I've started a website to house my extensive recipes and trip photos, etc. It's too much to have them here on the blog, so the link is to the right.

My birthday was a fun week of gifts and little outings culminating in a trip to Ruidoso. We stayed in a cabin in the upper canyon area. It was great. The first night we had snow and the whole area was really beautiful. The next day, blue skies and sun making it warm enough for shirt sleeves.

This week has been crazy. Steph went to Minneapolis for a job interview. I've been skullking around Craig's List Minneapolis seeing what's what. I loathe the idea of leaving here, but the salary that they are offering is like five times what we make together, so it can't be discounted. We've talked around all the possibilities...to take the job or not. First I said, you don't want to jump at the first thing. Maybe we should wait and send out apps in the fall. But then we talked some more and realized we could go to Minneapolis and still send new feelers out in the fall and make a ton more money in the mean time. So if they offer her the job, it will be a tough decision. I am already secretly preparing myself for a potential move so that if and when it happens I won't have the whole impact of it on me all at once. I want what's best for her, and I don't know that staying here is what's best. And ultimately, what's best for both of us is for both of us to have the opportunity to meet our goals and have jobs we really like. She would have the opportunity to teach more than just composition there and I think that really appeals to her.

My mom and sister are coming for a week long visit. I'm really looking forward to it. I love having company, and I love bringing people to Albuquerque. It is truly the best place I've ever lived. I used to say Sicily was the best...but this place surpasses even that awesome living environment. There is too much to recommend, the food, the people, the varied and many things to do, the amazing landscape, the weather, THE WEATHER! The minute you see this place it is so easy to understand why artists love New Mexico.

In a few weeks we will have one of our Sheldon Harvey paintings home from his one man exhibition at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock. I can't wait. I first saw his work in the windows of the Andrews Pueblo Pottery gallery in Old Town. It was after dark and we were walking the dog and enjoying the cool evening when I saw them. The figures were remarkable. They were sculptural, rendered in a way I hadn't seen from Native American artists. Typically the spiritual figures I had seen were more two-d, and geometric, like sandpaintings but on canvas. That said, I didn't have much experience or knowledge of Native American art beyond what I saw around Old Town and in Santa Fe. The masks the figures wore took on the liveliness of the face, expression, the bodies were sinew and full of morphology, not human, but something so human-like in posture. They conveyed power, curiosity, mischief, beauty. I don't consider myself to be very spiritual, and I don't have the personal connection to the history Sheldon Harvey is recording in his work, but I know what I like, what I respond to on a gut level. Seeing those paintings there in the dark, I couldn't just walk away. Every chance I had I went in to look at Harvey's work. I found a small painting that I thought I could afford and the next time I visited it was gone. Before long it was obvious to me and to Steph that we needed to own one, hang it in our house. It took several visits before we found the one, larger, more expensive, but it was perfect. It took more than a year to pay off and now it will be coming home in a matter of weeks, and I am so proud that he had this piece hanging in his show.

I thought that his paintings were a me thing more than a Steph thing until she walked in to see some of his new work and fell in love. I saw it in her face right off and I left it up to her to decide, to make the commitment, which she did in about five minutes of seeing the figure of a woman, so perfect, beautiful colors, a kandinsky-esk feel, certainly a different look than mine...and right off I knew where we should hang it in the house when we bring that one home.