Signs of Spring and Early Morning Surprises

Just a quickie.  This morning when I came in to the ranch house I was greeted by a full rabbit head and front legs staring up at me from the mouth of the smallest dog Tugboat.  He looked up at me with blood all over his little beard like, what, what's the matter with this?  It was a lovely scene to wake up to.

On a sad note, one of the cats has wandered off and we haven't seen her for about five days.  We are fearing the worst.

Today we have a guest arriving, so are time alone is officially done.  We have been spending the last few days doing lots and lots of yard work.  I don't think I have raked since I was a kid raking leaves, but boy, that's what I've been doing for hours and hours for the last week.  My arms are getting pretty buff!  I am raking up fossilized dog poo and rabbit guts and all kinds of stuff that feels like it's been there since the mid eighties.  

A few days ago we spent the day taking one of Jonathan's friends and employees, Hector, out to "La Balsa", which is the word they use for raft here.  It's basically a raft they use to cross the river in order to go out to the glaciers.  We had breakfast with Hector and his family in town, which was wonderful, and then spent the next three hours or so driving him and his father in law out to this raft through woods and fields and over bridges that did not look like they could hold a truck, let alone the hundred or so pounds of cargo we had in the back!  It was a great day.  And to top it all off, we saw pink flamingos on our way back.  Yes, pink flamingos.  Apparently the only native animals to this area are pumas, guanakas (which are kind of like llamas), and pink flamingos.  Go figure.

That's it for now.

Back in Action--Hackers in China be Damned!

So many of you may have thought that the blog was no more!  This is because someone from China somehow hacked into my gmail account to try to sell stuff, and gmail detected this and disabled my account.   A week ago when we came into town to check email, I was told there was suspicious activity on my account and I could not access it.  Now, when you only check email once a week and it's a big activity a message like this is pretty annoying, BUT it turns out to have been for the best.  Of course, the only way to fix it was by having a message sent to my phone, and of course I don't have a phone here, so it seemed quite problematic.  My dear Dad helped me out in this pickle, and now all is well and I have a more complex password.  Kind of freaky though!  It seems like a lot of things are going wrong now that I have no way of dealing with them.  Unfortunately checking email has become the most stressful part of the week.  So please, send me happy emails that are not about bills that were supposed to have been cancelled but somehow were not, or insurance claims that have been rejected, or leaves of absences being rejected.  Please!  :)

In happier news, life here continues to putter along peacefully.  We have gotten a fair amount of snow in the last few weeks, which has been lovely.  The weather seemed to have been turning warm, with the other day creeping into the upper 50s, but now we're back to frosty.  Fortunately that beautifully warm day was one in which Luke and I left the ranch and went hiking out near this town called Guadal.  It was gorgeous, and other than me falling into a poison thorn bush, it was a great success.

We are trying to begin to hammer out some plans for when we leave here.  Around the 23rd of September we will be heading on a ten day trip with Jonathan Leidich, who is Mary Ann's exhusband.  Anyone interested in what is going on in this area should check him out.  He is a very active member of the community here, and has been involved in numerous documentaries about the area.  He is the one with the guiding business.  We are going out to  his ranch with him for a while to help him build some fences and do other assorted ranchy tasks.  This trip out to his ranch will be quite involved.  We must first drive a few hours through brush and mud, then take a small balsa wood raft over to the other side of a river, then take some sort of zip line (I kid you not), then hike 13 miles, part of which involves wading through a glacial river.  All the while we will be carrying all of our necessary supplies.   The 13 mile hike is supposed to take around 7 hours.  I am really hoping the weather will be a teensy bit warmer by the time the glacial river crossing happens.  Now this place is isolation at its most isolated.  Jonathan, a native of Colorado who has lived here for the past 15 years after hitchhiking down here at the age of 19, plans to move full time to this ranch in the next few years.

We finally joined WWOOF Argentina, and we are going to try to set up some farm work for about a month from now.   We have been diligently (okay, somewhat diligently) studying Spanish everyday to prepare for our departure from the ranch.  I am actually reading a book called Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin I believe his name is.  It's an English book, but Mary Ann has it in Spanish, so I am slowly ploughing through it and doing double duty--learning about the area and increasing my Spanish vocabulary.  I am learning a lot of words like woolly mammoth and brontosaurus, which might not necessarily help me in my conversational Spanish, but are interesting nonetheless.  And who knows when I might encounter a Spanish speaking paleontologist.

Hopefully hackers will keep out of my life and the posts will be more frequent.

Sending happy thoughts northward.  This is a picture of our backyard.

Wind at last!

This morning when I took the dogs out for their morning walk there was a full rainbow in the sky.   I wished momentarily for a cell phone so I could call Luke to tell him to come out and look since I was already a ways off, but I realized that it was just one of those fleeting moments that would have to pass by. 

