My "mail" town

My mail comes out of here, three times a week. So my postal address is in a town 40 miles away.

Population under 200. No grocery store. Coupla bars. A hardware store. Hey, we got a little library!

Like so many small towns on the High Plains it's struggling to hold itself together in the face of forces it didn't make and doesn't completely understand. But who does? The country is changing at a mighty rate and some of us are just barely hanging on.

Full-time job looming ominously

Western Ireland Farmhouse

I joke about getting a job so I can get some rest, but that only applies if you work for somebody else!

I've been a photographer/designer involved in the communications "industry" for many years. Last year I bought a wonderful giclée printer capable of producing archival prints (80-200 year permanence) for my limited edition prints. Recently I've started using the printer to produce archival note cards in various sizes. Mostly a lark—I love the design process— it is starting to get out of hand. The other day, just before our mini-vacation, I spent all day feeding the machine with high-quality heavy-weight paper to keep up with recent orders.

Now I'm starting to rethink the whole bright idea. I really don't want a full-time job—or anything that comes close. I've had a few of those in my time. I really enjoy the design and the problem-solving, and the pleasures of the finished product as well. I'm just getting really thoughtful about how far I want this to go.

(The picture above is from the Irish series of note-cards and prints.)

A Busy Day

The first day back from a trip is always taken up by playing catch-up, especially in the growing season.

My grass didn't really need cutting when I left, but by the time I got back it did. I also had some sink holes in the rear dog pen that badly needed filling. So I spent my day driving the Rhino out onto the prairie to an old dump area about a mile away that has good, clean "beach" sand and brought back two big loads to dump into the holes. (The dump-bed on the Rhino is a great help!)

Then the grass, of which I have about one and a half acres to mow. Then the dog pen areas, front and back, and weed-whacking the borders, and... Well, it seemed to go on and on and I still didn't get to weed the garden. Tomorrow for that I guess. But the place looks great and now, except for the garden, it's time for another rest. Oh, what a tension filled life I lead.

All this rain we have been having (more than our annual average rainfall in less than a month) has the prairie waist high and lush. Wildflowers are abloom everywhere and you could hide an elephant in the wild dock thickets. The deer have been lying low, fawning. But I did see a mom and a young'un today while hauling sand. A less pleasant result of all the moisture has been the 'skeeters. We are fortunate in that we usually have enough breeze to keep them off you. But if you are in the shade when the wind dies down to nothing you are gonna get et, for sure.

But this is such a glorious time of year, 'skeeters and all.

Back from our mini-vacation

We're back on-ranch from our July 4th excursion.

We had a great time, the dawgz and I. They are liked and appreciated at my friends' place and there were two new puppies there for them to play with. They had a great time.

Mostly we all just lazed around and "hung out" (I think the phrase is), but we did a little prairie dog shooting. I had been super-lazy and despite having all manner of varmint hardware just brought a scoped Ruger 77/22. Great fun was had plinking away at way-out-of-range prairie-poodles, but I did manage two confirmed, clean kills at 160-yards or more with the little rimfire. But the outing itself was much more important than the kills, despite their nuisance nega-value to my friends' ranch, which has a-plenty of the little vermin.

Sunday we had a good BBQ feed at the local rural fire department, with all neighbors gathering to feed their faces and swap lies. Gracious, but the food was good, and way too plentiful.

So we're back now. With grass that needs mowing and a garden that needs weeding and limbs that need clearing from storms. All will be done in good time.

Right now the three of us are doing a bit of post-trip loafing. And not feeling the least guilty about it.

Taking a break

The dawgz and I are going out of state to a friend-family's ranch for the 4th. I'll be taking a few days off from fiddling with this blog-thingy.

Happy 4th, everybody. Let's all try to think about what we're supposed to be celebrating. Have a great one!

Variety is the spice...

The lakes, ponds, and wetlands are rich habitats and a treat for the eye, but a mile or so up the road there's this. It's hard to get bored driving around this country, even at 10MPH. There's always something different just ahead and it's almost always worth savoring.

Even this barren-looking country has its appeal.

Vibrating with life

These prairie ponds and wetlands are alive with life of every description. This one came right up to the road, which was elevated somewhat levee-style. There were little puddle-ducks paddling around everywhere and having a great time. When I stopped to make a picture, instead of flying off, they just paddled off into the vegetation. I couldn't see them, but I could see the plants trembling and moving from their passage all over the place.

I've never experienced any environment so rich with varied life as the prairie.

Puddle ducks

Here's a couple of unidentified flying objects, A/K/A "puddle ducks", in a pond a mile or so from 'Pelican Lake.' This is a shallow pond, as almost all here are, and this pair was having a ball diving down to the bottom for a bite of lunch. Next time I come by this way I will bring my binoculars.

Pelecanus erythroryhnchos

Many of the ponds and lakelets serve as breeding grounds for the American White Pelican. They're with us for quite a while in the summer time. These are big fellows with an eight-foot wingspan. They look clumsy and ungainly but they are wonderful flyers and can soar on our high plains winds like expensive Swiss sailplanes.

This bunch was on one of the larger ponds.

Prairie ponds

One of the highlights of my trip yesterday were the many prairie ponds I passed along the way. While some are heavily alkaline and therefore useless for much of anything, others are beautiful wetland habitats, oases of abundant life. Some are quite small, maybe an acre or two. Other are perhaps one or two hundred acres in size. This one is on one of the ranches where I hunt deer.

The short cut

Yesterday I had business in a town I don't get to very often. There's a way to get there that's mostly hard road, but then there's the "short cut" that runs for almost forty miles across one of the larger ranches in the area (over 100,000 acres) to finally meet up with a good hard road that runs the fifty miles on into town. I chose the cross-country route yesterday, since I hadn't been that way before. I'll definitely go that way again as there's a lot to see, even though the road isn't too good. The picture above shows one of the better sections. I'll post later about some of what I saw.

Another neighbor gone

If I told him once I told him a dozen times: "Nathan, you gotta stop messing around with those silly centrifuges and that cheap, mail-order uranium!"

But would he listen? No!