Chicken with bones

Saturday encore ~ Good friends help you bury a body...

This encore post is from June 15, 2016. 

...great friends help you dig it back up and bring it home.

 It would have taken years for Lucy and I to bring this home piece by piece,

so I enlisted Ethel to help me retrieve it in one fell swoop.
That laughter you heard out of the west Friday morning? That was us.

(If the cow looks familiar, you may remember it from this post,

when Lucy and I brought home the skull.)

Anyway, when these bones finish bleaching out, 

I'll have plenty of raw materials to make stuff.

What stuff, you ask? 

I saw something similar while perusing Pinterest

and thought it might look and sound interesting on the front porch.

Just as the feral beast and the chickens and the swallows 

were getting used to it...

...a 30 mph gust brought it to its knees. 

Turns out that 6-pound fishing line is no match for the New Mexico wind.

But that's ok. The parts are still in tact, and I should be able 

to easily restring it with something stronger. 

It was a noble experiment that fueled lots of boneheaded ideas 

for future projects. (Ethel, come back soon!)

Saturday encore ~ Lucy brings home a cow with a bad toupee

This encore post is from March 2016.

***

Several rides ago, Lucy and I happened upon a recently deceased cow.

We returned to the scene over the weekend, hoping that the skull would still be there,

(and that it wouldn't be too ripe) so that we could bring it home.

 

The cow with the bad toupee will remain in the garden until the sun bleaches it white.

I'm surprised Johnny was willing to get so close.

It smells like steak, but not in a good way.


p.s. Ethel and I brought the rest of the cow home in the Ranger a few months later:

Lady Mary visits the bone yard and makes a hasty exit

Tuesday spoonful

Saturday encore ~ Collector's items

Today's encore is from Oct. 13, 2015, and features Lucy,
the best riding donkey in the universe.

If all goes as planned today, I will be meeting Lucy's previous mom
in person for the very first time. Of course there will be pictures taken,
so I might even have something fresh to blog about next week.

***

As if the weather and the company weren't perfect enough,

Sunday's trail ride was topped off by the proverbial icing on the cake:

finding an entire cow skeleton.

Spotting bleached bones from a mile away is my superpower.

Me: Look, Lucy! Another skull for our collection.

Lucy: If I keep my eyes closed, maybe it will disappear.

I'm not sure if Lucy was giving the stinkeye to me or the skull, but I'm guessing the skull.

It was still a bit ripe.

Lucy: You can hang the jaws on my other side for balance, but that's it.

We'll have to come back for the rest the next time...
and the time after that...and the time after that.

I'm guessing this poor girl has been decomposing for about a year. We found the skull, jaw, neck

and a shoulder blade about 30 feet away from the main skeleton, and they were bleached clean.

The rest, not so much. 

I still can't believe Saint Lucy puts up with me.

For now, the skull sits on the hearth. 

I covered the last one with howlite, a sort of poor girl's turquoise.

I'm going to try to electrify this one and turn it into a wall sconce,

as long as Smooch doesn't get to it first.

Another bedazzled bovine

 Back in October and two cow carcasses ago, Lucy helped me bring home

this skull. My intention at the time was to electrify it into a wall sconce,

but the cow with the bad toupee will be better suited for that,

so I decided to bedazzle this one.

 I went rock shopping on Etsy and bought a pound of Snowflake Obsidian from Utah, 

plus a couple pounds of assorted semi-precious gemstones, 

from which I sorted out all the whitish ones.

 You know you live in the middle of nowhere when gluing stones to bones

passes for entertainment during a heat wave.

You're probably thinking "who's got more rocks in her head, her or the cow?"

I started wondering that myself several days into this project.

The stones had to be placed on a flat plane so that they wouldn't slide off

while the glue dried, and it turns out a cow skull has many planes. 

So the process was: apply glue, apply stones, let dry, rotate, repeat.

