Building the Bunny Barn

Tex the Container has a new companion, the Bunny Barn:

                                "Puttin' on the Roof"
                              

 It took the two of us nine days (including one day spent in Elko taking care of business, and two half days in West Wendover, buying lumber), using only hand tools, with one minor exception: Greg did an angle cut on the short boards between the rafters with a circular saw, back at Home Base in town.

                      "I have a saw, and I know how to use it ...."

            Step one: dig post holes. Water helps with the digging.

         "Post holer: digging holes for posts." -- River Tam, in Firefly

                             Posts and girts frame my Mountain.

                                     Add a top plate and rafters,

Put on some siding,

And close in the roof. Finishing touch: photograph the moon on Easter morning.

Then turn around and photograph Easter Sunrise.

We also put together a chain-link kennel to give Rosa a coyote- and hawk-free place to hang out. It has a chicken-wire top, indoor-outdoor carpet and the Puppy Palace, a doghouse I cobbled together out of leftovers from the Bunny Barn. To my surprise, once she realized she can jump on top of it, Rosa decided it was okay after all:

                                "If Snoopy can do it, so can I!"

The main challenge we have here is the wind. After five and a half years in southern New Mexico, we're no stranger to wind, but riding it out in a travel trailer is rather different than living in a house. But mostly it stops us from working when it gets too strong. Good thing we don't have deadlines to meet.



Well, well, well ....

It's been a busy week at This Land, and I now have a new appreciation for the job of well drilling. Thanks to Mark and Phil, who spent the entire week drilling, pumping and capping, the well is in, all 180 feet of it.

"Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!" Okay, it just looks like Lucille Ball at the laundromat--this was part of the flushing process, apparently involving suds of some kind. It looks a lot like the snow the guys brought with them on Monday from Elko.

Several of the neighbors came to call, both the four-legged kind:

and the people kind. James stopped by on Thursday and introduced himself, then on Friday we had visits from Curt (who helped deliver Tex--thanks Curt!), Harold, Dianne and Robert. It's good to know we have friendly, helpful folks around us. We really aren't in the Middle of Nowhere. (We know almost as many neighbors here already as we knew in our city neighborhood.)

While the Well Guys were hard at work, so were we, hauling dirt around to fill potholes in the driveway, cleaning up the site of the first building project, where the old shack stood, collecting trash (and a few more relics of the past) and rocks for that first building. Rosa the Chewdle got to explore her new bit of desert, although she has to watch out for coyotes, hawks and Edgar the Raven, all of whom would find her a tasty snack.



Running Away To Home

Montello, Nevada--only 200 miles round-trip to Wal-Mart. I think I'll shop local ....

We finally made it--home. Well, almost. We're renting an RV space in town while waiting on the well and a couple other bits and pieces. We spent four days on the road, to accommodate those 40-mph hills towing Serenity, and trying to get into the habit of relaxing. Also, driving shorter distances was less stressful on Bunnicula and Bun-Bun, the two Cinnamon rabbits given to us shortly before we left New Mexico. We don't usually name livestock, but we wanted a way to tell them apart, short of saying "the dark one," or "the lighter-colored one." (No photos yet--they're currently battened down in a covered dog run, awaiting the arrival of a last-hurrah winter storm due in any minute now.)

Marvin and Matilda, two of the Terrifying Space Monkeys enjoyed themselves at campgrounds along the way, first at the Picacho KOA near Tucson:

and then at the Ely, Nevada KOA:

On Thursday morning, a call to the well driller brought an almost-immediate response, and now the drilling rig is sitting on This Land, not far from Tex, ready to start drilling:

This will probably also have to wait until the projected storm passes, but we're confident the well will go in soon, as I'm sure they'll want their rig for other jobs.

Montello is a fairly friendly place. Just this morning, the neighbors came to call:

In the meantime, Greg has been busy reattaching barbed wire to the fence posts and I've been cleaning up the site of an old shack/cabin. The building has been gone for a few years, but the footprint is still there, and full of trash. Some of it is interesting trash, though, like partial pages from a 700-plus page book on such things as composting, growing fruit trees and other subjects of interest to the average homesteader. I believe the relics to be at least 20 years old, some much older. (The two fairly complete polyester shirts sort of scream 80s. No, I didn't save them.<shudder>) In the midst of very masculine relics (rotting socks, a razor handle, car parts and bits of a radio, I think) I found most of the pieces of a very delicate Sheffield china tea cup:

Interesting picture of previous occupants ... I find myself wanting to build my studio on the site of this former dwelling. There's history here, and a fabulous view of the mountains across the valley. Home.



This Land, Part One

Our Compound now has a building:

Thanks to Preston, Tex has arrived and is waiting to be useful storage/workshop space.

While exploring the property this week, we again found something of a mystery. We saw it before, but I didn't think to photograph it. It appears to be an earth-bermed condo for some kind of burrowing animal, as it has ventilation holes on top at the back. Anyone have any ideas what it might have been used for? It's probably been there for 25-30 years, at least. I keep trying to think of a good use for it:                  

The lid of the barrel is lying in front there, waiting to be put back over the opening. Curious ....

