Red Flag Warning

March 14, 2021

Howdy everybody!

Another great week at the ranch has come and gone, complete with wild weather, water issues and hay transport problems. We were under a Red Flag Warning most of the second half of this week with non-stop, pounding winds and super low humidity. Friday evening when I went out to feed the horses the relative humidity was 6%! It was only in the 50Fs, but the air was so dry that it still had an oven-like feel to it. The interesting thing, though, was that the humidity was back up to 90% when I took the dogs out the next morning at dawn and then even 100% an hour later when it was briefly drizzling. A few hours later around lunchtime the humidity dove back down to about 20%. It typically goes back and forth, like most places, but something more like getting up to 60-70% humidity overnight and then being in the 30-40% range during the day. The winds have been even more ferocious over the weekend, with a constant 35mph wind blowing and it gusting up to 60mph. However, the humidity has stayed at a more reasonable level and so we haven't had another Red Flag Warning. Otherwise, we were without water all day last Sunday as we had a ranch-wide septic issue, which caused us to bottle up a bunch of water and brush up on our water thriftiness. This was fixed the next day but that then bled into hay transport issues as we're having trouble chopping up these big 800# bales into 'half square bale' sizes and then getting it out to the pasture without the wind blowing it all off the pallet first. I came up with a cardboard solution on Friday but then found out over the weekend from Kim that the wind had obliterated it...back to the drawing board. Better yet, we're getting the buggy back in just a couple of weeks and we won't have to use the tractor to get the hay out to the feeders anymore! Still, it's fun to troubleshoot and come up with solutions...we're both good at that. Erin is much better than me, in fact, and has already fixed one of Kim's water pumps for a fountain and has had to fix tons of little things that we've had issues with in our little house. I wing it in a MacGyver-like manner...Erin figures out what is needed to fix something correctly and then nails it!

On the food front, we already liked to eat Southwestern and Mexican style foods, but we're finding a whole new pallette to work with out here. One thing that we're eating tons of right now are nopales...cactus paddles. They are quite tasty but also leave you feeling somewhat full like you've been eating a meat dish. Erin made an amazing meal just out of thin air last night and made us Tostados Nopales. You start with a tostado...basically a great, big, round tortilla chip(these were made out of nopal and chia) then she cooked the chopped-up nopales that we had and dressed them with tomatos, peppers, salsa and cotija cheese. Out of sight! She's already trying to figure out how to grow them in her garden this year! I really should weigh about twice what I do with the way that Erin cooks. She can nail any dish from a recipe, from any style or ethnicity, but my favorite words to hear are when she asks what I'd think if she just 'threw something together.' As for me, I've done a few more slow cooker meals, but have also been finding a go-to in Choripan. This is basically Latin-style 'hot dogs.' You cook chorizo up and get them really seared and tasty and then throw them on a fresh roll with a Chimichurri that you have made up earlier: a whole bunch of parsley chopped up with a couple small tomatoes, part of an onion, juice of a lemon, olive oil, red wine vinegar, garlic and red pepper flakes. They're quite tasty, too, and I've been fine-tuning my approach, chomping at the bit for us to get our grills out of storage and over here on our stoop...this dish would be perfect on the grill!

