by 
Nothing like a warm fire on a cold evening...
December 8 Yesterday out at the ranch I spent some time looking for the southwest corner marker Kari and I looked for when we there in August but couldn’t find. I started from the northeast marker and walked what I thought was a diagonal path hoping to stumble across the southwest corner marker but to no avail. I found it a few decades ago, I think. I guess I’ll have to excavate the directions out of my files and have them handy for the next time I go out there. I have never been able to find the northwest corner pipe, maybe because there isn’t one, but I would like to try again.
December 15 Abigail and I managed to haul off the last of the dams in the south lane over the last couple of weeks. We had previously done the same in the north lane, so the experiment with the twig dams is over, rendered untenable by marauding chickens. Besides the twigs, we also removed one dead tree and the limbs reachable with the pole saw from another plus trimmings from several overgrown four wing salt bushes. And we worked in a couple of Fridays at the Bluff. Yes, we are justifiably proud of ourselves.
All preparations have been made for celebrating Christmas Eve at 1911 with the Zbindens and traveling to Sachse Christmas Day to celebrate with the Wylies.
December 25 We celebrated Christmas Eve in style yesterday evening, or what passes as style for us. We kept a nice fire burning and Christmas music playing while we consumed the victuals Kari and Abigail whipped up. I made a dessert tray; mostly berries, nuts and chocolate. It went over pretty well based on how little was left when the evening wound down.
It has been overcast and chilly all week, which is nice for celebrating Christmas. Makes it feel more Christmasy, in my view. That cloud cover was also nice for the drive to Wylie world, kept the sun out of my eyes. The weather here in Sachse isn’t much different than Amarillo, except they’ve gotten rain.
Passing the cotton fields on the drive to Sachse, I noticed a change in the way cotton is harvested. Until a few decades ago, hay was was cut and bailed in rectangular “bails” a person could handle. Handled of few myself back in the day. Then someone came up with rolling large bails of hay and wrapping the bail in plastic. Using a tractor, the bails could be stored and subsequently moved to where they were needed to feed the animals.
Cotton used to be handled in a similar manner. The bails (more like loaves) were large and had to be handled by machine. I noticed several fields where the harvested cotton was packaged like hay, in large round bails and wrapped in plastic. Unlike hay bails which are wrapped in clear or white plastic , these bails or rolls were wrapped in colorful plastic. I saw yellow, green and blue in different fields, some scattered and others lined up nicely.
December 30 We’ll, that’s about it for 2024. There’ll be some whoopin and hollerin tomorrow evening but I’ll probably sleep through it. We will probably have a fondue and maybe some champagne, which will be nice. Then it’s on to the New Year. Hope it’s a good one.