Sunday, November 23, 1997

Greetings from the Americas, in the form of that wonderful invention the Christmas letter. I am sorry I did not write last year, but I was too depressed and the jolly Christmas cheer seemed to be missing from my missive, so I canceled Christmas and celebrated the New Year early.

Well, what a year it has been. Jack was unexpectedly laid off from his job with Tencor Instruments in September of 1996, and this caused a certain alarm and despondency in the Rains household. We decided that it was time I got myself a proper job, with medical benefits, pension plans and all that good stuff, and so in February of this year I got my first ever real, permanent employment, with a small software company in Mountain View. My boss seemed to be a most wonderful, stimulating, interesting character, and it was only a little later that I found out that he was as crazy as a coot, and totally unbearable. The turnover at the company had been 200% a year historically, and I carried on the average by managing to stay there 5 months. It was interesting and I sure learned all sorts of things - the main one being that I had no further interest in living and working in Silicon Valley, but wished to retreat back to a mud hut on a mountain, and the sooner the better.

After a little persuasion Jack decided to agree with me, and we started looking. We decided that New Mexico might be nice, and consulted a map to find out which areas had the lowest population density, and then went onto the Internet to see what we could see. Well, on the Internet we discovered all sorts of things, including what looked like the perfect mud hut. From there it was but the flash of a Visa card to fly into Albuquerque, and then head north in a rental car until we hit the nearest major population center, a delightful faded Victorian town that used to be the wildest place in the Wild West, called Las Vegas (population 15,000) (NOT to be confused with THE Las Vegas, gamblers Mecca in Nevada).

The crack of 10.30 am found us just off the beaten track of a wide spot in the road called Holman, New Mexico, gazing at a mud hut (actually two mud huts) with an assortment of tiddly mud huts scattered around, all on an acre of land. Irresistible to any connoisseur of mud huts! When I say mud, I really mean mud - all the buildings with the exception of the (modern) chicken coop are adobe, sun baked mud bricks stacked into thick walls and topped with "hot tin roofs" (literally). The property was part of a Presbyterian mission, the actual mission building was demolished, but the delightful little mud church is still standing right next door. On our property we have the old teachers house, the schoolhouse, the school cafeteria, a carriagehouse, well house and outhouse (still in occasional use, as the water supply is variable here). The house is in good shape as a family of 5 was living here and they kept it well maintained, but the schoolhouse has been vacant for 25 years and not maintained, so it is at the point where it needs some serious work, as do the other little buildings.

We finally sold the house in San Jose on November 13, and left for New Mexico on the 15^th, with one wailing cat in a basket each. We arrived in the snow on Monday, and our worldly goods arrived in a howling gale on Wednesday. I had spent two weeks here in September, with gorgeous weather, but of course the house had been empty since then and winter had started - it was cooooold when we got here and to date we have only managed to heat up the living room, which has of necessity (due to the temperatures) become the bedroom and computer room as well. Both heating AND cooking are on wood stoves - the hot water however is on propane. Rather interestingly, while we have had snow the atmosphere is intensely dry here - so dry that it evaporates snow and water directly and incidentally sucks all the moisture out of one's exposed skin as well. Holman is at 7,000 feet altitude so winters are cold and dry and snowy, and summers are warm and wet. Autumn is the best season by all accounts, and the weather was glorious while I was here in September.

Jack is planning to work on and build up his web business, and I am hoping to get a job at a fish hatchery that is under construction 6 miles down the road. I am also selling my house in Spain now that I have another mud hut - this may take quite a while but hopefully it will sell in the spring. San Jose quite spoiled us both in terms of amenities and opportunities, and it takes some getting used to a much slower pace of life, and rather variable services. The phones, electricity and water all get cut off at irregular intervals and for no apparent reason, and the electrical circuits in the house get overloaded very easily. The propane could also run out on us if we do not keep an eye on the gauge, so we have to be pretty vigilant. First project is to get a new wood stove installed - we have this gorgeous old pot-bellied parlour stove in the living room but it is very inefficient and gobbles wood without necessarily giving much heat back, so we are going to install a super efficient non-polluting modern stove - it is quite astonishing how they have advanced in the last few years with all the environmental regulations here - the model we are thinking of buying has a catalytic converter, just like a car does, and emits virtually no smoke at all. I have not tried to use the wood cook-stove yet - I rather think that for Thanksgiving this year we will have a turkey stir fry in the electric wok, and then in Spring I shall acquire a nice modern gas stove. When I think how I used to be into the organic vegeburger earth mother style of food preparation..... I feel that with age I have become wiser and learned to appreciate the comforts of advanced technology and fluid fuels. Wood cook stoves definitely come into the category of "Great in a museum" and "how did women manage with those things????" There is no local recycling here so to cut down on long drives I have decided that Jack is going to learn to homebrew - but first we have to renovate the basement, do the rewiring etc etc etc ... so for the interim we are still on bottled beer. (Any colder and we stay on bottled brandy! J.)

