RANCHO BASTANTE CALOR

You are looking at the reason why Princess Abbie doesn't get a lot of baths. Within moments of being clean, she break dances in the middle of the nearest patch of dirt or grass (she prefers dirt). She still manages to have a fairly shiny coat but will not be winning any "shiny dog" awards (do they have mud bog races for dogs?). She gets called "dirty dog" a lot (and the chickens get called "dirty birds" a lot, too).

See what I mean?! Here she is practicing her break dance routine. I think she has secret SnapChat and Instagram accounts.

This is grandson, Evan Jennewein, wearing his custom made anti-cootie mask. His granny is really good at making them!

This is the bike rack at our Porterville Wal-Mart. Not a bike to be seen. A couple of weeks later there were a few of them hanging on the rack. They are probably made in China so it may be awhile before we see them again. 

There are plans to rebuild the library and tons of books are being donated for "the cause". Time will give us the answers to all of our questions, no doubt. 

Here's the Ol' Drone Meister, himself still trying to figure out how to use the iPhone drone controller. Did you know....these new-fangled things can take pictures too?! By the way, this is in "Food 4 Less" and it's a "no drone zone". Bet you knew that. 









It’s June 2020! Almost half the year has whizzed on by faster than you can say the alphabet backwards!! It’s enough to make you want to snuggle up next to the Hi-Fi and listen to the latest “Cowsills” album (which I think was in ’69)! Moving along……

The heat is here…sort of: ….the grass on the hills has turned to gold….the ground is being baked rock hard by the sun….summer has (sort of) arrived….the electricity bill is about to go through the roof….irrigation regimens are in place and sprinklers are (mostly) ready….dash blast the gosh darn blankety heck! I was just getting used to the wonderfully mild spring with the gorgeous cool mornings and now we can expected to be hammered by summer! Dinga dang!

Prior to being pounced upon by the sun’s duty to scorch mankind, it was 65 degrees for a high temp going into the third week of May! Historically, the third week brings 95+ temps. But, fickle weather found us going from a high of 72 to a low of 72 and a high of 100+ in about a week. If that doesn’t just melt your “Dilly Bar” (thank you "Dairy Queen"!), we went to sweltering in place with a “Bang!” when we hit 106 (a record)! Just what we all needed: more sweat time.  Ugh.

So, as short-lived as it was, on May 30^th, it was a wonderful and remarkable 74 degrees! No complaints but, what on earth is going on?! We didn’t have Ol’ Swampy on and haven’t even set up the fans! Can you believe that?! It was marvy!

And, on Wednesday, June 3^rd, it was 102. Two days later, it was 72 degrees with a slight prospect for rain (and it did, in fact, rain!). Does that just make you want to race for pinks, or what?!

This is definitely a first for me! Never has it been this cool in June that this old Villain (Porterville’ain, that is) can ever recall experiencing!  Then, to wake up and find 56 degrees on the thermometer and with a forecast for 81 degrees for a high (and 76 degrees as the next day’s high) was unreal! Now to beat the band: tonight’s low is 44 degrees! Ah, but the beginning of the second week in June is also the expected return of the nasty ol’ heat.

Sleeping with Chickens: Princess Abbie has finally learned to be a “chicken dog”. This is to say that she no longer thinks that chickens are toys sent from God for her to play with as she sees fit. Long have we suffered with her high-spirited coon-doggedness for wanting to either play with or tree anything that moved. Though we still aren’t sure how she “got the memo” that her job was to serve and protect the birds and be their friend, she finally did just that. She can now be trusted to follow along with the ol’ rooster roust’er during his chicken chores.

That being said, it is RR policy to count beaks at night prior to locking them up in the coop. There have been too many rebellious Road Island Reds and Barred Rocks that have arbitrarily decided to spend the night away from home. They’ve been found anywhere from under a bush to up in the trees. Rather than having them attend “Chicken Safety” classes, beaks are counted and the door is shut. No free chicken dinners at the “Rocky Raccoon Diner” that way.

Well, Miss Abbie decided to follow me into the coop one evening about 9:30 or so. That’s the best time since it’s good and dark and the birds will be half asleep and more amenable to my being close to them.

Now, you must remember that she is mostly black with some well-presented white and with a tad of tan trim. She’s a pretty little pooch but she blends into the evening rather well. That makes her a great coon dog at night (all I need is a day off so’s I can go coon huntin’ at night). So, being “the nose that knows”, she busied herself sniffing out small critters or other invaders while the old egg hunter (egg head?) collected eggs, counted beaks, and insured peace in the pecker palace.

