header

On my way down to Albuquerque, it's 465 miles, I took some pictures of the mountains along the way. I cropped one of Mt. Elbert, or one of those fourteeners in the Collegiate range, and used it for the header on my blog. The picture started out really big and screwed up but I was working on it at Joe's house and he saw me having a fit about not getting it to come out right, so took my laptop and fixed it for me. I watched him do it, but there's no way I could repeat whatever he did. Anyway, I wanted to describe where that picture was taken. I don't know how many fourteeners, mounntains that are 14,000 feet or higher, in the Collegiate Range but there are a lot. It's a really spectacular drive.

Visit to my son, Joe, and Amanda

I had a nice long visit with Joe and Amanda. Too bad my grandsons weren't there, but they went to a concert in Santa Fe with their mom and back to Taos. Friends are getting to be a big thing in their lives, to the exclusion of others... like grandmothers. that's OK. I got to spend more time and attention on Joe and Amanda instead. Still, Jojo's dog, Diego, missed him. Because of that, I had a dog that was really hard to shift sleeping in my bed while I was there.

It was HOT in Albuquerque. 96 degrees yesterday. there's a public swimming pool close to Joe's house so we went swimming a lot. Walden may be really back of beyond, but at least it's cool here.

southwestern heat

The Arkansas River was running bankful. I saw lots of rafters parked along the highway getting ready to float the rapids on my drive down through the San Luis Valley on my way to New Mexico. Snow melt from the Collegiate Range was running off in a lot of small creeks and rivulets. the Rio Grand here in Albuquerque is almost out of its banks and muddy brown. It made the long trip down through Colorado along the Continental Divide pretty interesting to experience springtime in the Rockies like that. At one point I thought the runoff looked about to wash over the highway.

snow

Coming home from our trip back east, it was a shock to return to the barrenness of winter. The Aspen in front of our house had no small emerging leaves, the ground was still covered with brown dried grass. It was COLD.
We got home late Saturday and I went to Laramie Monday to run Melodie and Ken's bookstore..... and it snowed all day. What is WRONG with this place!!!!!!!!!!!! It's almost summer!

cheese soup

At my sister, Dorothy Ann's, house, she made cheese soup for us one night. It was sooo good. I found out the recipe, and when I was staying at Melodie and Ken's when I ran their store for them for a couple nights, I made that soup. However, I decided to get already grated cheese rather than chop it up myself. I cut the recipe in half and it was still way to much soup for one person. The only thing was, I used cheddar cheese instead of velveeta. This is because my family makes fun of me for liking velveeta cheese so I try to be more gourmet. In this case, it's just WRONG! It was much better with velveeta, so if DA is reading this, your soup was better than mine.

home

Left Iowa Saturday. Drove all day. 90 degrees across Nebraska then snowed on crossing the state line from Wyoming into Colorado. Ahhhh... home. What I want to know is, why do we live in such a godforsaken place? It snows the year around,for heaven's sake!!! Today I'm watching the kids' bookstore while they take time off to visit friends in Grand Junction. Snowed pretty good yesterday but at least it didn't stick. I got pictures but I'm blogging in the store and don't have my laptop hooked up to download pics in, so I'll put them up Thursday. (If I get around to it.) I need to be more conscientious about this blogging thing if I'm going to do it. It's kind of fun.

headed home

We are in Iowa at my sister's house right now. We left Greyling yesterday at noon and got here at midnight. We were going to return by way of Wisconsin but Jay found out Brit and Alex planned to fish the AuSable tuesday and wednesday so he couldn't stand to miss out on THAT! So we went back to Canoe Harbor to camp for another couple of days and got caught in a big wildfire south of the road. Well, it didn't reach our campsite, but it was pretty exciting there for awhile.

I got more pictures of gravestones for my family tree. My great grandparents are buried north of here about 60 miles, so we went up there and I found out some accurate dates and names, which I now know I didn't have. The one name, my great grandmother Eckels, is important because she was a remarkeable artist and I have two of her works hanging on my walls so I feel more of a connection to her than I would otherwise. What I want to know is, considering how good she was, where are some other of her works? I am trying to trace some of her other descendents to find out if anyone else has any of her pieces.