Go Karts

It's been a while, but I'm back! I'm a subject in a couple of interesting trials, but I'll talk about that later. Today the story is about Go Karts. (Grandson) Eli and I went to Hinkle's Family Fun Center to play miniature golf on Saturday.  At the counter, I saw that kids under 5 years old cost $3 and kids over that cost $8.  So I told Eli to go look at something else/make himself scarce while I claimed he was 4, but he refused.  Sissy.  And no senior discount, so it was $8 for him and $9 for me!  That was for only 9 holes, but when we get to the ninth hole where the hole steals your ball, we skip that one and go on and play the rest of the 8 courses.  Skip the 18th hole and you can play all day.  Duh!  But then I wanted to race Go Karts, so I put some funds on Eli's Fun Card so he could go play VR games while I did my thing.  When I got up to the counter for the Go Kart ticket, the guy says, looking past me, "For how many?"  I said, "Just one."  He said, "What age?" (assuming I guess that I was buying the ticket for somebody else.)  "I'm 68, Jeez, dude!"  I should have said, "7" and gotten a discount, but then they'd want the 7 year old to stand against the wall to see if the kid was over the minimum height line, and then, busted. I' m sorry to brag, but I'm just saying that nobody can beat me in Go Karts! The first race, it was me against eight 20s-30s guys. I told them in line that I would beat them all. They rolled their eyes and one said he HAD HIS OWN Go Kart and has raced it, so he would win. Blah blah blah. They let 4 out of the gate before me, so they were well ahead. I am cutthroat and fearless and eventually beat them through every corner. The guy right behind me tried his best to squeeze past but sayonara, sucker. We bumped hard in one corner but I prevailed. I came over the finish line alone. The guy with his own go kart congratulated me at the end and conceded the race. You live in Albuquerque? I will take on all comers. Oh, and when the attendant guy was escorting me up to the Kart and checking my seat belt I said I bet him $20 I would come in first.  He said, "Sounds good!"  And then when I did it, I went back to him to collect and he said, "Oh, I thought you meant you were betting with somebody else in line."  Loser.

Oh, going back to all this blog stuff is so confusing! I've written some good stories elsewhere and I need to find out how to consolidate them here. My last Spanish Camino walk, through Portugal, I posted on https://findpenguins.com/jillgat It's a good platform because it plots on a map where you are along the way. And then I am writing stories on Facebook that just get lost, so I should copy them here. I don't know if you enjoy them, but when I read my stories from long ago, I laugh out loud, because I have such a lousy memory and I don't remember it was me who wrote them. So now it is 2023. Byron rides his bike 35+ miles every morning and then spends the rest of the day napping between taking Lucy (his sweetie puppy) for walks, to fields to chase balls and to different dog parks. And he is creating these genius cartoons using Eli's characters (Frog, Ginger, Rocky, Potato, Kyle, et al) and usually based on conversations he has with Eli. Eli spends most weekends with us. I start every day with a long "To Do" list, which I cherry pick each day for the funnist things and then do other stuff that isn't on the list and the rest of the items get carried over. I have new chickens (the neighbor's dog ate my last ones), I'm building a new chicken fence for them, I buy frozen mice at the pet store that I thaw out to feed to my loyal roadrunner friends who hang out in the front yard. And I have one last elderly gerbil, a huge fat toad I rescued as a pollywog just before the Rio Grande dried up last year, a box turtle that just came out of hibernation, and two parakeets. And Lucy the chihuahua and Jackie, who was rescued from the Navajo reservation and is AT LEAST 18 years old now. I have a million mosaic art projects going on, many mosaic classes I teach at my house and other venues around town, I'm making soap and candles which are inexplicably popular and could make money for me if I cared enough to focus on that, which I don't. Found out that all the Black McGruders in Alabama are related to me by blood via a Magruder ancestor of mine who was a slave-owner who fathered children with an enslaved woman, and we were on TV about this family story and I visited them in Alabama. Lots of pictures and stories about that (will add later). I got diagnosed with ADHD (DUHH!), and got on treatment. I entered a clinical trial as a test subject and found out I have biomarkers that are predictive of Alzheimer's Disease, which makes it more pressing to me that I record all of this stuff before I start fading out... I've also got four knitting projects in the works and am reading several books: one by a woman who rode her bike around the world (and then got hit and killed by a car on her bike when she got home, bummer) and another book about Anasazi ruins and history in the Southwest. Etc. I hope I will find time to expand on all of this and add pictures, but thought I'd at least barf it all here for now as a placemarker. Thanks for listening!

