Month: April 2014

Tomorrow (Sunday)  I will be heading up to our mountain property for a week of work. The backhoe I rented will be delivered Monday morning, and that will kick off the season’s main project, extending the driveway. I hope I can re-master the operation of a backhoe; I have not operated one for a couple decades. Hopefully a week will be long enough for me to complete the driveway extension – which will be around 600 – 700 feet long and built into the side of a hill. Other items on the agenda include leveling two flat spots in the saddle area, one for the RV and the other for our shed. Once this is done I can arrange for the delivery of the shed and will re-set the trailer on it’s new location.

Pam will be coming up with the dogs and will be there part of the week. She will have to return home mid-week and come back up again toward the end of the week. It is going to be a hectic schedule. The fuel companies will love us.

This trip will require opening  the trailer and getting it ready for habitation. I will need to get water, fire up the furnace, install the new solar panels, and generally get the trailer re-stocked. Pam has a list of food and clothing we will need to take and I plan to go shopping a bit later this morning to get the food items we need. Since we did not leave any liquids or freezable items in the RV there are quite a few items we need to restock. And, it may be too early yet to leave fluids in the RV anyway, so many items we take up and don’t use will need to come back this trip.  Good thing we are taking two vehicles!

I  picked up a culvert from a shop in Grand Junction. It is 20 feet long and 12 inches in diameter. The culvert will be installed in a low spot that the driveway will cross. In the 3 years we have been visiting this lot we have never seen water in this location but better be safe than sorry. Culvert cost  $215.00 with taxes. The backhoe rental, with delivery and pick up, came to just under $1,900.00. With fuel and other expenses this project should come in at around $2,500.00.

Our driveway culvert ready to take to lot

We bought a couple Diesel fuel cans and I will need to stop and fill them, probably in Breckenridge as I go through. The backhoe burns about 2 gallons per hour and should arrive fully fueled (37 gallons, by the spec sheet) so I should not have to worry about fuel for a couple days.

On the down side, the weather is going to be poor for the next week. Highs in the upper 30s and lows below freezing, and a chance of rain or snow most days. Not the best conditions, but who knew this would happen when asking for vacation time and making the rental reservation? We will make the best of it.

I will probably miss next week’s post as I will not be home until Monday the 5th and it will take me some time to look though the photos and video footage I plan to take.

Pam won’t be adding her usual Two Cents Worth, but asked that I update the status of the kittens born on our back deck on Easter. All three are dead, unfortunately, the last one dying late last night. De Beque is a “mean streets” kinda place for wild kittens, and even with human intervention the fatality rate is quite high.

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Happy Easter, everyone.

Here is our Easter card compliments of Jacquie Lawson:

We hope everyone has a good day.

Yesterday we did a lot of yard work. Pam cleaned up around all the fence edges and I mowed the lawn and weed-whacked around the edges. It is nice to have everything tidy and to smell the fresh-cut grass. Along with grocery shopping and other routine chores the day was quite full of activity.

In the past I created my Galleries page so I could keep track of various photo collections including photos I had posted in this blog. The last week  I  created a different type of page, one with links to video clips. This lets me access various video clips from a single page. It makes it easier to take another look at these clips without having to find the blog post that contained them. Take a look and let me know what you think. The new page is Video and there is a link to it from our home page as well.

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

It has been a week of death – and birth.

Isadora, AKA Izzy

Isadora, one of the moms that had kittens in our master bathroom last Summer, had to be euthanized this week as she was in acute kidney failure.  Only three years old and tame as can be, Izzy had at least two litters we know of (maybe more) in her short life. Someone had domesticated and dumped her.  Izzy’s story is everything that is wrong with animal rescue challenges in De Beque.  A gentle soul, Izzy was a quiet addition to our garage colony this Winter and will be missed.

This Easter morning I found one of the feral cats had given birth to a litter of kittens in the Dogloo on our back deck.  This particular cat has resisted trapping in the past, and I think it best to just leave her be.  No doubt she will move her kittens somewhere else in the next few days.

And so it goes…

Happy Trails.

This time of year is a transition period; we are not working the Sanderling lot and little else of note is going on. This makes it “interesting” to come up with a weekly post but I keep trying to generate some content.

It’s raining in the high desert today, which means snow in the high country above 8,000 feet. Our mountain property could pick up 6 – 12 inches of new snow out of this storm. The rest of the week, past Monday, looks good though, and we hope the snow melts off the mountain lot by the last week in April. Tonight (Sunday) and tomorrow have forecast lows below freezing; Pam is planning to cover some flowers but the rest will just have to survive on their own. Tulips are beginning to bloom and I see some daffodils blooming around town. Our daffodils don’t look like they will bloom this year – the bulbs may be spent.

