Greetings
and welcome to the "Rancho Relaxo" blog for December. Would you believe that there are still a lot of things
going on around here? So, the Ol' Rooster and Ol' Hen just wanted to share
what's happening at our humble rancho nestled in the dying-to-be-green foothills
of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. "California Gold" is supposed to behind us because
we're entering our rainy season but we're still waiting for the change of color. Nevertheless, a great expectation of wetness from the “El Niño” has been forecast. The few drops of “mad rain” we’ve had so far are disappointing but still encouraging.
Our first part of winter seems to be a wonderful extension of
fall. That has been a true bonus because it keeps the heating bills at a minimum. But, we’re ready for the seasonal changes (did I mention how we need the rain to start?). We've only needed to wear a light jacket so far because the daily high temps
have been comfortably cool. And, we were blindsided by the 77 degree high we just experienced! It was dang near an "Indian Summer". I've experienced one of those and it was weird!
Anyway,
thanks for dropping in at the Rancho Relaxo global headquarters where we are…moving along.
Note: click on the pics to enlarge.
Wanna see my antenna? This is the big base-loaded mag-mount "trucker's" type CB antenna that is used for the 10 meter Ham/Amateur radio band. It's tuned with an MFJ-949E antenna tuner and has a 1:1 SWR reading. The other day (when lots of things happen around here), I was talking to Hawaii, Texas, and other points around the country on a little Radio Shack HTX-100 monoband transceiver. It puts out about 18 watts. Many years ago, and while driving to Texas, I was talking to Europe from Arizona on that little guy and this antenna. Fun stuff!
Oh, deer! This is a fairly common sight around these parts. It's also not all that uncommon to see a doe with the fawn and it's (sadly) not all that uncommon to see one alongside the road. We had already had lunch (and our freezer is full) so we let this one pass without hindrance.
Here's the "mad rain" that's referred to from time to time. There's enough rain to make mud but not enough to rinse it off. UGH!
"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas....". Yep. Connie the Canner and Christmas Cooker unpacked the Nativity set and enlisted my help for wiring and any "gorilla work". It's set on a timer so it doesn't run all night.
For all you ex-pats out there, he's a shot looking west from the bridge on Lower Globe Drive. It won't take long to notice that it isn't at all the same as before. It's like looking at a completely different river. It's cleared out and much wider. I hope to have a fishing report before long (uhhhh.....but don't hold your breath).
Here's our proud and cocky-but-handsome bantam rooster. It's hard not to love this little guy. Now that he's all nice and grown up, it's time to find him a nice new home. Most likely, we'll ship out the two bantam hens, too. They sure are cute but not all that useful so they'll need to go. ;
Nothing
really to see here. It’s just that I’m so dad-blamed happy to walk past these
two handy gadgets and not see their guts hanging out all over the floor. The Maytag dryer has been overhauled twice (it had lots of guts) and the Samsung washer is
new. Ye old Maytag was a piece of junk that I no longer wanted to mess with. It
wasn’t worth salvaging. Now, that’s a piece of junk when it isn’t worth
the Ol’ Rancher’s attention and wrenches!
A word from
our sponsor:
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Tip of the
day:
“If you find a toilet in your
dream, don’t use it” - Anon
It’s
December….already! Doesn’t that just sink your sampan? Christmas is only 18 days away!?! We just blew through another year! YIKES! OK…ok….moving along…
Well…sort of moving along. Since it’s “that
time of the year” (again), Connie the Canner has donned her Christmas apron and
other togs and started decorating the Christmas tree…and house…the front porch….and
the church…and church fellowship hall…and the dogs….umm…maybe not the dogs (but I haven't checked today).
But, then again, it’s probably only because our furry buddies refuse to sit still long enough to be adorned with a wreath or a bow. Anyway,
the place is alive with an ocean of cute tiny lights and sparkly bibelots that
are the sure sign of an imminent Noel.
She’s
finishing up thinking about her plans for this year (the ones she's has been working on since December 26th of last year. Not much get's passed her that way). For instance, there were a few extra Christmas trees that had been accrued over the previous few years so they were spiffed up and sold (extra cash is our friend!). Busy lady, that gal.
