Feeding the Fire

Due to a lot of cold weather days the wood stove has been eating up the wood scraps at a rapid pace. We thought it was time to supplement our supply by taking a trip to the tree limb recycle place and bring back a truckload of wood. In a few hours we had it cut and stacked.

Christmas Dinner

It turned out great and there were tons of leftovers.

Christmas Morning

The bird tree - a minimalist effort at decorating

Christmas Eve

While Dad cooks the Christmas turkey I am up here downloading some pictures from Christmas Eve. The park ditch is iced over, there is still some snow about. Our supposed Christmas Eve snowstorm never materialized.

Foggy Dawn

Some scenes on the way to the airport. It was a foggy morning with heavy frost. By the time we got to the main highway the fog had lifted revealing a blue sky.

The End

In every life there is a cycle - birth, growth, then maybe some high points of achievement, a few changes along the way, and then eventually the end. Today the stump met it's fate. Chunks are burning in the stove at this very moment.

Ducks in the mist

Coming back from yoga at noon I saw ducks walking up the shallow water in the ditch in the park, not seeming to notice the cold, as the mist rose from the water around them. Why wasn't the water frozen? Not sure but I guess the ducks liked it. The outside air temp was hovering around 5 degrees at the time.

minus eleven

After a cold day yesterday it was even colder this morning, down to minus eleven or so. It is sunny though, and starting to warm up again.

Artic Front

Cold air has descended from Canada onto us bringing the temperature down to minus 2 this morning and leaving us with four new inches of snow. It looks Christmas-y.

Hungry Fire

The wood stove has been going through a fair amount of wood lately. We've been running it most mornings and evenings, often with a cat or two stretched out in front of it, and I usually let it burn until lunch time. If the sun's out it warms up in here after that. On rare gray cloudy days I try to keep it going all day. Construction debris has been supplying us with all the wood we need most days but occasionally we run out and look around for things to burn. The "barn", our former movable chicken pen, bit the bullet yesterday morning and has been contributing to the warmth. Actually I am glad to see it gone from the back yard, as it has been getting more and more decrepit lately. Who know? Maybe the stump next.....

Africa Bags

Thursday evening I worked at a fundraiser event. One of booths there was for African Bags, a non profit organization that started in January 2007 by setting up 4 very poor villages in Malawi with fabric and treadle sewing machines, and training on how to make cloth shopping bags. 100% of the profit goes back to the villages. It is very successful and the project now has ten villages working on bags. The villages are more prosperous and are starting to build community centers and can now afford to send their kids to school. The bags are sold here for about $10. The organization also makes t-shirts here that they sell as an additional fund raiser. I already have some bags, so I bought a purple t-shirt. Here's a photo of one of the bags and my new t-shirt. Their website is www.africabags.org

First real snowfall

About 2-4 inches fell on Wednesday evening and Thursday. It got quite cold and went down to 4 degrees yesterday morning. Today the sun is out and the roads are melting off, the sky is blue.

On the Way Home

The first picture is a morning shot of the mountains near Portal. The next is a sunset view of mountains near Truth Or Consequences, NM taken as we traveled north up the highway towards home. As we drove into Colorado the weather got snowy. We passed this horse munching hay in the snow near a rest stop.

Cave and Mine

On Friday we hiked up to one of the bat caves and then had lunch in a small cave entrance nearby. We saw no bats but found a few other creatures along the way, including a pair of lizards peeking out from under a rock crevice, and this beetle hiking up the rock wall. The big cave was impressive, but full of guano and awfully foul-smelling. Later we hiked up to a limestone outcrop above an old mining site and looked for fossils in the rocks. As usual, M. found the best ones, some crinoid stems and some shells. I gathered up a couple blue/green copper mineral specimens also. The hill was very steep and while angling between an agave and a prickly pear clump I lost my balance. I almost fell backwards into a large prickly pear cactus clump and managed to get a bunch of the nasty tiny spines lodged into my hand and hip. The tiny ones are evil and difficult to remove. The agave thorns are very sharp also and M. got speared in the back of her leg by a nasty one that bled profusely into her sock and shoe. However, the view up there was great in the late afternoon light and worth the trip, and it was fun to look for the fossils.

Along the River

While waiting for the food to cook and for people to assemble on Thanksgiving, we hiked up the river. Unlike last year the river was still running here and there down in the town, and had many newly gouged out channels from last summer's heavy monsoon rains. There were still some red and pink maples that hadn't lost their leaves yet, and plenty of water bugs darting about in the shallow pools. We saw a few quail and woodpeckers. It began to rain lightly and the sky broke into a rainbow.

Dinner that night was a hit, with lots of fiddle and banjo music and interesting conversation.

On to Arizona

The trip down to Arizona had relatively good weather on the first day, but we awoke to a light rain on Thanksgiving morning. The dark sky soon gave way to shifting banks of fog and patchy clouds, with occasional sunlight breaking through, leaving spectacular views of the mountains. I took a few shots of the fog near Hillsboro. After driving through a small storm, we arrived near Portal around noon, entering the valley to see the whole range spread out before us.