The Old Ball Game

Here's the real beauty part of February in ABQ. The UNM baseball team begins hosting games at the end of the month; the home opener was Friday. So Saturday we gathered up the family and headed out to Isotopes Park to watch the Lobos take on the Texas A&M-Corpus Christi Islanders.

As a UNM student, I get in free, and tickets are $5 for Summer and $3 each for the kids, making it a cheap outing. And the crowds are small--maybe 200 people in a stadium that seats 12,000+, meaning there's always a good seat.

It was a gorgeous day at the ballpark; gametime at noon, the temperature was 55, reaching the mid 60s by the last out. We first sat three rows back behind home plate, but as the afternoon went on, the sun dropped behind the pressbox and it got chilly. So we moved up the third base side a bit, until that too got cold. Finally, we moved over to the sunny first base side, behind the Lobos dugout, and basked in the sun.

The game itself was good; the Lobos had lost 13-3 on Friday, but they came back with a nice victory Saturday, winning 4-1 (the second game was a UNM blowout, winning 22-2). The Lobos infielders made some dynamite defensive plays, and the pitching was solid.

Here are some pictures from the game. First, Evan, who loved just wandering around the seats all game long:
And second Isaac, who sat a few rows behind us in our first seats. Looks pretty smug, huh?

And with that, I bid you welcome to baseball season, my favorite time of the year. Here's to a few more UNM games (BYU comes to town next month), my Spring Training trip in just under 4 weeks, and a half dozen or so 'Topes games. Play ball!

Off The Beaten Path in New Mexico

(That’s the working title for a travel book about our family’s wanderings throughout the state. The subtitle might be something like “Four kids, a station wagon, and no clue.”)

Over the weekend we had talked about making some sort of day trip today since the kids were off school and I was off work. But we were very indecisive about our plans, which usually results in us doing nothing. We are compulsive planners, and not deciding typically equals not doing for us. Today, however, was different. We got our spontaneous on.

The plan—such as it was—was to visit Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, just south of Socorro. This is where a number of geese, ducks, and cranes winter, and while the high season for migratory birds is winding down, we still figured on seeing a lot of avian wildlife.

We got to the refuge a little after 10 this morning, and, after a quick stop at the visitors center, which has a cactus garden and some picnic areas, we hit the auto loop. A two-mile loop circles the wetlands where, according to the bird count in the visitors center, over 22,000 snow geese were in residence. We stopped at two observation areas to see the throngs and let the kids run around.

The kids in the cactus garden

The second observation area was on the northwest edge of the wetlands, closes to where thousands of snow geese had settled down. It is an amazing sight, one that our simple little camera does not capture well. From here, we also saw wave after wave of geese come in to land.

The wetlands--the white dots are snow geese

But the real draw is the concentration of sandhill cranes—almost 15,000 today. Our timing was such that we missed the big show—at sunrise these masses of cranes takeoff from the wetlands to feed all day in the adjoining fields, and at sunset they return to bed down. Our midday trip cost us this spectacle, but we did see a number of cranes on our drive along the edge of the fields where they dine. The real treat was seeing a dozen or so cranes directly across the draining ditches, probably no more than 50’ from our car.

Sandhill cranes just off the road

After a picnic lunch, we headed south along NM 1, the two-lane road that passes through the refuge. We thought we would take the scenic route south to meet up with I-25. After about 12 miles, we saw the turn-off road for Fort Craig, a BLM site about halfway between Socorro and T or C. Throwing caution to the wind, we set off on the four-mile dirt road to this 19th-century army station.

Fort Craig, as it turns out, was established shortly after the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War and made the Southwest US territory. During the Civil War, Fort Craig was the Union army’s largest outpost in the Southwest, and site of an important battle.

In February 1862, a Confederate force moved north from Texas, set on taking New Mexico (they had offered the territory Confederate statehood) and cutting the eastern US off from California. As the largest garrison of supplies in the area, Fort Craig was a prime target. Just north of the fort the armies fought to essentially a draw. The Confederates did not take the fort, but they did make their way north, eventually capturing Socorro, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe before losing decisively at Glorieta and abandoning the western front offensive.

We walked around the ruins of the fort; not much is left of the adobe walls, but interpretive signs mark the walls of the fort and detail the history of the area. By the time we hit the road again, the kids were pooped and we were ready to trek north.

Here is what may be the best part. Obviously, we had fun, saw new and exciting things in our own backyard, and learned some history. But for me the real victory is the bottom line. We spent a shade under $12 to top off the gas tank (we got home with a shade under a half of a tank) and $3 for our admission to the refuge. The grand total for an eight-hour day trip: $15. Not a bad bargain at all.

If It Wasn't So Cute...

