The verdict is in.....

 8:30 am - Tuesday - February 16th - TWW - 33° F, humidity 63%, cloud cover 40%, wind 17 mph out of the south by southwest.....partly cloudy today with a forecast high of 44° F.  The view this morning....

.....and on this date in 2013 TLE and I made it to Key West, FL....one of our bucket list items....

.....it was also the day my blog, still in its infancy, passed 50,000 total page views....we now sit at 3,450,862 total page views as of this morning (Tuesday).  We are adding 60-80,000 page views a month now, which should put us over 4 million page views by the end of the year.

By 9 am Monday the forecast winds had arrived, and by noon time they were steady at 25 mph, with gusts into the 50's at times.  Not exactly a day one would want to spend much time outdoors, and we did not.  You could tell rain was on the way, and it finally arrived around 7:30 pm, but I get ahead of myself.

We spent all morning indoors with short forays out to the greenhouse to check on our rapidly maturing vegetables.  We knew we had a package at the PO Box, which had arrived Saturday, and we were waiting until the afternoon to go into town and pick it up along with any mail as we were hoping two other packages would arrive, but they did not, so around 2:15 pm we headed into Seligman in the Explorer to buy some Velcro at the General Store, some milk at the Family Dollar, pick up our mail, and then have a late lunch at Westside Lilo's.....it was kind of a delayed Valentines Day occasion.....

Have I told you before how much I like their coffee?

.....TLE ordered their Ruben, and I their 'BOLT' (bacon, onion, lettuce and tomato).  I chased my entree with several cups of their wonderful coffee.  We lingered over our entrees talking about this and that until almost 4 pm, and were home a little after 4:30 pm.  The original forecast by the weather guessers was for rain by 5 pm, so we wanted to be home before it started.

As it turned out the rain did not arrive until 7:30 pm, and it did not stop until sometime after 2 am.  The wind was blowing furiously all the while.  I woke up several times to the driving rain wondering how much we would would capture in the three IBC water totes we installed last week.  Well, the verdict is in.....

The southwest corner of house....almost a third full....

.....the southeast corner of the house.....a little over 1/5th full....

....and the northeast corner of the house....2/5ths full

.....combined the water we collected would have filled one 275 gallon IBC tote from just one rain storm.  The IBC water totes at the greenhouse (we've been using water from the one on the southeast corner to water the plants inside the greenhouse) also did well....

The northeast corner of the greenhouse is about 1/3 full now (was about 1/4 full before the storm).....

....and the one at the southeast corner is just back to 1/3 full, where it was a few weeks ago before TLE began using that water to water the plants in the greenhouse

.....this is water we would not have on hand without the rain gutters and totes.  We've got a forecast snow storm heading our way early Wednesday morning that may drop 1-3 inches over 6-7 hours....we'll see.  If the storm does materialize, then we'll be adding to our water catchment totals again....very exciting!

We watched some Winter Olympics coverage for our evening entertainment.  There was short track speed skating, figure skating pairs finals, Monobob (single person Bobsled) finals, and curling.  We haven't really gotten into the Winter Olympics this time around, but there have been some interesting stories.  We do really enjoy the short track speed skating, Skeleton, Luge, and Curling....not exactly the glamourous Winter Olympic disciplines....lol.

We were in bed a little after 10 pm listening to the rain on our riveted aircraft aluminum roof.....thanks for stopping by!

This adventure.....

 8:47 am - Monday - February 16th - TWW - 44° F, humidity 42%, cloud cover 59%, wind 13 mph out of the south by southeast.....cloudy, and a forecast high of 52° F, and winds 25-30 mph with gusts to 50 mph today.  The view this morning....

.....and on this day in 2013 TLE and I were on Marathon Key of Florida Keys fame....

.....we drove our 2002 T-Bird the rest of the way to Key West...the furthest, southern most point in the U.S.

We expected to have to run our Predator 5000 dual fuel generator Sunday a goodly portion of the morning due to cloud cover, but the clouds unexpectedly parted enough for a few hours enabling us to shut her down after only 90 minutes, and let the sun take us the rest of the way to 100% charge.  

We decided to make Sunday a rest day after getting a lot of work done this past week.  Round four of the AT&T Pebble Beach Invitational was playing on the TV all day where we saw Scottie Scheffler come from 8 strokes down to finish his round tied at 20 under par with three other players.  However, the other players still had 6, or 7 holes to play when he finished, and ultimately one of them, Colin Morikawa won at 22 under par. It was, however, an exciting round four which saw 8-10 golfers in position to win at any given time.

