Home again

It's so nice to be back home again!

While I had heard rain during the night, once I woke up it was sunny.  Outside the temperature was 40 degrees but with the sunshine and no wind it felt warm to me.

The mountains had snow on them halfway down.  The ski resort's runs were all white.  I missed my mountains!

A solid mass of clouds were bunched up and slowly slipping over the mountains to the east.  The mountains to the north had large scattered clouds moving against or over the mountains on their way to Glacier Park.  Overhead and to the west it was mostly clear.

I so wanted to go hiking in the mountains.  But it was my first day home and I needed to unpack my luggage and get the place back in order.

First up was to turn the water on and hope none of the pipes froze and broke from the near zero temperatures when I was gone.  Success!  When I turned the water on the well was fine and so were the water pipes in the house and house's crawl space.

Sunday was getting a fire going in my wood stove to heat the house up from the 47 degrees inside.  And unpacking.  And getting used to being back home.

Late afternoon Kelly stopped by to hunt deer.  He had placed his deer stand in his usual tree last week. Jan had told me that when she came to get me at the train station Jasmine almost  pulled her over.  When they went outside of Jan's house there were six deer in the yard and Jasmine wanted to chase them.

I also noticed that my neighbor finally tore down the rest of his fire damaged building and cleaned everything up and hauled it away.  It looks different now that the decades old large white building is gone.  The view that direction is more open now.  He also replaced the fire damaged fiberglass panels on my hay shed.

Monday I placed my pocket gopher traps back into the hayfield.  The ground was wet from all the rain that occurred when I was gone.  Still I found a few mounds of dry dirt dug up recently.

I also picked the litter out of the ditch on my side of the road.  That never ends.

I ended the day outside by trimming some dead branches from trees in the front yard until it got dark.