The color of a winter storm.

Our Friday morning sky as the latest front moved in bringing high winds and a night of rain instead of snow.

Has it really been over a week since I last posted? Mike has been intent on getting as many things caught up on his short week home as he can and I have been doing my best to help him. For those who have worried about us, I admit that the continued issues with our internet access have put a damper on blog posts. I've gotten to where the frustration of spending an hour just trying to get a few photos and text up no longer seems worth it when combined with the stresses of the season. Of course it will get better when we have more time to address the satellite issues and when the Christmas rush is over. As a matter of fact, I believe December 26th or there abouts will mark my second anniversary of blogging. Hard to believe.

Our beautiful brand new stove! Just converted to propane and ready to hook up.

As always, there has been an endless list of necessary pre-winter/winter jobs to do in the brief window of Mike being home. We ended up with around six inches of snow the day after Thanksgiving which melted rapidly. Mike had to go to Albuquerque for a doctor appointment on Wednesday which is a two plus hour trip each way. He brought home a brand new and absolutely beautiful gas stove with a wonderful list of features. For the last four years I've cooked on a two burner camp stove with a small convection oven for baking so this was truly a wonderful Christmas gift for us both.

The old two burner camp stove will not be missed.

I won't miss the old camp stove even one tiny bit. It was such a chore to try to keep the old thing clean that I finally gave up on it. Hey...a number of holiday dinners have managed to get prepared on that two burner stove. I have fond memories of the dinners...not the stove.

Two cords of firewood ready to be stacked.

Then on Thursday two cords of firewood were delivered. This is what two cords dumped off the back of a pickup looks like from up on the deck. It was supposed to arrive on Friday when we might have had a chance to stack it but another winter storm was due then and they delivered it early. We settled for covering the entire pile with a big silver tarp to keep it dry until there is an opportunity to get it where it needs to be.

Fourty plus bales of hay stacked up at the house. This will see us into January and then we will have to bring more up.

So why couldn't we stack the firewood on Thursday? Remember last August when I posted all of those photos of the semi-load of hay we received from California? Well, 105 of those 115 pound hay bales were still stored on our flatbed trailer. Since we need that flatbed trailer tomorrow to get another 105 bales of hay to get us through the winter, Mike and I also unloaded, stacked and stored those 115 pound bales of hay on Thursday. Just the two of us. With bad backs. Trust me...by the end of the day on Thursday, we could barely move much less try to stack two cords of wood.

With bad weather outside, today Mike worked on assembling the new stove and converting it to propane while I worked on getting the house back in order and in the shop finishing Christmas orders. We are both still very tired and finding out the only time window for driving to Edgewood to get more hay will be tomorrow is about the last thing on earth either of us wants to do. Gotta do it though. Getting to February with still two more months of winter and finding ourselves out of hay would not be a good option. There you have it, the whole story of the last week of happenings at Star's Rest. It's been so good to have Mike home after being gone for over three weeks that both of us are feeling depressed he has to leave again on Thursday. Even Duffy is depressed about it.