The downside is all the wonderful friends and neighbors we have left behind - but we are already getting to know people here, and of course we have phones and email, and at a pinch, snail mail. Visitors will of course be most welcome, and will not be put to work before they have had time to down a cold beer or two and admire the scenery.

Post Thanksgiving (December 1, 1997)

What fun we have had in the days gone between composing this letter and the present. I actually cooked Thanksgiving supper on the wood cookstove in the kitchen - I have now definitively decided to switch to gas in the spring, and on top of it I can trade that stove to some neighbors for some more wood. I started about 12 o'clock wondering how to light it, and if there was just one woodbox or two. I lifted the top on the main box and discovered a delightful black crust over an inch thick on every part inside, so thought maybe I should clean it out a little before use. About 2 o'clock Jack came in and started laughing about the black smears all over my face, so I had another beer and decided to just light the thing and start cooking. I had bought a small chicken (about 2 and a half pounds) so I stuffed it and shoved it in the oven, and then had a glass or two of wine. Things actually seemed to be going well, so I got to feeling sentimental and that I should keep the stove and learn to really master it, and be virtuously organic, and all that sort of (alcoholically influenced) good stuff. By 5 o'clock we were both ravenously hungry and somewhat drunk, so I decided that everything was done enough and it was time to eat. Best silver on the table, and let's open another bottle of the California wine that we brought with us. Well, the chicken was distinctly pink (good job I did not buy a 25 pound turkey), the vegetables were definitely al dente, and the gravy was pale and pallid as I could not get the heat revved up enough to brown the flour. The supermarket pumpkin pie heated up in the microwave for dessert was quite palatable, having been cooked up in some wonderful modern industrial appliance with temperature control. Thus endeth my brief love affair with the wood cook stove.

Our love affair with the wood heating stove is also being put very severely to the test at the moment. We did lots of research and decided that a super-duper emissions controlled woodstove would be just the thing for these cold winter nights, but decided that the current arrangement was a little inconvenient, and that it would be better recessed into the wall, to be precise into an old fireplace that we were convinced had been covered up, at least according to the marks on the wall. Well, we got an enthusiastic young man in to start knocking into said surmised fireplace, and were very surprised when all he found was adobe bricks that had obviously been in place since before the ark. So, we decided that we wanted a fireplace anyway, so he and a couple of young helpers went to work with a will a few days later. This time he cut the plaster from the allotted area, and found a little hole some two feet off the ground. This turned out to open into a smallish niche with a chimney entrance, which of course invited more exploration. Unfortunately, he chose to prod at the stuff in the chimney while he had his face under it. First I knew was there was lots of shouting and yelling and coughing and choking, and he and his two young helpers staggered out of the black cloud that totally filled the living room and was following them out, like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe story.

Well, order was eventually restored but the clean up job took most of the rest of the day. We then shoved the new stove into the vacant space and cobbled it into the chimney, where suffice it to say that it is working quite well under the circumstances - i.e. very poor draw into a dirt tube full of highly flammable creosote and soot. Dangerous, but there is no way we can live without it as it is the only source of heat in the whole house. This situation should be remedied this week, but before the installer can put the new stainless steel flue in we have to sweep the chimney - out of kindness to my gently readers I will leave a description of that endeavor to the next letter. All I shall say is that we have bought a selection of chimney sweeping implements and a supply of beer, and are planning to start tomorrow morning.

This year we are planning to have a tree and really do the Christmas thing - hot toddies, mulled wine, Christmas punch - you know the sort of thing. Oh yes, and the turkey stir fry in the electric frypan!! We should have snow to set the scene as well.

Lots of love and Christmas wishes and all that sort of good stuff, and hope you get some Christmas cheer from this poor letter