Never a Dull Moment

June 26, 2022

Hello everyone,

Well, we had a little bit less hectic week this week once our company left on Wednesday. Ken and Astrid rolled out of here after lunch and reported back to us that they had made it back to northeastern Pennsylvania by 9pm Friday night. Erin ran them into Santa Fe on Monday to stop by and see where I was briefly working and to show them the downtown, the plaza, etc. Tuesday was pretty much a complete rain-out and they caught up on laundry and getting the van ready for the return trip while I spent my last day in Santa Fe. But, just to keep things interesting, I kept getting a missed call out here from an Albuquerque number throughout Wednesday afternoon(cell signals are poor at best out here...so, don't move once you get one!) and so when I was finally in the right spot to answer it two hours after our company left, I was informed that a tractor trailer of hay was in Lamy(just outside of Santa Fe) and would be out to the ranch by 7pm. Now, to say the least, I was shocked and more than a little upset, as I was supposed to get a head's up from the sales rep beforehand. I knew the load was coming while the boss was away on vacation, but I didn't know when...until I knew when! So, I kindly asked the driver if he could wait until the morning and that I'd meet him out at Pecos River Station at 7am and then we'd get him unloaded as quickly as we could. I got there at 6:45am and found him already waiting on me, so I looped around and guided him back to the ranch. He had a 48' trailer, so I could immediately see that we weren't going to be able to get him to the hay barn, as the driveway is very serpentine. I texted my foreman to let him know that I was going to be on the ranch that day but was going to have to take the day off to deal with it and then promptly led the trucker up to a big gravel pile/turnaround on the ranch's old driveway. I ran back to grab the tractor and Erin and the two of us set about unloading the truck. We had 420 bales of alfalfa forage to tackle that came on 14 pallets with 30 each on them. Our little tractor can't handle pallets that big(and the backhoe is still out of commission) so Erin sliced through the pallet wrap to take the top ten bags off of each one so that I could move them, restacked the loose ones on new pallets and kept going on down the assembly line. Having owned a feed mill, this was nothing new for us and we were the perfect duo for the job and got the driver in and out of there in three hours. He did get stuck trying to turn around by the gravel pile, but I was able to hook up a chain to the tractor and get him out of there. It took a while, but once we started rocking back and forth it only took five minutes or less. We both hopped out of the cabs and were high-fiving and reminiscing about our teenage years when getting unstuck out in the middle of nowhere was a weekly occurrence!

Erin had her first gig in town and did some landscaping(mainly weeding) for the couple who own the old casita that we came in to tear down last week. They are from Brazil and said that they were always known for their property's landscaping, so I think this is a very temporary gig for Erin to get the whole yard cleaned up before a big crew comes in to do a massive, new design for them. She had a lot of fun and just enjoyed the autonomy of having her own day planned, her own lunch packed and her own work to do. She might end up helping them inside at some point, and she'd really like to get more into cooking, gardening & meal prep, but we'll see what happens. The biggest perk, though, is that she can then go get the shopping done in Santa Fe afterwards that she needs to do. The boss always wants us to go into town to pick stuff up, but we're usually only ever in Las Vegas, which is much closer to us and tends to be cheaper than the capital. She's doing another day this week and already has a half-dozen stops to make just for the ranch, let alone anything that we need. I ended up back on the ranch working for the rest of the week and have mainly been cleaning up the place as the different subcontractors get their jobs done and leave. It rained 9 out of 11 days starting on Friday, June 17th and ending today on Monday, June 27th , so it's been like one big duck pond out here and there has been mud everywhere. The boss is due back from vacation on Friday and we're racing to get everything done in time. We had company for 10 out of the 21 days that the boss was away, it rained for another 10 of them, we had a surprise tractor trailer of hay to unload and we had extra animals to take care of, but now we need to get the little lists done that we were each left with...no rest til the weekend!

So, I have another batch of pictures for everyone's enjoyment. First up, here's a series of five shots from us unloading the tractor trailer: first, coming up to it, seeing where I stacked the pallets next to the truck(I put them there to get him out of there more quickly, only to have to move them all anyway so that he could turn around!); then, a little closer, showing Erin talking with the trucker, Doyle, who was from up above Taos in Questa; next, a return trip to the barn with a pallet of forage; then, finally, two selfie shots showing me in the cab of the tractor and Erin riding the backhoe attachment on the back...she really had to hold on, I almost threw her off twice! Next, two shots from me rearranging the barn to make sure that we had enough room for everything the night before the delivery, first with my hay-moving fuel, then, a shot from after I got everything put away on the night after the delivery. Then, a series of six shots showing all the ponds that the boss made in the horse pasture with the backhoe last summer and how full they are now after all the monsoon rain that we got: the first two are looking out towards the feeders; then, a shot in the other direction, looking back towards the houses; then, another looking towards the feeders showing all of the hoof traffic; next, one of the smaller, stand-alone ponds with Ela & Willow racing around in the back; and, finally, Willow's the tallest so she gets to always go in first and check to see how deep it is! Lastly, the boss has been telling us about this old truck that was heading to the ranch soon...always soon, but never as yet to appear over the last year. Then, at last, of course while I was away in town, it showed up unannounced and was placed up in a corner in front of the barns where it's not in the way of anything. The belts looked somewhat newish and you could move them and the fan and the crankshaft, so it isn't seized up. The engine is huge and clean and is a big, old inline V8...I think this could be chugging around out here within the next year with a little bit of work! First, a shot as-is; then, with obligatory cactus growing in the bed; then, an artistic rendition.

That's it for this week, see you soon,