Alan and I have always played a lot of music in our homes and cars. More than most people? Probably not, but hours every day. During the past few years, with streaming services, we abandoned our large CD collection for subscriptions with Pandora (first), then Spotify, and currently with YouTube. For the past few years we’ve had a small Bose knock-off speaker that worked pretty good, but lacked decent bass. Anyway, Alan gave me an early birthday present of a new Sharp stereo. Old school, 3 piece system. It sounds awesome! So, I dragged out our ancient CDs and am going through them to see which ones are still ok. The Sharp also has Bluetooth, too, of course….what doesn’t?
Our road is beginning the spring melt already, although it isn’t too bad yet. With snow coming next week, it’ll get pretty sloppy. We brought the red truck home today after a month in the body shop (result of a hit-and-run last November). Good to have it back, as it handles the county road a bit better than Alan’s heavy Ford. Now we can start prepping for our road trip in March, too. (More on that in the next post).
Around 4Fords, we’ve been focused on doing small projects and chores. Alan’s been running circuits for more lights, which are going to be wonderful. I put new treads on the stairs and other piddly things, along with quite a bit of school work….oh, and taxes. The house intermittently looks sort of like a construction zone. We spend hours every day playing and taking icy/muddy hikes with the dogs, although Zane re-sprained his neck and is back on steroids, so we can’t do that for a while. The vet is worried he will need to have his cervical area fused! We have to figure out how to keep him from playing SO hard. It’s a bummer…he’s in a lot of pain.
Cabin fever finally struck last weekend and so we impulsively packed up the dogs and a change of clothes and drove down to Abiquiu, 75 minutes south of us. No snow! 60 degrees. We took a couple of short hikes in the desert and spent the night at the beautiful and friendly Abiquiu Inn. We strongly recommend it! There’s a wonderful restaurant, too, with great art. I ate fresh trout (my favorite fish!) for breakfast, and a friend joined us for a great meal. www.abiquiuinn.com.
At home, it’s becoming clear that the days are growing longer. Being in a canyon, we take great pleasure in watching how the sun moves throughout the year. On the winter solstice, it set just over the cliff on the left of the picture below. You can see how far it’s moved north in just 6 weeks.
The picture below shows how powerful the albedo effect can be. This is the garden, where we spread our wood ash during the winter. You can see how effectively it works to melt the snow under the ash. The ground is completely bare here, while the snow around it is still 18′ deep.
4Fords Journal 