Oh, I wish that it would rain, Rain, RAIN!

Staring up at the sky. Nary a cloud. Not a wisp! Brilliant sunshine. Curses! Welcome in October, maybe even March. Not in July.

In July, this is what we want to see. Thunderheads! Pregnant gray-bottomed cumulus. Rain!

This is the time of year when the same is on everyone’s tongue. You hear it in the grocery, in line at the little theater, read it on every Facebook page. Rain!!

This must be the only part of the country where people pull off the road and get out of their vehicle when the first splatter hits the windshield. Faces upturned, breathing in the RAIN!!!

This year of drought, we pray for, dance for, beg for, and bargain for rain. Rain arrived July 3, a mere one-hundredth of an inch officially. Enough to create a degree of pandemonium and worry. Pandemonium because it rained and set everyone to hoping. Worry because that 1/100” might be enough to give some a belief that the grass was safe for fireworks and the forest would be the target for dry fire-causing lightning.

Monsoons! Yes? No? What constitutes monsoon, anyway. Whatever does, it isn’t – not yet. A few days later, it rained over there about an inch. The next day, it rained over here an inch and half. Not yet the overcast gray fortuning a real rain. We still celebrated. RAIN I posted on my Facebook page; friends posted back, “Smelled wonderful!”

We’re still waiting. Still staring. Still praying-dancing-begging-bargaining. Everyone has too much of something this year – too much heat, too much flooding, too much rain. We’re on the not-enough-not-yet side of the scale.

Hopes up again today. Clouds built from early morning. By mid-morning, it was gray and overcast without a sunbeam in sight. Through the day, clouds moved overhead, thickening, threatening. At 4 pm, a spot of blue over yonder. By 7:30, a gorgeous sunset

Critter Tails

We have an overabundance of rabbits this year. Of both varieties: cottontail and jack. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t see 2 or 4 or 5. Often in pairs.

Last year was so green. When there’s more food one year, there are more babies the next. Works with squirrels, and apparently works with rabbits. We’ve started counting jacks and cottontails as we go from here to our new house. They are usually by the side of the roads because that’s where the green is. New grass isn’t easy to reach in the high weeds of uncut fields. But where the edges of roads are mown, the grass is coming in. Even without rain, there is a green haze. So there are the rabbits. In a way, it’s sad that there’s always the lag time between an abundance of food and an abundance of eaters. And usually by the time the eaters are there, the food is not. As in this year!

On to puppy-dog tails. We have a 6:30 am routine, Nutmeg and I. I feed her, and she eats. To be a little more specific, I pick up her bowl, rinse it out and fill it with fresh food and a little water, put it on the floor and get my hand out of the way fast. She is sometimes crunching before the bowl settles on the floor. You’d think we starve this dog! This morning, 6:30 as usual, I picked up the bowl. I turned on the radio. I rinsed out the bowl. My ears tuned into to some story on NPR. I put the bowl on the floor. The bowl was full of fresh water. Not fresh food. Nutmeg looked in the bowl, looked around on the floor and looked up at me. I never knew that WTF was in her vocabulary. Believe me, I corrected that mistake, but fast!

House progress

There are walls. There is a roof, though not yet shingled. There is a beautiful, brick-red concrete floor. It even has zias lined in it! There is a front porch roof that is ceilinged with clear ponderosa pine over douglas fir beams. The front porch framing and the back deck and side porch framing is waiting for decking. This week, they start framing the first floor interior.

I’ve been put to work. The framing has to be caulked (or foamed). So I spent hours on Saturday and Sunday with a caulk gun and a case of DAP, caulking the lower level where the frame plates meet the block foundation wall. Believe me, I’m not doing this because it’s fun to crawl around on the floor running caulk beads along the joints. The Build Green New Mexico and the passive house approach call for a “tight house” and that includes preventing all thermal bridging. So I’m just getting started. All of the framing needs to be either caulked or foamed on the inside. All of the seams in the sheeting (OSB) has to be taped on the outside. That’s how you get from one to the other in this picture.

If you need me any afternoon after work for the next couple of weeks, you know where to find me.