Skeet's Mountain Home

 I knew many of you would be inquiring about Skeet. 

Does he like it here? 

He's probably wondering what took us so long to bring him here. LOL.

He's by our side each and every day

He's made a new friend in the resident gopher that lives just off the deck. DH has named him "Pockets" and Skeet is absolutely transfixed by him. Each morning as we linger over tea and coffee, he lasers in on Pockets and Skeet is entertained for as long as Pockets plays hide and seek, which lasts about 45 minutes. It's the funniest thing to watch.

Each and every project we tackle is accompanied by our project manager

He's taken his job very seriously and is just as exhausted as we are at the end of the day

Deck duty is a tough job

He likes to ride down to wherever we're working each day

And lead the way back to the house when the job is completed 

Between keeping us in line, as well as deer, elk, bear, coyotes, fox, squirrels, gophers, chickens, guineas, cows, and horses; he's got his paws full, and I think he likes it that way.

HOT!

 Living in the desert SW, heat is expected, but oye!

Even the kitties are wilting

 I'm ready for Fall! Almost every morning for the last 3 weeks, you can find me here at 5:30. 

DH has been working with a couple of horses and time in the arena is part of their education.

We usually spend about 2 hours first thing in the morning trying to beat the heat of the day.

Monday evening we had a welcome shower that dropped 1/2" about 8:30. I was already in my jammies and headed to bed, but ran out to capture the puddles. When you ranch in the desert, you spend your life praying for rain so when it rains, it's a camera-worthy occasion. 

                       

So that means that yesterday morning it was too wet to rope. The ground in the arena isn't great and it doesn't take much moisture to deem it a no-roping day. A few days before it rained, DH commented that if all the bulls peed in the arena at once, it would be too wet to rope. 😂

So instead, we drove 45 minutes to the SE side of the ranch and I dropped DH and our camp man off to gather and move cattle west.

The sun wasn't even up as I headed back when I spotted this little owl basking in the early morning dawn air

Morning blessings!

May your day overflow with them!

Catching Up

 I'm not any busier than any of you, and I seem to keep up with everything, but somehow I can't manage to post on a regular basis. So after neglecting my blog for 10 days, the things I intended to write about pile up and you get a hodge-podge post with lots of odds and ends.

We made an overnight roadtrip for a bull sale a few weeks ago

Then, one day I drove to a quilt shop in the mountains for an embroidery workshop. We were so busy and I was soaking in so much information that I didn't even take any pictures. I bought a new-to-me machine over a month ago and went to pick it up, but I have yet to even turn it on, but I finally took it out of the box yesterday and that's as far as I got

I forgot my laptop cord there, but the owners, Jackie and Eugene, drove by the ranch on their way to Texas so I arranged to meet them at the mailbox. I traded them Pumpkin Pie Spice Snickerdoodles for the cord:

Yesterday was a rough day. Skeet had to go in for surgery. A few weeks ago I noticed he had a growth on his upper gums so we took him to the vet, 

who also happens to be a friend. Poor puppy is out of his element in town. So after dropping him off at 10

 I had made plans to spend the entire day in town running errands and tending to things that always seem to get pushed to the back burner when I'm in a hurry. At 11, DH phoned and said we could pick him up at noon so I shortened my list a little and aimed for 1:00. At noon I got a call from our camp man and when I answered, I heard DH's voice. He had lost his phone and needed some info that was in a book at the house to attempt to locate it. They were gathering cattle about 45 minutes away from the house. Some were hanging out in a marshy, knee-deep area and when DH took his horse across it to move the cows out, he thinks his phone disappeared. So I dropped everything, picked up a very groggy Skeet and turned towards home. Alas, they were unable to locate his phone so that was the first rule of business this morning. 

We're getting our ducks in a row for Fall Works next week so DH has been juggling lots of phone calls organizing the crew and all the details. Thankfully, all of his contacts transferred to my phone so he was able to tend to business as usual. Isn't it funny how we've become so dependent on these silly little pocket computers these days? 

Then when he tried to contact our north camp man this morning via text and then phone, there was no answer so he called his wife. His phone had crashed so he too was phoneless. Sigh. 

More cattle were moved and both boys are back in business.

Skeet too is back in business. They removed the growth and sent it off to be biopsied so we're praying for a good report.

