Deadfalls......

 6:18 am - Friday - December 19th - TWW - 40° F, humidity 32%, wind 6 mph out of the south by southeast......clear, blue skies today with a forecast high of 65° F.  On this date in 2014 TLE and I were southbound on US-395 at the Mono Lake Vista Point on Conway Summit.....

....it was cold, so we took our customary picture through the windshield of the Newell.  Lee Vining is in the distance.

There are a lot of deadfalls (dead trees on the ground) around the property, plus a few old railroad ties, and it seemed like a good day to move them to a different location to make use of them.  What kind of use you ask?  Well, on one side of the entrance gate (north side) the property is fenced all the way to the property line, but on the other side of the gate, if one was inclined, you could just drive onto the property (if the gate were closed) and be on the driveway in seconds.  In fact, when we first visited the property with Charles and Phyllis the realtor could not open the gate so we drove around.  Over the last 18 months a large part of the juniper tree which resides on the south side of the gate fell to the ground creating a natural barrier, so we decided to add to that making it a little more difficult for unwanted ingress.  TLE and I had already hauled all those large rocks we extracted from the driveway, and the front of the Newell out there for just that purpose.  It took a couple of hours using the Ford 420 diesel loader/gannon, and here is what it looks like now....

.....I would like to see us put up permanent fencing on the southside of the gate, but for now this will act as somewhat of a deterrent to most people.

As you know, we usually don't start our work day until around 10 am as it is often too cold (by that I mean too cold for people living through their 8th decade of life), so by the time we finished it was around 12 pm.  Now a lot of the old deadfalls are gone, along with the old, rotting railroad ties making the area around the house look a little better.  We've probably got another 100' of deadfalls we can haul out there when the mood strikes us.

After a suitably long break I decided to screw down the solar panels I put on the trailer roof a while back.  As you will recall just a couple of days ago I inserted 2 x 4's under the panels to get them a couple of inches off the roof so when it rains they will not be damaged underneath.  With the 2 x 4's there I had something onto which to screw them.  It took me about 30 minutes to finish securing them.  The reason for screwing them down?  Well, it can get quite windy here at times, and that will prevent them from becoming air born in the future.  So far, every day since I installed those solar panels on the trailer roof to aid in charging the lithium house batteries they have reached 100%....something that did not happen last year.

Right now, just two days prior to the winter equinox, the sun is setting at 5:22 pm, and rising at 7:37 am.  In two days that process will begin to slowly reverse itself with the sun setting later, and later, and rising earlier and earlier

For the evening entertainment we watch the finale for Survivor, season 50.  For the first time I an remember, and I am often wrong, the three finalists were all women.....Savannah, Sage and Sophie.  In the end Savannah won the 1 million dollars.  She won four immunity titles tying a record for women, and had to make fire to get to the final three, and just based on that should have been the winner, so it was no surprise to us.  Another great season!

Thanks for stopping by!