Buying and Selling in Socorro

Shopping in Socorro is a little odd...many businesses aren't in the phone book, some of them do two or three things, so I thought I'd sum up what I know about buying and selling in Socorro.

• You can get a fair amount of pet (dog and cat) supplies at Southwest http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifFeed at 408 N California St.
  
• Need running shoes or children's dress shoes? Brownbilts at 111 Manzanares Avenue has brand name running shoes, some hiking boots and kids shoes...and, cowboy hats, boots and jeans.
  
• Socorro has a Freecycle group -- it's a listserve where you can post items that you want to give away or items you are looking for (no buying!).
  
• While Socorro doesn't have a craigslist of it's own, if you go to the Albuquerque craigslist and search for Socorro you'll find lots of buying and selling -- more than 100 items last time I looked -- that's more than is in El Defensor Chiefton. There's also some rentals listed. I've been told that most of the selling is Socorro to Socorro.
  

Recycling in Socorro

Recycling in Socorro is a pain. The city briefly supported curbside recycling, but dropping prices for recycling and rising collection costs forced them to stop. Socorro is such a poor city that recycling is just not a priority for the majority of the residents.

Items that are still valuable, or downright dangerous, can be recycled piecemeal, as described in the list below. Or you can hire Morning Wood Cutters for $20 a month at your house. They recycle cardboard, paperboard, newspaper, computer paper, junk mail, magazines, glass bottles, plastic bottles, plastic grocery bags, tin, aluminum, copper, and steel.

What	When	Where
aluminum cans and newspaper	1st Saturday 8:30-11:20AM	lot south of Ace Hardware
aluminum cans	anytime	various cardboard recycling bins
mixed paper and paperboard	3rd Saturday 8:30-11:20AM	Plaza
e-waste	business hours	Computers by LTJ 105 Plaza
plastic bags	business hours	bin at Walmart or Smiths. Smiths gives "points" for bringing your own plastic bags
cardboard boxes, motor oil	anytime	next to animal shelter/UPS
vehicle batteries	business hours	NAPA Auto Parts
tires	landfill hours	landfill, 1$ charge (closed for high winds)
toner cartridges	business hours	Cottonwood Charter School
cell phone, rechargeable batteries, all toner cartridges	business hours	Rotary Club boxes at  Coffee Shop, Library, Smith's photo, Corner Copy

What about compost? There are two facts that you need to know about composting in New Mexico -- you must water the compost -- or it will mumify rather than compost. The second thing you need is worms.

Bad sunscreen, no skin cancer!

I belong to that embarrassing group of people who love New Mexico but who don't have the melanin to take the sun. I'm such a mixed race mongrel I don't know where our pale skin and glaucoma-prone eyes even came from; but I'm a hat wearing, sunscreen wearing, lover of New Mexico.

Bummer to find out that much of the sunscreen you can buy either doesn't protect against skin cancer or contains chemicals that are bad for you!

The Environmental Working Group has published a study on sunscreens, rating sunscreens from 0 (very protective, no harmful ingredients) to 10 (no UVA protection, cancer-causing ingredients).

Two things in particular stand out in their research: if you get a sunscreen that protects against UVB but not UVA, then you can stay out all day, not get burned, and still be collecting rays for skin cancer. Secondly, many sunscreens use oxybenzone as a UVB blocker -- but oxybenzone has been shown to cause cancer, and disrupt the reproductive system -- and other, better UVB blockers are available.


Surely the sunscreens (or at least the expensive ones) in our medicine cabinet are OK? No, most of them contain oxybenzone, and they score an average of 6 on the EWG scale. Of the thousands of sunscreens they reviewed, they made a summary of "easy to find" safe sunscreens. However, that list includes things never seen this side of Santa Fe -- I have never run across the brands "Mission Skincare" or "California Baby".




The one item I do take issue with is the recommendation against any use of spray sunscreens. EWG worries about ingesting and inhaling all sun screen ingredients, but is especially worried about inhaling spray sunscreens. As you can see in the picture, my babies have just a tiny bit of hair -- not enough to protect their scalp. We have done battle with hats, but finally spray sunscreen has come to the rescue. We only apply it outdoors, we spray from the back, but it protects her head and cannot be easily replaced by a oil-based cream.

So I did some research, at Smiths, John Brooks Supermart, Walmart, then in Albuquerque at Walgreens and La Montinita. Walmart had decided it wasn't summer anymore and taken out ALL OF THE SUNSCREEN. John Brooks had several "natural" brands of sunscreen, but all contained oxybenzone. Since the safest sunscreen recommended by EWG were extremely expensive, I have sorted this list of "locally" available sunscreens by price per ounce.

