Loving my evenings with the dogs....

On most evenings when I get home from work I am greated by a mass of tail wagging furry joy. Fisher and Darwin have been a wonderful welcoming committee since we arrived in Flagstaff. They are our buddies. They love us and they are happy when we get home. And this makes a big difference when you are brand-spankin' new in a place. On nights when Meg has class, I would take the boys on a run on the trails behind our neighborhood, climbing over and under fences and racing each other through fields of sunflowers (I know this sounds
ridiculous, but there really were fields of sundflowers until it got cold...). On nights when Meg didn't have class, all four of us would go on walks on the trails. A good way to end a day spent in an office or writing papers.

And now we have the puppy and her sweet wrinkled eyes. Our walk schedule has shifted a bit. I get up early so I have time to take her on a walk before I go to work and if no one else is at home, I come home for lunch to take Addy on another walk. Tonight when I got home, all three of the dogs were ready to go, so I tried the 3 dog walk.... It was comical. We were a mass of tangled leashes trying to make our way down the street. Coordinating pit stops was impossible. When we passed another dog who wanted to be friends, I thought someone might get strangled, but we all made it to the woods in our respective pieces. I let the older dogs off their leashes so they could run and wear themselves out a bit. The sun was going down and the horizon was bright red through the Ponderosa Pines. Amazing. We all ran home in the dark and arrived happy and panting. Now all 3 pooches are asleep at my feet. This is a good life.

AdaMae/Atlas



















Last week we drove up to the ski mtn to watch the sunset...











rose bundled up with the sunset....














more puppy shots....

















fisher was a butterfly for halloween.
very dignified.

these pictures are somewhat backwards....
meg and i at the top of the mountain/hill we climbed.













fisher, very worn out, after the climb to the top.


















woods outside of Flagstaff on our way to hike up a mountain....
















where is the lizard?

















rose regulating the wild west.












view on our hike up the mountain...

















rose and fisher walking up the mountain (hill).

It's Saturday morning and Loren (roommate) and I and the dogs are pooching in the living room listening to npr. I was looking back at what we've put up on the blog so far and realizing that we don't have any pictures of our house up...so here are some from our living room and kitchen. We're hoping to paint sometime soon and brighten up the white walls a bit, maybe when Meg, the painter of the house, is on winter break from school....

The big news in our lives is that we have a new puppy! Last weekend we visited the shelther and fell in love with a little pup who was found on
the rez with her sister. She is the funniest looking dog I've ever seen. Supposedly she is a
great dane/shar-pei mix. She has the ears and long legs of a great dane and a couple of shar-pei wrinkles thrown in for good measure, but most folks seem to think she looks like a hyena/dingo/egyptian dog. She is a sweet heart though, a regular cuddle bucket. Fisher and Darwin aren't quite sure how they feel about her yet though, especially Fisher, who at 97 lbs, still considers himself the baby of the household. We got them all kong bones today though to try to disapate the canine jealousy.... We'll try to get pictures of little Atlas/Ada Mae = "Addy" up in the next couple of days.

My work has been keeping me pretty busy the past few weeks. We put on a conference for our child care providers in Navajo and Apache Counties and have been doing outreach presentations all over northern Arizona. Last week I rented a mini-van and checked out a bunch of books-on-tape from the library and procceeded to drive about 1,400 miles throughout the week. It's a lot of driving, but pretty amazing to get out and about and explore small towns around Flagstaff. Once you get out of the mountains, down to 4,000 feet, it's mostly flat scrub-land, not quite desert, but full of sage brush and bone-dry creek beds. I've seen quite
a few cayotes, a bunch of deer, and a handfull of flattened snakes on the road. It's stark. It's empty. It's big sky. It's beautiful and a lonely sort of way. It almost gives me vertigo, or almost an opposite of clastrophobia, compared to the closeness of the big San Francisco peaks around Flagstaff.