It's NOT?

We moved to our new ranch near Corona, New Mexico on June 21st, 2011. The first day of summer seemed kinda appropriate for us to be moving to our "place in the sun".

Almost immediately the unpacking began..and went on and on and on. Then finally, a reprieve of sorts. It was time to do fencing, six freakin' weeks of it! The unpacking was put on the back burner.

Til today. Hubby just unpacked the firewood holder for the living room, just in time since the nights are gettin' down to the 30s. A fire in the fireplace sounds pretty cozy.

Someone else thinks the firewood holder is for them. "Ohhhh Bailey?"

"Huh?"



"C'mon sleepy kitty..."



"This isn't a cat bed silly, it's for storing firewood."

"It's not?"



Grumble, grumble..."Let me know when the firewood is moving in."

Zzzzzzzz...

First Snow at the Ranch!

And it was a doozy.

The recipe for early snow apparently goes like this in New Mexico (our new home since we retired in June and moved from Washington to our ranch):

Start with a 60 something degree day. Add one part thunderstorm, strong and gusty winds. Mix in dashes of extreme lightning and thunder that rumbles for a good 20 seconds or more. Throw in a huge amount of rain and intermittent spells of hail. Then let it all quiet down for about 15 minutes.



Turn on the patio light to see how wet it is outside and WHOA! --- Big fluffy flakes of snow!



We hunkered down for the night and woke to about 5 inches of snow with drifts up to 8 inches. After a fence line check to make sure everything was secure we let the horses and Pete out into the Winter Wonderland.

Ahem...they weren't very happy. Someone had covered up what pasture was left!





"Hey! That patch of grass I saved for today....it's GONE!"



We designed our house to be passive solar and positioned it so it could take advantage of the sunshine in the low winter sky. It's working! Last night it got down to 27 degrees, today up to 40. The house, with the sun shining in and warming the porcelain tile is keeping us a toasty 70 degrees WITHOUT the heat turned on. Yes! We have radiant floor heat that will warm us when we need it and two fireplaces. This one is outside. I don't think we'll use it til it's time for some coffee and Baileys!