...Isaac would be in trouble for sitting on the bookshelf:
But it's hard to get mad at the kids when they're reading.

Pizza

I believe that pizza is the perfect food, containing all of the food groups and needing no utensils. And a good pie will yield leftovers, making lunch ("Or," says Summer as I type, "breakfast") the next day a snap. In the search for more sources of this perfect food, we've made some local discoveries.

Our first was Dion's. Still the go-to--especially since a restaurant opened not a mile from the house. They also sell slices and whole pies at Isotopes park; the game day triple play with pepperoni, sausage, and green chile is better than a hot dog.

This past October we tried Il Vicino in Nob Hill with Summer's parents. A classy joint, it seemed like it wouldn't be very child friendly, but then the waitress brought out a ball of pizza dough for each kids to play with while we waited. And the pizza with spicy olive oil and shrimp was wonderful.

Then, this past Friday, we tried the Old Town Pizza Parlor, located on Rio Grande just north of Central, in a 150-year-old adobe building. To be honest, we had low expectations of this new eatery, but we were very pleasantly surprised. We got the Farmer's Market, with olives, mushrooms, green pepper, red onion, tomato, and green chile. The veggies were piled high, and the crust was simple but satisfying. I'd like to go back to try their sandwiches and calzones.

Our next foray will be Farina, located in the growing East Downtown (or EDO, a bit of a ripoff of Denver's LoDo area). This pizzeria looks a bit trendy, but it's worth a try. We'll go for lunch this week when we just have two kids in tow. Maybe Tuesday afternoon...

Verb This!

This promises to be a fun entry--one part fun tidbit about the kids, one part nerd-fest. Here goes:

Some people in my line of work have a real gripe with turning nouns into verbs (there was a tussle a while back about how to say that someone used a Taser on someone else--do you tase a person or Taser a person?). I see the virtue here, as academics are adept at making perfectly good words like normal and Balkan into ugly things like normalize and Balkanize. It can get messy when institutionalize becomes a standard part of your vocabulary.

But making verbs from everyday things can be fun:

• To Dizz--Made by a young Allyson to describe the process of becoming dizzy. I think she heard us say "You're dizzy" and thought it was "You're dizzing." She then back-formed the base of her new verb.
• To Jammy--A sort of shorthand meaning to put pajamas on, this verb is typically combined with up, as in, "It's time to jammy up."
• To Binky--To give a baby his/her pacifier. This verb was born at 3 am when one of our kids lost the binky and started crying. At that hour, it was easier to say, "I'll go binky the baby" than the unwieldy "I'll go give the baby his binky." Efficiency is the mother of linguistic invention.
• To Dissertate--This one grew out of my recent renewed emphasis on writing my dissertation, and means simply "to write actual dissertation content." My goal, with which I slipped a bit this week, is to dissertate for an hour each day.

I'm Behind on Pictures...

...So this is a week old already. Here's the background. Last Saturday, Allyson's Girl Scout troop participated in this global scouting day event. Each troop researches a country in which Girl Scouts operate, and they then put up a booth with their work. Allyson's troop chose Italy, and she wrote about some famous scientists from the peninsula (Galileo, da Vinci, Fermi).

But the best part of all of this (better even than an excuse to rummage through old mission stuff) was when Allyson got home. It turns out that her troop wore individualized aprons with the Italian flag. And fake mustaches. Time to start waxing the upper lip, no, Guido?

Play Ball?

This past week has been phenomenally warm; highs have been at or around 60 every day, and even though Thursday and Friday were a bit cloudy, it was still warm enough for me to go to work without a jacket yesterday.

This has reached such proportions that this afternoon the kids and I went outside and played some baseball. The gloves were cold and stiff from several months of laying inert (my legs felt the same way the first time I had to chase down a Ryan fly ball), but after about 20 minutes I had stripped off my long-sleeved shirt and was playing in short sleeves.

We played for a little over an hour, and a few things stand out that I would like to comment on. First, Isaac is truly ambidextrous, with a tendency to throw better with his right hand. He writes almost exclusively with his left, but when we play catch he now has to use a right-handed glove. I find it funny how his physical skills are evolving; it wasn't much more than a year ago that we bought a lefty mitt for him.

I was also reminded of how coordinated Ryan has become. He belted my first pitch,and by the time we were done, I had backed up and was pitching to him overhand. And he'll still pop it across the street pretty frequently.

It was also gratifying to see how well my children do play together. Allyson is very aware of and careful around Evan, who in turn follows her around like a little puppy. and all of the kids did a good job of taking turns with the scooter and the baseball bat.

I'm sure we're in for another dose of winter soon, but in the meantime, I'll enjoy this early spring.