Christmas greetings from sunny, very chilly northern New Mexico, It is that time of year again, my goodness the year has passed quickly. When I was a child a year seemed to take forever, and now as I age each year seems to speed by faster and faster, a whirlwind of doings with little time for reflection. Now is my time to reflect, so sit back and enjoy my tale.

In the Clovis culture calendar this was the Year of the Big Cave Cleaning!!!! My big project for the year turned out to be cleaning and de-junking the house – I started just before last New Year’s and, with a couple of breaks during the year I have been at it all year. I know this does not say much for my housekeeping, but at least better late than never. I made a fiery bonfire of all the court stuff – that chapter is done, and then rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I swear the house has lifted up a couple of inches with all the stuff that has gone, and still every shelf is full and I am short of space. Last year the garage was at least housing the tractor – now even that has been evicted to make way for stuff. Jack swears he will sell his carriage next year –and that will give me more space to fill with –uh, empty space would be nice. I supplied the school with crayons and pencils for the next year, and I still keep finding them lurking in odd corners, grinning at me.

We recently acquired a dog from the Albuquerque animal shelter – a male red heeler who was an exemplary dog for about 3 days, and then decided that doing his business in the cold wind was not his thing. So I have ended up doing yet more cleaning and clearing up, and he is currently allowed only in the living room, under strict supervision. He is actually a nice friendly dog, still young and a bit puppyish, and I am sure he will get the clue. We have also ended up with three cats – a big one, a medium one, and a kitten. The kitten started off as Shadow, but that was quickly changed to Shredder – you can imagine why. Don Diego got a sentence in the Thanksgiving school newsletter – how he was thankful for his cat shredder. We pointed out that some capitalization and a comma would have avoided some bemusement on the part of the reader!!

Back in the spring we were being inundated with dire warnings about hyper-inflation and other evils, so I cleaned out the office area and turned it into a food storeroom, and then went down to Costco to fill it up. Then, I decided that we needed a fresh protein source, and thought that chickens would be both cheap and efficient at converting veggies into eggs, with the side benefit of being edible if the project grew tiresome. I decided on a heritage breed called the Dominique, and I purchased 8 pullet chicks (talk about sticker shock!). Everyone else in the country had the same idea, so I we waited a long time for them, but finally they arrived and I put them in a nice heated box in the loggia. The boy’s favorite game became chick picking – those poor things were well handled and are easy to catch even now. Well, as time went on they needed to be moved outside, and we noticed that one seemed to be a little different – lighter in color and with slightly larger comb and wattles. It was confirmed when my pullet started crowing!!! We now have a very handsome rooster, who thinks that he is at the top of the pecking order. He tries to fight with Don Diego, but a few swift kicks dissuaded him from attacking everyone else. (Don Diego tormented that rooster unmercifully, so turnabout is fair play I say!). So every morning we get our wakeup call!!! They started laying in September, and just gave it up when the weather turned really cold. So far the price per egg is a sum I do not even want to think about, but when they start laying again then the price per egg will slowly decline. A positive fringe benefit is that the boys got to care for them, and as long as I keep after them they are very responsible caretakers.

I also decided that a small garden would be a good thing, this from a woman who is phobic about earthworms. The soil was so hard we hard to dig the garden with a backhoe!!! (Finally a use for the tractor). Well we prepared our plot, with horse dung, moldy old hay, and pigeon poop laced pumice from the school house attic to aerate the soil, and I made nice neat rows and planted a variety of seeds. After 3 weeks of generous irrigation with our very nitrogen rich recycled water nothing was happening, so I decided to plant onions instead. About 500 onions!! Then the other stuff started sprouting. Ah so! I got about 450 onions out of there, and fed most of the lettuce to the chickens who loved it. We are just not great salad people. I planted some English green beans, and one bean took 3 months to germinate!!! I planted 3 tomatoes, of which two survived and we got some delicious tomatoes. (All that nitrogen I expect). So, not too bad for a first try, in the middle of the mother of all droughts.

Jack worked very hard to start a Youth Hunter Education Challenge (YHEC) program for the county, and ended up with a team of 5 kids. Kids and parents went and camped at the NRA Whittington range near Raton in early June for the state championship event – shotgun, archery, muzzleloading, rifle, orienteering, wildlife ID, and Safety trail. The Mora team did not come in dead last(!!!), but I think the most daunting event for them was the kid’s dance on Saturday evening - all the boys had an attack of serious shy! We are talking about girls who could outshoot and outcompete them after all!! Everyone had a great time, and we will do it again next year for sure.

