Okay, I’ll Start Here

So basically, the past two weeks have been crazy.  The summer solstice is a huge deal here, and we have a bunch of events for it, including sunrise events at Casa Rinconada and dances at Pueblo Bonito by the modern Pueblos, the descendents of the ancient Chacoans.  This year the dances were by dance groups from Acoma and Laguna Pueblos.  The day of the solstice, June 20 this year, we have a special schedule where we don’t give tours but do have to set up for the dances and keep everything going.  It’s pretty crazy, and while there are a bunch of volunteers who come in to manage the events themselves it’s pretty rough on the park staff as well.

In addition to the usual commotion, this year had some peculiarities that made it additionally stressful.  The most important is probably that the campground is closed for repairs, which cut down on the massive crowds we usually get (which was nice) but also meant that the visitors we did get were likely to be upset about not being able to camp.  Luckily, however, the weekend also happened to be one of the three fee-free weekends proclaimed by Ken Salazar earlier this year, so we had one way to reassure people and set them at ease.  It was a good thing, too.  All of the higher-ranking people, including the supervisors, were out of the park for the weekend, which makes sense from their perspective but meant that there really wasn’t anyone around with substantial authority in case there had been any serious incidents.  Luckily there weren’t, and everything actually worked out just fine.

In addition to the solstice commotion, my mom and her sister and brother-in-law happened to be visiting me that weekend.  It was nice to see them, and it was good that they were around when there was plenty to do, but it left me with pretty much no free time.  Which was okay, actually, since shortly beforehand I got booted off of the wireless network for using too much bandwidth (uploading pictures to Flickr takes a lot, it turns out), so I couldn’t have been hanging out on the internet as usual even if they hadn’t been there.  The person in charge of getting me back on the network was extremely busy with his won (rather more important) projects the whole time, so it took about a week before I got back on.  It was fine, though, since I hadn’t really had time to spend online anyway.

There was more, too, but I’m not going to be going into detail about it here.  The above should give a sufficient sense of how crazy my life has been lately.  It’s starting to settle down lately, though, which is nice.  And my mom brought a ton of food, so I haven’t had to go shopping in a while.