December Moon

December 18, 2022

Hello again,

Well, after a beautiful week with the temperature reaching the 50s most every day and staying at or above freezing at night, this past week was a bit of a return back to more normal weather for us.  We saw lows in the teens at night and highs stuck in the 30s, with just a day or two breaking the 40 degree barrier.  That being said, things can really whipsaw out here and it is nothing to see temperature swings of fifty or sixty degrees over the course of a few days any month of the year...30-40 degrees within the same day is not at all uncommon.  Our little houseful of cats keeps getting more and more raucous as our two litters of kittens keep getting into more and more trouble.  We've pretty much needed to start packing up all of our little knickknacks again, or anything within their ever-expanding reach that we care about at all.  We still have only let them out twice: once, they loved it and explored and ran around like crazy; the other time was very windy and they did not like that at all, so it was short-lived.  Still, we need to start getting them out more and more and introduce them to the two remaining outdoor cats that we have: Bootsie and BRJ.  We haven't seen Boo-Boo in a month or more and can only assume the worse, although I did crack the door to the garden shed open the other day and did see some little orange paws scurrying around under one of the garden crates...so, more kittens there!  We've come up with some names for the first batch of five kittens that have begun to stick: TG Swiper; Dottie Minerva; Misty Gish; Ebony; & Mini-Me.  The first one Erin kept calling Tough Guy, later shortened to TG, while I was separately calling him Swiper, because he always swipes at you when you walk by.  The second and third ones are from one of our favorite shows(Bob's Burgers) and helps us tell the difference between the two black & white tuxedo cats(one has a big white dot on its chin).  The next is simply because this kitten is all black and we didn't want to use Boo-Boo again.  And, the last one looks just like a miniature version of her Mama, Chelly.  Twenty-year-old Buckwheat mainly stays up on her perch in the window over the bar, but once in a while we set her down on the couch and she just sits there silently watching the chaos of all the little furballs running around like crazy.  She really hisses(or used to before all of the kittens) at Chelly and her sister, Zia, the Mama to the other batch(both last year's kittens), but so far she doesn't seem to even notice the kittens...or, at least, she doesn't react to any of them like she did to their Mamas!

Work continues to drag on and on as we still keep cutting flagstone every day.  I make square after square and rectangle after rectangle, in four different sizes, while my friend, Valentin, works on the third stone patio with his hand-cut, whimsical designs.  I'm busy stockpiling pieces for the last patio, on the other side of the house, and two or three steps that we're going to put in outside of doors.  So far, I broke the foreman's heavy duty Skilsaw that I've been using to cut all the stone, getting to the point where it would run when you pulled the trigger, but the blade would no longer spin.  Valentin also broke his angle grinder that he had been using...it's like the tenth or twelfth that he's gone through since he's been here cutting and working with stone for four years!  Erin's gigwork in Santa Fe has trickled down to just about nothing and she has become trapped on the ranch more and more by work being done on our house and the boss's house next to us lately.  Quite often, both the boss and I are at work and there is only Erin left to be here for any contractors or technicians that need to stop by.  She's taken it well, though, and has just resolved to work on more things in the kitchen and in the garden on the days that she gets marooned here.  Sometimes, though, since you have to plan your shopping trips out here because we're so rural, she just about wants to scream when a much-needed grocery run gets pushed back two or three days in a row.  All in all, it's hard not to like being stuck out on this ranch with all of the critters, both wild and tame.  That and the constant changing of the light in the sky, especially right before and after dusk and dawn.  And the silence.  It's a far cry from the busy, little street that we used to live on in central Pennsylvania, less than a block from the only river crossing within ten miles, that all the trucks used to bypass the string of traffic lights that went through our little downtown...that and the ambulances!  Oh, the ambulances!  Now, if you strain hard enough, you can just about hear the neighbor coughing on their back porch half a mile away on account of the quiet!

And, once again, here are some pictures from this week out on the ranch.  First up, three different shots that I played around with on the computer: a closeup of Willow & one of the kittens; then, a shot of me in the bathroom suited up for the cold; and, finally, a shot of the moonlight dancing across the water of the stock tank.  Next, four shots from Erin of the younger batch of kittens: they are still upstairs and only come out in the dark, so she had to sneak to get these shots of them and I had to really tweak them to be able to see their faces.  Then, two shots of Willow and her kittens: first, with Misty Gish; then, with Dottie Minerva.  Next, two shots of the sky glowing right at sunrise on one of the frosty morning in the teens.  Then, two shots of the full moon rising with Jupiter standing watch in the sky right above.  And, finally, three shots of the moon dancing across the top of the small water trough as I filled it one night this week...the swirling water made each shot seem more intricate than the one before it!

See you soon.