Warming Up a Cold Day

My intended plans for the day included going to two museums (one wasn't open) and getting a photograph of us with some of the hokey alien creatures lining the streets of Roswell. What I hadn't planned on was cold, dreary, drizzly, windy weather so the photographs were scrapped for another year's visit to the area and instead Denny and I headed for the warmth of the Roswell Museum and Art Center.

As we entered the doors we were greeted by a staff volunteer who immediately informed us that the gallery to our left was closed for remodeling and I thought "hmm, this doesn't bode well" but I was wrong. How can you not love a place that has a modern version of "The End of the Trail" statue where the horse has red glowing eyes glaring at you as you enter the building? The Roswell Museum is large, bright and airy with plenty of room for exhibits to come. Currently exhibitions include the artwork of Peter Hurd, Peter Rogers, women artists of New Mexico, the collections of Rogers (not a misspelling) and Mary Ellen Aston and a display on the life and inventions of Robert Goddard. I fell in love with the work of Peter Rogers, especially a small pen and ink drawing of a dove superimposed over an angel superimposed over Pegasus.The museum displays are housed in glass paneled sections with laminated flip-page books explaining each piece inside the glass wall. That was a little strange and hard to manage if you wanted to look closely at the piece and match it up with the book as the books were set at the edge of one side of the exhibit so you would have to walk back and forth to read what the difference displays were. However all the artifacts they have gathered are well displayed and beautifully kept. And as always we learned something new as we read our way through the exhibit about Robert Goddard, who advanced the science of rocketry, starting off small with rockets that went a whole forty-one feet in the air to inventing propulsion system that eventually led to man being on the moon.

There is also a planetarium attached to the complex but Denny and I passed on that for this visit. We needed to pick up a few groceries and top off the truck's fuel tanks since diesel prices were twenty-eight cents a gallon cheaper than in Amarillo, Texas. I was still feeling the chill of the wet day when we got home so I made a pot of spicy vegetable soup. How do I do that, you might ask? Make up a potful of vegetable soup using your favorite recipe and then instead of dicing up tomatoes or adding a can of diced tomatoes (you DO add diced tomatoes to your vegetable soup, right?) toss in a can of original style Rotelle tomatoes with green chiles. Yum! It adds a surprising kick and went very well with our roast pork loin sandwiches.

All in all, a very good day despite the lack of hokey tourist photos of us standing next to lime green aliens.