a word of warning

This:

 

Can lead to some pretty complex mucus issues.

Because dogs are gross.

I was feeling lazy today, so I took Maya up to the dog park on North Mesa.  This "dog park" is really just an old fenced-in volleyball court, now filled with sand and weeds, but it's part of the greater North Mesa dog area.  Depending on your point of view, this is either a combination multi-use trail system and "off-leash dog training area" or a very large lot of undeveloped county land filled with broken bottles, dead crows, dog poop, and well-urinated-upon-signs reading "off-leash dog training area."  Either way, Maya loves it.  The fenced area is, by informal agreement, a single-user area, which no one else enters (at least not without asking) if you're already playing in it.  Every town should have one.  It's relaxing.  Oh, also, the views can't be beat.

Those are the Sangre de Cristo mountains, to the east.  To the north, the park borders the public stables, filled with horses, donkeys, goats, chickens, and other amazing-smelling things.  Mostly horses.

Today was wonderfully warm, prompting t-shirts and many exclamations of delight (39ºF, for those of you living in different climes, but sunny and breeze-less).  Consequently, most of the horses had collapsed into ecstatic sunbathing heaps.

The only shadow, both figurative and literal, lay in the west.

You probably can't make it out too clearly, but the yellow-brown smudge in the air on the right-hand side of the photo is smoke.  The county is conducting "maintenance burns" this weekend in three of our canyons.  They used to call them "controlled burns," but then they lit one in the summer of 2000 that went wildly out of control and nearly burned down the entire town.  So now they use different terminology.  And try not to do that again.

They are conducting pile burns now to clear out the few in-town canyons untouched by last summer's fire.  And they are doing them now because weather predictions for the rest of winter/spring indicate that we are headed into another very dry year.  Joy.

Instead of worrying, I threw the Flying Squirrel.  Again and again and again.

 

 

Until Maya was a great grinning bundle of happiness.  Extra mucus and all.