Cleaning
up or Dirtying down:
Our “spring cleaning” is way past due and it looks like it won’t be addressed
until…next spring (and that’s what we said the previous spring!). It even looks
like we are trying to set a record for getting the fewest number of things
accomplished in the most amount of time. So far.... I think we’re crushing it.
It’s almost
a conundrum. We have a lot of things in the barn that need to go to the hangar
at the airport. But, we can’t just haul stuff outside the barn into the weather
(be it too hot or too cold or too wet). And, we can’t just shuffle stuff around
inside the barn since there it’s already shuffled to the point of not having
enough room to even turn around in. “Sigh”.
An attempt
was made to pull a bunch of stuff out so we could haul out one of our fridges (it’s
dying). However, after getting started, the weather abruptly changed and we had
to stuff it all back inside. Hauling, moving, racking, and stacking, for
practice is really not part of my professional training. So, we’re trying to haul, move,
rack, and stack, for real this time.
It would be almost
twice the work but I’m nearing the time to stop thinking about it and just haul it all it to
the hangar anyway and sort it out later (or haul it to the Salvation Army or
the Sheltered Workshop in P’ville). In any case, the fridge has to come out and
that won’t happen until the aisle is cleared. It’s enough to make Maynard G.
Krebbs cringe and cry.
The ”Great
Flood” mystery has been solved: Not long ago (but longer than the other day), our coop was
inundated by a quite unexpected flood of good ol’ water (we have really good
water here). Finding almost a foot of water in your chicken shack is a rather
daunting discovery (the daunting part being the part where you already don’t
have enough time to fix things that need fixin’ as it is). What to do? All I
could think to do was scratch my head.
It was more
than a mystery since the Ol’ Rancher wasn’t irrigating the oranges or his
garden boxes. And, the next door neighbors (who used to leave their water on overnight and flood the place)
have graduated to a better place than Springville (you know; the place that has
all those harps, clouds, and angels and the lawn doesn't need to be irrigated).
The new neighbor, whose aid was enlisted, deduced that the water was coming from the inside of the coop so he turned the water hose off at the source. Sure enough! That was the issue! The hose was under the water and you couldn't see that the water was running. The hose was turned off and the problem was solved, right? Ah, but this
Rancho Relaxo and you just never know what will happen or when surprises will execute their malevolent tactics.
A few days later, the head chicken sitter was out in the now-dry huevos hotel giving his bipolar biddy buddies (they can’t make up their minds whether they are there to actually produce eggs or not) some love (in the form of layer pellets, scratch, rice and noodles). And, with every food cart trip, the ten-gallon waterer is sure to be checked and filled as necessary (PRN, eh?). All was going well.
Imagine the look on Rancho Ran’s mug when he
started to head out the door and glanced back to see the water hose gushing
water into a pool that was rapidly getting larger! What?! Since you can never
tell what will happen when you enter a chicken coop (other than knowing what
you’ll be stepping in), the old egg heister was already wearing his sturdy rubber
boots and was ready to tackle the puddle.
But, what caused
this mess?! A stupid chicken (is there such thing as a smart chicken?) stepped
on the ball valve and it turned on (the valve connects two hoses in the middle of the coop)! Mystery solved! Other than David Copperfield
being involved, nothing else can explain what happened. Besides, I’m pretty
sure that I saw a guilty look on one of the nearby hens. Yep.
The Great
Dust Up or Rancho Ran the Dust Buster:
I haven’t
always lived in the SJV (San Joaquin Valley). As a boy, my family moved out of
state on more than one occasion. We lived in Kansas (more than once), Colorado, and Wyoming. To
make life interesting (as if it wasn’t already), I attended the second grade in
four different schools in three different towns (one in a different state), and went to the fourth grade,
sixth, and seventh grade in two different cities in two different states.
Then, as an
adult, I lived in Illinois, Oklahoma, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington State. So,
these are the respective “air quality” references used when judging things like
how many pounds of dirt are in each cubic foot of air that’s being sucked into
my lungs with each breath (and probably why my favorite band was the “Rolling
Stones”).
But, having
grown up mostly in the Central Valley parts, not much thought was given to such
scientific matters as an AQI (air quality index). In fact, our town was a little dinky farm community where
most folks were lucky if they could spell “s-c-i-e-n-c-e”. Not that I couldn’t
spell science, but it was that I was a farm laborer and dish washer (otherwise
there would have been no money for Saturday nights at the local roller rink and
the Sock Hop, don’tcha know). That was from ’63-’69. Reckon, dirt was my friend
back then (not so much now unless it’s corralled in garden boxes).