This morning, he was raring to go for our morning trot - it's the only way I can think of to cheer him up

Things have been a little empty at home because sadly, Oliver disappeared yesterday. I am missing my little chore buddy

As is Skeet

They were huge buddies

Life is good out here at the end of the dirt road, but sometimes it can be a little 😭

Answered Prayers

 When the kids were here Memorial weekend, it began to rain. Our girl is in Oklahoma and I don't think they've dried out in 3 years. They are sick of the rain. She even said she thought she was beginning to mold and she was looking forward to soaking in some of our NM sun and drying out. Alas,  she got wet in the desert. We've been praying for rain and we were so grateful for answered prayers. 

DH said we ought to hold our girl and Kenny hostage and then rent them out to all the ranchers since they had brought rain with them. LOL. And it really hasn't dried out since then. That's 2 months of wet and we are so just tickled. This is what the above area looks like now:

This is so unusual for us. It pretty much quit raining in 2010. Of course, we've had some rain, but our annual rainfall is 9" here and for the majority of those years, we had 2-5". It's hard to grow grass with those numbers. So far we're at 14" here at headquarters. With 128,000 acres, the rainfall amounts, of course, differ across the ranch, but that's a pretty good average. We've been spending lots of time in the ranger, checking rain gauges and marveling at the water:

And studying the forage:

We're seeing grasses headed out:

And that's worthy of celebration after a 10 yr drought. We sold 70% of the cattle and are giving the ground some time to heal. Without the pressure of livestock (we kept 300 hd), these grasses will go to seed, disperse and multiply if it continues to rain. We're just so tickled to see growing green things:

We've got weeds shooting up taller than the fence in places:

DH and I have been having fun discovering new plants we've never seen. This is a Scarlet muskflower or Devil's bouquet. Such a strange name for this beautiful flower, but it has a very unpleasant smell.

And grasses as far as the eye can see in places:

If we're not together, we discuss what we've found at the end of the day and when we are together, we're making lots of stops to study what we've discovered, capture a picture and check our plant identification app. We just discovered these apps and they are fun, but they're not so good at identifying grasses so we still rely on the books we've collected:

Skeet and I have been enjoying our morning walk-abouts:

It's a fun way to begin the day:

And Skeet is particularly thrilled to have water holes to sink into along the way:

Who wouldn't want to begin the day with joy!

God has blessed us abundantly this summer

And now I've been praying for the fire ravished areas. Ya'll need it more than we do right now. Be safe!

Storm Report

 I hope this finds those of you who have been snowed in and iced over, thawed out and plugged in with heat and water again. As storms go, we fared well. We had snow and ice and wind for 5 days and one morning with rolling power outages, but not a big deal. We have a gas stove, lanterns, and plenty of quilts. 😉 DH's winterizing paid off and we left faucets dripping when the temperatures plunged to 0°. On Wednesday we had a leak at an outside faucet that is set up for the crew to wash their hands:

It was wrapped, but on a ranch, things wear out, storm or no storm, and this faucet had lots of age on it, so we dug:

DH does a lot of fixing around here:

We still had about an hour's worth of chores to do in the pens when we started on the leak and we were running short on daylight and expecting another single digit night. No sense filling the hole back up with rocks so I pulled out my garden wagon, filled it with a couple loads of soil from a flower bed because it was close and convenient and filled the hole while DH drove to check a well on the south end of the ranch.

DH fussed because the dirt around the faucet was mixed with rocks -not naturally - someone had filled the hole with rocks at some point. We've been here for 16 years so it was before that and it made for a challenging fix, but we're good to go now:

                                               

We'll move the rock pile in a day or two. The storm dumped about 6-7" in  a 3 day time frame and we welcomed every flake that fell on this drought ravaged land, Skeet welcomed it too:

As he welcomes everything...with pure joy:

We just had a few inches when I took these shots:

                              

That little dog LOVES the snow!                              

I didn't take a lot of pictures because we were pretty busy working, but although Skeet is always on the job, he also reminds us to fit a little playtime into every day:

                                 

DH and I made a trip to the farm store on Thursday morning for some feed:

And for plumbing parts:

There are at least a couple hundred miles of pipeline on the ranch and leaks are just part of ranch life in general, but when things thaw out after winter storms, we always know to expect a few more. 

Come chore time, my chariot awaits!

Skeet loves it too and everyone needs a sidekick to help with chores:

                            

A few months ago we got this Ranger and it sure is handy to zip around in and out of the pens filling bunks every evening:

My little doggie calf is settling in well and follows me around like a puppy. 

I let her out of her pen sometimes to romp and play:

I feed her 3x a day and Skeet is always there as part of  the support team - he adores her and after the storm, we're all glad to be spending time in the sun: