The voltage modulation routine I would later use in November of 2023 was, by every measure, a direct application of the engineering principles I had spent 31 years developing at the laboratory. The laboratory had trained me for the exact scenario I would face. Sandia Vista Estates was built across our south property line in 2014 on what had been the Whitford Ranch the developer Bramble Holdings purchased in 2012. 48 homes on lots between 1/2 and 2 acres around a small clubhouse and a community pool. The development was marketed primarily to Albuquerque commuters and Santa Fe retirees.
The development opened in 2015. The development had been a relatively quiet neighbor through 2019. Tamsin Lockhart Bramble and her husband Kendrick Bramble moved into lot 12, the largest pad in the south row, with a clear line of sight view of our solar array, in October of 2020. They had paid $970,000 cash. Kendrick was a senior partner at a regional commercial real estate development firm based out of Albuquerque, and he was the cousin of the developer who had built Sandia Vista in 2014.
A family connection that explained how they had gotten the prime lot. Tamsin had been a Houston commercial real estate marketing director for 12 years. She had quit the Houston job when they moved. She drove a 2022 white Tesla Model S Plaid she had purchased in May of 2022. She got herself elected HOA board president in November of 2021 by a vote of 34 to nine.
She had run on a platform of elevating Sandia Vista's brand standards and modernizing the community's sustainability profile. She had won because the previous president was a 68-year-old retired engineer named Wendell Bouchard who had quietly stepped down after his wife's second stroke. Wendell had not endorsed Tamsin. Wendell had told his wife Renata, by Renata's later careful description at our kitchen table, "She is going to do something embarrassing. I do not have the energy to stop her.
Someone will need to in 2 years." Wendell had been right on the first count. Someone, me, would, in March of 2024, stop her on the second. I want to describe Tamsin Lockhart Bramble as Placitas came to know her because the description matters. She arrived in town with the polished confidence of a Houston commercial real estate marketer entering a small mountain village.
She referred to Placitas as the village with the soft Houston vowel implication that Placitas was a temporary lifestyle adjustment for an Albuquerque commute. She wore Lululemon to the Placitas Cafe. She had told the Placitas Cafe owner, a 62-year-old Placitas native named Aldena Vargas, no relation to my own grandmother's Vargas family, just a regional Hispanic surname overlap, that, "The local coffee is fine, but I prefer my Starbucks order from Albuquerque." Aldena had told her, in her measured Placitas Spanish-inflected English, that the local coffee was fine. The exchange had become a small Placitas Cafe legend across 2021.
The Cafe still has a small handwritten sign above the espresso machine that reads, in Aldena's calligraphy, "We brew what we brew." Tamsin had not gone back. The Placitas Cafe had not missed her. Tamsin wrote me her first letter on the 3rd of February, 2021. The letter was on Sandia Vista Estates HOA letterhead.