Contented Cat

And, yes, that is a horse saddle blanket; now it is a cat blanket. I like the way he has half of himself on the blanket & half on the wood. It's a cat thing.

Lil'Red's ride, today

 In the Red Shanks "Forest"

 Some of our boulders

 Lil'Red is admiring the boulders

 More boulders

 Some of the open space out here

 Overlook from the High Road

 More Overlook. It just goes forever.

What goes up, mus come down. The road starts the steep downhill part soon.

VirgaBow!

 Not quite a rainbow because it is not arched across the sky. It is refracted light from a virga, which is a small burst of rain from a cloud that never reaches the ground. You can just see the virga coming down from the cloud and then it catches the sunlight.

Lil' Red Dressed Up for the Gnats

Yeah, there really is a horse under all that. Every morning before the gnats get up, I'm up feeding & dressing horses. Every night, after the gnats have gone to bed, I'm out undressing horses. Only two of them are gnat-sensitive and get the full armor. The others just get fly masks. I also spray all exposed areas of horse to keep the gnats off those parts. But it works. I've not had them go super itchy and need steroids since I started doing this. This fly sheet is in it's second season, and its ability to do that is because it is made of Textaline fabric and I learned how to make patches with old blue jeans & fabric glue (none of the patching shows in this photo).
The things we do for our horses...

Cooper's Hawk

 sitting in the elm tree right outside the window.

Cat working out

And after a hard workout, The Fluffy Cat needs a good rest.

Stuffed Animals

There are two kinds of stuffed animals in this photo. The two with the glowing eyeballs want to be more stuffed. They had just finished breakfast but felt that it was not enough. The horses here don't need to eat, unlike the ones outside. My annual delivery of hay is coming this week. 250 bales of bermuda at 105 lbs each and 70 bales of alfalfa at 110 lbs each. I still have 6 bales of bermuda from last year & 29 bales of 120 lb alfalfa from last year.

Smoke at sunrise

 Photos taken this morning before the sun came up over Red Mtn. Friday July 19.

Mountain Fire

 Photos taken about 1pm Wed. July 17. In this photo, smoke from both branches can be seen. The southern branch is just visible.

 The northern branch, behind Red Mtn.

 The horse w/the fly sheet is SSM Dream Fire, 30 yr Morgan. The roan is Sedona, TWH

 A closer look at the smoke.

 The fire is fairly far away from us. And of more import, we are upwind of it.

Waterworks--I should Know better

I've lived up here for 30 years & never has fixing or putting in new water pipe EVER gone to plan. Why would I think that this would be different? When handyguy Mike cut the 2" main pipe, this is what we got--

Not exactly matching up, is it. Over the decades, the ground shifted and put pressure on the pipe, which caused the weakest place to give away and cause the leak.
 We gave up for the day, Mike capped it so I could have house water & horse water and we re-planned. 
The next day, Mike had to dig out all 3 directions of the pipelines to take pressure off the pipes and make them more flexible. The result was a big mound of dirt and a bigger hole.
It worked, however, and Mike got the pipe ends to line up.

But he could not get the repair coupling to fully seat and thus we had water still coming out. We needed more then just my one large pipe wrench.  We ended up calling handyguy Joe to request back up. Mike went to get Joe & he arrived with a large pipe wrench & a large channel lock. That got the job nearly done. There was still a slow drip but we all agreed that it would probably seal up overnight. It did.
Now Mike just has to come back and fill in the hole.
There is always something fun going on here.

Waterworks--again

The past month or so have been hectic & stressful closing down my business. The past few weeks, when walking up the hill to the house, I would notice a large patch of very green, very large, very lush weeds and think "I wonder what is up with that?", then my brain would go off somewhere else. Finally, Saturday, I looked at it & said "Nuts, that is right over the main water line." Sure enough, the ground was wet.

So today, Mike, my friend & handyguy, came over to dig it out. We found the problem, something neither of us had seen before. There is a "T" in the main 2" line to take a 1" line to the house. In the "T", there are about 10 pinprick holes, each with its own little geyser of water. We have seen cracks in pipes and breaks in pipes, but never pinpricks.

Further digging revealed a large tree root from the elm tree 15 feet away. We are thinking that the pipe started leaking some time ago and the tree found it & grew the large root to take advantage of the jackpot. As the root grew, it started to press upwards and sideways on the main line, which then stressed the "T" and finally made more pinprick holes. But why little holes? The only thing we can think of was that the "T" was defective to start with.

So now Mike is sawing up tree root (I hate doing that, but have no choice) and taking inventory in my workshop to see if I have all the right pieces to fix this without a special trip to town. The water is turned off at the pressure tank at the well and I have 4000 gallons in the tank on top of the hill. It is a nuisance but not a catastrophe. Just another fun day in the hill country.