Gas, Coal, Power, and lots of Rivers

I'm in Farmington for work and it's been an interesting trip so far. We got in last night and one of our local volunteers invited us over to their amazing house for drinks. These people have something like 32 acres of property and, I kid you not, we entered their driveway via a gate and then drove about 2 or 3 miles up their windy, scenic driveway to get to the house. The house itself wasn't huge (ONLY about 4,000sf as I was told) but it has beautiful open spaces, a gloriously large kitchen (two ovens and two dishwashers...sigh, even in my wildest kitchen dreams, I never thought about having two dishwashers), a pool, a hot tub, a guest house, and a huge deck with beautiful views. Although the weather has been completely shitty and rainy since I got here, I can tell Farmington is a really pretty place. I drank a few too many martinis, haha, but it was nice just to kick back for a night before all the madness began.

They have three rivers here! I actually got to sleep in a bit this morning and ended up going on a run/walk on their riverwalk right behind our hotel. I think I ran about a mile again, haha. Maybe one of these days I'll just wake up and be one of those people who just has to run. Like my day won't be right unless I run. ; )

Today, we went on a couple tours. The one I really enjoyed was to the PNM San Juan Generating Station where they take the coal and convert it into power. It was pretty cool to tour the plant and we got to see where the coal comes in and they grind it down to a powder and then produce power from it. They are really working on clean ways to burn coal, which is good because it's the most reliable power source and the U.S. has loads of it.

PNM's San Juan Generating Station

Tomorrow and Saturday we have the session so hopefully all goes well. Every time I feel like I have the hang of things around here, something comes up. Our "year" ends mid next month though so I am really looking forward to starting over fresh and, hopefully, getting ahead of things. I feel like since I started this job, I've been playing catch up and sort of throwing each session together the month before. Now that I have a better idea of what these sessions entail I plan on being way ahead of the game and rocking it next year : ).