Hi Everyone,
I thought it was hot in Las Cruces until I spent 4 days in Phoenix! You live there and you really know what it means to be hot enough to cook an egg on the sidewalk-even at night. We were however, able to easily escape the heat between the baseball game at Diamondback Stadium, the Mall, the Performance Hall on campus, and my niece’s new home. We got really lucky and won lottery tickets to see the musical Wicked…front row. Oh my, was that good.
I was also able to get a bit of summer vacation in the cool Rockies near Denver. 
It rained every day. It was a fabulous summer trip spending time with good friends, eating good food, drinking good wine, laughing and crying and reading a book! A real summer vacation. Time to think about life, work and what is ahead for us. People regularly ask if I’m busy. During this vacation time I have been pondering what busy means. I feel like I’m always busy. I decided to take at look at busy. My conclusions: there are four types of busy. Mellow-busy-most retired people that I know fall into this category. You have to schedule with them because they always have something going. Regular-busy-parent-type people who work. Crazy busy-people who schedule their lives to the max, be it with school, work, church, friends, volunteering, etc. Then there is Stressful busy…this is someone who can’t fit everything into a day. Their commitments are beyond their means or circumstances (usually with work). They are in this stressful place a lot of the time. I’ve felt like that during Showcase a few times! Mellow-busy, and regular-busy are healthy places to be with a little crazy-busy thrown in once in a while. Life is interesting, challenging, and full.
Back at the office Melissa, Kathleen and Max were holding down the fort. I believe we are in the mellow-busy category at this time. We are using this time to organize and make improvements to our home building process. We are in the troughs of drawing up home plans. It is an exciting process of putting someone’s dream for their home on paper and helping the client translate those visions into reality…. Helping them decide on what is important to them. Building today’s home offers hundreds of choices. Our job is narrowing those choices down and choosing what is most important to the client, helping them commit to that choice and making them stop watching HGTV! (At least until the house is built!)
Back to the vacation-as a builder I am always looking at construction sites, homes and the like. 
On my way back down from Colorado we stopped in to an amazing “construction project”. Just outside of Pueblo, Colorado near Lake Isabell, a man by the name of Jim Bishop has been building a castle by himself for the last 40 years. And what a castle it is. It is built out of rock and ironwork. If you are ever in that area I highly recommend you stop and see it. Google Bishop’s Castle and there you can see what I mean. It just shows you what one man can do in his lifetime if he decides to do so. I wonder if he ever got a permit for this job!
My next home building related trip will be to Santa Fe the middle of August for their Parade of Homes. I now combine it with a group of friends and we spend time checking out the multi-million dollar homes, mix in some shopping, a lot of good eating and seeing the sites of Santa Fe.
So next E-News I will be reporting in on the homes we saw in Santa Fe and other summer news from Soledad Canyon Earth Builders. Let me know what you know. Anything you’d like to share with others about your home, life’s pleasures or what’s happening around Las Cruces I’d be glad to pass on through SCEB’s E-News.
The basis of our business: Honesty, Integrity & Transparency
Pat Bellestri-Martinez
Lady Contractor