that yet).


In the end, it was a great trip to ABQ to see Meem. The lawyer part of it, was, in my mind, quite secondary to getting to explore the area with two of my most favoritest-est peoples, bear, pig, and dinosaurs. While the legal ceremony probably marked the highlight of most people’s week, for me it was just a backdrop to a fun adventure in a really cool city. While I don’t see us needing to return to ABQ any time soon, we were constantly taunted by the fact that the massively popular and internationally renowned Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta was only a 10 days away as of the day we all left.


The mini-balloon-filled lobby of our hotel – while neat, it was a constant reminder of “No loons’ for you!”

So, given our enthusiasm for the fiesta, and Meem’s enthusiasm for the fiesta, and the Boys’ enthusiasm for the fiesta, and also the fact that it happens every year – I bet we’ll end up going to it at some point. No idea when, but if I were I a betting man (I am not, mostly) I bet it happens. 🙂

In the meantime, I’ll appreciate the fact that I got have not one, but two parts to my ABQ Adventure and that both times I had people there to share the fun with. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank Meem for largely sponsoring both adventures, and also SB for driving us around. Now, I’m off to sue someone or something.. I think that’s what lawyers do?

Until next time,
-Taco

Westward Bound

by

Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear!

Well, here we are again – another move. While Dinosaur Bear is much younger than yours truly, it is old enough to have documented several moves in the past few years of my life. While moving is exciting, moving is also challenging. However, I much prefer to write about the fun side of moving – which, for SB and I – one of the most fun parts of moving is the road-trip portion (we’ve had non-road trip moves, but we still like the road-trip part the best). When we were planning our first big-people move of any noteworthy distance we had family help us and used trailers to move our things. While that move was a decent clip (~110 miles) it was also nothing compared to say… 1000 or 3100 miles. Once we hit those distances we knew we needed to be even bigger peoples and do it with a rental truck (since movers were not, are not, and likely never will be within SB and I’s budget) – or airplane. We did a lot of research on U-Haul, Budget, and Penske, as well as secondary options such as the moving cubes and lesser-known rental trucks. However, my grandfather – a former trucker (and engine builder) himself and person whom I generally consider to be the best driver I ever knew – recommended Penske. So we went with Penske. We had been leaning toward Penske – despite them being the most expensive – already, and his recommendation sealed the deal. Turns out it was an extremely good decision. We’ve now driven nearly 4,000 miles in a Penske and the only issue we’ve ever had was a non-issue where the onboard computer temporarily couldn’t read the PSI of a right-rear tire because it was something like 100 degrees outside.

So, with the specter of moving on us once more, there was no consideration – Penske or bust!


In keeping with the “L” and female themes of our past Penske trucks we went with Lucinda, a fitting name considering that we were headed to the Southwest. If you were wondering about the female thing, we have an entire system in our head-cannon for Penske trucks. First, Penske trucks come in the following sizes: 12′, 16′, 22′ and 26′. We have determined that the size of truck relates to its stage of “growth” (yes growth). Therefore a 12′ is younger than a 16′, a 16′ younger than a 22′, and a 22′ younger than 26′. Penske also offers Semi-Truck rentals, and the Semi-Truck sized Penskes are the “Grandmas” of the bunch. While Penske is nearly synonymous with yellow trucks, they also have less common white trucks. The white Penskes are male, and follow the same size-to-age algorithm. As there was far more yellows than whites, Penske trucks live in a matriarchal society. Thus if you want to empower women, go with Penske. The male Penske trucks are just fine, but Penske trucks are a society of women-haulers, make no mistake.

All of our trucks have been 12′ and yellow, thus they have been “babies” and female. Lucinda was the oldest of our trucks – we think she was about to grow into a 16′ and she was showing signs of her “terrible twelves.” There was nothing wrong with her, but she was a bit “rough around the edges” – a sure sign of a truck about to schlep off its old skin and grow. Lucinda, being near adolescence, also had a fiery spirit and liked to go fast (her cruise control liked to stay on the higher end of whatever you set it at 🙂 ).

Anyways, as we had gathered all our stuff for the first time since.. ever, we knew that the 12′ Penske was going to be tight. We almost went up to the 16′ (as the 16′ is generally the same price as the 12′ since Penske has way more 16’s than 12’s) but decided to stick to what we knew. Subsequently, my organization-loving self put the Tetris abilities of my mind to their full use and we packed Lucinda to the roof and to the door. In the end my mental planning worked and we had less than 1/4″ of clearance – space well used! I didn’t do it alone though. SB helped a lot and Tristen helped by talking about how “manries” it all was.


