Rick's Ramblings

Thursday, December 29, 2005

Christmas at the Cabin, Day 7 (Wednesday)

It is really scary when I sit down to write about an entire day’s activities and I can’t really think of anything to write! Time really flies up here.

Last night it was as windy as I have ever personally experienced up here. The background roar of the constant wind was very loud, and the gusts would cause the wind generator to furl making a loud humming noise that sounds like a helicopter landing on the roof. I would guess the steady winds at close to 40 mph and gusts much higher than that. I know it can blow up here, but that is the biggest blow I can recall experiencing. So, it was a restless night.

Our morning routine was, well, routine. We had grapefruit that Dave had brought us on Tuesday and it was delicious. It was Lynne’s birthday, so she opened cards and gifts and then talked to her Mom on the phone for a while. We had a light crab cobb salad for lunch.

We took the dogs to the bottom rather than “around” and they seemed satisfied with that. I started up “Beastie” (our 1984 Ford F150 pickup truck with a snow plow attached) and moved some snow around. The objective was to run the truck for a while and exercise the hydraulics. We started a jig-saw puzzle that Lynne’s Mom sent us for Christmas. It is a puzzle shaped like an old Victrola record player with a theme of a Victorian music room—very challenging. After all that hard work, a short afternoon nap was well deserved.

It continued to be windy throughout the day, so it was a good day to be indoors.

Larry and Donna Martin invited us over to their cabin for dinner. So, went over there around 4:00 and had a great meal of home-made chili and fry-bread along with

an apricot

a peach pie for dessert. Yum. After a great meal and great conversation, we came home well after dark and let the dogs out to run around a little bit. After that, we settled in and watch a movie on TV.

There was a 50% chance of snow overnight.

Speaking of snow, that reminds me to tell you about something I learned on this trip. One of the first days we were up here we were walking through fresh, pristine, undisturbed snow on our snow shoes. I saw a patch of what looked like very fine black ash on the top of the snow. I thought that was strange and bent down to get a closer look curious about where the ash had come from. What I observed where thousands of very tiny black bugs jumping around. They looked just like tiny black fleas. Lynne thought I was crazy until she also saw them hopping about.

So, when we got back to the cabin, I googled “snow fleas”, and sure enough found several references to the very critters I had seen. Here is one of the references. It is a story similar to mine. Turns out the critters are not really fleas but springtails and may be the most common creature on Earth! They are everywhere, but so tiny we don’t see them. They eat decomposing leaves and stuff and are sometimes found on snow under a tree or bush. They are harmless, so we don’t have to worry about them bothering us or the dogs.

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