Digging out

Cloudy and windy all day yesterday, you just knew something dramatic was going to happen. The desert likes its drama.

It finally started snowing around 2:30 and didn’t stop until around six in the evening. Not a huge accumulation, 2 or 3 inches, but it made up for that with wind and cold.

Unfortunately Landlady was on the road through all this. Having done it, lemme tell you, the trip from the Big City to the Gulch can be very long indeed when you’re doing it in a snowstorm. In particular, the last 50-mile stretch to the little town nearest where we live may as well be on the moon – except in a snowstorm. No lights at all except what you bring with you, and they only light up the falling snow. In her case she could have made it in relative safety before darkness really fell, except she got behind some guy who’d never seen a Fast & Furious movie and crept along for 30 miles at 15 MPH. Apparently he had quite an entourage by the time Landlady encountered him, so passing was a problem until the whole convoy got to town. I’m sure whoever that was has a permanent place in the hearts and minds of several people, and is still-living proof that guns don’t cause violence.

So it was well after dark before she got to the parking lot off the county road, where I met her. Going further than that in her little 2-wheel-drive would have been foolish. She brought a huge pile of stuff and one overamped/underexercised dog, all of which had to be shoehorned into the Jeep.

It’s between seven and eight miles of windy slippery dirt roads from there to the Gulch, and at one point I misjudged where we were and took a slippery downgrade much too fast, but eventually everything got sorted out at her place. Which, since I was going there anyway to tend chickens, I had unlocked, lit up and warmed up. ‘Cause I’m the caretaker/gamekeeper. 🙂

And then I went back to the Secret Lair and unloaded a pile of care packages almost too heavy to carry in one load…

Holy cow. Much of this turns out to have come from my older brother, who’s been working out 12V LED lighting schemes and is concerned I may starve, but quite a lot is from Generous Readers…

And despite the obviously food-centric nature of that photo there’s quite a variety of stuff – but a detailed description will have to wait, because I’m still digging out from the storm and anyway the camera batteries chose that moment to die.

So more later. Hope you’re staying warm, I mostly am.