We made plans to go the big High Plains Rendezvous in mid- June in Nebraska this year for a change – a thousand mile drive but what the heck. Never seen Nebraska before, and 3 days before we were due to leave we got a call from Game and Fish – “Did I want a bear?” “Uh, what size of bear?” “Don’t know, I haven’t caught him yet”. “Uh sure, never had bear before”. This year, with the horrible drought, the bears have been really hungry and problematic. This one had been raiding chicken coops, and was starting to try and enter houses. Anyway, I ended up a 10 o’clock that evening with a young male bear to clean out and somehow get into the freezer. I finished gutting him at 1:30 – I discovered that bears are built very differently to elk and deer, and do not come apart easily. An experienced friend came over and helped me the next day, and I got him into the freezer in several large pieces. Starting in the autumn I have been turning him into green chili and spaghetti sauce – one leg at a time.

Last winter and spring were incredibly dry and by early summer, just before we left for Rondy , a huge fire started over by Los Alamos, with another huge fire on the Arizona border, and then a fire in Raton right on the Colorado border. We figured that it would be lovely to breathe slightly more humid air without the smoke in it as we headed up the newly re-opened freeway past Raton.

Well, we hit eastern Nebraska right at a time of “severe weather” (what a delightful euphemism) – it cascaded with rain every night, there were tornado warnings every day, all the rivers were way high and actually flooding about 30 miles away, it was humid as hell, and the mosquitos were having a field day. (She forgot the ticks – JR) Ye Gods!!!! We were in the sandhills of Nebraska – the land is literally several hundred feet thick of wind borne sand, so it drains very, very quickly. Imagine enough rain that puddles were accumulating!! Wowzah!! So we steamed like clams for the week, but had fun even so, and then packed up to go to western Nebraska for a few days with our rondy friends. On the way we passed under some evil looking low clouds – we found out after that our native guide (in a separate car) was seriously nervous about those clouds. Ignorance IS sometimes bliss.

We ended up a party of seven in a big old chevy as we explored around the Black Hills and had a blast – David, our native guide is a paleontologist and geologist, so we found rocks everywhere we went. We visited the South Dakota mining Institute museum and found type specimens for all sorts of fossil animals, including the mososaur – (think 30 feet long of fish shaped reptile with lots and lots of long sharp teeth and serious attitude). The boys were thrilled!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Our friends both have Harley’s, so we visited the biker’s mecca of Sturgis – amazing number of bars in that town! We also went to Mt. Rushmore (presidential head carvings) and to Crazy Horse – that is expected to be finished sometime in the next century or so, and what a monument it will be! The whole area is most touristic and interesting – and we want to go again, but maybe not high summer. The area makes its’ annual revenue in just four months – ouch!!!

I have not even mentioned the months long campaign to fight the proposed closing of the Holman Post Office. First we knew was a mailer in April from the post office (USPS to differentiate from our local PO), that they were planning to close us!. I was volunteered to spearhead the campaign to “Save our Holman Post Office”, and so we set up a web page and launched a petition drive and did all sorts of stuff. We managed to convince USPS to give the community a second meeting after the first one proved to be a disaster, and we are currently waiting for the USPS to respond to our appeals. Here is a link to the page, where you can study our activities in a lot more detail if you wish. LINK

We also ended up forming a group called “Concerned Parents for Mora Independent Schools” in response to a Nixon style administrative regime established by our new Superintendent, who is also our state representative to the NM legislature. This man started a vendetta against the music teacher, so he fought back by getting the kids to tell us all about it, and so we parents besieged the school board meetings and caused the dropping of all such plans for this year. However, we are going to have the same fight or worse next year. The administration had spent lots of money on their building and offices – lovely furniture etc, to the detriment of the kids and their programs, so our group is trying to get the superintendent out, and his staff too. We are currently working with the NM Governor’s office, and hope that the pressure will have an effect. What we really need to do is get control of the school board, so next year will be getting the message out and working on winning the school board elections.

The boys are doing well, though JJ’s cohort (class) is the poorest in achievement in the whole school. Don Diego was promoted from second to third grade at the end of the first quarter, and he has an excellent teacher who is challenging him, and his classmates. He is loving it, and doing very well. We are trying to do extra-curricular stuff at home to challenge JJ, but are not very consistent at it. They are both looking forward to ski season this year – the local resort has a few runs open but they are crowded so we will wait until they have more snow. In March I took them and an adult friend to the Wolf Creek resort in southern Colorado – it was lovely and they had a grand time skiing long wide runs. I got food poisoning the first night, so it was less fun for me, but they had a good time and good skiing, which was the whole point of the exercise. We plan on doing the same next March, but I will not go near that restaurant for any reason!

JJ also got an elk permit for the week after Thanksgiving – we got a lot of exercise but never even saw an elk. It was fun though, and we are planning to explore the area thoroughly next summer – it is literally about two miles away as the crow flies, so we can spend some happy time up there. Immediately after our hunt, we had to teach a weekend Hunter Education class for Game and Fish, which is always long days but very rewarding when the kids pass the test and start planning their first hunt. Our youngest student this year was seven, and he passed with flying colors. A very enthusiastic young man indeed!!