Now, as for our wonderful little village that we now find ourselves in...San Jose. Or, to be proper, San Jose del Vado. A 'vado' in Spanish is a ford or a river/stream crossing, and the ancient trail that connected the buffalo and Indians of the Plains to the Pueblo tribes along the Rio Grande crossed the Pecos River at San Jose. This crossing was later used by the Santa Fe Trail, the stagecoach routes, the railroad, and then finally the highway. Spain granted this piece of land, and also the neighboring San Miguel del Vado(four miles downstream, opposite bank), in 1794 to create a settlement that would serve as a buffer between the Comanches to the east and all the Spanish settlements along the Rio Grande to the west. They also encouraged Genizaros, unaffiliated Indians who had been slaves of the Spanish and were no longer considered part of their original tribes, to settle here to help them grease the skids with all the Plains Indians. I can't repeat enough that the High Plains and southern Rockies intersect right where we're at...Indian tribes would meet to trade right where San Jose was later laid out because it was at the ford in the river where those two worlds intersected. The Santa Fe Trail was officially 'started' in 1821(when Mexico gained Independence from Spain) and San Jose was a stop on it. It would build a church in 1826, a stagecoach stop in 1846, a post office in 1858 and then the railroad reached it in 1879. An 1896 Supreme Court ruling reduced the size of the original land grant, and with the subsequent gobbling up of land around the town by the federal government(who wouldn't let locals graze their animals there anymore), the town dwindled in size. In 1926 Route 66 went through, perking things up a bit, but it was rerouted eleven years later and as the soon-to-be interstate system was developed, the town quickly seemed to be bypassed. Now, when I go into the Post Office every week, there's a whopping total of not even 180 PO Boxes there!

On the digital front, Erin keeps working and reworking things on the website. She's starting to pick up steam and is getting more and more stuff on there every day. We had always wanted to import products from Portugal to resell in the US: common, handmade items out of natural materials that were hard to find outside of the little area that you found them in. We have an eye on doing something like that here, finding some great, quintessentially New Mexican things that we can get a bunch of to sell on the website. We're thinking of creative ways to do something with all of our photographs that we take and all of the drawing that I do. In any event, stay tuned. All the emails are going to be posted on there and you can go back and look through them and the pictures. I'm going to start putting some of my drawings on and Erin is going to have a section of the site that keeps up with what she's doing in the garden, in the kitchen, at the farmers' market, etc. She's even threatening to have a section made up of just the apparently crazy outfits that I wear sometimes. Keep in mind, she never takes the dogs out and I have to take them out anywhere from just before dawn to midnight and may have a critter encounter. I usually have a roaring fire going and am in shorts and a t-shirt. Nature calls and the dogs finally become annoying enough for me to get up and then the magic happens and an outfit comes together: shorts, t-shirt, muck boots, hat, bathrobe, leather gloves, Iroquois war club! Maybe next week, I'll include one of these infamous pics...

And, speaking of pictures, here's what I have for all of you this week. The first three are dog pics: Cheyenne; Willow; and then the whole Vizsla crew. I've been experimenting with different filters and black & white settings and am having loads of fun playing around with them! Next, I took things one step further and played with a photo on my laptop's photo editing program. I liked the original picture myself, but knew that Erin would kill me if I shared it because it was first thing in the morning and she still had Sleepy-Wake-Up-Face...so I tweaked it a little. Next are two shots of the horses: Felipe; then Rosie. Felipe always does this goofy, knock-kneed pose when he eats and just has this boyish look of delight on his face...at moments like this I'm not entirely sure that he's the one in charge of the herd. Then, there's Rosie, always shoving her mug in front of the camera...she likes to kick the shit out of the hay when I first get out there and it's lying on the pallet. She sends it flying everywhere until I can get it divvied up between the two feeders. This shot was right after she gave the hay a good thrashing. Then, a shot of the outside cats having one of their many daily meetings...this is usually followed by at least one of them staring at us through the window with their face about an inch away from the glass. The next eight shots are different landscape shots: sunset through a cholla; a juniper closeup; a study of the new stone wall being built between the hay barn and the tractor shed; light rain or snow falling this afternoon just north of us a little higher up in the mountains; a shot of the mesa seen through the haze Friday afternoon when the humidity dipped to 6%; a closeup of some boulders out where I feed the horses, below the coyote den; light and shadows at dusk; the sky, well after sunset, one night last week...everything had gotten dark except for that bluest part of the sky(you can see where I-25 is by the line of headlights)! Finally, a shot of the church in San Jose, just opposite the little post office where we go in to get our mail.

That's all, folks, be good!