Minding the Heat

July 16, 2023

Hello again,

Boy, have we been hot out here lately!  This whole week saw the high making it up to the mid-90s every day...well, yesterday, on Saturday, it peaked at 86 and that was our coolest day of the week.  We're not having any kind of heat like they're getting in Phoenix and elsewhere around the Southwest, but it has certainly been hot.  Normally we see a daily spread of something like 85/55 most summer days, but that average has definitely risen by about ten degrees lately.  We haven't hit 100 yet, but it has certainly come close.  It's been very stormy lately, but more often than not the storms miss us, typically developing to the north of us further up in the mountains and then spilling eastward out onto the plains.  It's not wise to generalize like that, because the weather can literally come from any direction, but that seems to be the boilerplate anyway.  We're still waiting to see if the monsoon rains will set in.  Some years they do and some years they don't.  We had a very wet and snowy winter, but thus far not a very wet summer.  Hopefully, though, the rains will start falling soon and we can keep the aquifers nice and wet.  The heat has been hard to work through, as I'm outside all day long just about every day.  Lately, I've been prepping for the hydroseeders that will be coming to seed native grasses and flowers around the new house later this month.  I've been raking my little heart out and running the tractor and backhoe trying to get all of the ground prepped.  Then, there are the weeds!  Some things do grow in abundance out here but usually they're not the things that the boss wants to be seeing out her window!  I get a few preparatory remarks on which plants are weeds and which are wildflowers that haven't bloomed yet and then off I go all day.  I think I'm doing a pretty good job, but I'm sure that I've yanked out some things that should have stayed right where they were at and others that I left that should have had their roots exposed to the hot, desert sun.  I've also been spending an hour or two every day watering all of the potted plants and also installing metal edging everywhere in preparation for gravel and mulch here and there.  I've been trying to get a little mowing done, too, but a lot of days just don't have it in me after having my brains melted in the sun for hours on end.  Still, little by little, we're getting the boss's move to her new house more or less finalized and all of the new landscaping duties taken care of...although some of the spots around her old house have gotten a little shaggy while we keep waiting on our impending move next-door that never seems to get here.  Shhhh...

Erin's been having a hell of a time with her garden this year and it's been just about making her pull her hair out.  There are more grasshoppers out here than we've ever seen and there is also an abundance of big, fat caterpillars that have been munching on everything in sight: flowers; vegetables; herbs; weeds; whatever!  She's had to replant quite a few things that didn't survive the onslaught and her garden has already totally changed in layout and design a couple of times now.  Of course, she says that all is ruined and we're not going to get anything out of the garden this year, but all I see is a mountain of lettuce that we have to eat every day just to keep up and many more things on the way.  Last year her garden was overrun with volunteer flowers that just popped up everywhere and took over because she moved where all the raised beds had been and rearranged everything.  At first, she thought it was really cute, then stunning once all the flowers were blooming five feet off the ground, but then decided that she was only going to be able to grow cut flowers because of it.  Needless to say, we stuffed ourselves with vegetables out of the garden last year and she canned quite a few things, too, to boot.  Now again, she's pretty sure that we might as well just put a fork in the garden, but, as far as I'm concerned, I'm thinking that we're going to be giving vegetables away in about a month or so when she wiggles her magic, little garden fingers and commands the earth to bear its fruit!  We had committed ourselves to working on our storage units in the evenings and on the weekends in anticipation of our always-imminent, but never-attainable move into the boss's old house, but with all of this languid heat turned on as high as it can go, most days find us retiring up to the garden to just sit and watch the sun shine on the mesa.  There's a lot I need to do with my two old cars, too, but I just can't seem to lay on gravel when it's nearly a hundred out!

So, here again, is a batch of pictures for everyone's enjoyment.  First up, I spontaneously took a goofy picture of myself after roasting in the heat all day...and clearly losing it a little!  Then, a series of five different cat shots: first, Misty stuffing herself into a little 12-pack of Shiner Bock; then, GG lounging inside the entrance to Cat 5, our little cat city out front; next, Chelly's latest batch of kittens sleeping on my Muck Boots; then, Mickey, from the same litter, all sprawled out on top of the wood stove; and, finally, Zia with her latest bunch of kittens.  Next, a few landscape shots: first, one of the aforementioned caterpillars; then, Ela checking the weather on what will be our new front porch; and, then, a current shot of Erin's garden.  Then, the sun lighting up a couple of the statues we have that survived the 2000-mile move out West.  Next, a series of shots that our boss took for her photography class that she's taking...mostly of Erin and one of me.  And, finally, one of my other projects lately which has been to slowly get everything out of the Boneyard that isn't a beam or viga into this tractor shed, before I then break it down, sort it and organize it and move it to the tool depot that we have...that project is taking forever, but I'm hoping by winter to have it done.

That's all for this week!