THE GREEN (AND RED) HOUSE
After living in New Mexico for 12 years, Andrea Hill and her family moved to a rural part of Wisconsin where they knew no one. That didn’t stop residents from asking the mailman about their “forwarded from” address. “To this day, folks in the surrounding communities refer to us as ‘the Mexicans in the green house.’ We cannot boast of any Mexican heritage,” she says, “nor is the house still green.”

Luckily, UPS delivers green to the house. Red, too. “We ship in a case of each kind of chile from Hatch every month just like clockwork,” Hill says. “It’s something you just can’t stop eating once you’ve been indoctrinated.”

BOOK ’EM, DANNO
The crackerjack staff at the State Library in Santa Fe caught a “Missing” moment that only a skilled cataloger would. Bradley Carrington, chief of the library’s Technical Services Bureau, says the crew was handling its copy of author Don Bullis’s new book, New Mexico Historical Encyclopedia (Rio Grande Books), and pulled up its record in WorldCat. That’s the main database for libraries all over the nation.

“When we checked the Dewey Decimal number that it had been assigned—maybe by the Library of Congress, since they create most of the records—we noticed something odd,” Carrington says. The book’s number was 972.0003, which is reserved for encyclopedias covering Mexico, Central America, the West Indies, and Bermuda. Using their library-cataloger superpowers, the staff changed their book’s number to 978.9003, which everybody knows is the number for encyclopedias devoted to our enchanted patch of earth.

TEXAS TACKS ON TAXES
Journalist Craig Springer divides his time between Santa Fe County and Hillsboro, and keeps track of himself at CraigSpringer.com, a website supported by Squarespace. Imagine his surprise when he received a notice from the company informing him that he would soon have to pay more for that privilege, thanks to an increase in the Texas sales tax—“because our account records … indicate you have a Texas billing address associated with the zip code 87015.”

Oh, yeah? Our records indicate that would put him directly in the eastern part of Santa Fe County and, hopefully, safe from the long arm of Texas revenuers.

RETAIL IT IN THR MOUNTAIN
After “a wonderful week” vacationing in New Mexico, Sandy Woerner returned to work in central Ohio, happily wearing her new turquoise-and-lapis necklace with matching earrings. A co-worker asked where she bought them, and when Woerner told her Albuquerque, the worker nodded knowingly. “Ahhh,” she said. “Duty-free shopping.”

Woerner later moved to Arizona, and we do hope she still pops over our “border” to invest in exotic and decidedly domestic baubles.

HAVE A “MISSING” MOMENT?
Send it to fifty@nmmagazine.com or Fifty, New Mexico Magazine, 495 Old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe, NM 87501. Include your name, hometown, and state. Thanks!