I considered using a barbecue spit for the rotating part

but didn't want you to think I was weird.

 My bedazzled bovine has found a home in the sunroom.

 I wonder how many bedazzled bovines in one home is too many?

So far, I'm up to two.

Good friends help you bury a body

Great friends help you dig it back up and bring it home.

 It would have taken years for Lucy and I to bring this home piece by piece,

so I enlisted Ethel to help me retrieve it in one fell swoop.
That laughter you heard out of the west Friday morning? That was us.

(If the cow looks familiar, you may remember it from this post,

when Lucy and I brought home the skull.)

Anyway, when these bones finish bleaching out, 

I'll have plenty of raw materials to make stuff.

What stuff, you ask? 

I saw something similar while perusing Pinterest

and thought it might look and sound interesting on the front porch.

Just as the feral beast and the chickens and the swallows 

were getting used to it...

...a 30 mph gust brought it to its knees. 

Turns out that 6-pound fishing line is no match for the New Mexico wind.

But that's ok. The parts are still in tact, and I should be able 

to easily restring it with something stronger. 

It was a noble experiment that fueled lots of boneheaded ideas 

for future projects. (Ethel, come back soon!)

Lucy brings home a cow with a bad toupee

Several rides ago, Lucy and I happened upon a recently deceased cow.

We returned to the scene over the weekend, hoping that the skull would still be there,

(and that it wouldn't be too ripe) so that we could bring it home.

 

The cow with the bad toupee will remain in the garden until the sun bleaches it white.

I'm surprised Johnny was willing to get so close.

It smells like steak, but not in a good way.

Collector's items

As if the weather and the company weren't perfect enough,

Sunday's trail ride was topped off by the proverbial icing on the cake:

finding an entire cow skeleton.

Spotting bleached bones from a mile away is my superpower.

Me: Look, Lucy! Another skull for our collection.

Lucy: If I keep my eyes closed, maybe it will disappear.

I'm not sure if Lucy was giving the stinkeye to me or the skull, but I'm guessing the skull.

It was still a bit ripe.

Lucy: You can hang the jaws on my other side for balance, but that's it.

We'll have to come back for the rest the next time...
and the time after that...and the time after that.

I'm guessing this poor girl has been decomposing for about a year. We found the skull, jaw, neck

and a shoulder blade about 30 feet away from the main skeleton, and they were bleached clean.

The rest, not so much. 

I still can't believe Saint Lucy puts up with me.

For now, the skull sits on the hearth. 

I covered the last one with howlite, a sort of poor girl's turquoise.

I'm going to try to electrify this one and turn it into a wall sconce,

as long as Smooch doesn't get to it first.

Sunday leftovers

 I don't think Johnny likes the tall grass as much as I do. It's harder for him to see his prey.

 This is Smooch alerting me that the big, scary propane truck had arrived.

It was the highlight of her week.

 Minnie contemplated a bone in the yard.

 So did I. It was good to see some life in the old bones.

I saw three monkeys in this set –

the hear-see-speak-no-evil ones?

If you haven't seen this article in the NY Times, you might want to check it out. It's called  

Forty Portraits in Forty Years. Photographer Nicholas Nixon took a photo of these four sisters, 

in the same arrangement, every year since 1975. The images are nothing short of captivating. 

I think part of my fascination with them is that I was probably the same age as one of the sisters in 1975. 

To see the aging process on them is to see it on myself. Kinda scary.

What do you think, guys? Shall we take a selfie in the same spot each year for the next 40?

When I get to be 100 and somebody asks me what the secret is to living a long, happy life,

green chile will be near the top of the list. I put up a sack of my favorite food yesterday.

The chore went by very quickly because Jack Bauer was in the kitchen helping me.

Having imaginary boyfriends keeps me young.

I like to wait until the end of the harvest season to put up my green chile because there will usually be

lots of red ones in the sack (the green chiles turn red when they ripen on the vine).