The wind finally started blowing last night and we have electricity for a little while!  Last night as we made dinner we were able to listen to music and charge the battery on the computer.   That is what I miss most about not having power—the ability to listen to music whenever I want.   The littlest things are so exciting now…being able to listen to a few songs, not having to wear a headlamp while making dinner, and only having the dogs wake us up one time last night!   The sound of the wind sends us into a flurry of excitement, but we try not to get our hopes up because in order for us to get power the wind needs to blow at 20 km/h for 2 hours.  The other day Luke accidentally knocked over the windmill and we had been really nervous about whether or not it would still work after we resurrected it.   But all is well!    

The temperature has been warming a bit.  After a week of waking up to 20 degree weather and shivering for the first four hours of the day, hovering by the fire, the past few mornings have been much milder.    I am able to compose this post at the comfort of the ranch and copy and paste it later when we go into town thanks to the wind.  My mind works a little better here.

We are overwhelmed with the number of eggs we have to eat on any given day.  My already high cholesterol is sure to take a beating from these weeks of trying to incorporate eggs into nearly every meal.  I am learning things I had not expected to learn here due to our need to experiment with limited food.  We make our own nut milk, and our major “vegetable” source comes from lentils that we sprout in mass quantities.  It is slim pickings in terms of what is available to purchase, and to buy anything we must drive an hour into town.  I have been baking fresh bread and homemade tortillas. 

We both spend time each day studying Spanish, and things are coming along in that respect.  The Spanish they speak here in Patagonia is almost like it’s own dialect.  When people speak to me in town I only catch about 50 percent of what they are saying.  It reminds me of being in Sicily and not knowing what they heck people were talking about even though my Italian was pretty good (much better than my Spanish is now).   Here, our interactions with other Spanish speakers are so rare as well that it isn’t such an issue, but we need to make an effort to improve our Spanish so that when we hit the road we’ll be in good shape.

I hope that the warm summer days and nights are finding everyone well.  It’s hard to imagine summer right now as I look out the window at snow capped mountains!  

One week out

We've been here at the ranch for a little over one week, and things are beginning to settle into a routine of sorts.  Mary Ann (the caretaker of the ranch) just left two days ago, so Luke and I are making it work with the six dogs now.  We are both a bit surprised at how much of our responsibilities entail the care of these six dogs.  It feels like we are caring for six two year olds.  Today as we attempted to leave the ranch to go to town to do some emailing, four of the dogs chased us down the road, and Luke, forever a softie, let them all in.  We sleep in a little room that is separate from the main house of the ranch, and now that Mary Ann is gone we were instructed to leave a low window open in the night so the dogs could go out as they needed.  We tried that the first night, and the dogs barked incessantly outside throughout the night until Luke finally shut the window and closed them in.  When I went in the main house in the morning to make a fire, I was greeted by piles of poop and vomit!  It was a bit of a frustrating first morning on our own.  Last night we tried for round two, and once again, at about three in the morning, incessant barking ensued.  We just dealt with it, opting for lack of sleep over poop and vomit again!  We're really hoping the pooches are just adjusting to life without mama.

Having natural light entirely dictate your activities has its enchantments.  Now at around six o'clock we must begin lighting candles, get our headlamps within reach, and make sure that a fire is burning in the wood stove in order to do the cooking for the evening.  The days have been surprisingly warm, but as soon as the sun drops behind the mountains, which happens around 5, the temperature plummets.   This morning we awoke to a thick frost on the ground.

Life is peaceful here, and so simple.  It's a throw back to another time period without any of the amenities that we take for granted every day.  I've thought a lot about this since we got here, how we run the water while doing the dishes, the energy we use to run the refrigerator in the dead of winter when we could keep so many things outside.  Here there is a refrigerator that sits outside unplugged.  It's cold enough that there is no need for power.  I don't know that I would want to live a life like this indefinitely, but it feels good to gain some perspective on the things that we consume and use up without too much thought.  Although as I type this post and my fingers are numb with the cold, I wouldn't mind some heat!

Jon, who is a  guide here, has offered to take us out into glacier territory when they return from the north in a month or so.  Our days are tied to the ranch now, so we are both excited about the opportunity to be able to get out and experience some of the wildness of this territory.  It's amazing that there are still parts of the world that are as untouched by civilization as this place is here.  The only reason we even have access to the internet is because Jon has it for his guiding business.  He is the only person in the town who has it, and there is no phone reception here!  You need to drive an hour to use the phone, and after that it's another seven hours until the next town.  The "highway" is a dirt road filled with potholes that are so bad people here need to change their shocks twice a year!

My fingers are frozen and Luke is awaiting the computer, so it's hasta luego for now.