Our plans are progressing, and I hope to soon be blogging from This Land, just north of Montello. We have a few million details to see to first, but there's light at the end of the tunnel, and I don't think it's a train. The sock monkeys can hardly wait!

New Year, New Life

"Yes, yes--this is a fertile land, and we will thrive here. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it--This Land!"

Pilot Wash's dinosaurs on Joss Whedon's "Firefly"

Here it is, 2012, and Life had taken a rather major turn: my husband, Greg, is now retired, three years early. This means we can now (or soon, anyway) move forward with our plans to move to our property near Montello, Nevada and start our ranch, which we call--This Land. We have some fence posts and a lot of sagebrush,

 which we hope to convert into a comfortable off-grid cabin and studio, a decent garden and home for some livestock. We intend to start small and grow the ranch as we can pay for it, since we are tired of renting our house from the bank. We have a travel trailer, Serenity,

to provide living space while we build the cabin. A lot of our friends and relatives think we're nuts for wanting to do this. We respect their lifestyle choices and hope they will respect ours. The off-grid, self-sustaining life is not for everyone. Nor is the "cold desert." But we look forward to waking up to this every morning:

and watching our neighbors:

I intend to chronicle our progress on this blog, so if you are interested, please check back often, and follow us in our adventure.

What Man Hath Wrought

"When you ask what man hath wrought

Don't rest your gaze on me."  

"Who Will Comfort Me" by Connie Dover

http://www.conniedover.com/ifever08.mp3

We went on vacation two weeks ago, to Silver City, New Mexico. Silver City is at the edge of the Gila National Forest, site of one of this summer's destructive wildfires, determined to be human-caused. The Miller Fire, which broke out in March, burned 88,000+ acres of forest. It was started by an unattended campfire, which the camper(s) made no attempt to put out. Part of the trail to the Gila Cliff Dwellings, one of the goals of our vacation, were still closed as a result nearly four months later, and we got an up-close look at the result. The smell of burned trees followed us all the way up and back, and the haunting lines from Connie Dover's song quoted above cycled through my mind throughout the visit.

When we reached the dwellings themselves, built nearly 700 years ago by the Mogollon people with only crude hand tools, the ranger explained that the ceilings inside the caves are blackened because some 200 years ago, someone burned them out, destroying most of the wooden supports and ceilings.

There was a theme to this excursion for me, and it had nothing to do with the amazing craftsmen who created these apartments.

The friendly rangers in the Gila Cliff Dwellings Visitor's Center encouraged me to try out their Native American flutes, in spite of my protest that I already had one. Of course, it's not the same quality, nor the same range, so I gave a couple of theirs a try. The walnut one whispered that it wanted to go home with me. I said I shouldn't. The friendly rangers offered to mail me one later, although they'd rather I took it home now. I returned the flute and headed for the trail to the Cliff Dwellings. As previously mentioned, Connie Dover's song followed me just as the smell of burned forest did. When we returned to the Visitor's Center, I tried the walnut flute again, and sure enough, it plays "Who Will Comfort Me" in a properly haunting voice. Needless to say, it came home with me. However, it still carries traces of the odor of burning forest ....

Who's in Charge Here?

Today I mopped floors. This is one of my least-favorite activities, right up there with root canals and tax forms. But at least while the water swirled around the tile, my brain was free to swirl around as well. I found myself thinking about writing, which I needed to be doing (but not as much as I needed to scrub the floors <ugh>). A recent discussion on a writers' list addressed the old battle of "literary" versus "genre" fiction. I write genre fiction. I write to entertain. My novel, TIMEWARP, for example, is pure escapism, right? I mean, it involves time travel. How serious can that be? It's an entertaining romp into history, something that could never really happen. Which is why, when a very real and very serious social issue, bigotry and hate crimes, suddenly reared its ugly head in the middle of my manuscript, I tried to banish it back where it came from. There's nothing entertaining or escapist about the subject. After all, I was writing this book, wasn't I? I could just take a U-turn and head in another direction, right? I spent an anguished day or two trying to make the specter go away, to get back to that fun romp I'd been writing. But I realized that it belonged to the place and time, and the people who populated my fictional world. This was, after all, a mystery, a crime story, and this was the crime that fit. As much as I wanted it to just go away and let me have fun, it had to stay.

That's when I told my husband, "If I ever get TIMEWARP published, we'll have to move." It happened the other way around--we moved long before I decided to release the book. Now, of course, I have another dilemma. I'd love to launch this story in the place of its birth, complete with a party, catered with appropriate goodies and attended by the people who, perhaps unwittingly, helped me write it. But would they celebrate a book that might make people stop and think about their attitudes, or those of their ancestors? Or would they be offended by it all?  Would they rather I had kept romping along in a lighter vein, allowing them to escape into a happy place, or left the story safely tucked away on my hard drive?

Maybe one of these days I'll develop the courage to ask them ....