Winds were forecast for Sunday, but they never really materialized, which is always a good thing.  We are fully expecting the forecast winds for Monday and Tuesday to materialize, and even possibly rain Monday night, so we are prepared, but if those forecasts fail we are ready to get more work done.  

I've been thinking about how interesting this winter has been so far, and how much time TLE and I have had to ourselves in this beautiful, tranquil, and amazingly quiet location.  We have this kind of unified vision of what needs to be done here, and often TLE will suggest working on the same thing I had in my mind for the day.  She is amazingly resilient, and strong for her age, and sometimes I forget, if even just for a moment, she is a woman.  I never ever hear the words "I can't" from her.  Sometimes it turns out she can't, but she is always willing to give anything a try no matter how daunting the task may seem.  I am so grateful for her adventurous spirit, without which we would not have done half the things we have done since we retired, and this current adventure on which we are embarked is no exception.  When we first arrived at TWW in October of 2024 the amount of work needed to make this property not just liveable, but productive once again was overwhelming, and I know we both felt overwhelmed, but we just kept putting one foot in front of the other figuring out things along the way.  Without the two of us being committed to a common vision this would never have worked.  And now, some 16 months into this experiment, we find our selves thriving on this off grid property.  We are now growing our own food, and we've been able to create a comfortable environment here where success is expected.  I say all of that to say this....without Elaine, this whole adventure would have no meaning to me.  Without her hourly, daily and weekly support, which never waivers, we could not have accomplished as much as we have.  Thank you TLE for signing on for this adventure!

Thanks for stopping by!

Why not burn all 3 in one day?

 8:35 am - Sunday - February 15th - TWW - 38° F, humidity 41%, cloud cover 75%, wind 9 mph out of the southeast.....very cloudy today with a forecast high of 56° F.  The view this morning.....

....and on this date in 2010 TLE and I were camping at Rancho Jurupa Regional Park in our 1982 Newell....

.....within a year (02/01/11) we would be workamping there, and living full time in the Newell.  I guess that means we've living full time in the Newell for 15 years!

We need light winds, or no wind at all to do burn piles here.  It's not a law, or anything, but prudence dictates that if we don't want a forest fire here at TWW we should use caution, and not burn on windy days, right?  Well, Saturday was a windless day until mid afternoon, so we decided we should light those three burn piles (one at time) around 10 am.  Before we lit anything we ran about 200 feet of hose out to the three burn piles to be sure we had adequate water to douse any unexpected fires outside of the burn areas, then we lit the first burn pile....

The first burn pile

The 2nd burn pile

The 3rd burn pile...the biggest of them all

We used the opportunity to burn a lot of old, rotten wood, too

.....the final burn pile, the largest of them all, was just about burned down to ashes by 2:30 pm, so about 4.5 hours for all three burn piles.  Once they were down to ashes we raked out the ashes, then doused each pile heavily with water to be sure hey were "out".

Once we were sure all the burning coals were extinguished we headed inside for an hour break before returning to coil up the numerous water hoses we had employed, and then put our tools away (rock rakes and shovels).  We spent the balance of the afternoon watching the AT&T Pebble Beach Invitational (golf) where they are having some of the weather headed our way.  We had planned a sunset fire, but by the time the afternoon breezes had died down it was after 6 pm, and too late to get a fire going, however, we did walk out and observe the sunset for a few minutes....

.....thanks for stopping by!

Two in one......

 7:56 am - Saturday - February 14th - TWW - 28° F, humidity 39%, cloud cover 10%, wind 3 mph out of the southeast....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 57° F.  The view this morning.....

Order is restored....we have SUN!

.....and on this date in 2018 we got a dusting of snow at Desert View.....

.....at the east entrance of the Grand Canyon.  Worked at the General Store there from November  2017 to April 2018.

First thing Friday morning, due to the weather forecast predicting rain all day long, TLE and I finished stowing the firewood we cut the other day for the house.  By the time we finished we had refilled the wood box on the wood deck....

.......we fully did not expect to do any other work outside Friday due to the aforementioned weather forecast, however, once again we were buffaloed by the weather guessers.  We did have heavy cloud cover one might expect with forecast rain all day long necessitating running the Predator 5000 for about 90 minutes first thing, but even with cloud cover we got back to 100% on the Bluetti battery bank.