Name	Size (oz)	Cost	$/oz	Score	Where to Buy
Coppertone Water BABIES - “Pure & Simple”	8	$12.00	1.50	3	Walgreens
Banana Boat Kids Tear-Free UltraMist Spray 30	6	$9.65	1.61	4	Walmart
J.A.S.O.N. Mineral	4	$7.99	2.00	2	La Montanita
Neutrogena “Sensitive Skin”	4	$9.99	2.50	3	Walgreens
Walgreens Sunblock with Zinc Oxide, SPF 45+	2	$5.00	2.50	3	Walgreens
Blue Lizard “Face”	5	$14.99	3.00	3	Walgreens
Blue Lizard "Baby"	5	$14.99	3.00	3	Walgreens
Blue Lizard "Sensitive"	5	$14.99	3.00	3	Walgreens
Neutrogena “Pure & Free”	3	$10.99	3.66	3	Smiths, Walgreens
Burt's Bees Chemical-Free Sunscreen, SPF 30	3.5	$15.00	4.29	4	La Montanita
Kiss My Face Face Factor	2	$12.49	6.25	4	La Montanita
Solar Sense - “Clear Zinc Sport Stick”	0.45	$4.49	9.98	3	Walgreens

I will mention that many of the "safe" sunscreens leave me with a white pasty face all day -- which is fine for my busy unselfconscious children, but not as acceptable for grown ups.

NMT Mineral Museum

I confess one reason I love the NMT Mineral Museum is that I grew up near a grocery/rock shop with a very similar museum in the back. Some deep part of me believes that childhood requires a rock museum you can return to, over and over again.

The NMT Mineral Museum has two large rooms of lovely rocks -- some sorted by the exact mine they came out of, and best of all, a glow-in-the-dark room (sorted by New Mexican and non-New Mexican specimens).

The Museum is free and is directly east of Macey Center park. It's open seven days a week. For my five year old it's good for about 15 minutes of serious browsing. I extend her interest by playing a game called "dibs" -- each of us picks out a favorite rock in each display case. Lynn's favorites are fool's gold and quartz.



I don't normally schedule outings entirely around shopping, but I have to say the BEST thing about The Mineral Museum is buying rocks. It's cool, educational, and the price is right. Graduate students are on call for questions or to sell rocks -- dial the number posted near the phone. Eschew the rotating display case (too awkward for kiddos) and ask them to pull out the trays of 25 cent rocks from the cupboard. Two dollars later you have a rock collection. I think it's cool that each rock comes nestled in packing material with a typed label identifying it -- naturally the kiddo strips this all off the minute we get home.

While the museum is upstairs, the elevator makes it wheelchair and stroller friendly. Bathrooms are around the corner.

A YouTube course on Media Literacy for Five Year Olds

Our five year old is media deprived. She is not allowed to use our computers. We go to great lengths to make sure the TV she watches is commercial-free. Everything she watches has to pass the our idiosyncratic family rating system -- Disney movies are too scary, the violence in Kim Possible, The Muppet Show, and Scooby Doo is fine. Home is a nice protected environment.

A few months ago our daughter went to a friend's house and had a transformative experience -- she spent a few hours playing on Barbie.com. For the next three days we talked about nothing but Barbie.com. I heard about the games, about the paper-doll dress-ups, the toys, the rockstars. While there's nothing I hate more than Pepto-Bismol-pink Barbie, really, I'm not all that upset. I remember going to my friends houses and making a beeline for MTV. I remember eating nothing but Cocoa Puffs and Captain Crunch three meals a day my first few weeks in college. She does need to be exposed to the real world somewhere, and a few hours of braincandy is not going to undermine our 24/7 home life.

What strikes me, in a bad way, is how powerful TV and the internet is. Since she'd had no exposure to any of this, she sucked it up like a sponge. My gentle prompting that Barbie.com has something to sell had little effect. So, fight fire with fire. I hit the internet, and found the makings of a course on media literacy for five year olds.

I suggest that you don't try to do this in one day -- both because kiddos have short attention spans and because they need time to think about their questions. Repetition is good -- I've shown this to her two or three time, seizing the chance when a friend is over. The second time I showed it to Alexander he gratified me by turning to me and saying "The Typhoon II isn't so cool, it only runs nine minutes before the batteries run out".

