New Realities

March 8, 2021

Howdy, howdy, howdy,

Well, another week has come and gone and we've been so tired that we actually crashed at 9pm last night and went to bed early. I had fully intended to stay up and get the email done, but I just couldn't seem to keep my eyes open and ended up getting more and more horizontal on the couch...Erin wasn't too far behind me, either. You know, I thought that we somewhat instantly acclimated to the elevation out here, but I'm starting to think that we're still dealing with it little by little. When Erin cleans Kim's house she goes up and down the one flight of stairs over and over throughout the day and is really huffing and puffing by the end of the day. I'm not much better when I take the dogs out and end up wandering a half-mile or more away, dreading the 'feet like lead' feeling that sometimes creeps over you as you're hiking back. We feel that we're in pretty decent shape: we've both lost weight over the course of the move up until now. Also, Erin does yoga every day with Kim and I usually walk 1-2 miles a day with the dogs...still, we're up at almost 6500' and it seems that there's the initial shock of being able to breathe at such a high elevation and not get headaches, etc., but then the more long-term issue seems to be how tuckered out you get from rather simple tasks and exercise. I think we're still working on that!

Willow's wounds from the barbed wire have finally closed up and everything seems to be healing nicely. We just kept up with cleaning her up after every time that she went out: a gentle saline solution and colloidal silver seemed to do the trick. Tetanus is usually noticed 5-10 days after the injury and we're up to day number 13. So far, so good, but we did read that it can kick in all the way up to three weeks after the fact, so we're not totally out of the woods yet, but everything seems to be trending in the right direction. You'd never know that she was injured, though, and we finally let her play with Cheyenne in the back yard over the weekend. They alternate between all-out wrestling with each other in the dirt and being on cat patrol. The four outside cats hang out in a big drainage pipe that comes out of Kim's backyard and runs underneath the driveway. They also hang out by the fence right next to our house where we feed them and seem to enjoy being just on the other side of the fence from where the dogs are...they're clearly taunting them. They'll saunter through the fence and plop right back down a muzzle-length away contentedly cleaning themselves while driving Willow and Cheyenne crazy. It's a cat thing, I guess!

Erin had to take her car into Volkswagen in Santa Fe on Tuesday for its 80,000 mile service that was long overdue. While you guys were all freezing back East she was sitting outside in the sun in 65F weather getting a suntan. Then, she got to spend the rest of the day shopping in town for both Kim and us and had a great time. Santa Fe is super cool, but it overwhelms easily, leaving you with way too many options and choices. This is every big town and city everywhere, but certainly is no less true out here. Still, there's a huge laid-back vibe that permeates everything there and really makes it easy to navigate and get yourself here and there. On another subject, Erin finally got a chance to finalize our website's front page and now has it up and running. It still needs a million photos added, and all of my letters back home, plus we also want bios on all the animals, etc., so there's still plenty to do, but it is now officially online... www.newmexicoranchlife.com .

On the same day that Erin was in Santa Fe, we had a brush fire pop up a few miles southwest of us, up on Rowe Mesa that I'm always taking pictures of. I noticed smoke billowing up over the ridge right before lunch and was able to pinpoint it on the government's wildfire website: fire.airnow.gov . By the end of the day the smoke had died down noticeably and was merging indistinguishably with a few low clouds that were skirting by. No big deal, in the end, just a hot spot, but a very real new reality for us out in the parched southwest. And, speaking of our new local environment, we're very close to the bears re-emerging and I'm very interested to see how much we see them, if they come in close to the houses, etc. Apparently, out here, the males tend to come back out in mid-April, with the females and cubs coming out about a month afterwards...if that one big skull that I found is any indication of size, then we're going to be seeing some big ones. Kim had constant trouble with them back when she had chickens, but without them now that will be one less draw for them to come in close and snoop around here. Still, Erin plans on building compost bins and we leave food out for the outside cats, so I'm sure we'll have some close encounters with them at some point. Already, I dug all of my reloading supplies out of storage and am getting ready to start making bullets again. We have two .22s, one .243, one .30-06, one .303 British and one .62 caliber flintlock and I have everything that I need to make bullets for them. I don't plan on needing tons of them, but am out of .243 shells and there are none to be found anywhere in the stores, so a good time to get my equipment set back up.

