Santa Fe vs. Seattle

Anne Carolyn asked me to post a blog entry about my time in Santa Fe and the past couple of weeks. I have happily been playing the role of husband-in-tow. A role I wouldn't mind making a more permanent position.

I have been struck by both how different Santa Fe is from Seattle, and how wonderful it is. I thought I would go over some of the differences.

• In Seattle, Anne Carolyn makes me breakfast and coffee while I get ready for work. Here I am the house husband and our roles are reversed. While she is off staging blocking and coaching arias I've been doing laundry, and running errands. (lots of reading and vacationing too)
• In Santa Fe bread does not mold. Your sandwich will however start to get dry like it was slightly toasted before you finish it. The humidity here is currently 16%.
• In Santa Fe at night with the windows open you can hear crickets. Where I grew up in the Seattle area you could hear frogs at night. I do not envy the frog that finds itself in Santa Fe.
• In Seattle a drought means that we are several inches short on our rainfall and the snowpack in the mountains isn't what it should be. In Santa Fe a drought is where it is so dry that half of the extremely hardy Pinion trees die off. (with the help of a bark beetle that can do some damage when times are dry)
• Speaking of water, there is no standing water to speak of in Santa Fe while Seattle is between the Puget Sound and Lake Washington with a half dozen other lakes in the city limits. On the maps here there are dry riverbeds marked. "Arroyo" is the special name for these.
• From what I can tell there may be only one tree indigenous to this area: the pinion. A big one might come close to 2 stories but most of them are less than 15 feet. The amount of trees native to the Seattle area is too long to list here... Fir, Cedar, Maple, Alder, the list goes on and on.
• In Seattle you can tell the age of a house by it's architectural style. Not so here. The majority of structures (not just houses) could be put in the broad category of "Adobe". There is a smattering of other SW styles as well as your typical doublewide, but adobe is the clear winner.
• Seattle: traffic? -oh yeah. Santa Fe? -not so much.
• While I am sure they exist, it is hard to imagine a cube-farm in Santa Fe. Cube-farms are rampant in the greater Seattle area. (if you are fortunate enough to not know what a cube-farm is, think Dilbert)

Don't get me wrong, Seattle is a beautiful and wonderful place but I have discovered that so is Santa Fe.