Burritos!!

I do have pictures to post in other posts, but unfortunately this one is without pictures.  It is a follow up, if you will, to the mini cow post of a couple weeks ago.  While the mini cows are still a source of delight, the latest source of squealing are the mini burros, or burritos!  They are so cute, though as Thomas and I passed them both Friday and Sunday, he said they are probably older than I think. 

 

He then described a mini burro from his days working at Philmont, I think named Chupa for being a nibbler.  You could hold the body in one hand and let the legs dangle over the side.  I think they played pranks with this little burrito that couldn't be fenced in because Chupa could slip right through. 

 

So, yes, I squealed with delight at seeing the cute little burritos, nursing and staying close to their mamas. 

Funerals

A friend of mine last year had a season of funerals, and that is what I have been thinking about.  My last two trips to Denver each included a funeral.  While I was away at the conference this past weekend, I missed two funerals in our parish.  At the beginning of the month, my co-worker Chris was gone for a week for a funeral in his wife's family.  It just seems that the last month has been a season of loss.

 

I read a book recently set in England that included some description of the mourning traditions - so regimented by society.  It struck me as odd that society or religion can tell you what you are supposed to do and how you are supposed to feel, as if the mourning is more for the people around you to witness than for our own grief.  I certainly don't knock tradition or religious customs, but I also appreciate the authenticity of our actions and emotions to dictate whether it might be a blue day or green day or a black one, whether we need a moment surrounded by friends who love us or a solitary one in quiet. 

 

So here's a moment of silence for Liam, Larry, Nick, Ronnie, and Maria's sister-in-law...and all the others who have gone before us.

on the road again

I have put more miles on my car in the last six months than I think Mary and I put on both of the cars we shared.  'Tis true.  I drive a lot of miles, but at least I get 40 mpg.

I embark before sunrise, which will make driving toward the west easy, as I should be headed north by the time the sun bursts forth from the plains.  I am on my way to Denver to catch a plane to Santa Ana, CA to meet my mom for a professional development conference - the LA REcongress, it is called.  We are staying with family friends, the Armens, and will get to see my Aunt Janelle.  I am terribly excited, terribly so!  The conference should be really good, but I am most excited about spending four nights and days with my momma. 

Flights were cheaper out of Denver than Albuquerque, so I will also get to see some old friends and take care of a little business, too.  By a stroke of sheer coincidence, there is a funeral tomorrow that I will also attend for a volunteer from my days at Metro CareRing.  If it were any other time, I couldn't go, but given the timing I can hardly excuse myself from being there.  What a blessing that it all works out!

So I am off to put the last of my things together - a good book, my tickets, and a few other essentials...no posts till next week?

Mini cows!

A week and a half ago, I had the birds and bees talk with Thomas.  Mostly I was asking about the heifers in the pastures that I pass on my way to Cimarron.  I was convinced they were all prego, but I don't know much about these things, and I drive so fast that it is sometimes hard to get a good look.  "/

Thomas thought, as we drove in to Cimarron, that the one field I was particularly convinced about might be full of pregnant cows.  They go wide, rather than have a bulge hanging below.  Well, on Saturday on the way to the dumpsters, I saw a heifer that looked like an over-sized football was lodged in her belly.  And then on Sunday, driving the other way, I saw that the field I had been watching had three mini cows in it!  They are so cute!  The calves are so tiny, and I know it won't be long that they are all grown up.

Today I had the pleasure of bringing Andres, Maya, and Sara home from school.  Along the way I really struggled to engage them with questions about this and that.  (I think they prefer to ride in the family room on wheels in which they all have ample room.)  Turns out they hadn't noticed the calves yet, so I had something fresh and new!

New life is a wonderful sign of spring moving in.  Just another five days...

Memory lane...

When it comes to my memory, I am sometimes regarded with awe, sometimes with mockery, and sometimes with disgust.  It's not my fault I have a somewhat photographic memory. 

Like when I read last week that Ahna and Oren were headed off on a date night to Winter Carnival - a String Cheese Incident concert of three nights, I not only remembered that it was at Winter Carnival in 2002 that I finally got to meet Oren, but the flood of pictures surrounding that event came flooding back into my head.  Not actual pictures, but the images of Ganesha, Mary's and my first car together, our neighbor Andy who sold us his extra tickets to Winter Carnival, and a broken window.  Sometimes I wonder if I sometimes blur the times and events of the past together.  This one I did verify in my journal, so I know it's not made up!

