Year End Caption Contest!

Just when you thought you had heard the last from us in 2006, here we are with a skill-testing caption contest to close out the year.

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The grand prize is a 3 day, some expenses paid, vacation at the lovely rat trailer in our canyon. Second prize is a 2 week, some expenses paid, vacation at the lovely rat trailer in our canyon. All winners have the option of trading in their prizes for a small stack of used envelopes, a small box of dried cow pies (vintage 2005-6 and dragged to the front door mat by Brou) or a bag of musty pine cones (harvested right here!).

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Okay, study the above photograph carefully. On the left is Beautiful Dave the Cat. A very young Brou is on the floor on the right, joyously snarfing his chew shoe. Dave used to lounge around beside that shoe before Brou claimed it from Mark. That's all the clues you should need. What is the caption? Think of a famous song line. Deadline? Open until we get the right answer, any answer at all or just get bored waiting for a non-event. If you don't try, you will kick yourself when you hear the preferred answer. My brothers would probably get it but they don't read this blog so the field is WIDE open. Don 't delay! Post your best guess to the comments section today!

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Happy New Year!!!

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A Quiet Blue World

The snow that began to fall on Thursday night continued today but with much less zeal. The margins of our normal world were drawn tightly inward by the storm and we fancied for a moment what it was like to live inside a snow globe. Years and years ago, my father had given me a snow globe and I would sit quietly watching the snow fall upon the little farmstead within and wistfully hoping for such a place one day.

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There is an eerie but peaceful blue cleanness to the canyon and a velvety silence everywhere. Only one vehicle went by today, the snow hushing any voice it may have had. Brou dashed around in the snow, trying to nip and herd me as I searched for wood buried in the snow. Grabbing a handful of snow and throwing it at him only ramped up his glee and pace of dashing and circling. Before I wore myself out flinging snow, he had mastered leaping up and catching the projectiles. If only, only I had but a tenth of that energy. When he came in hours later, he looked like the brim of a mariachi's hat with his hanging snow berries dancing and bobbing from every tuft of his long red hair. Between his toes were more tiny snowballs which looked disturbingly like sudden extra toes. Not that he seemed to care - this was a grand day in dog land.

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I slipped out again before nightfall and planted my old ruler into a patch of undisturbed snow ... eleven inches and a little. The predicted brunt of the storm has missed us again. The roads are still navigable if necessary but we don't need to go anywhere until next week. We have our New Years dinner stored in a cooler outside (presuming that Brou or other critters don't find it first) and a bottle of New Mexico Gruet for a bubbly midnight toast or two. From all of us here in the boonies, we wish you all a wonderful new year to come.

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A Christmas story from the desert

Retrospect: Christmas 2005

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It is still fairly discomforting to recall our first months here but there is a positive tale which needs to be plucked away from that misery and shared. The impetus for recalling it now is the revisiting cold this morning, registering minus 5 degrees, and the approaching holiday.

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For me, Christmas had declined over the years into a much dreaded affair bringing many unpleasant memories with it. The season clearly brought more bad memories than all other celebrative dates combined. Given our stark tenure here in the waning months of 2005, the weight of that dread was even more crushing. Hopefully, the concern of freezing to death would drown out those screeching harpies of Christmas past. We were now, indeed, in miserable enough circumstances to ignore all concerns but those deeply primal.

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One night, only days before Christmas 2005, the absorbing silence and darkness of the canyon was rent wildly ablaze with light, the chortling of a truck motor and the ka-tonk, ka-tonk of a cow bell(!?). Answering the gloved thumping on the door produced a tall, coveralled stranger. He exhaled a frosty mist in the cold which had swept into the trailer with him as he announced that he was Robin and had been sent by Virgil, our new contact with the gas well company. His black cowboy hat was cocked slightly back, fully revealing a rosy complexion which may have been from the bitter cold, high blood pressure or hinting at his Cherokee heritage but he stood there as a welcomed, glowing cherub with a mega-lotto smile. That wonderful smile was punctuated only long enough for embarrassingly polite replies of "Yes, Ma'am" and "No Sir"s. He had brought with him a much-needed 500-gallon propane tank, an item which we had not had any luck securing during our rare visits to town. And this tank was still half-full! We had survived to date by refilling barbeque sized tanks but one nasty isolating storm would easily exhaust our only means of heat. This beaming young man and Virgil had gone out of their way to insure our survival. Robin and Mark wrestled the ungainly pig into position behind the rat trailer and Robin left us with enough pipe and fittings to make the connections when daylight returned.

