2021-08-10
The Saving Grace

THE SAVING GRACE

It has been an incredibly busy, yet wholly productive, few days here at Hacienda Dominguez.

Albeit much stress has come with the territory, the saving grace have been our children.

Tonight, after spending the latter half of the day traveling to Albuquerque and then Las Luces, which is half an hour further south, I came home late, at nearly ten PM and ultimately found a wonderful note on my desk about how hard I’ve been working. It is nice to be recognized, especially by my children for whom I work hard to serve as an example.

Today, we picked up the second half of Milo’s secondhand bedroom set, 15 more bags of soil for another 30 cubic feet of soil for the new garden we’re building in front of the chicken coop.

At the same time I stopped by a restaurant which is closing down and it’s parts being auctioned off. We ultimately did win a number of items via the online sell off, but what pleased me most is that I learned much about the auctioning process by participating.

Likewise as helpful as the little ones, has been Sid, who goes off to college in a week. He’s been helping his grandparents, our newest neighbors, a lot lately, along with helping us here at home as needed. I’m truly excited for him.

As part of the garden I’m building and much of the landscaping we accomplished over the weekend, which included placing a couple of tons of large stones in circles around Junipers along our driveway, we’ll be adding a few five concrete Mayan statues, Parisian metal chairs and clay vases won at auction.

Finally, it behooves me to mention that we attended the Santa Fe County Fair on Saturday, where the kids were introduced to 4-H via a little chat with two sisters aged 14 and 10 who were showing off their goats. The older one bore an impressive set of braces, which are decorated with Turquoise, matching much of the jewelry she wore.

We also got to speak with Ryan Scwebach of Schwebach Farms in Moriarty (www.schwebachfarm.com) who had brought his market-ready hog for show. He’s primarily a barley farmer, who is actually a supplier for the Beer Creek Brewing Co. (the guys we harvested hops with this past week), which is the only brewery in the state of New Mexico that creates beer from grains exclusively grown here.

Although the county fair was much smaller than I had anticipated, ultimately, it was quite fruitful. For we got to talk farming with a few good folk and had a chance to see a lot of their prized livestock including cows, ducks, chickens, and rabbits, in addition to the aforementioned swine and car-jumpers.

As a reward for our little learning excursion, we went to The Pantry afterwards for lunch. As is seemingly my default choice at any joint that serves New Mexican cuisine, I ordered and ate the combo plate, which was as delicious as the first time I got it during one of my rat abatement trips back in March.

And as always, eating New Mexican makes me feel right at home, for which I’m wholly grateful.