Shortly before the concert, I had played games at Betty's in the evening.  When I came back out to the car, which was parked on Tremont facing north, I realized somebody had been in the car.  What is and was laughable about it is that there really wasn't anything of value in the car save for the broom I had borrowed from the house where I was dog-sitting to sweep snow off the car, and evidently, it wasn't valuable enough to the looters to be taken.  We also didn't lock the car because the people who gave us the car said that we wouldn't be able to use the key to unlock it.  The truth is that I might not have even known the car was broken into if the back passenger window hadn't been broken out.  That was what gave it away, and how foolish someone must have felt when the door was unlocked the whole time.  Anyway, it was an inconvenience to tape it up with a garbage bag, lose sight of our blind spot, and have to figure out replacing it on the cheap.

 

In the end Mary (and maybe Davis) helped track down a window from a junk yard, and I made an attempt to install it.  That was laughable, too!  I took apart the inside of the door - pulling off the window crank and the j-pin that held it in place, removing the arm rest, and trying to figure it all out.  I didn't have a long/thin enough screwdriver to get a couple of the screws out, so Mary went upstairs and asked the two guys who lived above us if they might have a more complete toolbox.  They didn't, but they tried to make something that ultimately didn't work.  When Mary went up, somehow the mention of Winter Carnival came up, and she told him we were going to see if we couldn't find tickets at the show.  When I went up to return the fake long-handles screwdriver, Andy told me that he had four extra tickets he would sell us for the show.  It just so happened that KU was enjoying March Madness, and Zach and friends, who had planned to attend the concert, would instead be watching their team in the NCAA basketball games.  Our luck!

 

So Ahna, Jennifer, Mary, and I bought tickets off Andy and went to the show.  I think we met Oren at Wendy's, but it is entirely possible that was another show.  Oh how little things trigger big ol' trips down memory lane for me!

Going green!

I have been lamenting that for all the snow and sunshine we have been getting around here, the only thing looking nice and green is the yucca....yuck uh!  But it seems overnight that along the edges of the road the grass is starting to green up.  I can only presume this is because it is still really cold at night, so the road is holding the heat of the day and keeping the ground nearest it the warmest through the night.  All the same, hooray!  It does mean that the deer are often hanging out close to the road for foraging those little green nubs.

 

AND the lake is looking awesome!  I have never seen it so full.  I imagine the heavy, heavy wet snow we had on Monday did a lot for it, coincidentally the night we had our Water Users meeting for irrigation/livestock water. 

 

Oh if I can just hold out for gardening season!

I must be bored as I drive in to work, because I am easily amused by the sights from behind the wheel.  Or maybe it is not the sight itself, but I then put little thought bubbles into the picture.  Or maybe I am going loco! 

 

A large bird sitting on a power pole - I think, "Wow, what a big bird!  It looks like it has red tail feathers, so I wonder if it is a red-tailed hawk."  The bird is thinking back, "DUH!! The color of the tail feathers kind of gives it away!" 

 

A new crowd of heifers have moved in to one of the ranches, and they were all munching by the road.  A big ol' long horn on the other side of the road a fence down is not munching the grass like his pasture-mates, but standing near his fence staring at the pretty ladies.  He's thinking, "Dang, I gotta get me a piece of that." 

 

And the antelope have a rather stupid look about them to me, so whether this lone antelope staring through the fence across the road and toward the mountain was actually the lookout for the others who had their heads down eating or was just staring into space, it reminded me of the stupid buzzards that are the guards in the cartoon version of Robin Hood. 

 

Random thoughts, I know.  And Marie, I have probably just made our daily grind sound looney - sorry!

 

 

miles and miles.....

With gas prices at $3.59 in Cimarron last I checked, I don't enjoy watching the numbers roll so quickly on my odometer.  But roll they must!

 

Yesterday was an extraordinary day.  It also felt a little extraordinarily complicated at times, but that is because of Monday. 

