Southwest Winter

November 20, 2022

Howdy folks,

My, oh, my, was it cold this week. We finally got a pretty strong dose of winter temperatures and weather over the past week with most days only ranging from the 20s to the 30s. One day did manage to squeak out a high of 45, but that was the sole outlier and we even had mid-teens for lows on two or three of the nights. Luckily, Erin cleans inside and didn't have any gigs in town this week. I was also lucky enough to be mainly working inside the new house here on the ranch all week, so I was shielded from the cold a little bit(unlike my friend, Valentin, who works outside and skipped two days because of the weather). We actually had a storm from Sunday night into Monday morning as the temperature went from the upper 50s on Sunday afternoon to the upper teens around dawn on Monday. We didn't get much snow, but everything was dusted and frosted. Santa Fe got a couple of inches, apparently, and in between got half a foot or more. I spent Monday and Tuesday nights installing a new stock tank de-icer to make sure that the horses had access to water all week. They ripped the last one right out of the tank and broke the electric cord towards the end of last winter(it was buried) and we limped on into spring without one. I got a new one all set up(above ground in conduit and buried in gravel) and was proud as a peacock, only to find it full of ice chunks the next morning, like some giant tub of soda with ice. The morning after that it was completely frozen over, so I knew that something was not working correctly. I rechecked all of my work and then went about checking the nearby outdoor outlet. Sometime between the end of winter last year and now the power got disconnected to this spot because of all of the renovations and work being done in the garage(where the power originates). So, I spent the rest of the week chipping ice every morning and even having to do it every few hours on Friday as the temperature never made it any higher than 24 and we were socked in with freezing fog all day. We'll have electricians at the jobsite this week to work on other things and surely we'll be able to divert them from that for a little while to fix this particular problem...just in time for us to reach 60 degrees over the coming weekend! My leather gloves spent most of the week right next to the wood stove, trying to dry them back out after constantly having to go bobbing for apples(ice) in the sub-freezing temperatures. At one point I was just pulling huge chunks of ice out of the trough barehanded because my gloves had morphed into a tiny, wet, rawhide-like ball of goo in my pocket!

The kittens have entirely overrun the house and are beginning to climb the steps to the loft, back to where they were originally at, and then they race around the top floor, sounding like a herd of elephants to us down below. This is keeping the dogs completely exhausted and they're all three walking around red-eyed and sleeping on their feet! They are so worried about what the kittens are doing and where they're at. Not a bad thing to be happening, though, as the amount of time that I've been spending on running the dogs is a lot less than normal, so the kittens are giving me a huge assist in tuckering them out. Zia's kittens are getting bigger by the day, but as of yet have not been making much noise and our nowhere near being big enough to get out of the dog crate that they're in. There is still no sign of our outdoor cat Boo-Boo, although there is a black cat guarding kittens in the bottom of the garden shed(either Bootsie or Boo-Boo). We've seen her mother(Bootsie) and brother(BRJ), but still no sign of her. More than once this week I've let the dogs loose in the middle of the night to race off towards the howling of coyotes, presumably trying to figure out how to get to those kittens! We usually glimpse the cats at night, right outside of our side window(that's head-high because the house is built into the earth), but it's really hard to tell the two girls apart, both being pregnant and all-black. We shall see. We're still coming up with a strategy to start letting them out a little without letting them turn immediately into coyote food. We're hoping to be able to throw enough bodies at the situation to create a colony that lives up in the barns, but it has been an ongoing project since we got here and we're currently at 3(maybe only 2) outdoor cats. We don't want to lose any of these cats, but we are deep in the heart of coyote territory and they are always sneaking around in the quietest parts of the night, just as you finally let your guard down and doze off.

So, here's another batch of pictures for everyone. First up, a photo of the hose attached to the stock tank last week that I blew up and played around with a little. Next, three shots of Chelly's little batch of hellions that are now running rampant all over the house. Then, two shots of the dogs: first, Ela & Willow checking on BRJ's whereabouts; then, all three crashed out on the couch this morning, exhausted after a long weekend of herding cats. Next, two shots from up at the jobsite: first, our long-awaited flagstone has finally showed up...four more pallets of it for three more patios; then, one of Valentin's latest creations...a dripping fountain that runs off of one of frost-frees and lets water drip out from the wall like a natural spring. Then, three shots from when I was refilling the water troughs, after putting in a new de-icer and cleaning them...I couldn't decided which I liked best, so I included all three! Next, looking down the path towards our casita one frozen morning this week and then a second shot showing the frosted mesa from the roof of the new house. Lastly, three quick shots that I snapped as I came back from Santa Fe on Monday afternoon, showing the winter wonderland that was all around.

Take care.