When you are very low on the food chain you become creative with where you build a safe home. When snakes are a very real threat, when hawks circle above, you do what is necessary to survive.

In this case, you take a buckets worth of dried out and dead prickly pear remnants and stuff them into the engine of an Expedition. You also rip out insulation and stuff that in there too for comfort. All that metal is uncomfortable and hot.

The car had been running a bit off. Felt like it needed a tune up. We have driven this vehicle across country and back. No real concern just time for an oil change etc.

My husband lifted the hood to discover his crazy wife had been driving around with so much burnt cactus debris in the engine it’s almost divine intervention that she wasn’t a roadside car- b-q!

I love how he tells me things. After almost 20 years together and having watched me melt down over huge ants just a day or two before he knew my mental was going to have trouble with this one. So he just told me to come look.

Now for those of you just arriving to this party I will catch you up. We moved to Gold Canyon in May. In 4 months we have had coyotes wander along the driveway, javelinas tear out plants and freak out the dogs, eight turkey vultures circled overhead, huge ant invasion, and 90 posts worth of random other crazy. That is why I started writing any of this; read “about me”. Daily there is something here to either marvel at or run from!

I looked at the engine and my brain paused and said…uh you are no mechanic but that’s not right.

Call us crazy but we are going to try the natural routes first before spraying chemicals all over our property. We moved into nature. They were here first. They just need to relocate not be destroyed.

Had my car turned into a bbq on the freeway this past week before I found out I probably wouldn’t be so generous. We shall see how this goes…