Pure Heaven

April 4, 2021

Howdy folks,

Well, it's been nice and toasty all week, trending towards 70F at the beginning of the week and staying in the mid 70s for the rest of the week. We did not have a repeat of the scorpion incident from last week, but I immediately took the old copper kettle for firewood out on the patio, assuming that it came from there. We haven't seen any snakes yet, but the little lizards are out. You see them everywhere out West and they are probably 4-6" long...you don't always notice them until you're about to step on one, but they've been out since mid-week. I saw a heron flying over one morning this week on its way to the pond, and even saw something largish snooping around the pond one night when I let the dogs out around midnight. I shined the flashlight over towards the pond and caught something's eyes which immediately froze, before ambling away pretty easily...I'd say four-legged, but not a deer or anything like that, so maybe a coyote or bobcat? New plant growth is creeping up everywhere and doubling in size from one day to the next. What looked to have been barren ground in a lot of places is actually grass...it just browns out quickly in the summer and dies back pretty easily if we don't get any rain. One of my duties is landscaping, which now with the sudden shot up from the 60s to the 70s has kicked into high gear and I've been: weeding; hauling away garden debris; demolishing and removing what's left of the old chicken coop; watering recently planted aspen and ornamental cherry trees; and basically being Erin's indentured servant in the garden!

Speaking of the garden, we finally got into it this weekend and Erin is just in pure heaven! She is never happier than when she's in her garden. We've walked by it a thousand times now, but we've everything else that we've been focused on, and almost a foot of snow just a short ten days ago, we've neglected to study it in detail. Once Erin got into it and started cleaning it up, she was pleasantly surprised to not only find seven well-made raised beds and a shallow bed around the entire inside of the garden, but also a good amount of plants that carried over and are already growing: parsley; mint; sage; scallions; collards; sweet William; and a host of other flowers. I removed an old fence(possibly from the old chicken coop) and Erin tore down some big posts that were in the middle of two of the beds. Kim hasn't gardened in a few years and has been letting the caretakers that were here do what they wanted with it...apparently they made some big changes, so she's excited to get back into it with Erin and grow a whole host of plants. She's just as crazy about gardening as Erin is, so both are terribly excited to get started finally. Plus, the garden is outfitted with a huge drip-irrigation system that Kim says is absolutely necessary and Erin needs to learn the ropes about watering out here in the high desert. So, with what we got going already and the huge cache of seeds that Erin's been saving for years and years, we shouldn't have to invest much money into making this thing produce all kinds of stuff! Other than onion sets and some potatoes, we might not even need to drop a dime on it!

A couple of big events that I forgot to mention about last week, I got honked at for the first time while out feeding the horses. The two girls that we get firewood from drove by the one night and honked at me and I just about died...it really made me feel like a local! Where we feed is right along the paved road, but you have to crane your neck a bit to look over at the right time to see the feeders. Also, on the same night, Xena nibbled on my cheek while I was squatting at the feeder next to her. I was scratching her belly and she swung her head over, parted her big, ol' horse lips and then spread her giant, piano key-sized teeth and ever so gently grabbed my right cheek and squeezed it between her teeth. I'm slowly but surely winning them all over and can lay my hands on all but three of them now, and even with those three I can feed them hay out of my hand...but only when I first get there and they grab their first bunch of it; after that, they grow wary again and just take a step or two back when I get too close. But as for the other seven, I can practically lie on top of them and lift their feet up to check their hooves, etc...they're really just like gigantic dogs!

On another front, we marshaled our forces on the 31st and spent a solid 2-3 hours at our storage spaces, moving everything out of our third one(the smallest, a 10 X 10) and spreading all of that stuff around in the other two so that we could cut our bill down. It's super cheap for the storage out here...only $235/month. Now, though, we've shaved it down to $170 and should be able to cut that in half and have everything down to just the one unit within another month or two. We keep making trips, one or two per week, bringing a carload home with some new treasures to rediscover from our old house on the Susquehanna. Some things we've completely forgotten about and it's a tremendous surprise, other things we've been looking for ever since we got here and there's a huge sense of relief when we finally find them! We'll probably need to borrow Kim's truck just one more time to take about three more big things home, but otherwise we can do all the rest in Erin's car. We used her truck once already to get our couch home, but have not needed it since. We still have a huge, handmade CD shelf that's way too big for her car, plus the outhouse that I bought Erin many years ago, made out of old Pennsylvania barnwood, that we keep our outside tools in and then her great and reliable deluxe charcoal grill.

Erin's been busy working on our website and finally got all of my letters home published on it this week. I then took the step of drawing a logo for us with colored pencils and got it done about midnight on Wednesday night. We're now going to be officially opening up our store part of the website this week and we will be offering all kinds of things with our new logo on it: t-shirts; long-sleeve shirts; hoodies; smartphone cases; coffee mugs; cloth shopping bags; and many more things as we vet them and find things that will work well with it. It's too many colors and too complicated to turn it into an embroidered patch for hats and such, but this is just the beginning with my drawings. I have hundreds of them done already and will have hundreds more as time goes by. I used 21 colors for this drawing and used Starvation Peak as the basis for my inspiration...I tried to match all the amazing colors that you see naturally out here and get them onto paper. As we were picking out shirt styles and seeing what color backgrounds looked best, we were tickled pink to see how well the logo looked on all the different backgrounds, especially all your sunset-inspired parts of the palette. Some of you have expressed a little worry about our finances(or lack thereof) and have even offered to help us out a bit...that is very kind of you, but, please, we are doing just fine and keep finding a way to pay the bills, but I will not deter you from checking out the new online store and purchasing something. This is the first crack at a logo for us and we're anticipating possibly having a new one for each year. For that matter, once I get in a drawing mood, I can churn out multiple drawings a day, so maybe we'll have a new logo each month! Stay tuned!

And, finally, to the pictures. The first shot is of the new drawing that I did. It was midnight and quite shadowy, but you get the idea. I took a better picture the next day outside in the full sunlight and then used my graphics program to digitally 'erase' the white background and make it translucent so that we could use it for apparel( I had to do this by hand with my finger on the laptop's mousepad, ever so carefully going over the areas that needed touched up...this took almost an hour!). The next five shots are from Erin out in the garden this weekend: first a view of it mostly cleaned up; next Erin in the midst of renewal; then her sassing me as I took a string of photos of her; next is a shot of our local garden lizard(sunlight is hitting his little head); and finally an old metal table and chair set from home that sure look like they've found a new home in the garden. The next two shots Erin took of the horses today: first Rosie peering through the metal bars of the gate; then Nanette giving my foot a good sniff-down. Today's the first time that I was ever out there without boots on(flip flops) and a few of them couldn't stop reaching down to sniff my feet, so I helped Nanette out and brought my foot right up to her! The next five shots are landscapes that I took around the ranch this week, usually as the sun was going down and the sky always starts blowing up with color: the first two shots are of the tall grasses out in the big field being lit up by the setting sun; then a shot of the same from Kim's wraparound porch; next the full moon setting over Rowe Mesa when I took the dogs out at dawn Monday morning; finally a shot of the way that the light likes to play off of the solar panel array. The next shot is from the week before as I was out digging us out after a foot of snow. I accidentally hit the button on the phone that swivels it around to take selfies and just went with it...I have trouble smiling on command, so this was the best that I could do! Lastly, two shots from us clearing out our third storage unit on Wednesday: first the car all loaded up with our little Buddha sitting on the tailgate(we still have one that is nearly 4-5X this size to get home!); and then Erin checking the last box that needed cleared out before we were free of unit #40!

Take care, one and all!