The Lights of Santa Fe by Eliza Gilkyson.

We love discovering a new artist. Wait, let us rephrase that. We enjoy finally crawling out from under a rock and discovering a fine artist who has been producing excellent music for quite some time. Case in point: Eliza Gilkyson. She seems to have moved from more of a New Age sound early in her career to folk/rock. Both work for us. There is nothing trite or soft or poppy in her work. Here's a link to one of her exceptional songs, The Lights of Santa Fe. If there were a YouTube video of Ms. Gilkyson performing this, we'd certainly embed it here, but have been unable to find a link. Anyway, as it happens, yesterday we were driving on I-25 and heard this song on 98.1 for the first time. Low-key, beautiful, and ever on the brink of breaking your heart. Oh wait, kind of like...Santa Fe.

Driving at night on Highway 25
Blindfolded I’d know the way
Just over the rise like a jewel in the mountains
Shine the lights of Santa Fe

How many times have I come home to you
Just to have you turn me away
Oh you’ve been betrayed by the ones that threw you
To the whims of the white man’s way

But you show no resentment and you show know resistance
To the ones who’ve done you wrong
Oh they’ll hang themselves on their own fool existence
After the laughter is gone

Oh Santa Fe, city of faith
I did my time in an honorable way
And now there is a candle for each dream that breaks
In the Lights of Santa Fe

From the houses of mud to the governor’s palace
Spirits walk the streets in the daylight
And some scream for blood, some bear no malice
For the ones who stole their birthright

Naīve tourist standing shoulder to shoulder
With wise and ancient souls
Oh the old way gets lost and the tracks grow colder
As the bell of St. Francis tolls

Oh Santa Fe, city of faith
I did my time in an honorable way
And now there is a candle for each dream that breaks
In the Lights of Santa Fe

There is a candle for each dream that breaks
In the Lights of Santa Fe.

Santa Fe alert system.

So the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Department is launching an Emergency Alert System. The free service allows county residents to get current neighborhood information on traffic delays, warnings on crime sprees, public safety alerts, news releases and flu updates. To sign up, go to http://www.santafesheriff.com/. You can choose to receive updates through email, text messages, or Twitter. Messages are categorized as countywide or area-specific. If you live in other states or counties, go to nixle.com.

Santa Fe air gets a clean bill of health.

A new air quality report released by the American Lung Association has Santa Fe ranking among the 17 cleanest cities in the U.S. Chaves, Grants, Lea, San Juan and Santa Fe Counties ranked among the top cleanest counties for short term or 24 hour particle pollution, which comes from a variety of sources including dust storms, construction, mining, industrial emissions and vehicle emissons. Even wood burning stoves and agriculture fields put particles into the air that can, according to ALA, damage human health. The annual average level of particles worsened in 12 cities, including Bakersfield, CA--which took over the most polluted ranking from Los Angeles--and Houston, TX which this year moved into the list of the 25 cities most-polluted by particle pollution for the first time.

Fargo-Wahpeton, ND-MN emerged as the cleanest city in the U.S., the only city to appear on all three lists of cleanest cities. Seventeen cities appeared on two of the three lists of cleanest cities: Billings, MT; Bismarck, ND; Cheyenne, WY; Colorado Springs, CO; Farmington, NM; Ft. Collins, CO; Honolulu, HI; Lincoln, NE; Midland-Odessa, TX; Port St. Lucie, FL; Pueblo, CO; Redding, CA; Salinas, CA; San Luis Obispo, CA; Santa Fe-Espanola, NM; Sioux Falls, ND; and Tucson, AZ.

Our own family's anecdotal evidence: after ten days last summer that we spent in Southern California, we were all suffering from various levels of smog-induced discomfort because we're used to Santa Fe's clean air.

If you think you understand pollution, try these two quizzes.

A day at the Garden Fair.

The Santa Fe Master Gardener Association held its fifth annual Garden Fair today at the county extension facility next to the Santa Fe Rodeo grounds. Santa Fe Greenhouses also helped sponsor the event. There were free lectures on heirloom tomatoes, container gardening; planting for pollinators and beneficial insects; growing your own vegetables; rose gardening; perma-culture ideas for home water harvesting; tree care; and medicinal use of native plants. There were some good kid activities, including what our older daughter termed Bean Art, and most importantly for L., firsthand knowledge about how to plant a seed, bring it to germination, and then to maturity. Following directions specific to the seed is very important.

