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! 
2 comments:
Beautiful!
Oh, I love your house! And, I think you were very wise to add all of those passive heating methods. I have an old house and the only passive anything I have is one passive cooling method -- mature trees that block the sun in the summer.
I wanted to tell you that I got an answer from my candidate about the voting. We were passing out literature to only those who "sometimes" vote in off year elections. Those who vote every year were not included. But, he also told me that, in these elections, only about 30% of registered voters turn out. That's pretty sad.
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