Our new feline overlords

 After months of occasionally frequenting the cat cafe in town, I succumbed to the overwhelming cuteness and we adopted a couple of kittens.

Meet Charlie

and Arp.

You can tell which one is crazier...  They are Very Good Cats and my phone will be hereby dominated by feline portraits.

100th Zozobra

 Zozobra is a tradition of burning away a representation of all the gloom that residents of Santa Fe have harbored for the year.  It has gotten bigger over the years, and since this year was the 100th occurrence, you can only imagine how much it has escalated...  Our friends Robert and Kathleen and Beth and Lee joined us along with tens of thousands of other folks at the park for the theatrical fireworks/drone show/pagan fire ritual.

WA

 We finally got around to visiting family in WA...this was very overdue!  

I always enjoy seeing the Cascade volcanoes from the plane and make a point of selecting seats on the correct side to see them.

Kean flew in at the same time, and my mom greeted him with a huge sign in the airport.

In addition to visiting my parents and my brother's family, we fulfilled a few obligatory chores, the most fun which was felling a giant tree in my parents' yard.  Chad put his Forest Service experience to good use, and dropped the big cedar without hitting either the garage to the right, or the cherry tree to the left. It was getting a bit too big for the space it was in.  My dad will get a lot of fence posts out of this one.

trip to Logan UT

 So after a few months of retirement, Chad sort of unretired, working part time for a small space-related company.  This meant he had an excuse to go to the small satellite conference in UT, and this time I got to tag along.  He schmoozed with the space community all week, while I goofed off.

We stopped at Aztec Ruins National Monument on the drive over, even though it was something like 105 degrees out.  

The ruins here are neat because you can go into some of them.

We stopped in Moab for the night, but it was hot and we didn't want to hike.

Once in Logan, my fun started.  Among other things, I rode up Green Canyon to the wilderness boundary,

explored roads and trails in and around town,

took a "recovery" hike up to some caves and ended up bushwhacking an extra 1400 steep feet up to another trail at the top of the ridge,

and then took a real recovery hike around Tony Grove Lake to see the wildflowers.

In addition to attending the conference, Chad did get some recreation too, enjoying the fly fishing in the canyon.  This year the fish were wee.

We were lucky to grab the chance to go this year, as the conference has now gotten so big that they will be moving it to Salt Lake City next year, which isn't quite as convenient from a recreational perspective.

Why??

So we looked up at one of the high windows in the great room and saw what looked like a strip of duct tape peeling loose.  Chad went to investigate and pulled the tape the rest of the way off.

What he found under the tape was a big gap, partially filled with paper towels and some silicone goop.  Apparently the window wasn't the right size and this is how someone "fixed" it, covered with some brown duct tape for disguise.  The joys of older houses...  We shimmed it with another piece of wood painted brown; I posit that that is an improvement.

Caja del Río Plateau

 We sometimes go ride on the plateau above the river that is a little to the west of us.  Some of the roads are in pretty good shape.  Others are steep and rocky and photos just don't adequately convey how intense that is.  However, it is all pretty, especially in the rainy season when everything turns green.

Spot the snake in the picture above! 

Summer brew

 Chad did his first batch of all-grain brewing during monsoon season and cleverly rigged up a tarp outside the garage to protect his setup from the rain.  Success!

A new mount for the Sunset Cam

 I got tired of the wind blowing our webcam off the porch, no matter what I lashed it to, so I made a new mount and epoxied it to a brick. This ought to do it! Of course, the big storage box it is sitting on has been blown around… I may have to put a couple concrete blocks in there, to steady it.

We get good critters

 Add Texas Brown Tarantula to the list of critters we see around the yard.  This one happened to come by during the time Kean and I were exchanging summer art prompts, so picked "spider" for this week and here is my offering.