E. likes trees in the crabapple family.

This display was timely, as E. enjoys making origami buckyballs. Everything is related, don't you know.

The best thing about fairs at the county extension is that most of the time, you can be outside.

Loved the Purple Adobe Lavender Farm exhibit, which consisted of...lots and lotsa lavender.

Everyone likes stone fountains, right?

We also chatted with Deborah Madison and picked up three copies (for friends) of her new book, What We Eat When We Eat Alone, which will officially be released on May 1.

Blessings from the Garden

May your garden bloom with joy.

May your life be full of peace.

May you be guided by gentle purpose.

May you have enough challenges to make life interesting

and friends, faith and family to give you comfort.

If you have a gardening question, ask a master gardener from Santa Fe, and you'll get a wise response.

National Parks near Santa Fe.

You might say our family consists of extreme National Parks aficionados. Our kids love the Junior Ranger program. We always have a good (and educational time) at NP sites. Here are some previous links:

Support our National Parks. Please.

One of the best day trips from Santa Fe (Tsankawi).

What they left behind.

Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site. (also, in search on this blog, type in Bent's Old Fort for more pictures) or go to Judging From His Tracks.

Capulin Volcano National Monument.

You can see four states from here. (also Capulin)

El Malpais National Monument.

Travel in Malpais.

Great Sand Dunes.

And of course, Bandelier National Monument, near Los Alamos and always a wonderful day trip from Santa Fe. This is an NPS shot of the backcountry:

Here is information about the Junior Ranger Program.

By the way, Bandelier has a new superintendent: Jason Lott, who has been superintendent at Casa Grande Ruins National Monument in Arizona, was appointed Thursday at Bandelier. He won the NPS director's award for natural resource management in a small park in 2005 as program manager for resources management at Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park in Texas.

More to come on this subject. We'll discuss Pecos soon when we cover the subject of Greer Garson and Forked Lightning Ranch.

All photos on this page except the last two (credit:NPS) are by Patricia Lenihan.

No more half-day Fridays.

Half-day Fridays at Santa Fe public elementary schools soon will be a thing of the past. The calendar for 2009-2010 approved this week by the school board eliminates the 12:30 pm dismissal. Students will also lose one holiday in the fall. This year's school year is 173 days long; next year it wll be longer, and then in 2010-2011 the school year will be 180 days.

The local cougar has been relocated.

Mountain lions are also called cougars, panthers, catamounts, or pumas. They are larger than bobcats and one was one hanging out in our neighborhood until yesterday. We'll call her Carla. We'd heard neighbors say they spotted Carla and then today in the paper we read that Game Warden Desi Ortiz got a call that she was in a courtyard on Camerada Road.

Now, Carla ran away after the officer shot a tranquilizer dart but soon she was seen staggering into another courtyard about three houses from the initial contact. After a couple more tranquilizers and an absolute verification that Carla was snoozing, residents lent Mr. Ortiz a sheet to help place her in a bear cage on the Game and Fish truck.

After being examined by a wildlife veterinarian, Carla was taken to the Jemez Mountains and released. "I wanted to get her as far away from people as I could," Mr. Ortiz said. "She'll find a mate and she'll do fine." Carla is around three years old and healthy, and we wish her the best.

NB: In a sad postscript, it was determined the next day that Carla was far too comfortable around humans, and could become a danger, and so she was euthanized. I don't understand this.

Should Rio Grande Gorge bridge be a high priority?

The Santa Fe New Mexican's somewhat unfortunate headline in the Local news section this morning was, "Gov. weighs in on Taos bridge," but the point is that he thinks engineers need to provide some solutions to prevent more suicide jumps from the 650-feet-high span. We visited the bridge a while back and it is definitely a place where people who tend to get dizzy should NOT go. In these budgetary shortfall days, should we allocate money to prevent an average of three people per year from jumping off? The bridge is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.