First day back

Back home in Montana! My first morning dawned bright and sunny. Okay... I think it dawned bright and sunny as I didn't actually get up at the crack of dawn.

Lots to do: unpack and put away most everything. Start the wood stove and heat the house up. Put batteries back into all the clocks and temperature gauges. Sweep and clear the snow from some of the buildings and part of the driveway. Unlock some doors to the buildings. I found I had forgotten to lock the door to the extra room in the garage but no one was in there when I was gone. Not that there is anything of valve to steal from this room. Everything around the ranch buildings appears to look like I had left it those many months ago in December.

I had left extra containers of my pumpkin paste in the non-working freezer in the garage room. They were frozen when I left in December. They were no longer frozen even though the temperature was in the middle 20s F. The temperature must have been warmer when I was gone as I could see mold starting to grow on the tops of some of the paste.

I turned on the well pump and immediately a pipe sprang a leak. Argh! The leak was in the shut off valve so I had to turn the pump off and drain the holding tank before I could unconnect the pipes to take the valve off. Fortunately I had a spare valve of the correct size and once I replaced it everything worked fine. For some reason over winter the pump has changed from a 28/52 pressure on/off to a 30/54 pressure range. I left it be.

The pipes in the house's crawl space all seemed to be fine. No leaks. The thermometer in the crawl space read 40 F. The carrots and beets I have in the crawl space seem to be fine though I see a little white mold growing on a few items.

The weather the first day was all over the place. Sun, clouds, melting, snow, heavy snow, sun, melting. The evening ended with snow then a near full moon rose over the snow covered mountains. Pretty.

It was odd getting back to my old routine. I had done this Montana return over and over the previous years, but I was missing being in North Dakota with my mother and brother and watching old movies. It would take some time to get back into what some call my "hermit" routine, but fortunately my hiking and skiing friends called Friday and I was back to what I love about living here: the mountains.