my world

2011-04-17T08:45:00.000-07:00

Spring

2011-04-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

Spring has Sprung!
There is still lots of snow, over a foot deep on the trails in my woods. Here in my yard the snow is finally receding. I can see over the tops of the snow banks in my yard and in spots the earth is showing through. It feels so good to walk upon the ground again. I am so excited when a patch of deep green moss surfaces, I check it daily as Rex has me trained to go for long walks twice a day as well as the short walks to do his business.
Rex has certainly given structure to my day. My life of wandering irresponsibly is somewhat curtailed for the moment.
The rabbits have returned to my field, haven't seen them all winter & was afraid that maybe the red fox had found them. The deer continue to use the trails through the property, there are several young
ones with them.
My little lilac survived the winter but was maimed (broken branches) by someone (likely me) walking over it when the snow was so deep in the garden. There are buds all over the bush so I have great hopes for it. Next year I will erect tall poles over every tree that I plant.
I'm going to organize pots for seeds to be started inside today...I'm going to plant lettuce, spinach, squash & carrots as well as tomatoes & peas. This year I plan to have a more organized garden, all raised beds. Last summer only had planted in wooden lobster crates & clay pots on the deck because of deer & rabbits. David will help me fence off the garden area. It is such a help having him here. He loves living here, we are very secluded with our 5 acres of woods.
My renovations are continuing, the bathroom is finally finished and looks beautiful. I've had the floor tiled and David and I installed the radiant in-floor heating with the help of the electrician. I am amazed at the cost of renovating one small room....the smallest in the house and yet the most expensive.
We will install the upper level flooring (bamboo) in June after Dave and I drive to Montreal to pick it up. The kitchen cupboards and appliances will be installed in August, hopefully!

Sam-I-Am

2011-04-04T08:44:00.000-07:00

Three years ago I adopted a little black cat (Raven) and brought her to my new home in New Brunswick. She had been abandoned in the wilds of New Mexico, found the ranch & bonded with me, to the almost total exclusion of everyone else. She is doing fine here, I keep her indoors during the winter months (too many hungry coyotes & bobcats), though she is becoming very interested in the birds that are appearing as the weather warms. Our first year here was a record one for my little hunter..she brought me mice, snakes, a baby rabbit and a bat! After that rabies scare I stopped letting her hunt at night!
Well, another abandoned cat has just come into my life! He's an 8 month old Tabby, grey & beige stripes & is about the size of a 4 month old kitten. We have named him Sam as in Sam-I-Am (Dr.Zeus) and Sierra Sam (he is living in a kennel in the back of David's Chevy Sierra pick up truck) and Sam Crow (from Sons of Anarchy), so Sam for short & he has personality+++. Raven is not sure about him, hisses if he gets too close so for now he is sleeping in one of Rex's kennels in the garage with a heater on & comes into the house to eat 3X a day..have to feed often & small amounts as he is still gulping his food.
There is an old abandoned farmhouse across from the logging road that leads to our camp in Laurence Station. We drove up there last Tuesday to spend the night. David stopped on the road to check the condition of the road into where our trailer is, so I jumped out to have a pee by the old house & heard a meowing. When I called a small cat came out of the house meowing like crazy, so happy to see me, licking my face, purring like mad! His coat wasn't too matted but he was very skinny & his breath smelled foul. The only food source for a little cat that we came across was deer, rabbit and moose droppings..Rex especially liked the big moose pellets much to David's disgust!
I gave him some dog food as it was all I had with me & David & I discussed taking him to the SPCA in the morning...we drove to the 3 houses that have people living in them in the area but he didn't belong to any of them.
About 1:00 AM we heard meowing outside our trailer & found the cat sitting on the tongue of the trailer trying to see in thru the window! He had walked all the way in from the main road AND the coyotes were howling like mad near by. Don't know how he managed to survive them!
We put him in Rex's travel kennel in the back of the Jeep for the night, fed him porridge & milk in the morning, packed up & headed home early...no cell phone service up there so were 1/2 way home before we could call the SPCA, only to find out there intake was on a Tuesday & this was Wednesday.
Well, after a trip to the Vet ($100 for distemper & rabies shots...the Vet believes someone deliberately abandoned him in such a remote & hostile place) we brought him home thinking we would take him to SPCA in a week if we couldn't find a home for him.
Needless to say, he is fast becoming a part of the family & we are no longer talking about giving him away...I do not need another animal to be responsible for, really, but what does one do when a little cat finds you? David says I must avoid the moose ?cubs/?pups in case one decides to adopt me!
Aaahh, life in the country.....

