Well, in my former life I was very punctual with my newsletter, but how life does change. A life altering event forces us all to adjust our priorities, and juggling and prioritizing my responsibilities has altered a thing or two.
That being said, the groundhog saw his shadow here today, for sure, and so I guess that means 6 more weeks of winter. In some ways it has seemed to be a really cold winter, but if we look back at winters past it has been a mild one. We have only had one night below 0 that we know of which qualifies it as a not so cold winter. When we first moved here 9 years ago we had a couple of weeks of sub zero temps, going as low as -35. So when we take that into consideration we have nothing to complain about. We have received a fair amount of snow, but we are still in a severe drought and need lots more moisture before summer if we are going to have a good stand of grass this year.
Allan had 3 more stints put in the middle of January and is recovering nicely. He is back to working around the ranch (can't keep a good man down!) and while he tires after a few hours, in the winter a few hours is often enough to get everything done that needs to be done. There is always a long list at the end of any day that still needs to be worked on, but I guess that is life.
On a sadder note, our grandson, Kyler (18), completely tore his Achilles tendon the second day of basketball practice and is out for the season. He is an especially talented athlete and basketball is his sport of choice. This is his senior year, so you can only imagine how disappointing this is for him. We had envisioned that he might be offered a basketball scholarship for college, but any hopes for that are highly unlikely now. Not a really big deal, though, since he is not fond of school and looks forward to getting out.
Not to mention that he now can't help Allan on the ranch - at least for a while. The injury will take months and months to heal completely. And wearing an irrigation boot over the top of the medical boot is impossible. Can you only imagine that he would step in a pile of cow dung with his cast? Not a pretty picture. So it is a very good thing that Allan is on the mend, because those darn animals still insist on being fed.
We can already feel the weather starting to change, moving more towards spring. Actually moving right into mud season! February and March tend to be our wetter months (a very good thing) but with that comes constant mud (a very bad thing). For those of you who live in a home surrounded by asphalt and concrete, count your blessings. While I still don't want to live in a development again, I can say for sure that the muddy spring makes me scratch my head as to why I love this life. However, the good definitely outweighs the bad, so here we are planted and here we will stay. It's all good, as they say.