Penske calculates the minimum amount of time you have to rent a truck for one-way rentals based on the distance between pickup and drop-off. For us it was 7 days this time, so we ended up picking up the Penske a couple of days before leaving and keeping it for a couple of days after we arrived (which ended up being very handy since we had no car). While having a full 1.5 days to load the truck was very nice (big stuff on day 1, boxes, etc. on day 2), it still went by very quickly and before too long the room where we’d been staying at MIL & FIL’s was all but empty!


For reference that mattress is not ours – though FIL tried his best to get us to take it regardless. 🙂

Thus, on a Friday morning we were on our way. While we’d had mostly great weather during out past moving road-trips, this time we had unintentionally timed our move with the inland arrival of Hurricane Florence, which resulted in a lot of rain until we got past the middle of the country.


For their part Lucinda and the Boys didn’t seem to mind, though the long portions of heavier rain made for stressful driving on my part. Our first night was in Gardner, KS and there it rained pretty much all evening and night. The next day we proceeded the long way through Kansas where the trip was still rainy and cloudy, but with a bit less rain than in IN and MO.


Aside from the dreary weather the trip was pretty uneventful – which is something anyone who has driven through the Great Plains is probably well versed with. We had intentionally went with “secondary” routes and had avoided the larger interstate highways precisely so that we’d get more of a true heartland road trip experience. So, the long, long, long portions of nothingness didn’t really bother me (I am actually a big fan of vast open spaces), and thankfully the rain decreased as we continued west. Plus, we got to make lots of stops in small little towns – including one such stop where Tristen met some of Sinclair’s family!


The rain and clouds followed us on and off all the way to Oklahoma.


However, by the time we got to Guymon, OK (where we stayed the second night) the clouds were starting to give way to more consistent bits of blue. That night we checked the weather and knew that we were going to be mostly sunshine bound for the rest of the trip, which made us all excited. The Boys were already excited because they had their own bed, so the prospect of sunshine only made them even more excited and thus difficult to get settled into bed.


As you probably just noticed, Floppsy was with is! Yes, we adopted Floppsy before we moved! Floppsy had lived at MIL & FIL’s the entire time we had known him, and he was such a very good friend of the Boys that he decided he wanted to come live with us. So, with MIL’s permission Floppsy joined our family. Floppsy is a stay-at-home sorta bunny (who loves living in elevated places with friends – which is how he spent a lot of his life, on top of a dresser with comic book figures), so he’ll largely be helping care for our myriad of other stay-at-home buddies, but he is the newest member of the family! This was his first major trip, as up until that point sleepovers at Grandma Meem’s house were about as far as he had ventured. So Floppsy was a bit nervous about such a life change, but the Boys kept him good company!

The next day we woke to clouds, but no rain. Plus, we knew the sun was coming, so we continued westward. Before too long we hit Texas, which made Tristen quite excited. To say he was happy about being in Texas would be a gross understatement.


It was also in Texas where the sun finally decided to destroy the clouds and dominate the sky. I think the temperature shot up about 20-30 degrees over the course of the day.


We weren’t in Texas a (comparatively) long amount of time as we were just skirting through the panhandle, but Texas marked the transition from the cloudy weather we’d left behind to the glorious sunshine that we’d have for the next several days. After a decent drive through the panhandle (where we saw, literally, 100,000+ cows – and I mean literally in the correct, non-millennial, sense of the word) we crossed the border into our new home: New Mexico.


Yes, SB and I are now residents of New Mexico – and have begun the (likely infinite and impossible) task of trying to become “New Mexicans.” 🙂 We had decided that NM was our goal quite some time ago, based in no small part on my own experiences there. Now, NM was also one of the more difficult places we were considering from a job perspective (we moved with zero jobs, and the one job prospect I had that seemed solid turned out to be a bust), but it was the goal and so we went with it!

Because SB and I like to arrive at our new homes early in the morning to maximum truck-unloading time, we did something similar to our move to Boston and stopped an hour or so away from our home for the final night of the road trip.


Tristen also liked our decision to stop because we took him to IHOP. The Boy loves him some restaurants like Cracker Barrel and IHOP and he had been asking for such a place for the entire trip. Actually he’d been asking since before we even left. Fortunately there was a nearby IHOP that we were able to just walk to.


