Today we had a lovely lazy day. When we first started this journey our mentor told us that we did not need chairs and to just sit on 5 gallon buckets. When we replenished our gear after the really bad contamination early on, we splurged and got $5 Walmart bag chairs. Usually I never have the urge to sit down, but today I actually got my chair out of the bag for the first time since we moved to the ranch and sat down. That only happened because it got up to 60 without much wind today because it’s not very fun to sit down if it’s cold. We had Paleo pancakes with Craisins and butter and our usual eggs for breakfast that I got cooked about lunchtime. Before that we laid in bed and listened to Brooks‘s sermon this morning. After we ate and sat around for a bit, Wesley asked if I wanted to go for a walk. We decided to take a different route today and walked through another pasture here on the ranch. We walked all the way out to the fence that borders the White Sands missile Range. Oryx do not jump fences, but instead they go under them. We saw many places where the oryx had gone under the fence and bent it up. It was nothing that would cause a cow to get out, but a small calf could easily walk under it. While we were walking, I saw my very first Jack rabbit. Their ears are huge!
Once we got back to camp, I decided to do the extremely painful thing and apply lotion to my dry, chaffed skin. It’s a breathtaking, awful experience every time. The electric tea kettle has really helped me get more water in, but my skin is so dry and my fingers are still cracked from not drinking enough water for a prolonged period of time. Hopefully once I get back on top of this, it’ll be better. Wesley worked on laundry and I worked on dinner. When we finished dinner, we got the dishes done and headed into town for our showers. I took the bottle of lotion with me so that we could have the lotion there at the house to lotion after showers. It was surprising to me how many areas of my body were so dry. The outside of my knee felt like an alligator, but at least that one didn’t sting so bad.
Wesley had in mind project he wanted to do with the tent this morning, but we decided that we should wait until the new tent stakes get in and make a call to clarify something tomorrow before doing far more work than needed. It’s a good thing that we’re airing the tent out because we definitely both react to it still. We’ve got a storm coming in the end of this week so we may decide to wait until after the storm to move because we tend to be more reactive to things during storms. I would say that’s a general rule, but the last storm we didn’t really react to much except for the night that I closed the gate from the wrong side. ? Yesterday’s laundry included the clothes from when we went to Belen. Only one pair of pants got retired bc of contamination, which is pretty good.