Winter Weekend

January 21, 2024

Hello again,

Well, we finally tackled a much-delayed project here this weekend.  It's winter, of course, and while we are in the Southwest where it's usually nice and sunny, we are at a very high elevation and it can be quite cold here, too.  Many days on the weekend, whether or not we're able to pry ourselves away from the ranch to make it to the hot springs for our weekly dip, it's just windy and cold enough that we tend to stay inside.  So, we finally decided to tackle our second floor loft.  Just like the casita that we lived in here for the first 2 ¾ years, we mainly live on the ground floor in our new home and also have a smaller loft upstairs.  When we moved everything over here, many of the things that we didn't know what to do with migrated upstairs, as well as certain pieces of furniture, such as desks and tables to use as work spaces.  Our intention was to get to this rather sooner than later, but, as with many such things in life, we never got around to it.  So, in the meantime, the few cats that are smart enough and athletic enough to figure out how to jump from the kitchen counter to the top of the kitchen cabinets to the top of the railing that borders the loft area...they have turned this into their own, personal cat paradise.  They like to lounge on the spare bed that we have upstairs, set up on the carpeted floor without a bed frame.  And, more than anything, they love to raid Erin's boxes of old newspapers and packing material that she's saved in order to shred it and feed it to the worms that she grows indoors for her garden.  Let me tell you, what finally pushed us over the edge was one particular day that a whole bunch of them figured out how to make it upstairs and then they managed to tip over one of the big boxes of paper and get inside of it, only to literally cover the floor with it!  I mean, we're talking about ten square feet of floor that now had about a foot of loose papers scattered on top of it.  So, we finally sacrificed a Sunday and pushed our sleeves up to clean up the mess and at least start the process of getting it organized.  There's so much space upstairs, and with the one table that we have in particular, Erin will finally be able to spread out and work on some projects, like doing a big batch of bars of soap and also bringing to fruition the ideas that she keeps playing around with about what to do with all of the beautiful, semi-hollow, practically braided cholla wood that we have here in so much abundance.  Even just to have the space to keep bringing some of the few things that we have left in storage back home to finally unpack and sort...we might just get fully moved in now that we've been here for four years!  Maybe...

Otherwise, the weather is all over the place.  Mostly sunny and at least ten to twenty degrees above freezing during the day, but always sandwiched between much colder days with precipitation.  Out here at over 6000' and with the humidity usually pretty low, the precipitation doesn't always reach the ground, but it can also really surprise you.  Sometimes we'll get a snow storm that only accumulates over 7500', but other times that line moves much further downhill and we get heavy snowfall, only to have it melt away just as quickly once the sun comes back out.  Things have calmed down around the ranch in regards to the big panther sighting and the pack of dogs that was running all over.  No one has seen or heard much in the last few weeks.  Not that those critters aren't always nearby - probably much closer than we realize, but at least there haven't been any more sightings.  I carried my old deer rifle around with me for a week whenever I ran the dogs, but that quickly seemed to be total overkill.  Plus, one of the neighbors drove by on the main ranch road, as I had walked all the way out to the end of our private driveway, before turning around and coming back, and my appearance with a rifle and hunting dogs clad in orange caused quite a stir.  Before I knew it, I was part of this group chat involving about a dozen neighbors, trying to prove that the 'gunman' that had been seen was only me, nothing more.  For some reason, nobody seemed to believe me, so for about a half-hour everyone was quite worked up about it.  Finally, the overall ranch manager called me to confirm that it was me and I just said that with a big panther running around, I was armed.  To this he replied that he never comes out to the ranch to check on things without bringing his gun, so, after that, he contacted all the right people and things calmed right back down.  Long story short, I quit walking that way and now bushwhack a little to avoid the main ranch road, gun or no gun.

So, now for another batch of pictures.   First up, two pictures of some of the cats screwing around in the garden right before dark.  Then, a big batch of eleven pictures of our dogs, Ela & Willow, on their daily patrols around the ranch, with the first one being in the garden and all the rest out in the pasture when I was filling up water troughs.  Next, a shot of some of the horses eating right at dark one night this week.  Then, two shots of me cleaning and refilling the water troughs, complete with extra sticky winter desert mud!

Take care.