Spot the Pigsten!

Oddly enough, despite the gorgeous weather of the day, the evening brought with it a CRAZY thunderstorm. I’m talking extreme lighting and torrential, street-flooding rain. Of course the storm hit the same time we decided to go to Wal-Mart to get a few things for the next day, but that’s life. Even more funny, in all the time we’ve been here since we haven’t seen a storm as intense as that first night. When we got up the next morning you’d never guess it had poured the night before, the skies were clear blue and the earth was bone dry again.


The final stretch of a moving road-trip is always a bit of an antsy period. For one, with the magical journey of the road-trip nearing its end you have to start processing the fact that you are about to, you know, move. Then you start thinking about all the secondary things such as setting up your new home, establishing new accounts, buying things (double points for when you have no income), not to mention the quickly approaching unloading process. Fortunately, NM offered up some wonderful scenery as we drew closer to our new home.


Lucinda also seemed to be pretty excited, I think she ate more gas per mile during those final mountains than she had at any other point during the trip! 🙂


Luckily for us, our new landlords have a very seamless move-in process and so all the paperwork and administrative stuff was very quick. It didn’t take us long to get the unloading process started and we even met one of our new neighbors who let us borrow a moving dolly. Heck, we got through the unloading process in record time! We once again determined that our mattress (not the box-springs, just the mattress) is the biggest moving PITA of the stuff we had, though new post-move acquisitions such as my desk would be far worse.

So, once we were moved-in we began the slow and steady (and ultimately nearly one month long) process of organizing, cleaning, and acquiring. Part of what made this move’s “settling” process so long was the fact that SB and I had so very little in the way of actual furniture. We had 1 – Office Chair, 1 – Small Bench, 1 – Couch (from a box, lol), 1 – Bed, and 1 – End Table. That was the extent of our furniture for what was to be the largest apartment we’ve ever rented. So, we had to spend a lot of time finding furniture within our budget. Said furniture ended up coming from a myriad of used furniture stores, Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, and Office Max (who we no longer recommend). As such, basically all of it had to be assembled. There was so much assembling, in fact, that I got mega blisters even with the nice gloves FIL got me years ago.


But hey, I had help! Plus SB assembled almost her entire desk by herself, almost. 😛

However, not all of the organizing/etc. was stressful, one fun part was finally getting to combine my Icelandic beer bottle cap collection with my preexisting Murkan one.


All of these are unique – if I simply collected all of the caps I’d have about 60 tons of caps.

Another fun thing is getting to know your neighborhood. I’m too reclusive to get to know many of my neighbors, though the ones I’ve met here have been nice so far. One of our neighbors has a bunch of cacti on their front porch, so that’s pretty awesome.


We tried to move all our plants outside – thinking we were being good plant parents. Turns out our sensitive indoor plants (even the Three Amigos!) were NOT prepared for the NM sun and they got sunburned! Poor Rosita looked like someone had burnt some of her leaves off with a lighter. Fortunately we noticed it pretty quick and now they are all indoors and have fully recovered. For the record, Little Friend did just fine outside. In truth Little Friend appeared to be thriving, even while his fellow cacti got roasted in the sun. He is one bad mofo, which makes his “death” all the more crazy to me, but he is doing good now!

I’ve also taken to some of the animals in our neighborhood. Of special note are our neighborhood Roadrunner – yes, an actual Roadrunner!


That Roadrunner normally appears in the bushes and road (duh) on one corner of our building. He/she even showed up on our very first day while we were unloading Lucinda! Yay welcome party!

Our other new friend is “Alfred.” Alfred is a little lizard bro who hilariously has one particular spot he likes to soak up the sun in, and generally speaking gives no shits about you walking right next to him.


We see Alfred during portions of the way when he spot is getting the most sun, and he is a bit of a more frequent guest than the Roadrunner (who is probably out thwarting a coyote – which speaking of coyotes, we heard them out in the nearby desert one night, way cool). I have told Alfred that when Meem comes to visit she would love to meet him!

In the larger sense we’ve also been exploring our new town – mostly out of necessity, but hey that’s still exploration!


In addition to more mundane things such as acquiring furniture and consumables, we’ve also spotted a few “would like to try” places, namely Tristen’s self-proclaimed “must have or I will die” restaurant, Church’s Chicken.