By 11 am we realized it was not going to rain, so we got dressed and headed back out to the chicken coop to  begin dragging all the branches I cut off those juniper trees into burn piles, plus dragging out all the wood, roofing and plumbing junk the prior owners had discarded there.  Once that was done I realized I needed to cut some more limbs off the surrounding trees, so I took care of that.  By the time we finished dragging everything out we had created three burn piles....

The biggest

The smallest

Almost as big as the biggest

.....and several piles of junk....

We'll cut this up to burn in our portable firepit

Old roofing, and siding

.....now that all the trees have been 'limbed up' the area around the chicken coop looks great....

Those trees will provide shade in the summer for the chickens

I cut a couple of the larger limbs into smaller pieces for future splitting

.....at this point TLE headed into the house to cook a roast in the house oven, while I remained out at the chicken coop removing all of the old chicken wire fencing, and posts.  It didn't take me as long as I expected....

The chicken coop sans fencing

Old 4 x 4's and T-posts

The old gate, and some type of cage

.....by the time I finished it was 2 pm, and I had been working for around 3 hours.  Time to put stuff away, and relax.  As it turns out the lack of rain enabled us to get about 2 days of work done in one day.  I had figured it would take TLE and I at least 3 hours to create the burn piles, and remove all the discarded junk, but it took the two of us less than 2 hours enabling me to spend that third hour taking down the fencing which I thought would be a 2 hour Saturday project.  On top of that we have two days of sunshine (Saturday and Sunday) in which we can light the burn piles, and begin to clean out the chicken coop.  Snow/rain is forecast for Monday-Wednesday next week, but who knows, right?  The weather guessers could be wrong!

Thanks for stopping by!

More than we expected.....

 8:42 am - Friday - February 13th - TWW - 39° F, humidity 68%, cloud cover 91%, wind 7 mph out of the east.....heavy cloud cover today with a forecast of rain, and a high of 47° F.  The view this morning....

....and on this date in 2013 TLE and I were in Miami, FL.....

....visiting the Viscaya Museum and Gardens (pronounced viscayaya).  TLE performed with her high school orchestra there back in the late 60's....she played violin.

We had enough sun Thursday to get all the batteries on the property back to 100%, and we had some beautiful cloud formations throughout the day...

.....when we first arrived here at TWW last October we found this old cement mixer out behind the barn, and it has sat there in the same position since then.  TLE and I had talked a few times about what to do with it, and finally we decided it should join our other lawn art collection out by the entry road next to the greenhouse.  I used the Ford 420 diesel tractor to move it....

....eventually we think we'll turn the wheel barrows into planters for flowers, and maybe even the cement mixer.  By the way, the tractor is running magnificently....starts every time....knocking on wood as these words hit the page....lol.

I've been wanting to move the water trailer from its current position next to the water tower to a spot out near Phyllis' Newell for some time now, but I needed to repair a severed cable that runs from the rear of the transmission on the 1969 Chevrolet C50 tilt bed truck back to the rear of the dump bed before I used it to do so.  That took me the better part of an hour of crawling in and out of the area under the dump bed, but finally the truck was ready to move, and hook it up to the water trailer for the first time.  You may recall I had a receiver hitch welded to the rear of the truck last winter, and just received and installed the adjustable hitch a few weeks ago.  With TLE's help I backed the 1969 Chevrolet C50 dump bed truck up to the tongue of the trailer, dropped the tongue on the hitch.....

Now we can drive through there again

The water trailer is now parked out near Phyllis' Newell (it is to the right in this picture, out of sight)

......and then moved it.  The water trailer has been parked next to the water tower, when not in use, for at least 2 months, and that path is one we frequently use to drive the side by sides from the front of the house to the area out by the barn.  When the trailer is parked where it has been parked we have to drive around.

After taking a suitable break around 1 pm we headed out to the chicken coop area to trim back all the trees which surround it in close quarters to we can begin to clean up the area, and rehab the chicken coop.....

Looking westward

Looking northward

.....the chicken coop (used to be a pigeon coop) is directly behind the house.  The roofing appears to be in good shape, and the interior appears to be staying dry.  We just need to clean out the interior, fix a few things, and then repaint it.....

....then tear down and replace the old fencing, which is in sorry disrepair.....

.....the aftermath of trimming the juniper trees which surround the chicken coop......

.....by the time I finished cutting branches it was 3 pm, leaving little time to drag all the branches into a pile for later incineration, so we deferred that part of the operation to another day, and put our tools away.  We got a lot done Thursday....more than we expected, but we were also tired.  I took a shower, then a long nap before TLE served her famous beef and cheese burritos for dinner.

Thanks for stopping by!