Tucumcari

September 4, 2022

Hello again,

Well, we had a busy, complicated and fun week out on the ranch. Bootsie had her litter of kittens for the second time this year and then promptly had her nest raided by a rattlesnake. This was Thursday evening...I can't really recall anything happening this week before that point. Erin had told me that she thought Bootsie had finally had her kittens on Wednesday, but hadn't been able to locate them yet and confirm it. Then, on Thursday, she was hanging out around the casita just meowing, yowling and talking. She's not the most skittish cat, and likes to watch us through the windows, but this was abnormal behavior. Not long after that Erin finally figured out what was going on and heard desperate kitten meows coming from the garden shed accompanied by the telltale sound of a rattlesnake. At some point in the last year the boss's dogs dug/chewed/clawed a hole through the bottom of the outside wall of the shed and to fix that we laid a big, thick piece of flagstone up against it. This setup had a very small gap between the stone and the shed that the snake was able to slide in through. Luckily, Erin had set the shed up for another litter of cats last year and had turned a plastic milk crate onto its side, facing the door. The snake got in through the side and then coiled up against the side of the crate, just a few inches inside of the shed. She quickly let me know that we had another snake, so I grabbed the snakestick and can and got ready to do my thing. This time, I had to grab him on the inside of the shed through a hole on the outside of it, since we flipped the stone over. He was rattling his tail like crazy, but otherwise not moving, so I thrust the stick in, missing his midsection, but grabbing him by a kink in the end of his tale. Even though I didn't have a very good hold of him, I was able to pull him out of the shed and get him into the can. I could see that I broke his rattles off in the struggle and got a seven-button rattle as a souvenir, still leaving him two for him. I took him up to the top of the hill and warned him not to come back, just like the other one. He quit rattling and just looked at me. As for the kittens, one was all but dead and Erin spent the next few hours trying to revive it, but to no avail. She put it back into the nest with the others, hoping that Bootsie would come back. By the next morning, all the kittens had been cleaned up, the dead one had been eaten(only the head was left) and there was another dead one, too. We decided to bury the dead ones and to move the other three into Cat 5, on our front stoop. In the end, she came back and started nursing them again and that's where they still are.

Then, on Saturday, we decided to go for a drive and ended up heading east out of Las Vegas across the plains to Tucumcari, some 100 miles away. We took a local highway, NM104, and were soon speeding across the very flat and green plains towards our destination. We slowly climbed to almost 7000' before finally hitting an amazing gap that took us down almost a thousand feet to a much more broken land below. We now had ridges and mesas running every which way and kept slowly going down in elevation until we actually got down to 3900' outside of Tucumcari. Our ears popped and we actually felt more air pressure, if that makes any sense...we haven't been below 6000' very often in the last few years! Along the way we passed by Conchas Lake, a very popular fishing destination in the region, where the confluence of the Conchas and Canadian Rivers was dammed up and flooded back in 1935. In the final stretch of the drive we started to see what we thought might be mesquite trees. Upon our return we asked around about this and were told that it was some other kind of tree, but upon further investigation we found that they very well might have been, being right on the edge of their range. For New Mexico, we were rapidly seeing it turn into Texas. So, when we got to town, we did a few loops to see what it looked like and found a crazy row of restaurants, gas stations and souvenir shops along the Historic Route 66 that were built to look like tipis, sombreros, stage coaches and other such Western themes. Town looked like it has succumbed to a slow trickle of people leaving over the years, but still had a cool vibe sitting there on the plains, with a cone-shaped mountain looming just a few miles to the south. We found a place to eat where we could be outside and still keep an eye on the dogs in the car(it was 85, but shady and cooling off). It was Del's Restaurant and we had a wonderful homemade meal of green chile fries, baked beef chimichangas, chicken crispitos and nachos & salsa, all washed down with a few New Mexican beers. Two hours later we were back home napping on the couch!

Now, here's a whole bunch of new pictures! First up, three shots from the rattlesnake roundup: a closeup; then, wide angle; and then the rattles that broke off. Then, two shots of Erin checking on the kittens when we moved them. Next, three shots from work: the first two making plugs for the new hardwood floor; then, routing the bottoms of the wooden flooring before final installation. Then, two shots from the ranch: first, the mesa through a sea of yellow flowers; then, a double rainbow over the horse pasture. Next, two shots of water coming off of the roof of the new house during a heavy downpour. Then, five shots along the way to Tucumcari: the first two looking north, then east along NM104; the third is the gap that we came upon; then, a shot once we were down lower in elevation; and, finally, pulled off along the road so the dogs could get a pee break. Next, four shots from our great meal at Del's: first up, the sign out front; then, the menu; then, Erin digging into her crispitos(with our car in the background); and, finally, zooming into the car to see Willow keeping a watchful eye on us! And, in closing, three shots from the dash of the sun setting on the way home along I-40 West.

See you soon.