Nathan Alter:

We were awakened to marching drums from the nearby high school this morning.  I hadn’t thought about that advantage of living near a high school.  Apparently, we just have to live with it because the Albuquerque noise ordinance has an exclusion for schools.  I suppose we could go to the games and cheer against Volcano Vista or something.    Thanks, sports.

We figured out how to eat at Sadie’s pretty cheaply.  Get the small nachos.  It’s big enough to feed 2 adults and 2 little kids, and is about $8.  I’d hate to see the large!

We took a walk in the desert to some volcanic rock hills near our house last night around dark.  I almost stepped on a small rattlesnake.  It slithered away and barely made much noise until it got under a rock and then started rattling.  It didn’t strike at me or anything.  Later on, another another one immediately started rattling and I walked out of the way pretty quickly.  I don’t remember ever seeing a rattler in the wild, but they seem to love warm rocks when the sun’s going down.  We also saw the international space station flying by…looked like a slow flying star or something.

Vanessa’s brother and family have been visiting and I’ve gotten in some time on LittleBigPlanet with the kids and Supreme Commander 2 with da bruvah-in-law.

Evin and family came through town the other day and kindly took us to Annapurna’s.  It’s a kinda veggie/gluten-free/hippie Indian food restaurant.  I liked the chai and some of the food.  But it seems like the concessions they have to make to gluten-free kinda ruin some of the more traditional dishes.  Apparently, I loves me some gluten.  Anyway, it was great fun to go there with them and we found a great portabello sammich.

On the 4th of July, we drove out into the desert and a trail to the top of some volcanic rock hills.  Nice view of the city out there.  Saw a millipede and tarantula.  Later watched fireworks…big displays as well as illegal displays all over the neighborhood.  The legal fireworks these days in a city are just sad.  Would you like a fountain, a fountain, or a fountain?  How about a fountain?  You can’t bomb ant dens with a fountain!

I’m looking for a tall mountain bike with disc brakes so I went shopping yesterday.  There’s a new Trek store on Menaul.  They seem to have a good range of prices…from 200 something to the thousands.  More importantly, they have a good range of sizes in store…including the elusive extra large ones.

Sean and I took a bike ride out into the desert yesterday and finally found a route without sand.  The sand sucks the fun away, you see.  We found where they’re piling all the volcanic rocks from all of the new development out in the desert…as well as some illegal dumping.

Extremetech has a nice article right now on building gaming PCs for various budgets.  The Radeon HD 5770 sounds like it’s the card to get at the moment…if I could get myself to trust AMD’s video drivers.

I finished a motorcycle safety class and got my motorcycle W endorsement. Why W? The instructor said that at some point long ago, someone in New Mexico was stamping the M endorsement upside-down and you can’t change bureaucracy. So, I’ve spent the hot evenings this week sweating outside in long sleeves (for safety/liability) and a helmet for the class. But after today, I think that was the easy part.

I work downtown, so I walked about a mile to the closest MVD, took a number, and sat down a while. Finally noticed a sign that said their camera was down so they weren’t doing any licenses. Walked back to work and looked up the next closest MVD. Google Maps claimed it was on San Mateo and Central. Drove over there and just found a bunch of state government offices…apparently the headquarters of the MVD but not a field office. Called up Vanessa who kindly guided me to the next one on San Mateo and Montgomery. Drove over and saw that it was an MVD Express…a commercial office where they charge you extra because they actually have functioning systems. I didn’t want to pay $25 extra so I called Vanessa and asked why the MVD website said it was a regular office. She verified that it should be a normal MVD. I went into the MVD Express and asked where the normal one was…just around the corner. Finally got to the real MVD and pulled a number…50 people ahead of me. Started waiting. Murphy relented at this point and they started splitting up people who were renewing license, registration, etc. Half way through line, I heard that they required proof of insurance. (They didn’t.) So I ran back to car to get it. Dude kindly held my position in line. It only took about 45 minutes after that. Gained new phobia of waiting in extremely long lines, getting to the front, and finding I was missing some vital piece of documentation or that some vital system was down.

I took a little bike ride in the nearby desert with Sean the other evening.  He learned that riding is sand is hard/impossible.  He fell of his bike and his hand landed on a purple flowery plant with white fuzz all over.  The white fuzz turned out to be extremely fine stickers.  What a mean plant!  Well, it’ll be pretty cool mountain biking out there, assuming we can find some non-sandy trails.

As of 2008, New Mexico state law says builders of new houses have to put in electrical wiring for solar panels…even though Home Owner Associations probably wouldn’t let you put up solar panels.

Another interesting part of this house is that it has a little Taexx pest control port on the outside. The pest control guy can just regularly plug into that and inject pesticide into the walls of the house without coming in.

Well, we’re all moved out into the desert on the western edge of Albuquerque near Ventana Ranch.  We traded a convenient location for a bucket o’ square feet.  (Price per square foot is inversely proportional to convenience of the location.)  Now to pay…I’m still trying to figure out a way to commute.  I can easily ride my bike 5 miles downhill to the bus in the Blue Line Rapid Ride bus in the morning, but can’t really ride it 5 miles uphill in the evening…it’d prolly take too long.  I may end up getting a scooter, but I haven’t had time to mess with it yet.

The new house is going pretty well, aside from some A/C problems that need to be sorted out by the builder (DR Horton).  Also, it’s a requirement that all new houses have tamper resistant outlets like this.



(The video lies about ease of use…I’d call the outlets “plug resistant”.)

Coinstar machines at Albertson’s and Smiths here in Albuquerque allow you to put in your change and get 100% back as an amazon.com code.  No 10% charge for counting the change.  Pretty good deal if you regularly shop at Amazon.  I think they also offer a code for Albertson’s.  Anyway, I took Sean there because he had a bunch of change and wanted something from Amazon that he saw on Mythbusters.  He was so excited about it that we went to the store at 11 PM.

I was borrowing Vanessa’s bike and it got stolen from the rack on the front of the bus.  This is the 2nd bike I’ve had taken from up there, although the first one might have been a case of mistaken identity.  Lesson learned:  don’t put a bike on the bus that you can’t stand losing.  I guess the alternative is to lock your bike to the bus rack.  I doubt that would make you very popular with the delay you’d cause, though.  Maybe I should look into a fold-able scooter or something.

UPDATE:  I started locking the wheel to the bike frame after this.  We’ll see if it works.