boarding, bands and basking in the sun...

Beautiful mountains!

Oh my goodness, what amazing weather we are having right now! It actually got up to 70 degrees yesterday here in good old Buffalo, WY! It was fun to see all the grinning people walking around town all day, dressed in summer clothes. Rob and I tried to find as much to do outside as possible, realizing this is probably just a tease.  The weatherman on the Casper news said that we can expect this for the next 7 days, though!

We got up nice and early because we had an appointment with Barbara in Sheridan to meet her and see the kennel where Thistle will be staying during our vacation next month.  Since it was such a beautiful day, we took the scenic route along

Kumor Road

and around the lake to get up to I-90.  The little pond where all the birds hang out in summer on Kumor is starting to thaw and we saw a bunch of big old geese hanging out there already.  The lake is still frozen pretty well.  Rob says he was talking to Rick D, who oversees the lake for the County, and Rick said there’s still an 18 inch thickness out there.  Good thing, because there sure were a lot of ice fishermen out there! Great day for it, that’s for sure.  There was hardly even any wind out at the lake, which is pretty unusual.

Barbara’s place is about 3 miles outside Sheridan near the golf course and she has a beautiful view of the mountains out there.  She has a black standard poodle of her own, whose name escapes me at the moment, but he’s a real sweetie pie.  After doing a little “talking” to Thistle, off they went with a young yellow lab who’s boarding there, to play on the 2½ fenced acres while us grownups talked.  Thistle had a blast and we’ve decided that, indeed, this is the perfect place to leave her while we’re gone. We usually take our dog when we go on vacation if we can but this particular trip we just can’t because we’ll be in a lot of places that dogs aren’t allowed and it just wouldn’t be fair to her. We’ll call frequently, though, just to check on her, like any parent would.

We had lunch in Sheridan with Chuck Belus, who we’re doing a band website for. Gosh, what a talented guy, he is!  He was telling us all about the ins and outs of getting sponsors for the band and how he’s getting his first CD put together. I had no idea it was so expensive to cut a CD! He was also telling us that starting pretty soon, he and Cindy Rogers will be doing some music at the Bozeman in Big Horn during the dinner hour on some weekends, just him on guitar and her on fiddle.  We’ll definitely have to go to dinner and check that out. Cindy is just so amazing on her fiddle! Combine that with Chuck’s musical talent and his unique voice and I think that’s a winning combination. I really see this Chuck Belus and the Let Er Buck Band going places! He says they are practicing quite a bit.  Original songs just seem to come to him so easy, too.

We had to stop a couple of places and pick up a few things, as always, while we were in Sheridan.  We discovered a new liquor through the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation magazine that we’ve been wanting to try, it’s a Blackberry Whiskey called Bird Dog. There’s only one place in Sheridan that carries it, T & C Liquor, so we stopped and bought a bottle to try. I have been drinking Captain Morgan for about the last 20 years and I’ve been trying to find something new to drink, I’m hoping this may be it.  If I like it a lot, I’m going to ask the Moose to carry it for me. I think I mentioned I’m one of those weirdos that drinks my alcohol straight, preferring to have my non-alcoholic drink as a side.  That means I don’t drink just any old rot gut alcohol, it’s gotta taste good!  I’m pretty picky and have run through a lot of different stuff over the years that I just can’t stomach anymore.  I used to love single malt scotch, Laphroig, but I woke up in a snow bank back east after imbibing a bit too much of that stuff many years ago and now I can’t even stand the smell of scotch!

I’m a real teetotaler lately, anyway.  I’m lucky if I can get down two of my rocks glasses of booze on a Friday evening these days.  At least that makes me a cheap date, right?  I really spend most of my time at the Moose talking with my friends, the booze in front of me is just there for show mostly.  Alcohol just doesn’t make me feel very good the next day anymore and I have too much I like to get done on Saturdays to be spending it sitting around feeling puny. That’s one of the reasons I always bring food to the Moose on Fridays….to soak up what little alcohol I do drink so I don’t have a hangover the next day!  The other night I made a wonderful Rueben dip to take down there which got scarfed up by everyone in pretty short order! I love corned beef and right now it’s everywhere with St Patty’s day coming up so it was a logical appetizer to make and so darn easy.

