February Freeze

February 6, 2022

Hello again,

Another week has come and gone on this big, ol' ranch and still we haven't seen hide nor hair of Chaco. It's been a little over two weeks now since we last saw him and something very interesting happened at the beginning of this week that made us feel a little bit better about the situation. A huge, orange tomcat appeared for a few days, beat the snot out of our outdoor tomcat, forced him to flee to the other side of the pond and then he just hung out in the hay barn with our outdoor female and then by mid-week disappeared again. We heard some big cat fights in the middle of the night for a few nights and saw blood everywhere on the patios and porches in the mornings, only to see that our tom was fine and just had a couple of big gashes across his already-broken nose. By the end of the week everything was back to normal with our two outdoor cats sleeping in the hay barn, eating outside of our big, side window together and traipsing around again like best buds, even though for three whole days they weren't seen anywhere near each other. Again, while Chaco very well might have been nabbed by the coyotes, this wandering tomcat confirmed to us that it is not only the dogs that run loose and cover big swaths of territory out here, but also the cats. So, did this big tom chase Chaco off unbeknownst to us? Our outdoor tom, Big R, with a head the size of a melon, can totally handle his own, but an oversized lizard might have given Chaco some trouble, let alone a bruiser of a tomcat, so who's to say? And, believe you me, I think this tom could have kicked any coyote's ass that we've yet seen out here: they are literally no bigger than a really big, red fox, not anything like what we're used to seeing back East, where we have those much bigger wolf-coyote hybrids. So, without really actually knowing, we still feel in our gut that our little buddy just moved along and has found some new digs and didn't end up somebody's dinner. While the Secret of Nimh story line might be a little too far-fetched with him off in some underground kingdom, hopefully he just found a really lonely person nearby who really needed a best friend and the universe made it happen!

Otherwise, we got another big, batch of snow mid-week, probably in the 6-8" range. It literally started just before midnight on Tuesday and didn't stop until after dawn on Thursday morning. It was the finest, driest snow that you could ever imagine and it just, ever so slowly, kept layering tiny, little piece over tiny, little piece, until we ended up with quite a bit of snow! It's always tricky to measure and determine the final amount out here because the sunshine is so brilliant and strong that it literally starts making the water run, even on the coldest mornings. Our snowstorm corresponded with a big drop in temperature and we had three nights in-a-row of zero degree temperatures. Yet, even on those super cold mornings, by 9-10am, the water starts running off of all of the metal roofs, the fencing, the car windows...just about everything. That being said, there are still many patches of snow on the ground, for once, wherever the sun doesn't spend much time hitting the ground. As I've mentioned before, this is the main way for us to get moisture in the ground out here, other than the rain monsoons over the summer months. And, historically, our snowiest months are February and March, so hopefully this pattern of regular, weekly storms keeps dropping snow on us. The temperature continues to see-saw, but the severe cold forced us to finally tear our stove apart and remove the built-up creosote that was all the way near the top, where the stovepipe exits the house. And, it was just in time, as we finished that project Tuesday afternoon before the snow started falling later that evening and then really began to drop the next day. But, just like anything else in life, just as we finally crossed that off of our list, about ten more things had to be put down on it! Que sera, sera.

So, now for another round of pictures. First and foremost, a picture of the big, orange cat that spent a few days here. Then, three shots of the dogs bounding around the property this week: first, Ela, showing that at age 8 she's still a super dog, capable of flying through the air; then, two shots of Willow, with her huge Dumbo ears, flopping in the breeze behind her. Next, two soon-to-be collector's-item shots of Erin dumpster diving while we were out looking for Chaco last week. The dumpster had just had a whole bunch of sheet rock and wooden pallets and crates thrown in there right around the time that he went missing, and we thought it was plausible that he might have ended up in there somehow, so we threw all the big stuff out and sifted through the whole, darn thing down to about a foot off the ground. Then, two shots of the water trough for the horses, which I had to chisel about 4" of ice off of the top of after the 30-hour snow plugged up the top of it and allowed it to freeze over: first shot, mid-way through the process; second one, all done and letting the sun start to work its magic and assist the de-icer! Next up, four shots of the horses from this week: the first three showing them on the morning of the blizzard, covered in snow around zero degrees; the last one was from earlier in the week when I walked out to the feeders to do a head count and had holes stared through me because I didn't bring any food with me. Then, two great morning shots this week, with the ground covered in snow and the sky just beginning to blaze with color. Next, a shot of the reeds out on the island in the pond. And, lastly, a shot of me from the previous weekend out on the stoop crushing aluminum cans, stripping copper wires and sorting glass, tin and plastic...waste not, want not!

Take care!