Mile High Sunset

July 24, 2022

Howdy folks,

Well, it's been another hot week out here on the ranch, hitting or exceeding 90 almost every day over the last week. After not getting any significant rainfall since the Fourth of July weekend, we've finally been starting to get some thunderstorms again. Nothing hot and heavy, but more than the usual dozen drops that just come to tease you in the summertime dryspells. In fact, the mosquitos have been absolutely horrible this summer, after all the rain that we got in June, and we've only just been starting to notice not being completely eaten alive when you go outside. At its worst, it's 24 hours a day when they're bad. As it starts drying out a little, and a whole bunch of the mosquitos go through their short life cycles, it starts getting better and is only bad from dusk to dawn. I was actually sitting on the porch towards dark just a night or two ago and was only in shorts and a t-shirt, so it's gotten that much better. You'd think being in the high desert that this wouldn't be an issue, but with a windmill-filled wildlife pond(run-off basin) within a few hundred feet of the houses and lots of tall flowers and plantings that stay really wet after the downpours out here, they can be fierce. Now, we look to be entering another wet cycle and are starting to go back out again covered up like Lawrence of Arabia. Erin has been taking a little break from the garden , in fact, because she has found no time of day to go up there when she wouldn't lose a pint of blood in the process. Luckily, everything was well-watered(and is irrigated daily), so now we're surprised every day with all of the volunteer plants that are coming up all throughout the garden, both within and outside of the raised beds. Erin totally rearranged the layout of the garden this spring and relaid all of the irrigation lines, so now she's absolutely tickled to see all kinds of plants sprouting up everywhere, especially flowers like: zinnias; calendula; marigolds; cosmos; and morning glories. We've already been eating lots of salad and have even had to send all of my coworkers home with a bag full of fresh greens on more than one occasion, just so that we wouldn't be overwhelmed. Erin usually is in the middle of half a dozen different canning and preserving projects, with things at all stages in the craziest of places both in and outside of the refrigerator, so space is always at a premium! She has also collected almost fifteen pounds of apricots from the place in Santa Fe that we've both been working at and has already turned most of it into jam...one day, instead of a big bag of fresh greens, all of my coworkers got a fresh loaf of bread and a jar of freshly made apricot jam. I'm telling you, I almost never get the urge to go out to eat for some reason...

Speaking of working in town, I haven't had to go in very much in the last few weeks, but was in quite a bit this week. I got to see my old friend, the jackhammer, and got to get good and reacquainted with him. We had to take down a little bit of the foundation on the casita that we tore down about five inches in one spot. We also had to take out a massive rock outcropping that was jutting out of the back of the yard, into a lower driveway area, that needed to be removed so that we could build a vertical retaining wall out of concrete and block. Later on, another crew will stucco and stain it and weave it seamlessly into the adobe tapestry that makes up Santa Fe. They've already done the front wall of the property that faces the road and it looks like it's been there as long as anything else on the street. This project turned out to be quite an adventure because there was only two of us and we had to figure out how to basically hold this huge jackhammer up in the air, above the outcropping. So, my friend, Dylan, that I work with in town, has had his little Kubota tractor there on-site and he got the bright idea to strap the jackhammer to the bucket of the tractor and to tape the trigger down, in effect, making an improvised tractor implement out of it. We actually got the whole thing done in an afternoon and only broke one strap in the process. Before long, I was back out on the ranch cleaning windows and cleaning up both inside and out of the house. My friend, Valentin, is working on outside stone walls in an area up by the barns, pretty much isolated from the rest of the crew and the foreman, Cisco, is there every day working on the bedroom's wooden flooring and doing every other job that comes up in the meantime. There's a tile crew there, too, at the moment that is really taking forever to get their job done, which is holding up the final job's finish date. We keep projecting ahead and then surpassing the same dates, so who knows when we'll get it done. The most recent assessment was late June/July, and we've blown by that, so, now, maybe...Christmas?

And, now again, since pictures are worth a thousand words, here's another batch! The first four shots are of the garden in all of its mid-summer glory. Next up, three shots of the jackhammer, first just unloaded, then strapped to the tractor. Then, five shots of the jobsite in town: first, two shots of the forms for the newly-chiseled-out space where the back wall will be; then, three shots of the retaining wall that we dug out and repaired(the middle of), before adding a few more layers on top that will keep the ground from pushing on the casita. Then, finally, four shots from back out on the ranch: first, looking north towards Barillas, which burnt earlier this year, with the sea of green in front of it; next, a perfect sunset from the jobsite, silhouetting the mesa; and, then, two shots of some of the tiny, little flowers that grow everywhere out here.

See you soon.