Our Own Private Dust Bowl

We watched "The Dust Bowl" by Ken Burns on PBS November 18 and 19; it was one of his best films since "The Civil War" if not the best. If you didn't see it, you should find a way to watch it. It's available for download on iTunes or you can buy the DVD or Blu-Ray at PBS. You can watch the trailer here.

What those people had to go through was unimaginable. We complain about the dust that constantly filters into the house, but it's nothing compared to what they had to deal with. The dust outside the houses piled up in drifts as high as the roof. And the dust invaded their bodies, filling their lungs, causing illness and many, many deaths. We complain about the wind that blows all through the month of April, but at least we don't get the "black blizzards" that they did. And it went on for 10 years, the storms growing more frequent as the years passed. No one in Washington, DC seemed to care about the situation, until the "Black Sunday" storm, which eventually blew the dust into New York City, into the Oval Office in the White House, and onto a ship out at sea. Finally people back east took notice and they started up programs such as the CCC and the WPA, which put people back to work, doing productive things that the country needed, such as building roads and bridges. The government also sent people to the dust bowl area to teach the farmers other ways of plowing that wouldn't harm the environment as much as the way they had been doing things. Gradually things got better and the dust storms stopped.

The "center" of the dust bowl was Boise City, Oklahoma, which is in the far western panhandle of Oklahoma, very close to the border with New Mexico.

The dust bowl was long ago, but it could happen again; sometimes it feels like it is happening, or at least starting to happen. No one is plowing the ground under, but we're in severe drought conditions and have been for years.

Ron and I were talking about it last night and we couldn't remember the last time it rained here. So we checked the handy-dandy weather station and saw that a month ago, we got a quarter of an inch of rain. The last "significant" rain we got was on September 12 when we got 0.68 of an inch.

We've only gotten 6.39 inches of precipitation this year, which I knew was extremely low, so I compared it with the precipitation totals of all the years since we got the weather station and created this graph.

As you can see, it's been a very dry year. Granted, the year isn't over yet, but we're not going to get very much precipitation in the next three weeks. There is supposed to be a storm here this weekend, with snow, but we won't even come close to what we got in our very driest year.

2005 - 11.64
2006 - 10.15
2007 - 12.16
2008 - 9.91
2009 - 8.96
2010 - 9.05
2011 - 10.38
2012 - 6.39 (as of 12/5/12)

And of course a dry winter means less snowmelt in the spring, which makes for a very bad fire season next summer. Sigh.

Time Change

I don't have to work weekends anymore (except maybe one a month), so this was the first time change in three years that I got an extra hour of sleep instead of an extra hour of work. That extra hour of sleep was always touted as the consolation for it getting dark so early, and it was always difficult for me to hear that. I never got an extra hour of sleep; an extra hour of pay just wasn't the same. So this year I finally got to enjoy the time change.

It's been hard on the cats, especially the strong-willed Satchmo. He's used to getting his dinner between 4:30 and 5:00, and this afternoon when he started yowling, I looked at the clock and said, "Hey, it's not dinnertime; it's only 3:30." Then I realized that for him, it was 4:30. I waited until 4:15 human time to feed them, giving them a gradual change. Of course I was outside between 3:30 and 4:15, so I didn't have to listen to his incessant yowling.

Ron fed the dogs a little earlier than usual, too, but they're not as vocally demanding as the cats are; it's just another gradual transition.

Vote Early ... And Often

Well, not too often. Only once per election. But if you can, vote early. We're fortunate to live in a state where early voting is encouraged. I've been voting early for years. Ron always preferred to vote on election day, going to our neighborhood polling place, and seeing some of the neighbors. But this year he decided to vote early, hoping it would stop some of the political phone calls we've been getting almost nightly.

So we voted today at the county administrative building, where early voting is held for all county residents, no matter what precinct they live in. Business was steady, with three or four people in line all the time.

It feels really good to have voted. Go vote, quick before they make it more difficult.

Weekend Work

On Friday morning we had 12 tons of "clean fill dirt" delivered so we could do some home maintenance.

