I retired from Los Alamos in May of 2017. I was 60. I had decided I had been at the lab long enough. My wife, Sigrid Cunningham, had been wanting me to take the early retirement option for 2 years. Sigrid had been a senior graphic designer at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe for 23 years.
She had been driving the 80-mile round trip from Placitas to Santa Fe and back 3 days a week since 1994. She had told me in the fall of 2016 that she would retire when I did. She had been waiting for me to commit. I had committed in February. We had both retired together in May.
We had spent the summer of 2017 sleeping late, drinking coffee on the back porch, and planning the off-grid solar array I had been designing in my head since 1995. Sigrid is 65. She had grown up in a small Norwegian-American Lutheran community in northern Minnesota before her family moved to Albuquerque when her father had taken a teaching position at the University of New Mexico in 1974. She had been a fine arts undergraduate at UNM. We had met in a printmaking class in 1976.
We had been married since 1982. She is the slowest careful person I have ever met. She is also the only woman I have ever loved. We have one daughter. Edith Cunningham is 38, a senior electrical engineer at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.
Yes, a different national laboratory from her father's, a fact she has been quietly proud of since she chose Sandia over Los Alamos after her PhD. She graduated from MIT with a bachelor's in electrical engineering in 2008, took a PhD at Stanford in 2014, and joined Sandia in 2015. She specializes in distributed energy resources and grid resilience modeling. She drives up from her Albuquerque house to the property every other weekend, often with her partner Inga Vandermire, yet another Vandermire, a recurring Upper Midwest and Mountain West Scandinavian surname overlap across my prior tellings. Edith and Inga have been together for 7 years. They have not married.
They have, by Edith's careful explanation at the kitchen table several years ago, decided to stay unmarried for tax reasons related to their respective federal employee benefits. The off-grid solar array I built across 2018 and 2019 is the practical infrastructure that made the response possible. The system occupies an approximately 1-acre south-facing patch of the upper property, what would have been my grandfather Clement's hay pasture in 1925 if Placitas had been a hay growing region. It is not. The array consists of 42 280-W monocrystalline silicon photovoltaic panels arrayed on a custom welded steel ground mount rack I built myself across the spring of 2018.
The panels feed a central junction box I designed and constructed during the summer of 2018, which in turn feeds a Sol-Ark 12-kW hybrid inverter, a unit I selected because of my own 31-year history with similar architecture, and four Tesla Powerwall batteries totaling 81 kWh of storage capacity.