Soon [the very evening] after the MOF Disaster and detour to la Veta our friend Erin arrived, saved by her Subaru but more than mildly shaken from a potentially life-threatening event on the icy highway crossing La Veta Pass, and we all had a dinner with Luz, Christine and Izel, the last of whom was redeposited Friday morning while his parents went North, seeking a replacement earthly vehicle in Parker, Colorado.  Their quest proved successful but turned problematic when the interstate iced over on the way home forcing them to overnight in Monument while we accommodated both the boy and the family pitbull, Lola.  Walking out in Saturday’s

morning sun to investigate our little guest cabin coincided exactly with the Parents’

reappearance in their game-changing new used car, a loaded 2005 4Runner, exuberant.

L and I nevertheless immediately took off for the dump where, although  no longer recycling ANYthing, they were happy to accept our two Habib chairs,  which

allowed us to return unburdened to a chaotic and possibly productive lunch chez Linda.   Following that L., Christine, Erin and I visited our friends Robert and Joan at Mountain Water,

their ambitious life-changing project which is finally taking form just down the hill after many years of dreams and plans.   Then, Erin on her way to Albuquerque, we went home where,

the pitbull and four-year-old having previously retired to nap-mode elsewhere, we collapsed.

Sunday it took more than a minute to remember what it was one did

but Monday, snow devolving despite bitter winds, felt guiltily luxuriant; walked [in bitter winds],

read, studio, lunch, read, studio…then walked to the saddle at afternoon’s end to discover that

the thaw had negatively affected the propane truck coming up from Leon’s.   We did learn from the driver that Aggie was a “white heeler”* just like one he’d gone to Kansas for and

that he was also perfectly content to wait there for the promised tow truck…but come the next

morning with 8″ of unexpected snow the truck was still there, the road still blocked and Leon, who’d meant to leave for Mexico yesterday, maybe had a new roommate**.  As for us,

with the 8″ of unexpected snow, a propane truck stranded in the driveway and Pueblo said to be surprisingly icy, we cancelled our trip and Linda’s dental appointment as the flakes just kept on comin’…and blowin’.

Mid-morning  a couple of guys showed up with a backhoe to extricate the truck which,

in semi-blizzardy conditions, took awhile.   It’d been too cold to use the studio all morning

and after a surprisingly immense hole had been blown in a potentially productive day

by the time, among other things, we’d slogged through the drifts to return an errant pitbull

it was quite late in the afternoon.  I took a side-trip for a look at where the truck’d stuck, then

stole half an hour in the studio as the light faded to remind myself…

Well, maybe tomorrow…or next week***.

With the sky wide open the nights grew cold and inexplicably sleepless…the next brilliant

if pretty much unproductive day

ended in scallops [not shown], all in anticipation of Linda’s postponed visit to the Dentist.

* she seems very happy now that we know who she is…or so it seems to me, anyway.

**turned out he didn’t spend the night; after the propane company finally found someone willing to come up, albeit one so clueless they sent a 4×2 one-ton wrecker which got stuck as soon as it left the plowed county road, Leon took the driver in and made him dinner until a co-worker picked him up around 9:30…they were back with the backhoe twelve hours later and somehow got out despite the intervening snowfall.

***Week after that people’ll be headed west, hoping to catch a lucky break and get over the Sierra in the beginning of February.