We had to put some all around the base of the house in the back courtyard, and also the two back porches, creating a slope so the rain that flows off the roof and the porch overhangs would flow away from the house instead of toward it, which would damage the foundation.

So we spent a few hours on Saturday and a couple of hours on Sunday doing just that.

And we're almost done; we still need to finish up a little bit next weekend. And we'll still have plenty of dirt left over for future projects.

Today while we were working, the next door neighbors had two of their horses in their yard keep us company. One of the horses is the loudest, most talkative horse I've heard since the horses in the movie "Young Frankenstein."



Except the neighbor horse was MUCH louder.

Black and White and Dead All Over

I understand that magpies eat roadkill. But around here, it's usually prairie dogs. When I see magpies pecking at the remains of a skunk, I keep thinking that either they're really desperate (really hungry) or they have absolutely no sense of smell.

For the uninitiated, magpies look kind of like crows wearing tuxedos.

When I lived back east and came out west on vacation, I saw a black and white bird flying against a deep blue sky. I remember thinking, "Oh, how exotic! How beautiful!" Then at the first opportunity (a National Park bookstore) I looked in a bird guidebook and found out it was a magpie and part of the crow family and considered filthy.

They're extremely common here, so I don't think of them as exotic anymore, but they are still beautiful. Except maybe when they're picking at the carcass of a skunk. And for some reason this time of year we always have an abundance of dead skunks ("in the middle of the road, stinking to high heaven" to quote that old song).

The Lizard

Well, that didn't take long.

We came home from our dinner at the Chinese restaurant (best Hot and Sour Soup in the world!) to find a motionless lizard on the living room floor and Satchmo sitting nearby, looking very pleased with himself. Having fallen for the lizard's game of playing dead before, we were skeptical. But this time it was true; the lizard was dead.

Ron scooped him up, using a paper towel, and put him in a box and we took a closer look. There was a small spot of blood on his body, possibly a cat-inflicted wound (we didn't take that close a look).

Ron was about to toss the body out in the grass, near where he had seen the lizard before it ever came inside. But first I said, "Wait, let me take a picture!"

So here is the picture of the lizard

Yes, he was missing the end of his tail when he first came in the house.

We'll see what Satchmo hunts next. Anyone want to place any bets?

Of Mice and Lizards

A couple of weeks ago, Satchmo caught and killed a mouse. He didn't eat it, but generously left the small furry carcass near the bedroom door, which was closed, so we would find it when we came out in the morning. Ron picked it up, using a few thicknesses of paper towel, and disposed of it in the garbage.

For a few days, Satchmo was on full alert, either prowling around for mice, or staking out a couple of places and sitting there, staring intently and not moving at all. One place is the laundry room; we think the mouse got in through the hose from the clothes dryer.

Yesterday when I got up, I saw a "blob" of indeterminate shape and color on the rug in the hallway, just outside the guest room. I hadn't put in my contact lenses yet, which is why the shape and color were so blurry. Once I had my contacts in, I took a closer look.

It wasn't a mouse; it was a lizard, about 5 inches long and of medium girth. Ron came and took a look, too. It hadn't moved at all, and we thought Satchmo the Sentinel had struck again.

But it was playing dead; when Ron reached out to grab it, again, with paper towel in hand, the lizard moved like a flash. I couldn't believe how fast it ran! It was like the roadrunner (from the cartoon) on amphetamines.

The lizard stayed out of sight for the rest of yesterday. Today it made a couple of appearances. The first was in the guest room (which is where it ran yesterday), but it disappeared again before we could catch it. The second appearance was in the living room; again, it played dead and when Ron tried to catch it, it ran away. But this time, Satchmo saw it and even pawed it a few times. So Satchmo is on alert again, but not full alert, not with the same intensity as he was with the mouse. I guess lizards aren't as natural a prey as mice are.

And if you're wondering how the lizard got in, he came in through the garage. Sometimes we leave the garage door open a couple of inches at the bottom. When you run swamp coolers, there always has to be an open window or an open door to relieve the pressure of the air that blows in.

He looks similar to the photo below, which is of a lizard called the plateau lizard.