Scott’s Surprise

June 27, 2021

Howdy, howdy, howdy,

We've finally gotten caught up with the weekly emails and cut out the little bit of slack that had been accumulating. It's been a glorious day today, only in the 60Fs, cloudy, with intermittent showers and storms threatening. We just went through 14 straight days with the temperature at least hitting 90F, then a showery day of 75F, followed by four more days of the former until we hit this weekend. The monsoon season is officially from mid-June through the end of September, and, sure enough, the rain has started to fall. We have at least a 50% chance of rain or storms every day for the next two weeks, and it will usually end up being an afternoon thunderstorm, but also with days like today mixed in where it is just kind of rainy and cloudy. We were in Santa Fe yesterday from late morning until evening and were baking in mid-80Fs heat and oven-like low humidity bouncing back off of the pavement and blacktop, only to come back to much more comfortable humidity and a temperature about fifteen degrees less than it was in the city. I really feel that we have found our spot, nestled in the foothills of the southern Rockies, wedged between the enormous horno that we call the Southwest and the tempestuous and moisture-rich plains. I'm celebrating my 45th birthday today and have mostly been relaxing at home. I started the day with two IPAs on an empty stomach before going out and cleaning/refilling the horses' water trough and was surprised by them coming over in the rain to see what I was doing(I don't feed them on the weekends). Earlier in the day I got the best birthday present ever when I finally and successfully arranged to have my two old Mercedes 300Ds picked up in Pennsylvania and hauled out to where we're at in New Mexico. It took me some time to scrape up the funds to pull this off and then have spent the last few weeks pestering friends and family back home with the many tasks needed to get these cars ready for transport. Then, since we apparently live in the middle of nowhere and were told that no trucks coming out of the Northeast head in this direction, we were patiently waiting for some kind of update as to when this might happen. Finally, out of the blue, I got a call Friday that they would be picked up Saturday, had my wonderful father-in-law drop everything to drive two hours and meet the car carrier and get my old diesels fired up only to find out that they couldn't make it until Sunday. No one was available to make it work this morning and then a last-minute call to our old neighbors back in Lewisburg got the whole thing all the way into the end zone! Many thanks to all involved for helping with this undertaking. We could really use more than one car out here and I have not been the same since I left them in the middle of a blizzard on that cold day right before Christmas...

On another front, Erin has the garden firing on all cylinders and it's really starting to take off and look good. She's had to figure out how all the drip irrigation works out here and has spent an enormous amount of time chasing those lines for dead ends, leaks, the wrong fittings, etc...kind of makes me think of me always chasing the seemingly miles of vacuum lines that are in my cars! In any event, she was having trouble with her tomatoes and peppers until Kim very matter-of-factly told her that none of those warm-soil plants will grow out here without black plastic because of the cold nights. Erin then went a step further and has dug through all of our old glass recycling(waste not, want not!) for jars so that she can keep each pepper and tomato plant inside of its own jar at night to create its own little greenhouse. Beans and peas are growing like a weed and she's been having fun seeing what she can get to germinate from her huge stash of seeds that she's been accumulating for the last decade and a half. This is a completely different climate than what we were used to back in the steamy mid-Atlantic, but surprisingly, we're only one category off of what we were according to the national planting zone map. The dogs have me up most mornings between 5:30 and 6am to go out and Erin is up not too long after that to go up and start the drip irrigation for the morning watering, while she hand waters some of the garden sections and spends time examining her plants and seeing what kinds of new bugs and fungi that she will encounter. If anyone can make a garden in the middle of the high desert blossom and bear fruit, this is the girl for the job! She's already salivating over what she will be able to can later in the year, let alone with what she can find at the local growers' markets or, if by some chance, I can get all the paperwork in order to be able to hunt here this fall and get us a deer or an elk! We keep thinking of schemes to get us off of this ranch and onto our own little piece of ground, but truth be told, we're so damn content here that we both feel very comfortable with pushing that decision off by about five or ten years!

Now, for the best part of the email, the weekly round of pictures. First, we start with an art piece that I made using one of my details of a cholla blossom. Next, I have four shots of Erin and her garden; three from earlier in the week on a sunny day, and one from this morning when it was cloudy and overcast. Next, a shot of the horse trough after I got it all clean and refilled this morning...it doesn't take long for it to get really scuzzy, especially when it gets hot! Then, a portrait of our pet doughnut that briefly lived in the refrigerator until Erin put it out of its misery...we had a big concrete pour both last week and this week and both times I had to man the gate to let all the trucks in one by one, only to miss coffee and doughnuts on the first round, but then to get three on the second time(being a smart man, I saved one for my wife!). It's the simple things like doughnuts that you miss when you're always out on the ranch and never go into town anymore. Next, as the cholla have all been exploding with colorful blossoms in the last week or so, I have taken almost a hundred shots of them at this point...and I picked the five best. Then, a close-up of a cicada on the handle of a shovel, or pala in Spanish, at the jobsite this week. I have already mentioned in past emails that we are close to a pond and see lots of insects and dragonflies, but I never saw a big, fat orange one like this! Kim has been here for thirty years and has never, ever seen anything like this...maybe it's one of those 140 UFOs that the government just released a report about that they couldn't verify as being aliens but couldn't say what exactly they were either? Then, the two coolest cars on the planet getting ready for transport and shuddering with the excitement of starting to run and move again after six months of slumber. And, finally, a black and white portrait of me out walking the dogs a couple of nights ago, during the heat wave, just a few days before my 45th birthday...my, oh my, where does the time go?

!Feliz domingo!