Phantom of the Pasture

April 11, 2021

Hello everyone,

Another week has come and gone and it's been beautiful out here...in the 70Fs every day and even pushing 80F on a couple of them. But, boy, does it cool off at night. It's not unusual for me to be in a short-sleeved t-shirt in the afternoon, but if I don't take another layer out to do horses in the evening you're suddenly freezing when the sun gets low enough in the sky and the wind picks up! And I don't think that we're going to need air conditioning either. We have two choices on nice days: open the house up and let the breeze keep things cool; or keep it closed up and insulated from outside. In the first instance, the house quickly cools off and very soon becomes almost too cold, plus the humidity in the house will dive down towards 30% or lower. In the second instance, the house stays a tiny bit stuffy, but the thick adobe walls keeps it very cool and then, all closed up, the humidity inside stays up closer to 50%...much more comfortable and much less havoc on the nose and sinuses. Of course, I've been playing with cracking windows, using the two ceiling fans and keeping track of humidity. It's very refreshing to have everything opened up, but it's nice to be able to escape the super low humidity(6% outside today!). Also, you can completely bake and burn if you're out in the sun for even a little bit at all, so I'm learning to wear my long-sleeved shirts to keep from turning bright red like a lobster, and, of course, always a hat...boy, is it sunny out here! And, even when it's only in the 60Fs, the warmth of the sun makes it feel like it's another twenty degrees higher.

Now, for an update on the website. I promised the drawing that I made would be available last week on shirts, cloth bags, mugs, etc., but we're still tinkering with it and trying to get a crisp enough copy of the image to make it look good. In the meantime, though, we've moved ahead with our first photograph that we're making available on the website and are inaugurating the store with, 'Phantom of the Pasture.' I was out feeding on Friday night with Erin and was screwing around taking shots, like usual, and ended up taking a great black & white close-up of Freedom's face that captured a mask-like shadow on the one side of her face. The picture wasn't as striking in color, but after playing around with some filters and seeing how shadowy and Escher-like it looked in B&W, we felt that this was the proper one to start with. Looking at it, you switch from seeing Freedom's face on the right to a giant, hawk-like shadow on the left side. There's many more in the pipeline and we're just excited to get the store part of the site finally up and running. And, once we clean up the drawing that I did, we're going to have that ready to go, too!

On another front, I got a job this week! We have been slowly but surely running out of the money left over from the sale of our house and were beginning to explore some other options. The website is one, and we have it up and running, but it will surely take some time for it to build up some steam and be able to generate any measurable kind of revenue. We feel that we have a real quality product with all the pictures, stories and drawings from the old Southwest, let alone once we add videos and the new songs that I've written! Still, immediate needs need to be met and I was looking at everything from working at the Love's Travel Center on the interstate to O'Reilly Auto Parts in town in Las Vegas, or seeing if the girls that we get firewood from needed any help with their cattle, crops or firewood. And, then, lo and behold, I was asked Wednesday morning, first thing, when I was out feeding the horses if I wanted to work 4-5 hours per day as a general laborer for the new house that Kim is building. There are three people involved currently, and she's ready to kick this thing into overdrive and get it finally finished by the end of the year, so I was asked if I would like to help. I instantly said, 'Yes,' as the commute was to die for, but then once I found out what the wage would be it got even better! I'll be making more than I paid even my highest paid employees at the mill for just doing odds and ends and other shit jobs around the construction site. So far, I've wrapped pvc radon pipes with landscaping fabric to keep them from getting debris in them and then dug out where they needed to be laid in a loose bed of 4-6" of gravel, but otherwise have spent the rest of my time out in a big trench at the front of the house where the sewer will then head downhill to the septic field by our house and Kim's original house. My job there was to take the trench down another 6-12" to maintain the proper grade and to get us down below the original plumber's installation that wouldn't flow downhill properly. I tell you what, the phrase, 'I'd rather be digging ditches than...,' has come out of my mouth many times in my life and now I know what that really feels like! It took me until about noon yesterday to finally get off the couch and even be able to take the dogs out...

We got some interesting news this morning as Kim ran into a neighbor who has seen a mountain lion crossing the main driveway from up where our pond is to down below, on the other side of the drive, where a little canyon runs down to the Pecos River. She's seen it more than once and has now stopped and found the tracks to match! As I've said before, we are right on the edge of prime cougar habitat, but a little too low in elevation and too open for it to be primo for them(they like to spring from crags and cliffs, etc.)...but, that all depends on how dry it is. When it's dry, we're told that everything comes down from the higher elevation towards the river and they really love stopping at the pond, so it's time to start carrying the .243 around with me wherever I go. April 1st is peak snow cover out West here and we're already looking to be worse than last year at this point, and if I read things correctly, last year was the third-driest out West here on record! So, basically, be prepared for everything and anything to be down checking the pond out. I saw something lurking about near it a week ago when I was letting the dogs out around midnight. I surmised that it was perhaps a coyote or bobcat, but maybe it was a really, really, big kitty!

Now, it's time for the weekly dose of pictures. First up, Erin took this shot of the dogs waiting for me to get back down from the construction site. As anyone who has dogs know, they don't need clocks, phones or watches, they always know when something's about to happen! Next, a shot of Rui and Willow checking out the pond a couple of days ago while the sun was absolutely lighting it up and making it sparkle. Next, is a close-up of Willow rising up from the couch to see if the outside cats were eating up on their table right outside of the bar window. Then, a shot of Erin loading up the buggy with horse manure for the garden...we have all the natural fertilizer in the world that a gardener could ever want! Next, a shot of me doing my rounds feeding the horses: first the long-stem hay, then the alfalfa forage on top, and then once in a while a few handfuls of sweet feed. Then, a shot of all the horses chowing down at one of the end of the day feedings...look closely and you'll see nine horses there(the 10th is on the other side of the feeder from the white ones at the bottom of the picture). Next up is my shot of Freedom, 'Phantom of the Pasture,' that I mentioned earlier. Then, a shot of a cholla backlit by the setting sun. The next three are close-ups of the emerging flowers that are popping up everywhere: first some Common Stork's Bill; then two shots of some Easter Daisies(first one in the morning/second one in the evening). Next, a Hedgehog Cactus that Erin spied really close to where I was doing some landscaping the other day...this should get a huge, bright, purple flower on it soon! Then, a shot of the trench where I spent most of my time last week...hard is not the word for the caliche(naturally forming concrete, basically) that I've been trying to dig, scrape, pound and bust through to get it down to the proper level. The next two shots are of the bridge/river in San Jose. If you walk or drive about two blocks down from the post office you see the Old Route 66 Bridge in the first shot that became outdated once the interstate system went through. The second shot is from the top of the little dam that sits right below the bridge, looking downstream towards neighboring San Miguel. Last of all, I had to run in to the bank in Santa Fe the other day and snapped this shot quickly while driving. I'm at just about Pecos, maybe 20 miles away from the ranch, with the spine of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains looming ahead above Glorieta, where the interstate makes a sharp turn to the left to go down Glorieta Pass before a further sharp turn to the right that gets you out of the pass and brings you within 10 miles of Santa Fe...what a place we have found ourselves in!

Take care, everybody, and be good!