Nickel and Dime Ranch-Five Years!

Five years ago this week we left our 30 year home in California.

Moving tip: Ulta and Barnes and Noble have great boxes

We said, "Goodbye" to family

I didn't realize they'd both be gone within the year.

..and friends

Goodbye, but not forgotten

We thought March would be a good time to move since it was almost springtime.

Rest area just south of Santa Fe

And spring did arrive....in June.

Ranch Headquarters

Ms. Pearl and Bonnie have adjusted to their new place.

Tom's become an expert woodsman. And Ms. P.

We like our neighbors.

Guadalupita Grassfed Yaks

I've learned to grow veggies at 7400 feet.

Everyone around here says, "This is God's Country."

Yes, it is.

Here's to many more years in Northern New Mexico.

Decorating the Nickel and Dime Ranch Headquarters: Part 4

The Nickel and Dime Ranch Headquarters is just a fancy way to say our house, an Airlock Log Home built about 12 years ago as a vacation place for a rich doctor in Kansas. Now we live here full time.  People always wonder how we ended up here, so suffice it to say that Southern California Edison and an eminent domain situation gave us the opportunity to give up our old home and relocate to Northern New Mexico. It was either this or a tract house in Riverside County. What a choice.

Chief decorator is Tom, with the same decorating sense as Sherlock Holmes which can be good or bad, depending on what he finds and brings home. As a historian, he wants his memories in plain sight, anything from an old glass Clorox bottle to turkey feathers to bones. So I live in a sort of museum of the interesting and weird.

Bones and skulls have been a recurring theme and yesterday when I was dusting, I discovered this gem setting on top of the lamp.

I am not sure why this bone is here, and I haven't asked.

In the background of the photo above, on either side of the doorway, is a pair of ship lamps that we use when the power is out for an extended time. 

Here is a closeup of the lamp with the clean chimney. The markings indicate it's from a ship called the SS Caledonia, from Glasgow, Scotland. I think they are neato.

The entry was a screened porch, which we really didn't sit in, preferring the outside porch and deck instead. So we windowed where there once were screens, which makes it more of a mud room now.

It holds hiking stuff, boots, gloves, hats, scarves, turkey feathers, more bones, pack baskets, cleaning stuff, paper for starting fires, and extra dishes and little appliances. We try to declutter it once a month, and it is due for another cleaning and purging right now, so I won't show you all the dirty details.

Here's a wall with some of our stuff on it. On the right is a Duluth bag with a pack basket in it along with some military surplus bags and canteens. I like the little school chair hung up because it makes a good ledge if you have to set something down.

We need more quilts around the house to add some soft, girly decor to the Holmsian interior. My quilts are usually given away, but with all the man stuff around there is an obvious need for more quiltiness. Tomorrow I will show you a quilt project which will add some yin to Tom's yang. (Hmm. Tom's yang. Sounds weirdly suggestive.)

They Didn't Crack the Safe and That's a Good Thing!

When planning our relocation to New Mexico, we decided after much debate to spend the big bucks for a full service mover. We were not starving students like when we originally moved to Alberhill thirty some years previously. And we had accumulated a lot of stuff, including some pretty heavy gun safes. Those suckers are heavy! I wanted this move to go smoothly. Leave it to the pros, we said.

My Tennessee born dad used to say, "Want in one hand and s@#* in the other and see which one gets fullest the quickest." And you know by now we didn't get what was in the "want" hand when it came to the movers.

There were several safes to move into the house including one really humongous one.

Ernest and Tom realized they couldn't use their considerable brawn to move this safe into the house, but Ernest had his tractor stored here, so they decided to use the scoop to carry the safe to the porch. Unfortunately the tractor's scoop wasn't angled enough to push the safe up the ramp and onto the porch.

So they used their manly ingenuity. Tom brought the Toyota Tacoma into the yard and winched a cable to the bumper with the other end around the safe. The cable snaked around a heavy log post on the porch and the pickup dragged the safe up onto the porch.

From there it was a piece of cake (just kidding, guys, I know it really was hard) to move the safe upright and dolly it into the house.

Exhausted, but basking in the glow of success.

Moving In, Do It Yourself Style

 Ralph the moving guy packed up and left and the guy at (Name omitted)  Moving Systems said, "Nope, we will not send a team from Santa Fe to complete the move."

They pointed out in the contract that movers were not responsible for weather related delays. Tom pointed out, right back at them, that the weather was fine, the road much improved since the day before when Ralph looked at it, and if the driver were to stay just one day later he would be able to deliver. "Nope,"said the manager. Ralph has to go."

 The next day dawned clear and New Mexico blue, a brilliant color the people here use to paint their doors and their windowsills. The road to the house was dry and passable, but our stuff was in storage an hour away.

During this time, Ernest, self-described ranch manager, was working his Ernest magic (more about this later). Suffice it to say that Ernest arranged to get our stuff delivered to the house less than 24 hours after Ralph had said, "No can do." On that beautiful blue sky morning we met Ernest, Andy, Ernest's cousin, and Manuel, Ernest's brother, at the storage place in Las Vegas. We would use our pickup and two other pickup trucks to haul our stuff out to the house. Our fancy moving equipment: a stock (cow and horse) trailer, a flatbed trailer, and a little utility trailer previously used to haul trash to the Corona dump. We worked all day, a tireless team of (un)professional movers.

A professional mover and three helpers (average age 28) couldn't do what a team of 50 somethings could! It took multiple trips to Las Vegas, but our stuff was all at home--most of it in the garage.

