Best In Snow

Wiley and I watched the Westminster Kennel Club Show Tuesday night, though to be fair he showed little interest in it and sat up only when Law and Order: Criminal Intent came on.

Aside: am I the only one who gets all teary-eyed and choked up during those Pedigree "Dogs Rule" commercials?

Anyway, I’m glad Uno the beagle won Best in Show, especially because he beat not one but two poodles (I know their froofy cut has a practical application, keeping the joints warm when swimming in cold water, but I don’t want any canid with a grooming routine more elaborate than Paris Hilton’s named top dog, you know?)

But as beautiful and impressive as those Westminster dogs were, none can compare to Mr. Kittenheads, who seems to be recovering from the shock of moving to 8,000 feet above sea level. Wednesday I had off, and woke to bright sunshine, so instead of doing laundry and taxes, we went for a drive.

Here’s a shot of my apartment complex (my building is the reddish-brown one near the center of the photo) with Rocky Mountain National Park in the background. This was the first day since moving here that the skies were clear enough to see the mountains, even though they’re less than 20 miles away.

Wiley romped a bit off-leash on a frozen, snow-covered lake with Indian Peaks in the background.

I stopped at a post office to get some stamps and couldn’t resist taking this shot of Smalls expressing his opinion about being left in the car.

A sidenote about the post office... no line, and the postal worker asked me where I was visiting from. When I said I’d moved there, she asked where, when, where I was working. Not in a creepy way, but in a social manner. When I got my Colorado plates last week, the same thing. No line at the county courthouse, and the woman helping me was far too pleasant to be a civil servant.

And Tuesday, I took Wiley to meet his new vet and get registered as a Colorado dawg. The vet, recommended to me by one of the sous chefs at work, has a one-room clinic in a wooden building that dates from the 19th century, and his own dog, Squirrel, has free reign of the place. The vet was laidback as can be, went over Smalls’ medications and told me he could stop taking his tick and heartworm preventives "‘cause we don’t have none of that out here."

Yeah, it’s a different world.

Here’s a shot of one of my favorite mountains that I can identify by name so far: Shadow Mountain (center of shot, overlooking Shadow Mountain Lake). There are a lot of cool names out here: Cutthroat Bay (arr!), Isolation Peak, Troublesome Valley and the Never Summer Mountains, which to me sounds like something Tolkien thought up.

We drove to Rocky Mountain National Park and along the main road as far as we could go... the road is the highest continuously paved highway in the country, and tops out above 12,000 feet, but we could only get about a third of the way before twenty-foot snow drifts blocked our path. It was far enough to get a shot of these mountains. I don’t know their names yet, but I will.