We witnessed the aftermath of a cattle rustling incident about a week ago, when we noticed a huge gut pile lying right next to the road where you get onto I-25 at. Way too big for it being deer, or even elk, so we presumed that it was from a cow. It was right next to a fenced-in pasture, so I don't know if they coaxed it over and whacked it, before quickly gutting it and making away with the meat or what, but according to Kim it is a very common occurrence out in these parts. I'm still reading Cattle Kingdom and there is a long tradition of cattle rustling out West here ever since the cattle era began. Back in those days, though, cattle rustlers could be executed on site and it led over time to cattle barons hiring what were basically mercenaries to protect their herds. This often led to a necktie social, which was the overly polite way of saying that someone was going to get strung up right on the spot and hanged, typically from the new telegraph poles that were starting to cover the countryside. As so often happens with things like this, many innocents were killed, too, as the cattle barons didn't like newcomers squatting, or even legally inhabiting, the nicer spots of land and, even more so, places that had good water. Many an innocent person was proclaimed a cattle rustler and killed on the spot, when all that they were guilty of was homesteading in the wrong place. The gut pile only lasted a day or two, and now there is just the partially processed feces lying there, as the coyotes and other critters were quick to come in and clean up the guts. I even saw three coyotes chasing each other around earlier in the week from the rocky knoll out in the pasture right above the feeders to the little hill on the other side of the road...back and forth, back and forth. Coyotes mate from mid-January to mid-March, so about 60 days later we should start seeing some of those little buggers playing around the mouth of the den.

So, now for some pictures. The first three are some landscape shots: first, a huge cloud sailing over the mesa as we got nearer to sunset about a week ago; then, the smoke from the brush fire on Tuesday popping up on the mesa; finally, another view of the 'glowing' cholla that I shared a week or two ago, this time with the tractor, feeders and horses in the background. Next, a shot of Cool Man Rui sporting his sunglasses and then a shot of Willow's chest from yesterday...everything's closed up completely except for the one big gash and that's coming along well, too. The next two are shots from the car while driving on I-25: first, on the way into Las Vegas, you finally hook towards the north and can see Hermit's Peak looming way up high; then, on your way back from Raton you can see Wagon Mound approaching and understand why settlers on the Santa Fe Trail named it that way. The next three shots are of our continuing efforts to spruce up our place: we finally found some of our cool statues and such in storage and lined them all up on the shelf above our bar; next, our front stoop with a brand-new string of red chiles hanging on the wall...you're not a true nuevomexicano until you have these hanging on your house; and, finally, our kitchen shelf and window, framed by some cholla we found and some of the animal bells that Erin has collected from Portugal...by the way, the ground behind the house is right at the bottom of that window, so if someone were to walk by there you'd only see their feet and shins! Next is a shot of the really cool courtyard behind Kim's house...it looks like one of the Pousadas that we used to stay in in Portugal. Then, some current shots of me and Erin: I up and shaved off my beard Saturday night, as it was getting really itchy and annoying...now, I finally have the Delaware Warrior's hair cut that I've dreamed of since my re-enacting days(front half of scalp shaved, long hair in back, no beard); and Erin lounging on her tailgate before we rolled up our sleeves and worked on our storage units some more yesterday. And, finally, our three storage units(two 10 x 20s and one 10 x 10) and all of our stuff still waiting to be rediscovered since the move. We keep chipping away with these and plan to empty out the little one by the end of this month and hopefully have it down to just one big one by the summer...as always, a work in progress!

That's it for this week, guys, you all take care of yourselves now!