Poco a Poco

January 7, 2024

Howdy folks,

Well, another year has come and gone, and while I've been telling stories and looking back over the last year, I haven't been keeping up with the daily goings-on here on the ranch.  Since the boss moved up to her new house in June, there has been nearly constant construction going on down here either in our former place, the casita, or here in the boss's old house.  For all of June windows were replaced here, then for August and September we had all the plaster and stucco repaired around where the new windows were installed.  We moved over here at the end of September and then the same thing happened at the casita: first, all the windows were replaced in October; then, since about Thanksgiving, the plaster and stucco guys have been back, fixing and patching up everything.  Hopefully, they'll be done in February and things can finally get a little quieter around here.  We've had some excitement recently and have had both a pack of dogs that has been running around terrorizing everyone on the ranch here(ours is one of about ten places on thousands of acres) and then a huge mountain lion was caught on camera just over the hill from us.  He was down where a stream empties into the Pecos from the Rockies to the north and the dogs have been seen more in the far-flung corners of the ranch, chasing mules and horses and making a general nuisance of themselves.  This is not at all uncommon out here, but it was rare for the ranch manager to catch them on the camera at the gate!  I chopped most of my ponytail off on a whim one night when it was cold and windy and there really wasn't much of anything else to do.  Erin had just gotten a haircut up in Taos and, after many years, cut about half of it off and then let the hairdresser leave her with bangs.  After wondering who this strange, cute girl was that returned from the north that day, and then staring at it for another day or two, I decided to follow suit and put my hair into a really tight braid and then lopped it off as evenly as I could.  Then, I repeat the process over a few days until it seems to have evened out and looks fairly straight.  I did have Erin give it a look, but this has actually been my method of hair-cutting for some time now.  I've had long hair since I left home and went to college some thirty years ago, but I did shave my head once or twice along the way, just for the fun of seeing the shock in everyone's eyes!  The bangs really freaked Erin out at first, but gradually, poco a poco, as they say, she's come around and is now really enjoying her new cut.  So, together with new haircuts, we are facing whatever the new year might throw at us.

On another front, I've started selling things for the boss on Craigslist and I'm still in the ad-building stages, but I've really been having fun with it.  So far, it's all things leftover from the house-build: lumber; siding; roofing; doors; windows; etc.  Since construction ended, I've been sorting the Boneyard out and trying to get as many things under roof or indoors as possible between the two barns and our tool depot.  For the longest time, everything was out in a field by the horse pasture, just soaking up that powerful Southwestern sun and the occasional rain or snow shower.  Someone started calling it the Boneyard at some point...as in, the place where things go to die.  The name stuck, to say the least.  Now, half a year later, I'm cleaning everything up, taking pictures, measuring very precisely and trying to figure out how I'm going to get rid of all of this stuff.  Obviously, a lot of the attention via Craigslist will be bogus and potentially fraudulent, as is sadly the case with many things online these days, but there are also lots of people looking for materials to start building with in the spring.  I'll report back in the weeks ahead to keep everyone apprised of my progress.  I won't get any extra money or any kind of a commission for this, but it is a great activity to add into the mix of my daily duties out on this ranch.  Some days I get tired of all of the physical activity and this seems to be the perfect antidote for that!  Plus, I've been building websites for 30 years now and also did my own radio ads for our feed mill that we used to have for over ten years, so we'll see if I can pull something out of those experiences to help make me the Craigslist king of New Mexico.  Erin, as always, is cooking every day, planning her garden, growing her worms, baking bread, running errands, cleaning the boss's and now, as if she didn't have enough to do, she's beginning to tinker with sourdough bread.  The boss got into it and is sending Erin all of her discards, so it's been like a bakery here!

Now, here is our first batch of pictures for 2024!  First up, two artistic renditions of photos that didn't make the cut to remain unaltered: a stunned bird closeup; and my chopped off tail.  Then, a selfie that I took of me and the little Monkey Man.  Next, four shots of the feeders that are back behind the boss's house, bringing in all kinds of birds on a daily basis.  Then, an unfortunately too-blurry shot of the big mountain lion that has been prowling around here, followed by a shot of the local dog pack running through the front gate of the ranch(I'm a bit behind with my letters home and this was taken a week after this week's report...we had eyewitness reports for a few weeks before they were caught on camera).  Next, five shots up in the tractor barn of all the stuff I've been sorting through to put on Craiglist, ending with a huge pile of Kebony siding that we have.  The last two shots are closeups of the Kebony, a Norwegian treatment of regular wood that turns its characteristics into that of a tropical wood by way of slow-cooking wood that has been injected with some sort of bio-liquid...pretty crazy, right?

Take care and see you soon.