2010-11-10T02:58:00.000-08:00

April 2008 New Brunswick

2010-07-26T05:20:00.000-07:00

Maritime Move

Relocating to Eastern Canada
I've arrived in St.Andrews-By-The-Sea, New Brunswick, a delightful Loyalist tourist town on the Bay of Fundy. I timed my move to coincide with the arrival of Spring but Mother Nature has delayed Spring this year. I am here in the depths of winter, snow on the ground & snow in the air most days. Below freezing forecast for tonight with snow flurries tomorrow...I'm going to stop checking the weather & just see what happens when I wake up!
I'm camping out in my house...bed on the floor & 2 lawn chairs, furniture delayed for another week and there is 3 feet of snow around the house..no heat..burning wood in fireplace. am sitting here, huddled in front of the fire with raven on my lap, trying to stay warm as a fierce snow storm rages outside...there is already a couple of inches of snow out there and more on it's way...I could almost think the weather is a sign that I should not have made the move here but I know that Spring has to eventually come to Atlantic Canada.
I have stacks of wood all over the place, only problem is that the wood is about 30 years dry so burns super quickly and quite a lot of smoke...good kindling, though. Bought a supply of hardwood from the man who cut my trees down...gave me some of his own home supply as no one selling wood this late in the season but i am very grateful to him.

January 2008 Largo Canyon New Mexico

2010-07-26T05:19:00.001-07:00

January: Life in the Largo in January is harsh. Morning starts at 06:15 when my alarm goes off in my sub-zero bedroom..rough plaster walls and cement floors, I'd be as frozen as my moisturizer (I left it on the windowsill overnight) if it weren't for the electric blanket! I stay toasty warm all night (except for hurried forays with the flashlight to the bathroom a couple of times a night-I'm still not accustomed to so many cups of tea) but when I wake up my nose is soooo cold. I jump out of bed with my clothes in my arms to dress down in the living area which has a woodstove, Pat is usually up & stoking the fire. After a hot cup of peppermint tea, we begin a 20" aerobic exercise program in a very cold room next door. After exercise, it's time to pour buckets of hot water into the horse's troughs, melting the ice so they can drink. Then we feed 11 equines hay: 3 donkeys, 1 hinny (donkey mother, horse father), 1 mule (donkey father, horse mother), 2 mares, 2 stallions and 2 mustang colts. I dress in many layers, with my MEC mountain-climbing longjohns, fleece vest, Wayne's winter jacket & toque and 2 layers of gloves, one wool & one leather on top. I'm so happy that my suitcases have finally arrived as I'm much warmer now with my own clothes and my workboots.
After the horses are fed, 07:00; 12:30 and 5:00, we eat! I am always so glad to be back inside and warm up by the stove with a cup of hot tea. Mid-morning is usually devoted to answering emails and paying bills, then outside we go to train horses. This usually entails Pat telling the horses to do something & me feeding them special treats when they comply....I've almost lost fingers to over-zealous horses once or twice. Do you remember how Toby, the largest donkey, bit two of my fingers a couple of years ago when I was feeding him porridge? well, I haven't forgotten!
After lunch, ours and the horses, is usually more horse training until sunset. It get's very cold here once the sun goes down. After dinner, I'm usually yawning & in bed by 9pm, sometimes I can read but mostly I am way too tired.
Tomorrow is Saturday and Pat & I are going into the cafe..Navajo City Roadhouse.. to run the cafe for the day, Pat to cook & me to waitress. Will be a change from what I've been doing recently, hope I can keep the orders straight and run the cash register.

