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...
