More Than Half Way There

Dateline: Early Morning, Kingman AZ

Wiping the crusts from my eyes, I'm stumbling around a motel room looking for bits and pieces of my wardrobe and grooming accessories to get ready to go down to breakfast before heading out on the second leg of my journey back to New Mexico, the journey that was postponed due to... coughing up blood and various annoyances associated with pneumonia and suspected other diseases. Well, I have officially been declared TB Negative, and I have the paperwork that proves it with me, so that part at least is done.

Got a call last week from our public works dept in New Mexico. They'd turned off our water. Good thing. Of course it had been running for who knows how long, the bill is something like $94 so it could be days, it could be weeks, but it had been running, due no doubt to busted pipes thanks to the freeze. Naturally, because the house was unoccupied when this happened, any damages are not covered by insurance. So my task is to assess the damage and get repairs under way if I can. It being New Mexico and all, you never know! This is not a slam, by the way. It is just the way things are in NM. It may take a while.

I worried that the pipes would break, of course, but the plastic plumbing that was used when the whole thing was replaced was supposed to be immune to freeze bursts. So I'm a bit puzzled. On the other hand, temperatures were so very low, double-digits below freezing on several occasions, it's not all that much of a surprise that they couldn't handle it. I keep thinking that if I had been able to go back in January when I intended to -- before the Big Freeze -- this might have been avoided, but the fact is I was too sick, and that's just the way it is.

Kingman is a little more than half-way there. It's a beautiful day as is so often the case, and though I dread what I may find, I'm very much looking forward to arriving. It's... hard to explain. But then, my heart soars whenever I pass over the line from Arizona into New Mexico. And once at our place in the East Mountains (ie: east of Albuquerque, south of Santa Fe) there is such a sense of... relief and release? Well, borderline joy will do! ETA sometime this afternoon.

Till then.