Magical night

Written by karen on February 24th, 2009

I had a lot of work to catch up on yesterday after traveling last week. Gradually, through the day, I watched the temperature outside rise into the high 80s and thought, “Man, I have to get outside.” I had planned to go for a walk around 4, but with just a few chapters to go in a vocabulary book I was working on, I kept working past that.

Finally, at almost 5, Brad and I decided to go out to our property and have a picnic dinner.

Before eating, we took a walk. It was wonderfully warm and breezy and really a stunning night. Over the course of an hour or so, we watched the sky change.

(As usual, click to enlarge the pics.)


It was really an amazing night. The air was warm, and it was so quiet. It seemed magical.

 

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Movie time – Road maintenance, ranch style

Written by karen on February 23rd, 2009

 

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You won’t find these at Walmart

Written by karen on February 22nd, 2009

A few months before we moved here, we toured around some places in NM. One of the places we really liked was Hatch, the chili capital of NM.

Our local Safeway in Douglas carries Hatch chiles. Last week, I bought a bag, and today I used them to make Fiery Tofu with Red Chiles, Orange and Ginger. Yum!

 

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Something we’ve been planning on for a long time

Written by karen on February 14th, 2009

Brad and I spent all day today working on our land.

For a long time, I’ve been working on this project. (We bought the sheet metal a couple months before we left LA.) I’ll be doing more of these to put up on various corners, etc. of our property.

 

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Floors

Written by karen on February 14th, 2009

We are planning to do the floors in our new houses as acid washed concrete. I was worrying a little about the environmental aspects of the acid wash. (I’m much more sensitive to what we throw in the trash, down the drain, and on the ground here.) Then we found SoyCrete — an environmentally-sound alternative. We also talked to someone about doing it, and she said it’s really easy. We probably won’t even have to etch the concrete on the existing slab. Now we just have to pick a color.

 

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The perfect snow

Written by karen on February 12th, 2009

Woke up to snow Tuesday morning. It was gone by afternoon.

 

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Movieland

Written by brad on February 8th, 2009

Karen is not the only one making movies here in Portal. I’ve started up again on my time-lapse movies. This one uses the koi pond as a reflecting device for the clouds as well as for its koi.

[coolplayer width=”540″ height=”360″ autoplay=”0″ loop=”0″ charset=”utf-8″ download=”1″ mediatype=””]
Koi Pond with Clouds
[/coolplayer]

It’s stormy here today and I have a camera setup facing toward Horseshoe Canyon. I’m keeping an eye out for rain, but so far so good. It’s windy as heck. I have the tripod kind of wrapped into some fencing to prevent it from flying off.

I’ve gotten better at looking at the clouds and evaluating their movie potential. It takes some patience to see the clouds move and to determine their direction. Today it’s too cold for much of that; I tried, but you can’t really shiver and watch clouds at the same time. I basically pointed the camera in a nice direction and got back into the house.

The world is so much different with digital cameras. I shoot all kinds of movies that never amount to anything and the only cost is batteries. Even those are rechargeable.

There are a couple variation of this time-lapse on youtube.

 

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A new take on Friday “happy hours”

Written by karen on February 7th, 2009

When we lived in California, Brad and I used to occasionally knock off work early on a Friday and go do something fun. (Not that it outweighs all the extra hours we put in, but this is one of the nice side benefits of having our own business.) Often, we went down to the beach or the harbor to walk, people watch, and, of course, eat.

Yesterday, in celebration of finally getting my desk cleaned off, we decided to go out and look for some more abandoned train cars. We found one, but then got sidetracked following a canyon road. This time it was Price Canyon, which is a few miles south of Apache (10 or 15 miles south of where we live.) These canyon roads, like the one our property is on, are all dirt roads that run west off 80, typically starting with with a few miles of beautiful open range land.

As the roads get closer to the Chiricahua Mountains, they meet up with the national forest.

Then the terrain gradually changes to more rocky mountains. This road first went through one of of the densest oak forests I’ve seen. It was beautiful. In general, the road was very good, but as we got back into the forest more, it got rougher, making us glad we have a big truck. There were some dry rock creek beds that were easy to imagine as rushing rivers in the wet season.

We saw a couple beautiful whitetail deer and many birds. Back in the forest, the rock walls and mountain faces were stunning. We can’t wait to come back and hike here. (From the end of the road, it’s 6 miles to Sentinel Peak and 9 miles to Rucker Lake.) There were some astoundingly tall pines as well. It is amazing how fast the flora changes here.

This was a pretty long road, going about 10 miles back before it ended at a trailhead that we can’t wait to hike and explore more. I rode most of the way back standing in the back of the truck bed (“safari-ing” as we call it), shooting some video. (Stay tuned for the video; I have a big work project to get through first.)

The day finished with us driving back into a beautiful sunset.

I have a feeling this will be the start of some great new Friday “happy hours,” possibly extending into some nice long weekend backpack trips. :)

 

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Old wrecked train cars

Written by karen on February 5th, 2009

There used to be a railway through our valley. I know this in part because you can see old tracks in some places and in part because I researched a deed restriction related to the railroads when we bought our land.

As a result, there are several old abandoned train cars on the plains here. They are beautiful. I’ve begun photographing them and hope to have a whole collection of pictures soon. In the meantime, here’s a preview. (Click image to enlarge.)

 

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Before and after

Written by karen on February 2nd, 2009

So we did decide to go with switching the living room and the office in our rental house. Here are the before and after pictures. (Note that none of this is our furniture.)

Living room before:

…and after (now the office):

Here’s the new living room (previously an empty room that we’d planned on being the office):

This isn’t our “dream house,” but it’s certainly more than adequate for the time while we’re building. And, while I was worried that having a home office might drive me crazy, so far it’s really fine. I actually enjoy not having to get up and “go to work” and being able to take a walk at lunch or after work in the surrounding beauty. (Knowing that dark is coming each evening around 4 or 5 is actually motivating me to stop work then.)

 

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