Updates, Projects, and Adventures

          Durango, Colorado is one of our Home Bases and my daughter Lorelyn and her husband, Travis always make us feel right at home. If you go back in the archives you will find several posts having to do with Tomboy Farm and its surrounding environs. There’s even on having to do with all of the Critters that live here and how we watched over them when Travis and Lorelyn went to Eastern Europe last November.

          Or best welcome this time was given by Ling-Ling, the fluffy, white, skittish, introverted, and mostly nocturnal, cutie-pie of a cat that most people have only had a perfunctory glimpse of. Even the fortnightly cleaning ladies called Lorelyn in a panic one day, reporting that there was a strange cat inside the house!

          It was obviously Ling-Ling and even though they had been coming in for years, they had never even had an idea that she even existed.

          We wondered if Ling-Ling would even remember us, much less make an appearance. To our delight, not only did she grace us with a sighting, but she also came right over to us and jumped up on our laps for a brief snuggle.  😊

          All is good in the land of friendly critters!

          When we visit here we love to be part of the general progress and improvement in the never-ending quest for the time when all the projects are completed and the time for just sitting around descends on Tomboy Farm.

          This much-anticipated event is scheduled for some time in 2050.

          Travis and Lorelyn are always asking us what we would like to do while we are here. We’ve been on many an adventure with them and sometimes, even though there is a lot of work to do around here, I think that they secretly hope that we want to have one of those adventures so that they can leave the chores behind without a guilty conscience. Usually, we are content to just visit and hang out and help with whatever needs to be done.

          They are in the throes of finishing the converted, tear down the old one, build a new one, truck barn/garage/workshop/apartment upstairs project.

          We are only too happy to help out.

          It a “My kids” thing.

          We do the same when we are at Danny and Katie’s place in Texas, we are only too happy to help out and do projects.

          We were going to help paint up in the new apartment, but the painter actually showed up and finished what needed to be done before the next step could begin. So, when Lorelyn decided that she’d had enough of the goats hopping the fence and eating her ”good” plants, it warranted a full-scale offensive on making a Critter Free zone in front of the house. That meant that the janky original, looks like something from Dorothy Gale’s farm in The Wizard of Oz, gate need to be replaced.

          Project Time!

          We raided the myriad of original wood piles strewn strategically around the property that were just waiting for a project like this in order to find the materials needed to make a replacement gate. Notice I did not use the term new gate.

          The mantra here is “Everything old is still old and will never be new again” because that’s the way they like it.

          It all looks original down to trying not to use new shiny screws and bolts, or at least an attempt is made to hide them.

          Here’s some photos of the endeavor.

          Today were supposed to be going to visit Mesa Verde National Park, home to the incomparable Cliff Palace made about 800 years ago by the Ancestral Puebloans formerly known as the Anasazi, but the Park Service needed to do so many projects and repairs on so many of the important structures and roads in the Park that it would have been a waste of time to try and have a meaningful visit.

Our friends, Glenn and Stephanie are making their first foray into the Four Corners Region, and this of course would have been on the top of their To-Do List, but we will just whet their appetite with a visit to Chaco Canyon National Historical Park and introduce them to the incredible culture of these Ancient Ones.

          It practically guarantees having them return in the future. 

          Be ready for a Don’s Traveling History Lesson tomorrow so you too, can astound and amaze your friends with your knowledge of the old culture of this region. I can hear it now as you are standing at the water cooler with everyone talking about the NCAA Finals and you drop a line like, “Speaking about the Anasazi…..”