Making it through February

There’s not been much garden oriented work happening at the Urban Ranch this month. We had a battle against scabies over most of the month.  No pictures of that.  It was two weeks of horrific itching and house cleansing.  Anything with material had to be either sanitized or isolated for a week.  Scabies are little mites that burrow into the skin, lay eggs, the eggs hatch, feed on skin cells, and lay more eggs.  We battled through two house cleansing and two prescription cream procedures.  I think we are done with that plague.  We don’t know where it came from and certainly wished it hadn’t visited our house.  Bradley and I were covered from just below neck to the tips of our toes.  If you ever hear the word scabies …. run.  They can live on fabric for up to two days and is highly contagious.  When I visited my doctor, I pulled off my shirt and he stepped back a couple steps; made a comment about how itchy it looked; said he would call in a prescription for it; and scooted out the door.  You know it’s bad when a doctor doesn’t want to be near you. 

We got blasted with Storm “Q”.  Well, we got about 9 inches at most.  However you know it’s bad when the snow plow that plows the street can’t make it up the hill past my house.  He did get the street plowed by coming up a shorter hill on the other side of my house and plowing down the longer hill.  Since I live on a street that has a T intersection on either end and most times the only traffic is those that live on the block long street, snow plowing our street is on the bottom of the list.  It’s usually at least three days before the plow comes by.  The issue is not being able to leave the house but always getting back up the hill to the house on the return.  Storm Rocky gave us a whopping .01 of an inch of moisture.  Ha, we can scrape more off the windshield on any given morning than that.  That brings my area up to .87 of an inch for the month which is almost up to the average of .91.  March will be the key.  Our average moisture for March is two inches.  Hopefully, we can keep our averages up this year. 

Bradley finally got his wish for snow.  He and a friend of his spent two hours whizzing down the school yard hill.  His grade school has one of he best hills for sledding in the city.  Every snow attracts kids from all around.  Bradley had some one to sled with other than Grandpa.  I got to watch them slide down the hill for two hours from the comfort of my truck.  Yea!!

The ariel fort built for Bradley and neighborhood friends is starting to loose it’s attraction.  This year a zip line will be added to the fort.  It won’t start at the top of the fort this year.  The kids are only four foot tall so maybe about four or four and a half foot from the ground will be a good place to start.  It will have to be strong enough to carry my rotund self down the line.  That way I’ll know that a kid of about 1/3 of that weight will hardly be a challenge for the line.  It will zip diagonal across the yard and be about 50 feet of sheer child adrenaline rush and end in a three foot high dirt pile.