Santa Fe Challenge; Also, Worms

This past week was Bike to Work Week. And it started out promising enough but it soon got cloudy, cold, and rainy for most of the week. Can't ever complain about the rain here, especially since this was the first precipitation we'd seen since that last little snow shower several weeks back. It all cleared and warmed in time for the Bike to Work Day gathering on the Plaza on Friday. This year, however, it turns out there were no burritos.

The NMFF had organized a tournament, the Santa Fe Challenge, to get an event going locally in the spring. I headed over to Santa Fe Prep for a couple hours on Friday night to help with the setup, and then back yesterday for the competition.

The foil, very civilized, was due to start after 2:00. Two epee tournaments started in the morning, one all-ages and one under-14. As expected, things were running late with those, and because I was caught just standing around, was drafted to referee one of the under-14 pools. Went well enough, and I think I worked most of my nervousness out there, instead of later in the actual foil bouting.

We eventually did start up, but there were continued delays as fencers were refereeing or still fencing in (sometimes both other) epee competitions. Our pool wound up waiting for three of our seven, drawing it out for a while. It meant lots of time to cool off and the muscles to fossilize, but it made for a much more leisurely, social event.

 

There were eight strips running in the main gym (left), and two of the foil, including mine, were in kind of a little cafeteria off the gym (right; my usual Monday night sparring partner Tony is lunging). Quieter, brighter, with chairs and tables all around, a nice scene out there.

Only won one, but felt I was fencing well. Mostly lost, I felt, on technique — knew what and when to do, just had a tough time putting it all together, the result of not enough foil practice. Gave some people a hard time, but was eliminated in the first round. By then, it was around 7:00, so I helped with some cleanup, then headed home.

So what was Monica doing all day? Building a compost bin!



We started a compost pile after moving in, but it was never contained and properly started. Went to the Farmers Market in the morning — their last temporary location before the completion of their new home in the Santa Fe Railyard — to buy worms.

Monica spent the afternoon getting straw bales from the feed store down the road, clearing out space for them and stacking them up, moving and turning over the compost, and getting our new invertebrate friends into their new home.