Working and Thriving Through the Storm

Yesterday we had a typical New Mexico storm for this area, cold and lots of wind. Yesterday’s high was 38 with 15-25mph winds. Those conditions are not fun, and I was not looking forward to it. I knew from previous storms that the goal needs to be survive. Don’t expect to get anything done, just live. I also know that Laura and I both get short tempered when we deal with nasty days. Recently, I’ve been reminded by some podcasts to be thankful. Going into yesterday I thanked God for the wind along with a bunch of other blessings. It helped me to frame the day in a better light.

We started out yesterday with a very slow start. Who wants to get out of bed into freezing temps? Laura and I were talking about what to work on to setup our new tent, and she pulled out her phone to check in the status of the gravel we ordered. After checking in with our contact for the delivery company, the driver called us 10 minutes later and let us know he was an hour and a half or so out. This took us from 0 to 80 in a hurry. We wanted to get our frame for the tent pad built before the truck got here. We had two halves assembled as the truck pulled in.

It turned out to be a good thing we didn’t finish assembling the frame. We ended up moving one of the halves and the driver dumped the gravel right where we wanted it and was able to spread it a little for us. If we had the frame assembled, we would have had a bigger pile to spread.

After the gravel delivery, we went up to the rancher’s shop and cut tent poles from electrical conduit. It was a nice break from the wind. By the time we were done cutting, the clouds had cleared and the wind was down slightly. We spent the rest of the day working on the pad. There is nothing like good hard work to keep you warm.

With all the hard labor to keep us warm and busy, we had almost none of the issues we had during the last storm.

Last night was cold, 18° cold, and probably colder on the ranch. We stayed warm with our hot water bottles and cuddled up together. This morning all our water was frozen. We typically don’t keep much of our general water over night, so I filled empty containers at the well first thing. Laura had to warm drinking water up and then pour it back in the bottle to thaw more out to get enough to fill up her water bottle.

We spent today catching up on laundry and putting the tent together. The tent came from Davis Tent company in Denver. Denver is known for having mystery toxin. We asked our mentor and he said we need to let the tent air out, but it was unlikely we would contaminate our clothes while setting it up. With that info, we dived into setting up the tent.

Assembling the tent was straight forward and we had it up in several hours. We left the rain fly off while the tent airs out. Laura checked on our heater, and learned it should be here in about a week. I look forward to using the new tent and having heat at night.

With lots of work, we have not only survived the storm, but thrived through it. God has continued to provide good things even on cold, windy days.