Greetings from warm sunny New Mexico,

I don’t know about the smell of winter, but I am writing with the sweet smell of success in my nose. This year can be defined as the year of litigation, and I have just been informed by our wonderful lawyer that we won a lawsuit filed by a neighbor nearly two years ago. Enormous relief all round.

This person owns a tiny quarter acre plot right next to our place, and a year and a half ago he filed a lawsuit claiming about a quarter of our property as his personal roadway to his land, despite the fact that his property was right on the road and had a garage. Well, all the preparations culminated in an intensive 3 day trial in Las Vegas in October, in front of a very smart, recently elected, lady Judge. The plaintiff dragged in all his family and half the neighbors to lie for him, and our defense was done in less than a day. The couple from whom we had bought the property came and testified on our behalf, and it was their very credible testimony that really made the difference – the Judge found that an easement had existed in the past, but that the plaintiff had lost it by non-use, and then by being locked out in 1985, by the then owners of the property. It is a very convincing win, and does not leave much room for appeal. If it hadn't been for title insurance, we couldn't have afforded to fight back. If you want to read it, here is the decision.

I filed a Harassment complaint on my co-worker back in the summer – it ended in a “blame all round” conclusion, but the atmosphere in the court has really improved and we are now working as a team again.

It has been, as always, an eventful year all round. My father died in June after a long bout with cancer – I do not miss him as I feel he is still with me in spirit.

I finally got to realize a dream held for 5 years, and went to the Tucson Gem and Mineral show in late January – I stayed with a girlfriend from Rendezvous, and had an amazing time. The stuff on display was mind boggling – incredible fossils, crystals, gems, cabachons, jewellery, glasswork beads and on and on. The energy was incredible, and I got really sensitized to it. My hostess, Chris, is a very interesting gal, among other talents she makes and plays digeridoos. We had a blast, living on steak and salmon and not much sleep, and I am planning to do it again in 2008. I could have taken 10 million dollars with me, and not come back with enough change for a hamburger – it was incredible.

Jack ended up in charge of a small Rendezvous on Memorial Day, and again for Labor Day. It was held at the old site of Elizabethtown – an abandoned gold mining town. The site is owned by a descendant of one of the families who were there in its heyday, and is really interesting and a great site for camping out and impressing the tourists. The owner and her husband are interesting people with an eclectic assortment of junk collected over the years, and although not many rendezvousers showed up, the spirit was wonderful and we had a great time at both events.

Our good friend Laughing Medicine Woman has stayed with us over the summer a couple of times, and she and the boys just have a riot. We have a lovely time and the boys just love her. She is part Lakota and very creative – she makes wonderful beadwork and jewellery, and Lakota style bullet proof vests. She used to hunt with a bow, and is responsible for getting me onto my first hunting trip in October. A friend of hers in Wyoming who is a ranch manager got us permits for deer and antelope, and I got a deer and an antelope both. The meat is incredibly good – Jack and the boys are very enthusiastic about it, so at the beginning of December we went back to Wyoming to hunt again. I came back with two antelopes, so we are set for the year.

I also came back with a stack of dried, scraped deer and antelope hides, so what else to do but turn them into braintan buckskin, Indian style. This process can only be described as very physical – I am developing great arm muscles. If you are interested in what it is then visit www.braintan.com for lots of information.

Jack has been very busy keeping everything running smoothly at Hacienda Rains – his honeydo list gets longer by the day, and of course the boys demand a lot of his time too. Don Diego started at Headstart (pre-school) this September and is really enjoying it. He has made great leaps in maturity and sophistication and is quick witted and funny, loving and a little termagant too. Likes to get his own way, he does, and gets it more often than is good for him, for sure.

JJ is becoming more responsible - he is actually doing his homework without supervision and is becoming a very useful helper around the house. He is still the tallest in his class, and geeky by temperament – prefers watching TV to anything else and is endlessly inventive in a fantastical way – not real familiar with the laws and constraints of physics but I guess that will come.

This year we tried making a garden – Jack put in a lot of work, and we grew the most magnificent wild sunflowers ever. (Read: Jack had a nice garden started, then Shelley threw in wild sunflower seeds and objected to any weeding because it might be something interesting. Jack) For those thinking of cultivated sunflowers discard this image – think 6 foot triffid with yellow flowers in all directions. Seeing them in the verges I had never really appreciated how tall and scraggly, and aggressive they really are. They have absolutely no place in a rose bed – they leave no room for the roses. Along with the sunflowers I introduced some weird French aerial onions – also very aggressive and don’t leave room for the roses. They are meant to be aggressively harvested, which we were not doing, hence their spread was unimpeded. I think the onions and the sunflowers fought to a draw, and the roses disappeared. Undaunted, we are going to try again next year, with much larger quantities of horse manure to try and break up the clay and an aggressive weed elimination program.

We bought a little Kubota tractor over the summer, figuring that the only way to even start landscaping this place is with a machine. It has a front loader and a backhoe attachment, which can be taken off to attach other instruments of mayhem such as augers and plows. It also has cups in the armrests for beer cans – truly an American dream machine.

It is fun driving it around, a real testosterone sort of a rush, and all sorts of mayhem is possible. We got about 5 inches of snow a couple of weeks ago so I tried to use it as a snowplow – scraped up a lot of driveway in the process and then a tractor owning friend told me the way to clear snow was backwards, not forwards. Now I am waiting for the next snowfall, and the backwards facing havoc I can wreak. Yeehah!!!!!!!!!!!!

On that optimistic note I will wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and the sincere hope that next year will be the best ever.

Love, hugs and kisses,