HBO has a great series from the 1990's called "Buy Me That" which is surprisingly undated. Available on YouTube is a 3 minute video on the reality of commercials: Buy Me That: Helping Kids Understand Toy Ads, Typhoon II

Next onto fast food commercials:

There's a wonderful food stylist video on YouTube -- she's a bit like Donna Reed as she puts cardboard in your hamburger, straight pins in the lettuce and Styrofoam in the french fries. I like to follow this up with the musical montage of real vs. fake. Encourage the kids to yell out "Real!" vs. "Fake!" as the images are shown.

Now I need a segment on product placements in movies, kid eye-level marketing in grocery stores and brand-orientated web sites. Suggestions anyone?


(for local parents in Socorro I have the full VHS tape which has:

• Typhoon II episode (toy doesn't work as shown)
  
• How the GI Joe Battle Copter ad was made
  
• Product placements in movies and video games
  
• Kids Clubs
  
• How special effects make everything sound better on TV
  
• Does buying everything make you a bigger fan?
  
• Do Nike shoes make you jump higher or run faster?
  
• How much Corn Flakes do you have to eat to collect all 15 3D baseball cards?
  

Children's radio program now online

For years we have listened to The Children's Hour -- an hour of talk and music on the "local" public radio station KUNM. We've had terrible luck buying children's music -- so much of it is cloying. We've found a lot of children's music we really like through The Children's Hour but the big problem is that if we forget to turn it on at 9AM on Saturday, that's it, it's over.

Now two weeks of archives are available at their website. The archive format is a bit awkward -- rather than select a show, you must select a time slot, so remember, Saturday 9AM to 10AM. So next time you need an hour of kid-friendly cheerful music, The Children's Hour will be there (maybe even two hours!).

If you listen often, please do remember to donate to KUNM. Public radio, like everything else, is suffering a lot during the economic downturn. Streaming and podcasting makes it seem like the programs come out of nowhere, but in fact there are real people who need real salaries (and health insurance!) behind the programs.

The New Mexico Starter Library

New to New Mexico? Welcome to the wild west. This article is not specifically for kiddos, rather it is a list of recommended books for adults (we deserve some reading above the level of "Hop on Pop"!).

So without further ado, here is my recommendations for New Mexico books:

Be My Guest, Conrad Hilton Conrad Hilton grew up in San Antonio, just twelve miles south of Socorro. His dad ran a grocery store/hotel, then they moved to the "big town" of Socorro. The first half of this memoir is well worth reading. Conrad's father stands out as one of the few settlers of the wild west who refused to carry a gun. He claimed that carrying a gun meant that sooner or later either you or the person you pointed it at died. There's a harrowing scene of him talking a drunken cowboy down at gunpoint.

Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides This book is much bigger than Carson alone. It tells the rich and complex history of the "taming" of New Mexico and fills in the detail of the brutal campaign against the Navajos. The US Army (hopelessly unsuited to New Mexico) has the duty to protect the pueblos and the Hispanic settlers only lately inherited from Mexico. The governor and army desperately want a Napoleonic style war, with a single leader to negotiate with, and had no idea how to deal with raids carried out by small groups of young male Navajos...thus the tragedy of Bosque Rondondo. This book explained something I never understood -- why anyone thought that interning Apaches with Navajo was a good idea.

The Harvey Girls, Lesley Poling-Kempes If importing brides to the wild west leaves a bad taste in your mouth, don't worry, by the end of this book, you are left with the joy of being a young women in 1900, getting to leave home (with chaperon), travel west (live in a dorm), draw a salary, and transfer between Harvey Houses! I've written more extensively in my article about the Belen Harvey Museum.

The Great Taos Bank Robbery: And Other True Stories of the Southwest, Tony Hillerman If you like mysteries (or even if you can just only stand them) you should read all of Tony Hillerman's mysteries. They are set primarily in Arizona, but the country, and traditions are New Mexican -- Hopi and Navajo did not draw those state borders. This light book is from Hillerman's newspaper days, and is a "Prairie Home Companion" take on New Mexico. We are a small town at heart.

No Life for a Lady, Agnes Morley CleavelandThere are intertwining strands in the rope that makes up New Mexico, this book is about the strand made up of Anglo ranchers. The roughness of life on the frontier, the joy and the practical jokes are all described. The horse culture, where the only acceptable reason for being caught walking was chasing a horse, is described with energy.

The Milagro Beanfield War, John Nichols This fabulous book is a wonderful romp through small town New Mexico. I hate to say much about -- I don't want to give anything away. Hispanic farmers, innocent and well meaning university volunteers, land developers and ghosts cavort. It should be required reading for anyone who crosses the border. I wish I could recommend all the books in the trilogy, but they get rapidly weirder and more violent.