Category: Uncategorized (Page 8 of 19)

Well, the first week of Christmas Break 2022 is nearly gone. We might not have had piles of snow to play in, but the weather has certainly been cold! If you’re beginning to worry that your kiddos are in danger of being bored next week, here are a few things you might want to check out here in Los Alamos!

The Ice Skating Rink

The Los Alamos Ice Skating Rink was opened in 1936 to help satisfy our town’s craving for a variety of winter sports. At this time, our rink is the only refrigerated, NHL regulation outdoor ice rink in New Mexico. You can check out their hours HERE, or call ahead to make sure there are no scheduled hockey games that might interfere with your visit.

The Ice Rink is tucked beneath the Omega Bridge on the canyon floor where the temperature can plunge to nearly ten degrees lower than the rest of town. They offer skating lessons for those who might need some help and hockey leagues from PeeWee all the way through Adult if you want to really immerse yourself in the activity. Skate rental is available and even if everyone in your party isn’t itching to get out on the ice, the winter scenery in the canyon is worth a visit and a short walk.

The Leisure Lagoon is NOW OPEN!

After much waiting and delays, the new Leisure Lagoon at the Aquatic Center is open for enjoyment! Between December 20 and January 3, this new feature at the Aquatic Center is open from 11:00am to 3:00pm during regular pool hours. If you want to plan your trip, give the Aquatic Center a call at (505) 662-8170. The new lagoon has a beach play area, a lazy river, and a 2 story water slide! A trip over to enjoy this new indoor activity could be just the thing to bring some warmth to the cold days of winter break!

The Los Alamos Youth Activity Center is Open!

Though the Youth Activity Center serving kids 3rd-8th grade has been closed this first week of holiday break, they will be open during week two for an adjusted schedule. Please feel free to call them at (505) 662-9412 beginning Tuesday December 27 for more information on hours. Even if your kiddos are not regular attendees of YAC, you can do a drop off next week as a visitor. Any kiddo who is either enrolled in the LAPS school district or a resident of the county is eligible to attend at no cost to the parents. The YAC is managed and staffed by the Los Alamos Family Council through grants from Los Alamos County as a service and safe space for kids in the community!

While the YAC’s county contracted hours for this holiday break did conflict rather confusingly with the Laboratory’s closure schedule, it might just be a blessing in disguise! How wonderful might it be to drop the kiddos off and enjoy a few hours of blissful mom and dad time? The YAC has a crazy variety of things to do. Everything from air hockey and video games to cotton candy and popcorn machines for special occasions. Games, movies, and supervised outdoor activities guaranteed to wear your kids out! The YAC has even managed to acquire a food dehydrator to experiment with making fruit roll ups and other interesting projects!

No matter how you decide to enjoy the second week of this year’s holiday break, get out and enjoy what our amazing community has to offer! I hope to see you around town and as always, when you’re ready to talk real estate in Los Alamos, give me a call! I’m your hometown real estate broker and I love to chat housing in Los Alamos!

You might look at my title and feel the urge to roll your eyes. Get on screen? Really? Isn’t the average person always on a screen these days? But when I say on screen, I’m not actually talking about watching endless loops of TikTok videos on your phone or tablet. I’m talking about being in the video.

These days, being in the video can mean a lot of things. Decades ago, before there were videos at all, being on screen meant you were on live television. And that’s how Public Access Channel 8 started out in the seventies. It might surprise some of you to find out that we have a television station here in town. But in the tradition of Los Alamos having a little more than anyone ever thought possible, we do. Public Access Channel 8 is located at the community center, in the basement on the Fuller Lodge side. I sometimes wonder if any community center has hosted such a diverse array of organizations. How often do you see a museum, a visitor’s center, a Youth Activity Center, a YMCA Teen Center, and a Public Access Television Channel share a facility?