Now, we’ve yet to have Church’s Chicken and Tristen is still quite alive, but the way he talks about it he is convinced every day we don’t take him is another day of Hell on Earth. We do have coupons for Church’s though, so I’m sure we’ll get it for him eventually. Another brand we’ve encountered that is new-to-us is Kodiak Cakes, a brand which specializes in pancake and waffles mixes AND – more importantly – not only features a bear on their logo, they donate a portion of their profits to help bears in the wild. As such, it is 100% Valentino approved (and sometimes aggressively required, lol).


On my front, I’ve found a hot-sauce that I really like that is simply called “El Pato” (the duck) and which goes really good with the low-sodium V8s that I just started drinking again.


I’ve also been exploring and revisiting beers – naturally. The one beer I was SUPER excited about was Odell Brewing Co.’s “90 Shilling” – a by most accounts good but unexceptional beer which I hadn’t been able to find for years despite having really liked it the first time I had it.


But, small stuff aside, the first BIG acquisition we made – yes even bigger than fancy beer – was our new car! Again, this is a “new-to-us” acquisition, not an actual new car, I’ll refer you back to the “no-income” bit above. 😛

So a fun fact. SB and I haven’t both owned a car since 2010, and we haven’t own a car at all since 2014. The cars we sold were both 1998s. As we now live in a place where the public transportation is either A) Non-existent or B) Way too limited, we knew we had to get a car again. We were nervous about this not only because of financial reasons, but also because this was our first “on-our-own” big-people car purchase. We also knew we had to get one quick since our rental cars: Felipe (2018 Ford Focus) and then after that, Roger (2018 Chevy Malibu) were quite expensive on a per-day basis. After deciding that the first car would likely be mostly SB’s, she – based in no small part on her time with Felipe – decided she wanted a Ford Focus. The nearest ones we wanted to look at were in Texas, so we drove to Texas for the big day.


Along the way we got very close to Mexico – we even got to see part of the famous/infamous (depending on one’s politics, most likely) border wall.


Mexico – and the hazy visage of a giant phone God hovering above the city below.

After some test drives, a lot of discussing, even more nitpicking, some financial soul-searching, and ultimately a gauge of “prettiness” SB and I (with the final call between two cars going to SB) decided on a 2016 Ford Focus! SB knew off the bat that it was a girl, but it was several days later before her name was revealed: Felicia!


Valentino rocking the driver’s seat in brand-new-to-us Felicia!

Felicia is the newest, nicest car SB and I have ever owned. Going from a 1998 to a 2016 is a heck of a jump: there are many buttons in Felicia that we had to learn via trial-and-error what they did. One of the two salespeople we spoke with was VISIBLY surprised the last car we owned was a 1998, but at least he humored our car ignorance (while trying to sell us the car, of course : ).

After adopting Felicia (adoption is expensive, yo’) our stress levels dropped substantially. Getting a car was – after an apartment – one of the main fiscal/mental hurdles we needed to jump. Sure, a lot of secondary expenses such as furniture and electronics (for instance we have no TV, I still miss Philip) added up, Felicia was the big expense and really the big requirement (you can go through day-to-day life without a TV with no real difficulty, a car – here – not so much). Now, of course we’re almost definitely going to need to get a second car, but the process will be less stressful because we won’t be relying on rental car in the interim, and now we know more about what to expect!

Of course our stress levels may have also just been lower because we had a pool day – Pigsten knows whats up.


One of our neighbors told us you can generally swim through October here – nice!

So, that’s basically the biggest points of our Westward Bound move. We’re now mostly settled, we’ve made a lot of progress on the job front (including some better-than-expected results, and some worse-than-expected results, all at once), and the last thing we don’t have is a TV – though as of me writing this one has been ordered, so hopefully (REALLY hopefully considering the post timeline I have planned) we will have one of those too by the time this actually gets posted. We aren’t going to get cable or satellite, that’s what the interwebs and Smart TVs are for, and frankly we don’t watch enough TV to justify anything like that anyways. The main reason we are getting a TV is to watch Sehrmit videos and also so Tristen doesn’t kill us.

With all that in mind, consider the Taco Household’s HQ to now be the Southwest!


In celebration of that, I have a couple of short NM trips we’ve taken in the blog pipeline to share with you all! I also have a couple of other posts in mind, so hopefully I can keep this writing machine spurt I have going for a bit longer.

Until next time,
-Taco

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