Beautiful day

What a gorgeous day! It was severely clear all day and the sun shone bright and warm. Even with a cool start to the morning with frost whitening the grass the sun warmed everything it touched. The temperature even made it up to 38 F at my place. And no wind at all today. Just a fantastic day. I may have enjoyed the day even more than usual as it may be the last of this type of day for quite a while as the weather forecast portends a change to the arrival of Winter (with a capital W). The odd thing is that, even with the day being near perfect, at the end of the day I wished I had someone to share it with. I don't know what brought this on as it is not common for me to think as such.

I rode my bicycle uptown to run a few errands and I took the long way home. I rode 20 miles today and now my yearly total exceeds 1000 miles. *whew* Even though this will go down as one of my lower mileage years, riding less than 1000 miles in a year is embarrassing.

The fresh snow on the mountains shone bright and they were beautiful from all angles. While I could have taken more photos if I had my camera during my bicycle ride, I did take one photo from home.


I still am able to break through the several or more frozen inches of ground in my search for pocket gopher tunnels. Yes, I am still trapping them. I got two more today. One was a pain to get out of the trap as it and some dirt had frozen to the top of the trap. I brought the two traps in for the winter as it is getting difficult to dig for more tunnels. And if the weather forecast is correct in a few days the frozen ground will extend more than a few inches deep. I left the other traps for another day as they showed signs of gopher activity as they had filled the traps with dirt. Oh yeah, I am up to 132 pocket gophers trapped so far this year.

I worked more on my loading corral fence and I think I've done all I can until next Spring when the ground thaws. I had finished the gate a few days ago and will post the photos of that soon. Today I added a few boards to the tie and corral panels tying them together more and making them more solid. The panels now appear to be on the ties solidly. I don't want a 800, 900 lb steer crashing into a panel and the panel popping off the tie.

Ok, so my little boards additions may not look like much but you can at least see how the panels are attached to the railroad ties. By the way, the panel wood is very hard. I don't know what kind of wood it is but I have bent many a good nail trying to drive it through the wood. I had some long screws and found that I had to drill most of the hole in order to get the screws through the wood. I even broke a small drill bit in the wood.

The past few days I have noticed quite a few small pine cones falling from a tree near the corral. They were dropping like leaves. Quite noisy and quite noticeable. Many, many at a time and there was absolutely no wind at the time. What in the world?! I looked and found a flock of small birds in the tree. I am not sure what they are getting from the pine cones but it must be something to go through all that work. And here all these years I thought it was the wind that brought those pine down down from the trees.

Then as the moon began to rise I split a few more logs for firewood. I already have enough wood split to last me the winter but I enjoy splitting logs and it reduces my pile of logs to be split. I need to make room for next year when I retrieve the trees in the pasture that have fallen.

The weather forecast doesn't look good - it looks like Winter will be arriving this weekend. The high temperature early next week is not suppose to get above 0 F and the overnight lows will be in the teens below zero F. Brrr! And maybe 7 inches of snow in the Valley. The ski resorts will be happy about this as one is not open and the Big Mountain resort only has a couple runs open on the backside of the mountain. Sue Ann called tonight and mentioned that she has been cross-country skiing all week as there is plenty of snow at her end of the valley. Anyway, I hope the weather forecasters are wrong again and that the cold temperatures don't make it over the mountains and they miss us.