 

Monday night I had to ditch my car.  It snowed.  Again.  A snow that reminded me of home in Oregon.  Marie and I decided to cancel religious ed classes Monday night because the snow was getting thicker and thicker.  It took a while to stick, but once it did, the roads became heavy with it.  Unlike, say, the snow we had last Friday, this one was like Portland Cement - really wet and dense and heavy, the kind of "powder" I learned how to ski in.  So Marie sent out the mass-text message; she loaded her kids in the van; and I followed slowly behind them heading south on Hwy 21.  At 30 mph I felt badly for holding Marie up, who was able to travel 35 mph.  My little Pita just couldn't handle the snow.  The ruts were too wide for my wheels, and as Andres said, my car was more of a snow plow with such low clearance.  I called her to ask if she could send Andres back for a little extra weight or if she would pull into Philmont, so I could abandon poor Pita and ride home with her.  I abandoned my car...

 

This made Tuesday so complicated because Thomas had wanted a ride into Springer to his carpool because I would be in Raton in the afternoon to give him a ride home, or more accurately, a ride to Cold Beer where he and Daniel would shuck oysters for the Mardi Gras party, a long tradition of those two.  Daniel would then get Thomas home.  School was delayed two hours because of the snow, so I got a late start into Cimarron to get my car.  The craziness ensued as Thomas and I tried to coordinate cars and rides, but the real fun came yesterday afternoon.  I finished up my meeting in Raton and brought Thomas lunch.  It was a quick one, but it was fun to sit at his desk and hang out.  I disappeared for a bit (appointment to file taxes) and then came back for a tour of the jailhouse on the top floor of the county building - glad I never had to share the pepto pink cell with anyone!  And then we were on our way to Cold Beer.

 

Out here there are pretty much three places to drink beer - at the St. James, at home, and at Cold Beer.  This bar, somewhere between Cimarron and Raton, serves up alcohol and pizza most nights, music and Jeopardy sometimes, hamburgers in the summer, and oysters on Mardi Gras.  The pool table is covered with a plastic table cloth and laden with the accoutrement for eating shrimp and oysters, along with beaded necklaces.  Out back in the shed, Thomas and Daniel hang out in the stink of oysters, popping them open over and over and over again.  They had 6 cases of about 5 dozen each, but they only loaded the plates of with half a dozen.  There were a few rotten ones, and there were some real winners, which may or may not have never left the shed.  When I dropped Thomas off, I thought I would walk back to hang out briefly, but some people from Cimarron talked me into sitting with them and having some beer.  After a half pint of beer, I made my way out to the shed and ended up staying an hour or two.  It was fun talking with the guys and teasing with them.  I ran the full plates into the bar and earned myself a cup of shrimp.  People would pop in and out of the shed for more visiting, and it was a lot of fun.  There was a band playing Cajun music and everything else.  I really enjoyed the washboard played with spoons - a fun sound.  And when the sun set and it got to cold for me, I headed home to start a fire and wait up for my stinky man to arrive.  Gratefully it wasn't too late, and he went straight to the shower.  The threat of him crawling into bed smelling of oysters was enough to keep me up and waiting! 

 

And now, having driven Thomas into Springer and back through Miami to Cimarron, my car has a couple hundred miles on it in 24 hours.

What an honor...

It's the middle of the day, and I can hardly think about work.  I have had a lovely mid-morning break from routine, and I wished it never had to end.  A little slice of Denver (really they are from Castle Rock) came my way when Ahna, Oren, and Ezra passed through Cimarron on their way home to Colorado.  What a great coincidence for me that I work in Cimarron!

 

We met down at the park, so Ezra could run around, or maybe because I knew the gallery with ice cream and coffee was just across the street.  It was fun to see Ezra running around and playing.  It took him a little while to decide he wanted to play "telephone" with the mouthpieces built into opposite ends of the playground.  Oren would call to him from one side, and Ezra would listen and then look around to find Daddy instead of calling back to him, but before we left, Ezra was the one calling for his daddy to talk to him.  The slides and the ladders, all are more fun with a 2.5 year old.  We did get ice cream and coffee, too, and sitting up there on the red plaid bar stools, Ezra gave me a sticker.  It is the police car from Cars with a "Good Thinking!" message.  I think that was his way of telling me that stopping for ice cream was a good plan!  Back out at the park, we played and talked some more.  It is rare to get to have Ahna, Oren, and Ezra all to myself, so I soaked it all in and am still smiling for it!

 

It is s really great to get to hug and love friends in the flesh, though notes and phone calls are good filler until we meet again.  So I feel really blessed to have gotten to do just that with the Bersagel-Brieses!  I can still feel the warmth of our time together and pray they make it safely home.