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Before returning to his native Texas, he and his fiancée came to see us one more time under the pretense of cleaning out more of his accumulated rat packings. But along with the items we might need out here, they unloaded several other packages. Jessie placed a large bag onto the floor, quietly admitting "Oh, they're just some things we thought you might enjoy ..." Robin, being the wonderfully big kid that he is, however, couldn't wait to give us the history about one particular package. "Well, it's just somethin' that I knew y'alls just hadta have out here, ya know. Nothin' REAL special, jus' somethin' I've had around wi' me for a while. She's jus' an old cow that I had to pop with a .22 way back but I thought that this is the right place for her and that y'all would appreciate her." I clenched with excitement but remained adamant that it would remain a bagged 'mystery' until Christmas morning.

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Come Christmas morning, we opened the small stack of Christmas cards and read their enclosed messages and letters. They brought a non-measurable warmth with them. Then we opened Robin's and Jessie's presents. She had given us (or rather me) a basket full of niceties for the bath. Perhaps she could imagine that longing for such things; soaking in a warm bath of fragrant oils with an after-bath application of soothing lotions. Although not even remotely possible, the mere thought provided me a virtual retreat of sensual indulgence. Robin's big surprise did prove to be a cow skull with a handsome set of horns. I had not seen one this grand so far and she was soon holding court from a prominent wall in our 'ranch headquarters'. Even our cowboy visitors wondered where we had found such a fine example.

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So although our first Christmas here was simple and unadorned, it was a very special one. While there was no neighbor like the Katlady offering dinner and company to a couple of newcomer orphans or caring whether we had ample heat resources, it was our gas field boys who came through with rare thoughtfulness. Their companies' 'good neighbor' policies didn't ask for much more than a polite intro and the occasional wave. What motivated them had come from the heart. So when you are making up your list, you might stop to consider that neighbor who never seems to leave the house on holidays. Even if they don't accept an invitation, they will know that someone cared enough to ask - and that's a genuine gift of Christmas.

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The First Snow Storm

Many thanks to everyone who saw the weather reports and asked how we fared. Although some areas of the state got over a foot, we happened to luck out. The storm started out as light rain, then turned to falling slush and then to heavy snow. What first landed either melted quickly or compressed itself into 'heart attack' snow. The good news is that there isn't much we have to shovel save for maybe the stairs and a speck of porch. When the last flake fell, we had about 6 inches piled up.

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The winds turned nasty in the night and rattled the loose Tyvec ends from our interrupted residing project. The loud rattle and hammering flap of the house wrap came in rounds, always just about the time I started to fall back asleep. It might have been augmented by sheets of snow sliding off the curved tin roof because I would awaken to what sounded like someone pushing a refrigerator across the roof overhead. I finally got up and sat in the company of the two cats and two candles (our non-generator time lighting) until sleep promised to return. The cats are always game for a nocturnal social event.

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It seems ironic that in some regions well to the north and east, people are still golfing and lamenting the likelihood of a green Christmas. Maybe this snow will find its way north before the holidays.

Possible Pepto in the Pipeline

Written on Friday, December 15th, 2006

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Well, if you are a regular reader but didn't check for updates in the last couple of days, you missed a couple of serious tirades.

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To put it mildly, we had 'issues' with part of the energy industry out here. Much to our surprise, the involved parties have come back with apologies and promises to set things right. Accordingly, I have magnanimously decided to withdraw those commentaries. We are still trusting and forgiving at heart so it seems like the right thing to do at this time. Mind you, we instituted a policy of 'one per customer' after the last decade of a parade of Lucys pulling the football out from under us time and time and time again. Watching our neighbor get jerked around shamelessly by another pipeline company did not help our level of faith going into this. She may not be the most pleasant entity to deal with but what is right is right, regardless, and her requests and offered concessions in return for their at least partial adherence to their original handshake agreement were really quite reasonable and generous. So there really are genuine corporate weasels out here in the sage - we just haven't had to deal with them yet, very thankfully.

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Accordingly, today was a good day out here, one of pleasant conclusions. I was ever so relieved to see some return of Mark's usual placid nature. And as if in a shared celebration, we saw the return of our jet fighter sortie. We had sorely missed their flyovers but today they made up for it. The lead jet executed a joyous low-level strafe-quality run over the rat trailer, heralding a heads up only a second before with that familiar eagle/wild cat hybrid's thundering scream. The rat shuddered and the hair on the backs of our necks stood straight up as we excitedly raced to the windows to catch but a quick glimpse of the banshee. He nodded his wings ... perhaps in a Christmas greeting? Rather than follow on his tail as usual, today his partners converged from opposing flank points over the mesas, dropping sharply down to join him. Now, with all flying below mesa top level, they flawlessly joined rank and negotiated the canyon's next big curve, wings perpendicular to the ground in a graceful pirouette and disappearing completely in less than a second. It was an awesome and inspiring display and I wished that our buddy Red could have been out here to enjoy the show as well - it would have given him a serious rush back to his FB-111 days. I also wish that the flight crews could have seen our wide smiles and my usual wild applause and know what it means to us. They can play in our backyard any day ... and may the angels fly guard over them always.

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