Oh, no, a-Nother Norther!

This winter is never going to end. We're probably entering a new ice age. It's supposed to get down to near 10° tonight. Nevertheless, yellow and purple flowers are blooming everywhere.

I think the purple ones are Verbena. Too cold to go outside and photograph them. Maybe tomorrow.

I was determined not to waste precious time spent at the oasis, so I went searching for the perfect rock for a bench I'm making for a concrete table someone gave me.

I found what I thought was the perfect one in a canyon quite a ways from the house. I tied a rope to it and spent hours hauling it up out of the canyon and to the oasis, only to discover it was an inch too small for the concrete legs that came with the table. (The original concrete seats/benches were broken.) So I finally found a bigger rock near the house that would work. I made a ramp to get it into the pickup to take to the oasis. After a couple of hours I finally got it to the top of the ramp and when I went to swing it around into the pickup, it pushed the ramp aside and fell to the ground. I braced the ramp so that couldn't happen again and after another hour of freezing cold and biting wind, I got it into the pickup. It's still there. I've decided I need to concrete the legs into the ground before I put the rock on top of it. Not sure yet how I'll get the rock onto the legs. Will probably need help. Too miserable to take photos of that too. Ultimately, I plan to have 3 concrete seats at the table.

There was a beautiful sunrise as I drove from Alpine to the oasis early this morning.

About six weeks ago Kelly Bryan and I banded hummingbirds at Far Flung Outdoor Center in Study Butte. Quite a few observers were enjoying the session. Among them was one of the employees there, a river rafting guide named, Tony Flint. 

Tony on left

Now Flint has been arrested, and charged with the murder of the owner of nearby La Kiva. Very disturbing event. I didn't personally know either man, but I remember watching Gil Felts building his earth-sheltered La Kiva at the same time I was building my earth-sheltered house. He went about his project totally different than I went about mine.He was an artist and it was his artistic creation. Made of massive rhyolite boulders.

Then Gil died in 1990 and his teen-aged nephew, Glenn, took ownership of the place and had run it ever since. It's sort of a bar/club/restaurant where local musicians and others gather. Both men were well-liked in the community. A sad thing to have happened, for sure. The whole community is mourning.

UPDATE: Apparently both men were drunk and arguing when they left the bar after closing. Had one not died, neither would likely have remembered the next day that they had a fight. Drugs and alcohol are such a scourge in our country. So sad for both families.