This is the part where things get…interesting. Seems that the Ol’ Rancher didn’t quite notice that his four-legged shadow hadn’t follow him out of the coop. Reckon she was too busy nosing about to notice that I had stepped out because she surely didn’t make a sound at the time. Dark night… dark doggie…dog gone. Bedtime for Bonzo.

After a good night’s rest, it was time to attend to the birds so that we wouldn’t be lying when we called them “free range” chickens. Can you imagine the look on the old dude’s mug when he opened the door and out popped a rather excited coon dog?! She cut several styles of dancing all at once and in more than one direction. It took a while to calm her down but she finally did.  

I promised her that I’d be more careful if she’d be more attentive and not be so nosy at night when inside the coop. A couple of doggie treats helped her to cope. It’ll probably be a long time before she’s locked up with the carceral cluckers club again.

Thrice mice! Or, Abbie hates meeses to pieces: there doesn’t seem to be any distinction with Abbie as to the size of her prey. If it’s a coon, you get full Abbie. If it’s a little blue-belly lizard, you get a full presentation of Abbie’s abilities. She’s an equal opportunity critter git’r.

That was the case the other evening when the ol’ varmint hater stepped out back to go count his chickens. Abbie was all jacked up and had the tarped-down rototiller at bay.

It wasn’t difficult to discern that whatever was under the tiller probably wasn’t going to attack and eat us; so, I just grabbed the handle bars, lifted them up, and gave a hard pull to in reverse. Sure enough, out zipped a small field mouse who simply couldn’t quite break the sound barrier in his dash for freedom. That’s not quite fast enough to escape so Abbie snatched him in the blink of an eye! Good girl! Schneller Hund – 1; Hated field mouse – 0.

About a week later, another field mouse found his way under the rototiller (probably looking for his brother). Once again, Blitzen Hund Abbie was lean, mean, and on the scene. That rototiller was cornered!

After a big tug, the tiller lurched backwards to reveal the little startled squeaker. He must have taken track lessons from his loser brother because, he too, was too slow to outrun my high-speed huntin’ dog. Go, Abbie! Abbie – 1; retarded critter – 0.

We’re not through catching mice, yet. A few days later, in the morning, Abbie’s biggest fan and owner was opening the big 50 lb sack of dog food on the patio when a something tore out of the top. In a blur, it rocketed out of the bag, hit the concrete, and the fled out back.

I heard Abbie instantly break the sound barrier so it was easy to figure out that the unknown object was a mouse. Had it gone any other direction, it may have stood a chance. It didn’t; it headed straight into Abbie who was patiently waiting for her morning chow. Yay, Abbie! Abbie – 1; subsonic varmint- 0.

Yes, we have lots of squashies …we have lots of squashies today: we’ve already started off the season with a few squash and bell peppers. When the big harvest hits, there will be a ton of squash (summer squash, zucchini, acorn, and spaghetti squash), mucho bunches of okra (8 plants! Hello, “Bubba Gumps”!), and scads of tomatoes (spaghetti and salsa, here we come!)! We may need to grab our pop-up canopy and set up a road-side veggie stand!

We can hardly wait until the maters ripen! We have one “Roma” plant with two dozen tomatoes on it! Can you spell “canning”? Connie the Canner will be stuffing those babies into jars quicker than E. T. can call home! My bet is that there’ll be a lot of spaghetti sauce in the offing too!

Sauté soir: the least the old folks could do with a handful of freshly-picked squash is to eat them with vigor. No one had to twist any arms, either! So, out came the sharp veggie whacker (dull veggie whackers are dangerous), a larger sauté pan, EVO, some butter, onions, garlic, and freshly-picked yellow summer squash.

A tall knife-wielding dude wearing an apron (oh, but what a sight that was) was seen carving up the veggies and heating up the pan while Connie the Canner grabbed some long grain rice and activated the rice cooker. In almost no time, Rancho Relaxo was flooded with the wondrous aroma of roasted garlic, sautéed onions and squash. Be still, my tongue! When the rice was done, we filled our plates and feasted on the bounty! This will happen again!

It was all-the-more satisfying to note that our home-grown goodies had much more available nutrition than store-bought produce. I once read that produce now has only about one-seventh the nutritional value that it did prior to WW2. Viva la veggies!