San Antonio, New Mexico The route we usually take from Albuquerque to White Sands is south on I-25, then turn off at San Antonio and follow that lonely road west to Carrizozo, then south to Alamogordo (my favorite graffiti on that road was in a rest area, "Here I sit, my buns a'flexin', giving birth to another Texan). San Antonio isn't really a town anymore, less than 100 people live around there now. Most travelers stop in San Antonio for the famous green chile cheese burgers at the Owl Bar. But there are other interesting things about San Antonio. It was a bustling mining town at one time and the train came through there. Around the turn of the century A.H. "Gus" Hilton opened a merchantile store near the tracks, which also included a small hotel, and his young son, Conrad (who was born in San Antonio), would meet the train and carry passengers' luggage from the train to the hotel. Conrad grew up, started his own hotel in Cisco, Texas and, after that, a chain of hotels. Then the mine dried up, floods took away a lot of the farmland, and the Hilton Merchantile burned to the ground. They were able to save the wooden bar from Hilton's store and installed it in the Owl Bar and Cafe, where we sat to eat our green chile cheeseburgers. The Crystal Palace, an old dance hall, still stands down the road, but most remnants of the town are gone. Pictured below is the vacant lot where the Hilton Merchantile and Hotel were located. No signage identifies it. I like to picture what would have happened to Paris Hilton if her grandfather hadn't started that hotel chain. She's probably be living in a trailer outside of Socorro now.

Just past San Antonio is another mostly ghost town, San Pedro. I have a habit of visiting old cemeteries around the state (and recording what I find on FindAGrave.com for people searching for their ancestors), and I love traveling with little Eli, because he can't stop me from doing that!

With my imaginary tour group, before we turned off at San Antonio, we would have already stopped at Sevilleta Wildlife Refuge, the Bosque del Apache (famous for birdwatching), San Acacia to see the longhorn cattle and an Indian ruin, pottery sherds and pictographs on a hill there and a couple of sites to see the ancient Camino Real.

Turtle

I'm trying to figure out how to post pics from my phone to jillgat.blogspot.com

Getting ready to start another Camino, this time from Porto, Portugal to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. I would like to at least keep some kind of blog this time, but wondering what platform to use. Problem is I don't feel like putting too much energy into the tech logistics of it after walking all day. My goal would be to post one of those breezily articulate, humorous, thoughtful diaries, interspersed with pictures of the trip. If only it were that easy with just a phone. I don't even remember how to do any of that, while comfortably at home with a real computer.

August, 2015 Update

So now it is August 4, 2015 and I'm not sure what I wrote last.

Job: At some point I moved from doing Clinical Research in the UNM Emergency Dept to UNM Project ECHO (Check it out, it is an extraordinarily creative and effective public health intervention that is spreading all over the world) I loved the program, had a well-paying management position, but felt tied to my desk and with so many diverse and changing expectations, stress, deadlines and supervising people, etc. kind of took some of the fun out of it. I got a partial retirement (will get the rest of it when my Dept. of Health retirement kicks in in 2 years) and started working at Albuquerque Healthcare for the Homeless in December, 2014. They wanted to interview me for a management position because of all my experience and I had to do a real sales job to convince them to hire me in a much lower position, working directly with clients. I ran the outreach van, doing syringe exchange and harm reduction education with mostly people addicted to opiates. Also ran a women's group for homeless women. Great work! I enjoyed the client interaction very much, but have found that i am less and less patient, tolerant of supervision, administrative policies, etc. Long story short, at age 60, I've been written up for insubordination twice and got a week suspension without pay once. Then I tore my rotator cuff at work (lifting boxes of syringes onto the outreach van!) and had to fight to get Workers Comp - got the sense people thought I was bilking the system or lying in some way. I didn't realize it would be an adversarial thing.... I've paid into the system for years and the employer has insurance for it, but anyhoo. Will go back at some point, preferably parttime.

In the meantime, my mosaic mailbox business is doing very well: www.mirafloresmosaics Also teaching a very popular Intro to Mosaic Art class through UNM Continuing Education. Hoping to figure out a way to do some classes at my house, too, but not sure how to market it.