Move about
3.5 pounds of calendar pages forward to the spring of 1990 when we moved to
Kelso, WA (neighbor to Longview, WA) from Fresburg, CA (sic…you just have to
have a pet name for the places you live, eh?). After moving there, we noticed
how amazingly green everything was (they can get more rain in one month than we
get in one year here). However, we hadn’t actually taken notice of just how
wonderfully clean the air was. You would think that not having to breath air
that was as thick as a chocolate milk shake was noticeable but I guess not.
That is,
until an opportunity arose some months later to head back to the SJV for a
visit. Talk about a shock! My throat was cracking almost to the point of dysphonia!
It was that difficult to speak! There had been no idea of just how dirty and
polluted the valley air actually was until being reintroduced to it! That was a
hard lesson to learn but sneezing dirt clods is hard evidence. This issue
resolved itself as soon as the cool clean air of Washington lavished my lungs. It’s
also one reason we make a run for the coast as often as we can. Fresh air is
our friend!
After about
five years, the season in WA was over and it was time to move back to the SJV.
It didn’t take long for the need for us to wash our Seville and pickup. But,
now imagine the fact that the car and pickup needed to be washed again three
days later! Yikes!! I knew that it needed to be washed because, when I went to
get into the bloody thing, it was brown instead of blue because of a huge
deposit of dust covering it! It would have been easy to lose my Jeep Comanche pickup
in any Wal-Mart parking lot!
That’s when
the weekly regimen of car washing was instituted so that we wouldn’t end up
feeling like lazy, unscrupulous, dirt huggers. Thankfully, we could afford the
weekly hit of “rinse and run”. Guess who did the inside cleaning and general
detailing for the tires and such? Ah, but my pickee-up truck sho’ nuff looked
spiffy all the time (the 4.0L straight six engine got detailed, too!).
Move 37.25 pounds
of calendar leaves ahead another 27 years. These are the number of years of having
lived back in the SJV. Rancho Ran and Connie the Canner are abiding in Dustville,
USA in a large two-story home with a large back patio. Imagine there being so
much dirt (not dust: dirt!) on that big beautiful patio (where three nice big BBQ grills are
parked) that it needs to have Rancho Ran use a motorized leaf blower to oust it
back into the yard. Then, try to visualize the grimace on his face when, two
days later, he has to blast the same ton of dirt off the patio again! That’s
the kind of thing that can really deflate your bounce house.
Bet you can guess
who’s really tired of being a dirt herder, eh? The Ol' Rancher has no issue with being a
farmer with dirt in his blood. But, Ol’ Ran does have an issue with having all
that dirt piling up on his patio, car, and in his lungs, throat, and ears,
though.
Goodness!
Gracious! Great balls of….fur! Our pal, Fuzzy, needs a haircut. He's overgrown to the point that he's a four-legged chunk of matted fur. Our doggy clippers just don't work so we're thinking about tracking down a set of motorized shears that they use for sheep, goats, llamas, and Yeti's (I think I saw a 5 hp model on "Craig's List". Should work ). We can trim the fur around his eyes a bit but that's when we use our regular house scissors. There's one last chance whereby we may succeed and that's to use our "Flowbee" hair cutting system. The vacuum cleaner will need to be hooked up first (we'll likely need the Shop Vac) . The "Flowbee" sucks up the hair/fur and then whacks it and it and parks it in the vacuum. We'll see and let everyone know if we can restore FuzzBall to his former handsome self. Right now his on par for winning the prize for the worst looking Doodle on the planet. He's a Wreck-a-Doodle for now.
Well....there
you have it: another short episode of the long happenings at Rancho Relaxo:
home of Rancho Ran, the world's least-most greatest authority: home of the
Yo-Yo twins and home of a retarded duck:
home of Connie the Canner, the world's greatest side-kook and CEE (Chief of
Everything Else): where the air smells and where alliteration reigns supreme:
where being modern is optional and where there are no slaves to fashion: where
the eggs are always mostly fresh: where things can get...interesting: where
it's all news to me and where...you just never know.
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