2008 New Mexico to Vancouver

2010-07-26T05:17:00.000-07:00

March 2008
One minute the horses accept me as a part of the scenery and ignore me, the next they run away. Pat refers to me as the "exploding red coat". She says it's because I move too quickly: apparently cats and dogs are programmed to us humans making rapid movements & changes of direction but horses get spooked - even if I raise my hand to scratch my head! They see rapid movement as predatory. Kitty Lauman, a horse trainer whose videos we watch, says horses are geared to rythmic patterns of repetition so I am trying to walk slowly, deliberately and with no rapid movements of any parts of my body...and I'm in agony if my nose itches or if I feel I am about to sneeze!

I stand in the middle of the paddock with my shoulders relaxed & my head bowed (as I learned from the training camp in Kelowna last summer) & Cisco comes up behind me & puts his head on my shoulder! That feels quite wonderful. He's definitely one of my favourites! He's very gentle but quite skittish, has always been afraid of ropes. Now if only the rest of them would regard me in the same way.

The weather has been simply awful since I arrived, freezing cold & snowy, with ice underfoot. The snow could be said to be beautiful as it falls in large flakes and it does decorate the sides of the mesas, but I cannot get beyond the cold! I am so grateful for the thermal underwear from MEC, I'd be a frozen lump in the far paddock without it, lost till the Spring thaw.

We have been slogging through the snow for days now to feed the horses. The water lines to the main kitchen, dining room & bathrooms froze about a week ago; the pipes are down 3 feet so not sure how long it will be before the ground thaws to that depth. The water lines to the barn & paddocks have been out for about a month now, so every morning & night we break the ice in the water troughs & fill them by the bucketful from the main greenhouse (which, thankfully, has a separate water supply). Carrying buckets of hot water through snow & ice has it's challenges, especially in the frosty early mornings!

The horses all have white whiskers where ice has formed, the ice also cakes on the bottoms of their hooves and the snow blankets their backs. But they are all healthy, we give them extra rations of hot bran and they have the new barn for shelter. Less fortunate are the wild mustangs on Forest Service land, they are not getting enough to eat with the heavy snowfalls and although every talks about it, there doesn't seem to be anyone willing to drive up there to leave feed for them.

The newest member of Pat's menagerie appeared about a month ago, a little black cat who was promptly named Raven. Raven mixes very well with the dogs here but is antagonistic with the 2 other black cats who live here. When I arrived, she had a raw area on her shoulder where the others had attacked her, it was not healing so I started isolating her at night in a travel carrier. She's been doing better ever since, she actually does not mind being locked up at night & being restricted to the house. Perhaps it's because she finally feels safe, I can only imagine what she has been through in her short life.

Vancouver: The 3 day drive up from New Mexico went very well, Raven & Chica (Pat's Jack Russell terrier) were excellent traveling comapnions. They slept most of the way in the back of the cab & were perfectly behaved. Raven tended to come up front to my lap several times but never when I was driving.
Pat & I took quite a scenic route, dropping in to Spokane to visit the White Boot company. Pat has been buying her riding & work boots from White's for over 20 years but has never visited them...always mailed her boots back for refurbishing when needed. We had a tour of the factory & learned how leather boots are made, it was great!
We also chose to drive thru Steven's Pass on Highway 2 out of Spokane rather than to take the freeway option. It was a beautiful drive without much traffic and we finally arived at Wayne's late Wednesday night. Crossing the border with the two animals was no problem (after we had paid for rabies shots and health certificates) as the border officials were more concerned with the mud on the truck than what or who we may be bringing into Canada! No questions re liquor or what I bought but concern that we had been off-road...I told them that Pat lived off-road but they couldn't seem to understand why we didn't have the truck washed on the trip! It just reinforces Pat's conviction that we Canadians are a strange breed.

Two years later and I'm still here!

2010-07-21T19:16:00.000-07:00

Just checking to see if this blog is still active...I haven't been posting to this one & think I should start detailing my renovation project.
This picture is of Rex & me on the beach at Martin's Head last month.

Maritime Move

2008-04-16T16:34:00.000-07:00