Health: So I had rotator cuff surgery on June 19th and have been in a humiliating arm immobilizer sling ever since (I'm 6 weeks out now). Starting physical therapy this Friday, Aug. 7, and am so looking forward on working to get my range of motion back. I figured that even with this sling, I could at least hike, but didn't realize how only having one mobile arm affects the balance and ability to stop a fall from happening. So I went down hard on my knee and now it's infected (I really want to post a pic here of it, but you will never want to eat scrambled eggs on a red plate again if you see it.) I'm on antibiotics and that's enough about that.

Travel There was a wonderful trip to Istanbul and southern Turkey at some point that I'm not sure I've written about. I highly recommend spending some time in Turkey. My brother is a Turkish citizen now and married to Necla, who is from there, so they were fantastic guides. In Dec./Jan., Olivia and I spent a couple of lovely weeks in Oaxaca, southern Mexico and then a week in Mexico City, meeting and getting to know our second cousins, the Chirinos, there. As you may recall, I finally found them after over a decade of research, seeking this lost branch of my family. Lovely folks! Patricio, my second cousin and his wife, Pao Castillo, Patricio's father Patricio (who was a member of the President's cabinet and the governor of Veracruz in the past), and son/grandson Patricio, my second cousin once removed and Olivia's third cousin. Also my other second cousins, Patricio's sisters, Monica y Andrea. Fabulous people! We had a wonderful time and Olivia got to visit the Frida Kahlo blue house museum. Have lots of stories and photos from that trip I should include here at some point.

Also on the topic of Travel, I have my sights set on walking 500 miles across Spain on the ancient pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago Compostela in June 2016. I often think about and plan this trip as a way to avoid pesky chores, repressed hostility, boredom, thinking about the parts of my future I don't want to think about. It works! I am hoping that Olivia will walk with me, but I'm fine to walk it alone, too.

More on this later. So I'm back.

The Cave of the Sleeping Sharks

July, 1975: It turned out to be a bad idea to paint the Bronco camouflage before driving down to Central America. Our idea was to be able to hide the truck in the jungle while we were out SCUBA diving. But mostly it meant we’d be repeatedly stopped by military police to be interrogated, the Bronco ransacked, and the contents strewn out on the highway while they searched for weapons and drugs. At one Mexican checkpoint, the federalistas became suspicious when they saw the SCUBA tanks and then reacted with alarm when they found my bag of tampons – complete with string fuses... They were sure this was some serious bomb-making gear. Fortunately they were so abashed by my description of what tampons were used for that they squealed away and left us to pack it all up and be on our way.

I like to be open to whatever comes along when I travel, but my boyfriend Steve was a compulsive and paranoid planner. Every evening, with the sweet, clamoring racket of tropical birds in the trees above, I swung in a hammock with a Dos Equis while he pored over maps and guidebooks, obsessively choreographing every minute of our trip. So I wasn’t that disappointed when the Bronco broke down constantly, forcing us to hang out in backwater villages and make new friends. Steve also didn’t speak a word of Spanish, so I got to be an expert at explaining what was wrong with the engine while he stood by helplessly. The mechanics snickered at him. By the end of the first month, I’d started to hate Steve, his wispy blonde mustache and his control trip.

We did do a lot of SCUBA diving. That was something Steve and I had in common. We brought a portable air compressor so we wouldn’t be tied to dive resorts to refill the tanks. .. Explored virgin coral reefs with explosions of tropical fish; big parrot fish and trigger fish followed us; fearless and curious about our purring bubbles. Occasionally there would be barracudas with menacing teeth. I used my hand to cover the regulator over my mouth because I heard they tend to strike at shiny things. Once in awhile the fish would all disappear and an ominance would grow. You could feel the ghostly presence just before you saw the shark. Black, hollow eyes, a large form undulating past with the economy of a perfect prehistoric machine. They terrified me.

From the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico we took a ferry to Isla Mujeres. I had heard about the island from an episode of “The Undersea World of Jacque Cousteau,” right before we left on our trip. The show was about sharks discovered to be mysteriously lying motionless in a cave off the coast of Isla Mujeres. A few species, like nurse sharks, have developed the ability to breathe while lying still, but most other types have to keep moving, to force water into their mouths and out their gill slots in a process called “ram ventilation” in order to breathe. The ones in the cave at Islas Mujeres were said to be bull and reef sharks, definite “ram ventilator” breathers, but – inexplicably - they were either sleeping or stoned. Cousteau got word of this and flew down to Isla Mujeres to investigate. Of course I wanted to investigate it, too. Steve pointed out that Cousteau was on the island for months and had to dive numerous times before he saw any sleeping sharks in the cave. And only one fisherman knew how to find the spot, so of course Steve poo pooed the idea. I ignored him.