The return trip to Buffalo was just glorious! The mountains were shining so pretty and white with all the snow on them and the sun was reflecting on them so beautifully!  We had the windows rolled down and we were yelling greetings out to all the wildlife we passed along the way.  Calving season is in full swing and we were laughing at all the little ones that were running around the pastures along the highway, kicking up their little heels, they looked like they were really enjoying the warmth as much as we were.  I think calves are just the cutest little things! Too bad they grow up to be cows, eh? Cows look so out of proportion to me.  They have those huge bodies and it’s all sitting on those stick legs, weird if you ask me. My mom says I’ve always had a fascination with cows.  When I was little in Texas, we’d pass a field of longhorn cattle and Mom says I would always lament that “Poor, poor moo cows got no shoes and socks” and “Poor, poor moo cows got no bafroom” Strange child, I was, I guess.

Even the horses were enjoying the great day!

Anyway, we spent most of the afternoon trying to stay out in the sun, soaking up as much of that yummy warmth as we could.  We still can’t get those white Christmas trees out of the front garden, though, they are pretty darn frozen in there.  Hopefully, since we are supposed to stay in the upper 60’s for the next 7 days, they’ll loosen up with all the tugging we’ve been doing and I can finally get them put away. We did manage to get a lot of the old growth cleared out of the flower beds and there sure is a lot of stuff in there that thinks it’s time to come up!  Today we’re going to mulch some of it because we know that the snow’s not over yet. I’m worried about our lilac bushes, though, they are already budding and it’s way too soon.  Our lilac hedge completely surrounds our property on three sides and if those buds get burned by a frost I’m gonna be really sad.  When that hedge blooms, it’s mighty intoxicating with the smell!  It sure would be awesome if we were really getting an early jump on the nice weather, though!

Well, hope you turned your clock up an hour for Daylight Savings.  Otherwise, you’ll be an hour behind everyone till you figure it out!  While I think the whole concept is rather silly, I do enjoy the fact that it makes it seem like we have an extra hour of daylight in the evening.  Rob is all excited that he’ll have time to work outside after work every day now.  He’s ahead of the game with the big veggie garden this year, we actually managed to clear out all the old vegetation and get it tilled before the first snowfall hit last fall. We even put a nice big stinky layer of manure down. You know, due to the crazy wind here, there’s no such thing as “topsoil” in Wyoming, you have to make it yourself.  When we first put in the garden 14 years ago, we had a company in Gillette, Dirtworks, bring in a huge pile of manufactured topsoil, it was a whole dump truck and a pull behind’s worth.  Since then, every spring and fall we add more manure and straw and in the winter we throw all our veggie scraps out there.  We’ve gotten it so it’s pretty rich now. Others in town are always asking how we grow such great vegetables and I tell them, hard work, that’s how. 

This past fall I canned over 150 jars of tomatoes, 100 jars of green beans and a lot of various jellies and sauces.  We also put up fresh onions and carrots that we are still eating now. I used to enter my stuff in the County Fair but one year they made me so mad I haven’t put anything in again.  I had entered some canned wax beans, which are yellow, right?  Well, they gave them back to me and had crossed out wax beans and wrote green beans on them and then wrote that they were the wrong color!!! Now, I’m sorry but if the judges are that stupid, I am not going to waste my time making up these perfect jars for them. You see, the jars I make for the fair have to be “just so”, not like the ones I make for us to eat.  One year I had 27 different kinds of canned goods I entered. That’s a lot of work! Of course, that year, I won Best in Show, which is what I’d been striving for and there’s really no need to do it again. I like it now, I can just go enjoy the fair and not be slaving in the kitchen and worrying about deadlines. I think this year I might enter the birdhouse contest, though, that’d be fun.

Okay, time to get up and at ‘em.  I hope your Sunday is as beautiful as I know mine’s going to be.  All I have to do today is laundry, which pretty much takes care of itself, so I’m going to grab a nice book and see if I can soak up as much sunshine as is possible today!

Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.~Hans Christian Anderson