Gopher gone! Or, Abbie vs soggy gopher: The other day (when lots of things happen around here), there was a fresh gopher hole in middle of our newly-mowed lawn. Since new gopher holes are not considered to be an asset at this ranch, options were pondered as to how to evict the small, brown, toothy, incredibly-presumptuous, varmint.

Experience has proven that, if a hole is new, the critter is likely to be pretty close to the surface. In such a case, one option is to “jug him” (YouTube. Search “jugging a gopher”) or to flood him out. Since there were no large jugs around, the decision was made to flood him out.

It just so happens that two hoses are kept in the front for irrigation purposes. One was appropriated and shoved into the fresh hole in the ground and the “ditch water” was turned loose (we have well water but irrigate with ditch water from the canal that runs along the hill behind us).

The hunch paid off; a really wet and really angry gopher emerged from his muddy habitat. Would you like to guess who was not at her post and not ready to snatch the brown bane as he exited the hole? Yep. Abbie had wander off to sniff….gopher holes. *SIGH*. After few “Abbie! Sic’em’s!”, she moseyed over to see what all the excitement was about.

It didn’t take her long to notice a really soggy gopher looking around and wondering which way was up. It was all she wrote at that point; Abbie took it from there and within moments had slain the bane. Abbie – 1; Soggy Mining Varmint – 0.

Hang it all: as busy as Connie is, you would think that she wouldn’t be able to tackle spring cleaning. Ho! Ho! You don’t know this seasonally motivated lady! It must be her ability to mult-task or something because she’ll “git ‘r done” somehow or another! She does spring cleaning (including last spring’s!) with a vengeance!

It must have been “Thinning Out Day” at the ranch because she was scouring the place and finding extra clothes hangers. By the time the San Joaquin Valley dust had settled, she had corralled more than 100 of them! Holy, coat hangers, Batman! Even she was shocked!

Weigh me down: the ol’ hefty home boy is down to 205lbs from 230lbs. But, he’s on his way to 190lbs which is his “fighting weight” (and you just know that the Ol’ Rancher is a really peaceful, fight-less, old dude). The hard part should be over with so the rest shouldn’t be a big deal.

It was easy, really. All I did was shorten my arms so that I stopped eating everything within reach. That, and I started consuming things that were easy to digests and actually good for you: like: water, coffee late’, almond milk, soy and oat milk, hemp milk (hey! It was a cheap 99 cent closeout! Yes. It tastes good, too), mashed whatever, pureed whatever, mineral water, and maybe a granola bar or two tossed in for good measure.

One favorite is the electrolyte water. That’s where they put electrons in the water and there’s no added sugar; it’s diet electrons, don’tcha know. I drink a lot of that stuff. Hope I don’t start glowing in the dark.

I also found that Burger King’s 8 piece chicken nuggets are pretty easy to digest, too (uh-huh). So is a large, organic, baked, butter-drenched, free-range, Idaho potato. Anyway, the weight is falling off like...well…melting off…uh... like…something …I was hoping to use “slabs” but that wouldn’t have been honest...I’m workin’ on it.

It’s difficult to lose weight. That’s especially true when you’re so hungry that you are ready to tackle, BBQ, then feast on the nearest cow, calf, pig, piglet, goat, rabbit, or hamster. Boy! It’s really tempting to sneak up on a slow-moving order of hot salty French fries, too! Look out, Jack in the Box tacos! Man! I really love those vile and amazing things! My common sense was telling me that I needed to skimp by on boiled baby carrots but my wild side wanted a fried adult hamburger.  

Say “Cheese……cake!”: what a wonderful surprise it was when a Styrofoam container showed up with some super treats in it! It was laden with two absolutely gorgeous cheese cakes that had been sent by Dan and Trixie Howden (Connie’s son-in-law and elder daughter) for “Mother’s Day”!

One was triple chocolate and the other caramel-chocolate-pecan! Zowie! Talk about good stuff!  We delighted in those two scrumptious goodies for the next week! Cheese cake is our friend (and they’re easy to digest)!

There you have it: another short episode of the long happenings at Rancho Relaxo, home of Rancho Ran, the world's foremost authority (the previous one died) and Connie the Canner (world's greatest side-kook): where the air smells like freshly roasted garlic and a sweaty overworked rancher: where things can get...interesting: where it’s all news to me: and, where...you just never know.