First post of the year.

 Sometime in either October or early November a chunk of crap broke loose in my left eye. I might add, my only good eye. My right eye was lasered in the 90's when Karen was set up for an operation to remove a growth on her liver. I stressed out and ruptured a vessel. They sealed it with the lazer, but it left me with very reduced vision in it. It was also distorted, with peoples faces looking more like a "political" cartoon.

I went to a specialist and found that it was more of a nuisance than serious. The specialist recommended that I get my Cataracts removed and give the junk time to settle. Then if it did not settle he said that he could suck it out in the spring.

I was set up to have the first cataract removed on Dec 13, and the second on the 21st. Of course one of the restrictions was to lift no more than 20 lbs for the month of healing. Unfortunately my winter wood supply arrived 4 days before my operation. I had already got and split 2 1/3 cords of wood, and this was my second load that would finish out my winter wood needs. I got most of it split and stacked. Connie came down and helped me finish the rest of it on the day before my procedure. The procedure went well.

The weather turned cold - single digits at night, so I brought Hope in from her mews and tied her up with Bud in the weathering area. Hope is a Desert bird and thus has no real defense against zero and minus temps. I wrapped a heat tape on her inside perch, but she wasn't going in at night. Spending the nights sitting on her outside perch, leaving me no recourse but to tie her up so that I could take her in the shop at night. She was carrying extra weight, but I had no way of knowing if that was enough so that she would be able to keep her toes.

My first procedure was to my bad eye, and the new lens improved it a lot more than I would have thought. Then just before Christmas we got about 8 inches of snow. Snow here generally does not last more than a couple of days. We had a storm blow through and we got a lot of serious wind, that caused a few drifts around the house. Connie had to go home to take care of some of her business. She had a rental car, due to an accident earlier with her normal car. She loaded up and was going to make a run home , then come back before Christmas. She took off and in just a few minutes called me telling me that she was stuck on a snow bank. The road was drifted about 3 feet high along the side of the gravel pit. It had compacted to the consistency of wet cement. There she was just like a "post turtle", little wheels turning but not touching anything at all. I went up with the Subaru, went around her out in the Sage and tried to pull her off with a nylon rope that I had used before to jerk a tractor out of a ditch in Klamath falls. The rope was ideal as I could get a run at it, and the stretch of the rope would keep me from ripping any thing off. I eventually broke the rope, she never moved!

At first it was kind of romantic and nice

to have snow for Christmas

Then the wind came up and it started drifting.

I was still under weight restrictions, but I still

had to get wood for the fire, not to mention shovel 

some paths.

Dave from next door eventually brought a tractor up and pulled her off the drift. I checked my old John Deere tractor, but the wheel had rusted out since I had last used it. Out came the quad with my four foot snow plow blade. I spent the rest of the day breaking the many drifts apart so as to make the road passable.

Christmas day we traveled to Meridian Id. to have dinner with a friend of Connie's. We left pretty early after dinner but the weather worsened with each mile home. It had drifted again and anything other than my Subaru or a truck wouldn't have made it down the road. It was touch and go, but we made it, threw a log on the fire, went to the hot tub, then to bed.

I again spent the day trying to clear the road of the, this time, frozen wet snow. Again it took most of the day to punch a hole in the 3/4 mile driveway. I was sure glad that I had that plow for my quad.

With all the crap going on I never picked Bud up again. There was no way to get to any place to hunt with him because of the snow, and quite frankly I am happy enough to have him survive the year. We will begin again next year.

This development has worked well for my friend Bruce Haak. He has no hunting opportunities where he is at, so he brings his falcon 130 miles to my house to hunt. Have I ever mentioned that this drought has made it very difficult to find something to hunt one's Hawk on.

The weather is pretty typical for this time of the year and we are in the midst of a temperature inversion, meaning that the outside temperature and the dew point are close together, so its foggy. It did lift high enough that we could fly his falcon today. She did kill a Spoonbill Duck, a rare visitor to this area, today. She was getting pretty hard to see at what I decided was around 600 feet up.

I found it a bit strange, Spoonies have a green wing panel,

 but I could not get it to show up with the camera phone.

Right now there isn't anything much going on so its hibernation time, warm fires, good books, spring will come soon.