past week

last saturday night we went with faith and another joe (alma d’arte americorps members) to a huge pond (there because of the rain) which smelled super weird but even weirder were these freakish frogs that sounded like goats. literally i had heard one earlier in the neighbor’s yard and i thought they had a goat. a goat or eraserhead, one of the two. anyone who has seen the film eraserhead will know exactly the noise i’m talking about.

anyway, on sunday we drove 3 hours northwest to the gila mountain catwalks which is basically a really beautiful area with a two mile hike carved into the canyon. catwalks meaning that there were some parts of the hike that were suspension bridges or catwalks affixed to the rock. there was a beautiful stream with lots of waterfalls all over the place. afterwards we went to silver city for dinner, and it was extremely difficult to find any place open for dinner on a sunday night. we found one place, spaghetti western, which was an extremely bizarre experience. i think everyone was freaked out by this place. but silver city seemed like a really nice town in the mountains with friendly people at least those we talked to on the street. silver city definitely has a charm that las cruces lacks.

GILA:


i started americorps on monday, so i’ve been there a week now. it is hard to judge at this point how exactly the actual work will go because we have two weeks of training first. this week included lengthy CPR training and a defensive driving course. i did get to briefly see the high school i’ll be working at. it’s still early and i will update once i get a better handle on the details.

wednesday night joe and i drove out to white sands, which is about an hour away. we got there just as the sun went down and watched the full moon rise. white sands is a crazy place...there really isn’t anywhere else like it on earth. i felt like i was on a different planet, or in a sci-fi movie. it’s huge and beautiful. there were lots of kids there sledding on the dunes. i look forward to going back again and again, especially when bringing our guests out there.

MOON:


what else? i bought my tickets to come back to minnesota for my brother’s wedding labor day weekend. i’m flying in early-ish on friday and then we are driving up to international falls that day. i’m glad i was able to work that out...it’ll be nice to spend the weekend up there and see family.