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Nov. 4
    I tried out Butters  yesterday at a doggy daycare facility.  I'd already visited one kennel with the expected fencing enclosed pens, so the CDA Pet Resort was a real step up, where they let the dogs socialize in groups by size and age.  Butters has always been aggressively social--insisting on meeting any dog within sight and barking at any behind fences.  But they led him off, and when I returned after 4 hours, he was milling around with the 10-15 dogs peacefully, although he was pretty focused on the one guy that was sort of directing traffic.  It wasn't a space they could really run around in, but it felt better than a wire cage.  I didn't get to see the private room with a cot and blanket that he will get, but it sounds more like camp than a kennel.

Nov. 10
Last weekend was the Fall Folk Festival, and I usually post the pictures immediately, but will be doing other things the next couple weeks and will not be posting here either. I had two photographers to help this time, and it's likely we still missed a few acts between us...  
Like most of the US, we're facing the first fierce blast of winter in the next couple days. We're still dealing with the last flowers and veggies from the garden.  The flowers included broccoli, which is a quite decorative yellow.   We left some carrots to overwinter with leaves to insulate them.  The broccolis and celery were the last to go.   Their  greenery went in the chicken coop, where it will get picked down to the stems by Spring.


Nov. 22
Back from a trip to the Midwest (Minnesota's trying to rebrand its location as "the North") including Minnesota and Iowa.

These are pelicans along the Mississippi river in the Quad Cities area of Iowa/Illinois.  They're pretty common there but I've only seen them in the Silver Valley around home...

On the way back, the most scenic state is Montana, with these Crazy Mountains photographed at dawn from Big Timber (which has no big timber, just as Mountain Lake Minnesota lacks a mountain, or surprisingly for Minnesota, even a lake).  The trip was icy in Montana driving out in the big cold snap, and just fine returning in a warming trend...

Nov. 29
The week has flown by since getting back from our trip.  The weather has been (literally AND figuratively) all over the map, with calm foggy days followed by strong winds and 50's, now expected to bounce back towards zero overnight the next few days.  We try to walk down by the lake daily, but it's often dark by the time we make it.  Last night we could see a pair of tundra swans by the bridge, so we walked down this morning to see if they were still there...


It was hard to get a clear photo of them both up, since they were dabbling constantly...  The little female mallard seemed to be hanging around for scraps, since they, like the swans, can only dabble as long as their neck will let them...

They do look funny in their common feeding posture, as do moose when only their front hump sticks out while feeding on underwater plants...

Our lake has a yearly tide as water seeps and evaporates away, and it's about at its lowest currently.  An old wood and wire pipe (possibly a sewer) is exposed that we hadn't observed before.  And the Nesbitt bottle above just washed out in the wind yesterday.  It brought back memories of their orange soda, which I'm sure I had a time or two.  A search on Ebay revealed someone claiming this style of bottle is from 1938 and worth $3.99.  It is sturdy and was designed for reuse, with the label probably fired onto the bottle.  I like the fine lines in the bottle as well that catch the light...

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