Updates: Paco, my surgery, the chaos

Paco died in the backseat of the car at the vet’s office. She tranquilized him and then administered the lethal injection. It was short and peaceful. We buried him down by the hoop house, under the willows. He has a view of the Truchas Peaks. I’m very sad.

It’s been five months since my knee surgery and I still can’t walk up the road. I don’t have Paco to take with me, but it’s not my sorrow that prevents the walk. It’s the fact that my knee is so swollen that without taking anti-inflammatories, lyrica, and 10 milligrams of oxycodone twice a day I would be in constant pain. I can do squats, ride a stationary bike, and bend my knee backwards close to its before surgery position, but I’m atomized by pain. A trip to Santa Fe to do errands leaves me exhausted. I couldn’t attend any of the hearings on the Sitewide Environmental Impact Statement for LANL in person, to cover for La Jicarita (they had zoom). And filling in for my neighbor Nancy at the ReUse Center at the dump, on my feet for two hours, just about killed me. The surgeon doesn’t know what to do to help but he wants me coming back “until the scar on your knee is almost invisible.” I’m not quite sure what that will indicate, but either because of guilt or compassion or a combination of the two, he’s taken me on as entire being who suffers other chronic conditions that may be contributing to my failure to heal.

The chaos that is Trump/Musk (T/D) has hit home here in New Mexico with the halt in hiring of Forest Service workers, especially fire fighters. They were supposed to be part of some emergency exemption but they’re not. The so-called winter of 2024-5 has been one of, if not the, driest winters on record. We had one big snow storm at the end of November that had everyone slapping on their skis—Jakob climbed up the backside of the Sandias three days in a row—and then we had nothing. The rest of the winter? A couple of smaller storms in January and February, a week of below zero temperatures with no snow, and several weeks of 60 degree weather. The last I heard we’re at 40 percent of normal precipitation in the Sangre de Cristos.

What this means for our forests is extreme fire danger with no additional fire fighters on board. Crews are already stretched thin from years of not only forest megafires but fires burning down urban areas from Colorado to California. It also means that unless the money was already allocated under Biden’s massive public spending bills like Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the forest restoration and thinning projects that help prevent megafires are torpedoed.

What this means for our rivers is restricted irrigation seasons on the middle and lower Rio Grande and probably water sharing all summer long in El Valle. To add insult to injury, this was the year that I finally challenged the acequia commission on its lack of transparency and due process—see May 31 blog in Un*#!ing Believable —to meet and discuss parciante input and complaints. Now all we’re going to do is worry over water and due process will evaporate into thin, dry air.

The chaos that is disrupting the rest of the world is beyond the reach of this particular blog post, but unfortunately, there will be others. It looks like this time around no one will be unscathed.