Public Access Channel 8 has been a 501(c)3 non-profit since October 9, 1981. The first agreement between the Los Alamos County Council and PAC8 is dated October 31, 1979. But that’s the first formal agreement. An additional agreement to operate cable access services is dated January 14, 1982. PAC8 has been broadcasting County Council and other county committee meetings since long before live streaming internet was a thing!

Throughout their long history with our community, PAC8 has offered young people a place to get experience in the creation of television media. A lot of you might be aware of a good number of LAHS graduates who got their start here locally and then moved on to acting, script writing, and movie production. But there are also more than a few remarkable individuals who grew up here and began distinguished careers in the PAC8 control room. In one notable case, broadcasting Los Alamos County Council meetings gave way to highly successful talk shows, and eventually the Emmys!

But times, they are always changing! These days, PAC8 has really grown in what they offer. If you’re a local business looking for advertising ideas, PAC8 offers commercial videography and editing services. The Executive Director of PAC8 is also a FAA licensed remote pilot. That means the organization can offer drone videography and photography services. PAC8 has even taken that a step further and is offering classes in drone operation to the community!

In fact, the current menu of services offered at PAC8 is what made me think of this post during the holiday season! I was reminded of old home movies thanks to Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. While Clark Griswold is trapped in the attic wearing clothes pilfered from a storage trunk, he passes the time watching old home movies. How many of those old movies exist in our basements, attics, and storage units? Whether they’re on reels or VCR tapes, how cool would it be to save them for embarrassing posterity on a thumb drive? What about your old vacation and holiday photos? Would you like to have them on that thumb drive too?

PAC8 offers media transfer services along with videography services that make getting modern, shareable video files of your special events easy! Just visit their website for a full menu of services and pricing. If you take a look at the rest of their website, you’ll find a variety of videos uploaded to YouTube. Everything from Homecoming Parade footage to recordings of the Los Alamos Living Treasures presentations. Honestly, if you want to see a strikingly comprehensive snapshot of events throughout the last several years of Los Alamos, you really need to take a look at the productions page at PAC8.

Starting in April of 2023, you can check back to see a listing of the classes they’ll be offering over the summer. Everything from drone operation to basic video production. If you spend some time watching the videos on the production page, you might run across some successful student projects from past classes. You never know, your kiddo might become the next big indie film producer thanks to a summer class you signed them up for on a whim. Stranger things have happened here in Los Alamos!

In the meantime, if you’re looking to talk real estate and not video production, give me a call! I can take some pretty good videos with my trusty smartphone, but I love to talk real estate in Los Alamos and I’d love a chance to chat with you!

Happy Holidays!

As we gear up for Halloweekend 2022, I thought it might be interesting to dig into the Great American Main Street Program in general. Most of us realize that our amazing Halloween festivities are planned through Los Alamos Main Street, but we might not realize that this organization is actually part of a huge network supporting small towns across the United States.

According to MainStreet.org, “collectively, the Main Street movement is the leading voice for preservation-based economic development and community revitalization across the country”.

What does that really mean?

Think about our struggles here in Los Alamos to pep up our downtown areas. We spend countless hours talking about bringing in businesses, restaurants, and activities that encourage residents to enjoy our community. That’s what The Main Street Movement is all about.

This movement focuses on small towns, mid-sized communities, and urban commercial districts. The United States has a long history of small town life going back to our identity as a fledgling country. A number of towns used to have a town square, (or a plaza!) with a community building or courthouse in the center, and businesses, financial institutions, and restaurants occupying the surrounding streets. Or maybe the towns were more like Western towns you see in old movies where there was a main street lined with mercantile stores, hotels, and businesses. Perhaps these business centers were clustered around the railroad or a main highway crossing. No matter where they were, these central areas were the lifeblood of the surrounding community. A place to gather and enjoy the fruits of labor.

Gradually over time, super highways and air freight terminals changed the way that local businesses were able to compete. Big box stores moved in with lower prices and a larger selection of goods and services. Smaller businesses couldn’t compete and gradually were lost to time. Since the addition of Internet shopping to the economic landscape, small businesses struggle even more to maintain storefronts that allow them to connect with their communities.