In “lot” news, I’ve put in a reservation for a backhoe and applied for vacation for the week between April 28th and May 5th. We are going to get the driveway extension done that week (one way or another). Should be an interesting endeavor! I went through United Rentals as they will deliver and pick up the backhoe to the lot, for a fee of course, but I don’t have the Big Boy Toys to haul such equipment over two mountain passes. We will have to pick up a couple of diesel fuel cans to bring fuel out to the lot. Nearest fuel station is about 25 mile away in Fairplay.

Closer to home, I took the ATV out for a ride yesterday. I wanted to ride through the area that was burned a couple years ago and see how, or if, the recovery was going.

Much of the area has developed a covering of grass but little else. The photo below is typical of this:

Burn area – spring 2014

The little patches of white, seen on the right side of this photo, are flowers.

Wildflowers #1

Throughout the ride I was struck by the number and varieties of wildflowers already in bloom. This makes sense as the high desert receives only about 8 inches of rain per year, and the flowers use the spring moisture to good advantage. Here are a couple more photos of flowers I saw during this outing.  (Our mountain flower identification book is in the high country, can’t specifically identify the flowers in the following photos.)

Paintbrush?

Wildflowers #3

So, even though I have ridden these areas before, there is always something new or different to see and I always enjoy getting out on the ATV.

As a follow-up to a note in my last post, friends Mary and Jeff are sending us photos from their trip to England. It looks like they’re having a good time, with a super-packed itinerary!

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

Sis Becky tells me the Chicago relatives have been clued in to this post location, so here’s a shout out to Nancy, Bobby and Uncle Norm!  They should get in contact with Bro Larry, who can give them a guided tour of the MyHeritage site – lots of family photos and genealogy content has been catalogued by Larry at that site over the past few years.

Daughter Felicity is in Spokane, Washington at the annual Sweet Adeline competition this weekend.  Upon her return to Oregon, she closes her apartment in Beaverton and, a few days after Easter, begins her life as a “digital nomad.”  Felic has developed a blog to chronicle the next nine months as she travels, house sits, and attempts to make a living entirely on-line.  For those who wish to travel along, Felicity’s blog location can be found here:  http://www.blog.felicityfields.com/.

Happy Trails.

The Wisconsin Badger men’s basketball team made it to the final 4 but lost to Kentucky last night by 1 point. For all our Badger friends we would like to say it was a good season in spite of this loss.

Birds are building a nest in our Cottonwood tree again. I saw one of the pair flying into the hole while carrying a feather to line the nest. The cats in the house can see these birds from the front window and it provides quite a source of entertainment for them.

I mowed part of the lawn yesterday. Mostly this area grows weeds rather than grass and is used as parking space for the Ford 8N, the aluminum trailer, and the ’76 Scout. I retrieved the Toro mower from the storage shed, did spring maintenance on it, and fired it up. It was nice to smell fresh-cut greenery again, even though this heralds the start of  Summer maintenance chores.

The solar panels for the RV (The Box) have arrived and will be installed on the next trip to the lot. I also ordered a carrying/storage case for the chain saw as hauling it around inside a garbage bag was getting old. We are getting “real uptown” now. 🙂

Pam has added a couple plaques to our walls. I like this one in particular.  Since I was born in the mountains Pam says the first part of the sentence is for her and  the second part is for me:

Our friends Mary and Jeff are traveling in Great Britain right now and we hope they are having a great time.

Daughter Felicity is planning a working vacation trip to Wales, starting in April. Given that most of her work is done via computer, she’s not restricted to any one geographic area to make a living. Certainly a change from my generation.

Just for hoots (like, when we win the lottery) we have been looking at real estate listings in Sooke, British Columbia. (Water and mountain views.) One million can get you a very nice house overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. “Sweet dreams are made of these…”  Hey, we’d have plenty of room for visitors!

Strait of Juan de Fuca from dream house. Pam loves the water views. Jerry has mountain views. (Realtor photo.)

On the “we are getting old” front, we watched a special the other night about the Beach Boys who are celebrating their 50th anniversary as a rock-n-roll group. We are still hoping for the “…fun, fun, fun..” to come along.

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

Big news in little De Beque – the town voted to allow marijuana sales in town, the first town in the county to approve retail pot sales.  Great.  We have a cop-for-hire police force and unsophisticated town government.  This should be a fiasco.  And, De Beque is on the Fall 2014 state ballot to allow gambling in town.  Is it too much to ask that this  might actually increase our property values so we can move out of this dump?  Not likely.

Happy Trails.