We found a “hotel” with hooks on the walls for our hammocks and strung them up. While Steve re-organized everything and laid out his maps and guides, I took off on foot for the wharf. I asked around and within half an hour, I met a fisherman who said his cousin, Carlos Garcia, was the guy who discovered the sharks and who guided Cousteau there and yes, he’d introduce him to me, “just wait here un momentito.” Back he came with Carlos, a lobster fisherman locally nicknamed “Valvula” for his ability to deep dive with no extra breathing apparatus other than what he had in his huge, barrel chest. For a small fee, Valvula agreed to take us out on his boat, warning that the underwater currents could be very strong and we’d have to be careful. He also told us to not to get our hopes up about seeing the sharks, as he’d rarely found them there. Jose Luis, a local who ran the dive shop on the island overheard us and asked if he could come too – he’d never had a chance to see this - and we said sure. I didn’t like the sound of dangerous currents, so having someone along with local diving experience sounded good.

I gathered up Steve and all our gear and we headed out with Jose Luis and Valvula in his little dorey. The surface was choppy but the turquoise water was so clear, we could see the ocean floor far below. Valvula dropped anchor, tied a net to his waist, pulled some flippers onto his feet, and jumped overboard, swimming quickly to the bottom. For an impossibly long time, we sat in the boat and watched him, holding his breath and paddling casually around the reef. Then he surfaced with two big lobsters in the net. He restarted the motor and we continued on.

The water got rougher and the boat was lurching when Valvula dropped anchor again and told us to follow him. He’d show us the cave, but warned us not to stay long because we might drift too far from the boat. It was too late to back out, so I pulled on my mask, flippers, weight belt and SCUBA tank and followed the others over the gunwale of the dorey. Fighting the current, we followed Valvula down, down, down to where the anchor wedged in the reef above the lip of an overhang. He curled below the ledge and quickly pointed, then he kicked back up to the surface and left us there. Lying ghostlike against the wall were two huge bull sharks. Jose Luis swam in closer and we followed. We touched the sharks. Touched them and felt their sandpaper skin. Other than the tips of their tails slightly rolling, the sharks sat perfectly motionless. It was astonishing.

Below 50 feet, divers can experience Nitrogen Narcosis, or “raptures of the deep” caused by breathing gases at high pressure. I could feel this “martini effect” as we drifted and paddled through the super-clear current and touched sleeping sharks. It’s risky to stay very long at that depth. I wandered… and then felt a sudden stab of panic when I looked around and my diving partners were gone. The buddy rule is one of the strictest codes for SCUBA divers – a diver is never left alone. But alone I was. The anchor rope was some distance away now. I looked up toward the surface and made an initial kick.

That’s when, from the corner of my mask, I spotted the large fan of a tail curving around behind me. I was being followed by a shark; what seemed to be an enormous shark. A shock of adrenalin buzzed from my fingers to my core and my vision narrowed to blackness for several seconds. There was no way to flee. I remembered hearing that divers ascending - like swimmers at the surface - resemble helpless fish to sharks and are more likely to be attacked. So I didn’t look back, but headed slowly down to the sandy floor and, as graceful and natural as I could pretend to be, I swam along the bottom like I lived there, with this large predator shadowing me, his snout close to my fins. The panic dissolved and I felt the peaceful calm that comes with knowing that one has absolutely no control of any outcome. I was a visitor and didn’t belong. And then, finally, the shark slowly swerved off to the right and disappeared.

Back in the boat, I confronted the guys for abandoning me. It wasn’t the current that had separated us. Jose Luis and Steve had seen the shark behind me, looked at each other, pointed to the surface, and got the hell out of there. They said they thought I was coming up, too. Maybe they did, or maybe they just didn’t want to be caught in the feeding frenzy. I remembered the statistic that a shark can detect a single drop of blood from a quarter mile away. My legs were still raw from washing up on fire coral the day before and I was menstruating.

As we headed back to shore, Valvula laughed nervously and told me I was lucky. He said it was a Tiger Shark. Tiger Sharks are responsible for more unprovoked attacks on humans than any other species besides the Great White. Jose Luis quickly added that they were lucky, too. We looked at Steve, who was quiet and avoided eye contact, like I often saw him do when he knew he was wrong but couldn’t admit it. Instead, Steve gazed at the horizon and then pointed and said, “Hey look, flying fish.”