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.