Daily Life

November 7, 2021

Howdy, folks!

We're starting to get close to being out here for a year now(officially in December) and are starting to feel like we have more or less familiarized ourselves with all the different seasons. We haven't had snow here on the ranch yet, but have seen it already on the high mountaintops around us that are over 10,000'. We have been seeing ice in the morning in puddles and birdbaths, and have had to occasionally defrost our windshields. My car is usually pretty stationary, already parked close to the jobsite, so I don't have to hop in it and warm it up every day, but Erin has had to wait a few minutes a few times on the windshield for early morning runs to the post office or town. The garden still has some holdouts left in it that will need to be picked soon when the nights finally get below freezing regularly. Kale, carrots, beets, chard, and even some lettuce are still waiting to be harvested, as well as mint and parsley. All that being said, we'll hover around freezing for most of a week and then not get below 45-50F for a few nights. Our high altitude makes it quite possible that it can be chilly here, year round, even in the summer, and especially when the sun goes down, but our perch right on the edge of the hot Southwest keeps that same sun always shining and the afternoons much, much warmer than the nights. Some days I start in fleece-lined jeans, knit hat, long sleeve T, sweater and Carhartt jacket and by the time I get back up to the site after lunch I'm stripped down to unlined jeans, a short sleeve T and a ballcap. Beware, though, you better hang on to that morning outfit because by about a half-hour or hour before sundown you're going to need it!

We had another great, personal accomplishment this weekend. Having been here for almost a year now, we are more or less settled in, but still have two storage units mostly full of things and have been negligent in that area of continuing to work on them. On Sunday, we made three trips to storage, two of them with my car, too, and ended up bringing five carloads of items back. Some of the items from this haul were: our big charcoal grill(can't wait - Erin always had the whole neighborhood drooling back in PA with this); 6-8 lamps and lampshades(we've mostly just used ceiling lights thus far); a desk, book shelf and CD shelf(always room for furniture!); an air compressor(always handy...you're really your own gas station out here); some more statues and copper art from our old backyard(forgot about some of it); and, of course, a few more boxes of CDs and books. To get to Erin's grill, we had to go all the way to the back wall of the very first of the three storage units that we rented and retrieve it from there. It took months of removing other items in front of the grill to get to this point, but now that we're there, the unit truly seems half-empty. The other one, too, is almost half cardboard from all the boxes that we used to move out here and Erin is slowly but surely breaking those down and taking them into Las Vegas where New Mexico Highlands University has the only recycling program on this side of the mountains. We sell our aluminum cans at a scrapper in Vegas, but our only other recourse is the university and they take just a few things: cardboard/fiber board/milk cartons; aluminum cans; and tin cans. We even set up a little office in one of the storage units so that Erin can sit at a desk while she breaks down boxes or goes through an unopened one to see what treasures from back East we've forgotten about. Sometimes I think it makes her day to have a little place to go and run away to, where she can hide out for an hour or so before heading back to the ranch!

Now, for another batch of pictures. I didn't take as many as I usually do over the last week, so I've thrown together a few series from the ones that I did take. First up is a shot of my phone's display of our big, 15-mile hike's route after a little digital manipulation. Then, a series of five shots with the sun setting behind the mesa, while I was out with the dogs the other night...front and center, as always, is Willow. We walk two miles, the older dogs three or four, and she must surely do ten! Next, two shots from the hay barn the other night as I made some room for a new load of hay. Thus far we are all stocked up on bagged alfalfa forage and grass hay, but this cleaned-out corner would soon have 150 bales of alfalfa hay in it! Then, a totally random drawing that I happened to see on the new dumpster that was brought to us for the jobsite...no idea about who, what, when, where or why, but definitely cool! Next, a series of five shots of the sunrise over Starvation Peak the other morning. I was standing with the buggy door open, looking through its 'frame' and thought that the metal bed and metal feeder added some interesting textures to the scene. Lastly, I got a flat the other weekend on the day of our big walk back home and this is the aftermath of it: I have everything that I will ever need for construction or automotive issues in my trunk, but you have to pull all of it out to get to the damn spare! At least it gave me a chance to rearrange and reorganize a bit!

Take care.