A little bit was in the house! Yay!

But there was a really, really big ticket item that still had to be moved....to be continued...

Living Room Camping

Before I begin the actual blog portion of our show, I want to explain why I haven't been here. My dad had been ill with lung cancer, so it was important that I be there, back in Orange County, for him and for my mom. So there were several (scratch that) many car and air trips back and forth until his passing at the end of June.

A week after my dad died, my mom went to urgent care, not feeling well. We found out that she had lung cancer, too. Her illness was quicker than my dad's and she left us at the beginning of September.  I stayed almost a month after that to help my brother and my sister-in-law wrap up the lives of Mary Lou and Earl Coots. Although we are now settled back in Northern New Mexico, it took quite a while to move in. I still don't know where everything is because we worked in fits and starts, either me or both of us leaving for SoCal. But I will pick up where I left off, which was when we actually moved in to the new place.

Remember when we were looking for moving companies how we warned them about the dirt roads? We chose (Name omitted) Moving Systems, connected with (Name omitted) Van Lines, because the salesperson assured us that yes, they would be able to move us and yes, we would probably need a shuttle because of those dirt roads. A shuttle is when the company must transfer our stuff from the big van to smaller trucks, like U-Haul sized. She even wrote it on the contract. "Shuttle will probably be necessary." She said the price of the shuttle was built into the total cost of the move.

The driver, Frank, unhooked in Las Vegas (remember this is the Las Vegas in NM) and drove the truck minus the trailer to our place. We were already there, camped out in the living room, where the night before Bonnie the cat had fallen off the stairs in the middle of the night. Luckily she just shook herself, looked annoyed, and was fine.

Miss Pearl and me waiting for the movers

 Frank decided after much conversation with his dispatcher that he would not be able to shuttle our stuff to the house. Roads were too muddy, snow was forecast for the day he was supposed to leave, couldn't get even a smaller truck in, blah blah. So on move-in day, instead, 40 miles away, (Name omitted) Moving Systems left our stuff at a storage facility in Las Vegas.

The dispatcher/manager  didn't accept Tom's suggestion that they send the driver (who said he had to go) on his way and in a few days, when the weather was to their liking, send out some guys to take the stuff from the storage facility and deliver it to our house.

The local people we met scoffed and said, "They could have delivered it. The previous owners used Ryder trucks to move stuff in and out in all kinds of weather."

So we spent another night camping on our living room floor.

Bonnie didn't fall off the stairs that night, so that was the good part.

Moving Thirty Years Worth of "Valuable" Stuff

Many moving companies were consulted and invited to bid for the opportunity of moving our "valuable" belongings.  Since neither T nor I wanted to heave large pieces of furniture and hernia inducing boxes into and out of trucks, we decided against the U-Haul-Penske-Ryder type of move .  This time we would relocate like adults: no pickup truck stuffed haphazardly with our belongings for us. We would leave with class, choosing a large, nationally recognized moving company, (Name omitted) Van Lines.

  Prior to signing the contract, T showed the saleswoman pictures of where we would be moving, pointing out details of the dirt road that a truck would have to navigate.  Discussions about the widths of the county road and of our almost half mile driveway ensued.  Kari, our saleswoman for (Name omitted) Systems, the local contractor with (Name omitted) Van Lines, agreed that the moving van would probably not be able to navigate the narrow county road.  A shuttle would be necessary, which meant that the large van would offload our goods into a Penske/Ryder/UHaul type truck for the final miles to our new home.  She carefully wrote on our contract: Probable shuttle at destination. No extra charge for shuttle.  That was okay with us. Sometimes moving requires flexibility, we naively thought.

 I traveled with Bonnie, who didn't poop until almost three days later, frantically scrabbling around in this cage, meowing insanely, "This is not how I am supposed to live my life! I do not shit where I live!"  The roads were icy, so I had to concentrate on driving without inhaling.

 T traveled in our other truck with the ever agreeable Ms. Pearl, who hopped into the car early on so we would not leave her behind.  She liked that Bonnie was in jail.

To be continued.......

Middle Aged Crazy or What the Hell Are They Thinking?

 I really don't know what we were thinking when we said, "We'll buy it!"  It was a beautiful day, the light just right, the same light that Georgia O'Keeffe, that cow skull decorator, painter of flowery genitalia, was drawn to, sparking an influx of artists to New Mexico that continues to this day.  A soft breeze, almost zephyrlike, made itself barely audible through the oaks and pines.  The air smelled sweet.  At night we could see every star in the sky.

So we bought a 100 acre piece of property in Northern New Mexico with an almost new log cabin, really, truly in the middle of Wheretheheck, Nowhere.  The closest town is a village, population a little over 26 as of the last census.  The next most populous town is the county seat, with a whopping 1500 individuals living in its zip code.  The big town is an hour and twelve minutes away.  That's where we will buy our groceries and maybe see a movie once in a while.

T and I are retired high school teachers who have enjoyed living in the country.  When our farming neighborhood of 30 years, in a rare rural pocket of Southern California, started to visibly display all the trappings of suburbia including mind-numbing traffic, we started getting antsy.  Eminent domain shoved us into a situation where we had to get out anyway, so we decided, "Why the hell not?"  We didn't need to worry about schools, or jobs, or if our kids would grow up weird living really out in the boonies.  So we are moving.

This blog will be the chronicle of this new chapter in our lives, and I hope you will lurch along with us on our New Mexican adventure.