Big Views, Small Accomplishments

We've been in Taos for three weeks now and we've been mostly enjoying the scenery, people and food (all of them great) and we actually managed to accomplish a few small things.

When you first arrive in Taos, you are struck ... almost bludgeoned ... by the views. So I'll start big

The Rio Grande Gorge

The night sky

Milky Way with Jupiter and the Scorpio constellation
We are both Scorpios, so we take this as a good omen

The Mountains

The sunsets

This is a tease
The colors can be spectacular
But you'll have to come visit to see them yourself

The view from our dining room window

And the view when I climbed 1,000 feet to see over the ridge behind us

We arrived the weekend of the annual Taos Lilac Festival.

The previous owner left us this garden with blooming lilacs.
Our arrival timing was perfect

And she left us roses

And she left us these weeds, which we have adopted as flowers

Some things I've seen wandering about

Lots of spring flowers. Again, good timing

Here is a view of "central Taos"

And as long as we are up here,

a view of Ranchos de Taos

The Rio del Pueblo de Taos has it's own gorge

We have met a few neighbors

This guy was very friendly

And this guy was interesting

Reminded me of an old friend

Now on to our small accomplishments

All the appliances we inherited were gross and barely functioning.

The washing machine sort of worked, the dryer did not

So we bought a new washer / dryer and it took only three weeks for them to be delivered.

Hanging laundry was fun for a while, but we are happy to have a working dryer

We also got a garbage can. You've seen garbage cans, so no picture.

But it did take 18 days and 5 calls to Waste Management to get one can

Waste Management did manage to get us an invoice in 3 days, tho

We have done some landscaping, putting in some additional plants and installing this parking pad.

This went pretty smoothly, thanks to Ulisses

We are working on finding contractors for a kitchen bath remodel.

We may already fired our first contractor. That is an accomplishment.

An anti-accomplishment?

And we got Internet installed. Fiber from the local co-op. That only took 3 months, 14 calls and, last week, an in-person visit to their office where I got lucky and caught the gatekeeper on break and talked instead to the head of the installers, who set us up for an install 3 days later. And his guys did a great job.

The gatekeeper was pissed.

But we now have internet

And I get to write blogs again

And you get to read them