Main Street America is all about salvaging that community feeling. Our Los Alamos chapter was given the Great American Main Street Award in 2016. That’s quite an honor! The award was established in 1995 and each year since, the organization has picked winners from towns and districts nominated all over the country. In 2022, Biddeford, Maine, Hammond, Louisiana, and Laramie, Wyoming have all been honored for their amazing efforts to revitalize their Main Street districts.

In 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission built our Community Center as a place for community life in Los Alamos. The complex housed the post office, retail shops, and even a cafeteria. From 1953-1995, this complex also housed the Mesa Public Library. These were the very beginnings of Main Street Los Alamos, a term that would not become “a thing” until developer Tom Netuschil renovated the Community Center Complex into Central Park Square in 1998.

Here in Los Alamos, the efforts to revitalize our Main Street are still full steam ahead. You might have noticed that the Hilltop House Hotel is coming down. We have modern apartment complexes going up and a continually growing number of Main Street activities planned to help our community connect. Los Alamos is a great place to be! When we were granted the Main Street America Award in 2016, we were dubbed “One to Watch”. So while the progress might seem slow at times, the wheels are in motion. And if you’re willing, volunteer with Main Street Los Alamos and get involved! Or, if you’re ready to join our community, give me a call! I’d love to talk Los Alamos real estate with you.

In case you hadn’t heard:

U.S. News & World Report released its annual rankings for the Healthiest Communities in the U.S., and in 2022 Los Alamos County, New Mexico, came out on top for the third year in a row. It’s the first community to take the number-one spot more than twice. ~ Travel & Leisure

Hmm. We’re the first community to take the number one spot more than twice? Considering the first time we won this award was right smack in the middle of the 2020 pandemic, it’s getting me thinking about what makes living in Los Alamos healthier than other communities.

If the criteria for being considered the healthiest community in America is population health, equity, education, economy, housing, food and nutrition, environment, public safety, community vitality, and infrastructure, I have to say I would love to see the scores in each category for all of the 500 communities evaluated. How on earth would you put a numeric score on our aging infrastructure or our stop and go vitality. These topics are pretty consistently in the minds of the public. Of course, the other big topic is housing. So how did Los Alamos snag the number one spot?

“Los Alamos County received a perfect score for its availability of affordable housing, public safety, population health, and access to parks.” Travel & Leisure

Wow. Surely some of us are wondering at the notion Los Alamos gets a perfect score in the category of affordable housing. So how does our available housing stack up?

Interestingly enough, according to a 2022 study conducted by Pew Research, Americans worry about the availability of affordable housing more than they worry over drug addiction, the economic and health effects of Covid-19, and crime. Pew studies also go on to say:

About six-in-ten U.S. adults living in urban areas (63%) say that the availability of affordable housing in their community is a major problem, compared with 46% of suburban residents and 40% of those living in rural areas. ~ Pew Research

This actually infers that while the housing crunch is a national concern, Los Alamos is less worried about this issue than 499 other communities. That actually makes me feel pretty darned positive! It’s hard to let go of that insulated feeling when you’re living in a tiny county perched atop a mesa. Los Alamos was never meant to be anything but solitary. So it’s good to hear that in some things, we’re just like everybody else. Housing all over the world is difficult to find. In America we’re experiencing a tough time finding our dream home, but it’s happening all over the country!

If you’re out there shopping for a home in Los Alamos, have faith that the right situation is out there for you just as it as for so many other hopeful homeowners in other zipcodes. And in the meantime, don’t forget to take advantage of the other amazing things that make Los Alamos the healthiest community in America! Head to the park, plan a hike to the reservoir to check out the fall colors, or go play a round of golf. Get involved, enjoy, and when you’re ready to buy or sell real estate in Los Alamos, give me a call. I’m your hometown real estate broker!