Mesa winds and visions of fall

Riki has a job at an upscale restaurant in town and he starts tonight. We're a little ambivalent about it yet. We have a friend who works there and says it is slow, not good money. She works lunch and he is working night shift though so we are hoping it is better. He is hoping to at least get his foot in the door somewhere so that when he wants to apply to another place it won't be so hard to get the job. Plus, he is weary of getting unemployment at this point. It's always a guessing game to know when or if you will get another extension anyway. We'll hope for the best. I think it will be good for him to get out of the house every day after all this time of being out of work.

The winds are a changing! Okay, maybe not dramatically but we did have a slight cold front with heavy wind gusts the other day....oh nothing big, just equivalent to tropical storm force winds, lol. We all get more excited about the change of seasons as the days go by. We hear that we should see some snow before Halloween. Our new friend Stacy is going to take us to ski valley and I'm gonna try snowboarding.

I've been on an ebay ordering frenzy for winter clothes. It is hard to outfit an entirely family for snowy weather with basically no winter clothing whatsoever. I did get some great deals on ebay though, especially some used Hanna Andersson stuff. Let's see. The kids now have thermal underwear, snow bibs, snow boots, snow jackets, down vests, and waterproof gloves. My closet of usual sundresses and hippie skirts is being slowly transformed into fair isle sweaters....too bad I can't knit those yet.  It may seem early to buy these things but I feel prepared. I'm ready...it was like Christmas today when we had like six packages from different places with all this stuff.  The thrift stores here don't have anything good and otherwise there isn't anywhere nearby to buy affordable winter clothing, unless you count a Walmart and super high end ski shops.

I want to highly recommend that everybody watch "Garbage Warrior", a documentary about Michael Reynolds, the guy who designed all the earthships around here. He built our house and the others in this neighborhood which is actually in the movie. It had to have been filmed from our yard as a matter of fact. There are also beautiful shots of the mountains here in Taos and some really funny stuff where Michael Reynolds goes up against the state legislation. He is quite a character.

School is coming up, seasons are changing, and we are all excited to discover new things to do in this mountain oasis when winter comes.