January 2024

January 15 It is good ol’ January and we’ve had a little cold weather to drive that point home. Long about Monday the eighth it snowed. Not your “Oh isn’t it pretty. Let’s make snow ice cream” kind of snow. More like a short blizzard. It had been cloudy and cool for a couple of days. We even got a little rain a day or two before the mini-blizzard. So what happened was the sky was cloudy, like I said. In the afternoon while loafing around the house I heard rumbles of thunder. The next thing I knew, the wind hit and the snow pellets (not flakes and not sleet) blew horizontally across SA removing any leaves still clinging to limbs on a few trees. Standing at the kitchen window I was admiring the storm and noticed the chickens huddled together outside the chicken yard. I debated whether to try to put them in the chicken house but decided not to because they probably would just run from me and then we would all be miserable. As I said, the blizzard was short lived and at dinner that evening I learned that Rebecca, Abigail and Chris had braved the storm to collect the flock and get it into the chicken coop. I had settled down to read a book and missed the rodeo.

Since then an arctic front has dropped the nighttime temperature to zero or just a few degrees above for several nights. Needless to say, (but I’ll say it anyway), there hasn’t been much work done on the place. Before the weather went to pot, Abigail and I managed to spend an afternoon clearing the garden. We didn’t finish but we’ll back to it when the weather permits.

One of the nice things I got for Christmas is a Grandpa Weeder. I was anxious to try it out, so on the tail end of a workday, Abigail and I tried it out on one particular weed, an invasive plant that has been trying to take over the place. I sprayed the weed as much as I could before the weather got to chilly for Weed-Be-Gone to be effective. I had started spraying with Roundup which will work in cold weather, though it takes a while for the weeds to die. When I got the GW, I was hoping it would work on this particular weed and found that it did when we tested it. We got to fighting over who was going use it. Since then, it has been too cold to even be outside for any length of time but one of the nice things about it is it can be used when we’re between jobs or at the end of the day when we have a few minutes left. I even tried it out on the yucca around the Bluff. When I cut yucca with a sharpshooter, it leaves the root and the plant will sprout from that and have to be removed again. The GW will work but it puts more pressure on the wooden shaft than I’m comfortable with; wouldn’t want to damage my new tool. However, I see that I can purchase just the mechanism without a handle so I could maybe fit a pipe handle to it and use that at the Bluff.

January 27 The month is rolling right along. There was a full (nearly) moon smiling down on me this morning as I drove to the Bagel Place. We have barely seen the sun this week, much less the moon. Cold, dismal and damp, that’s what it was, but the skies were clear this morning, the start of a spell of good weather for January according to the forecast. And to think there are political prisoners sitting in jail since January 6, 2021 yet to face trial for what, standing around?

Abigail and I ignored the drizzle and worked at the Bluff Wednesday anyway trimming more mesquite. We were scheduled to work around SA Friday but there was more than a drizzle all morning so we eschewed the opportunity. The more-than-a-drizzle turned into a light but steady rain in the afternoon so we called it right. This morning it looked like there was about .37 inches in the gauge., which, given the cold weather and moisture in the ground remaining from previous rain, that’s not nothing.

Yesterday I got an email announcing the beginning of a project to restore West Amarillo Creek. There are several volunteer days over the next few months, in fact, the first one is Today. I’m tempted to volunteer. At the very least, I’ll keep my many readers posted. It sounds like an interesting project. The link above will also be helpful if you want to find out more and keep abreast of the restoration activities.

January 29 Radio Derb had some interesting things to say about immigration, legal and illegal, while be his usual entertaining self.

January 31 Well, that’s it for this month. The forecasted pleasant weather came to pass and Abigail and I took advantage of it to take down the weather vane on the post in the garden. It’s been maybe 20 years since we put it up and I’m amazed that it lasted this long. The attachment to the post was beginning to loosen and we felt it would be better to remove it on our terms rather than wait till it came down on its own. We are planning to put it on top of the playhouse; should look pretty good there.