The Whole Of Life

Kory apparently has a thing for shoes.

Or (more accurately) she has a thing for shoe laces.

She likes to chew on them and break them off, and has succeeded on a couple of occasions in doing just that with a couple of pairs of LC's hiking boots.

Yesterday, while sitting on the couch in the living room I heard a noise behind the couch.

When I looked back Kory had one of my boots and was contentedly gnawing on one of the laces.

I yelled "Hey!" and that's all it took.

Like a rocket she slunk out of the living room and slunk into the office, and when I went looking for her she was sitting half by LC's feet and half under the desk.

After petting and reassuring and loving on my sweet new dog, I hid the offending shoes in the closet in the mud room where they were supposed to be in the first place, and then thew her a bunny.

Kory typically has dog-things spread out all over the hallway and living room.  Rubber things.  Stuffed things.  Biscuit and bone things.  My attempts to satisfy her chewing needs, in the so-far-so-good hope that she won't chew up the furniture.

Stuffed bunny was by far the favorite, but right now she seems to love a stuffed cat that I bought for her at a thrift store this morning.

All the stuffing is missing from bunnys' pink furry legs but that's why I bought it for her.

Picking up white stuffing and picking up cheap stuffed toys from thrift stores seems to be easy-enough insurance.............

Random pictures taken during random walks in town with my dog..............

I have to smile when I look at this picture.

It was so bright and sunny outside that when I looked through the viewer of my camera all I could see was black screen, and therefore I shot this picture totally blind and cut off her tail.

Caught in mid-jump it looks as though Kory missed the hay bales, but she didn't.

Of all the places we walk and run with her, the hay bales on the outskirts of town are by far her favorite.

Kory loves to jump up and jump down on the bales, loves to run the length of them, to sniff for rabbits at the base of them, just in case she runs into the huge snow-shoe rabbit again that she came across a few weeks ago.

She is fast and agile and sure footed and athletic and strong, and she never ever misses..............

I snapped this picture a couple of nights ago during one more late day walk with Kory.

It is of one of the Twin Buttes and they are located about 12 miles from Atomic City.

The twins are to the east of town and we can see them from the living room window of the house.............

I talked to my youngest son Chris the other day, just to see how school is going.

He has floundered so much ever since he got out of the military, talked about school often, registered once and then quickly quit.

For a worrisome long while, every time I spoke with Chris he had a different address and a different job.

But for the past nine months he has been working as a welder and living with an older lady who (as he told me) "makes me eat my vegetables".

Finally he signed up for a six month welding program at a community college that should make him highly marketable.  Chris applied to the VA for funding and never heard back from them.  

Following the current state of affairs in the United States from the relative stability of Calgary, he (to cover his bases) thankfully also applied for a Canadian government student loan, and received one.

Between money he has saved and money he has gotten on loan, Chris should be able to financially make it for the duration.

He smartly paid his rent four months in advance and smartly bought subway passes for four months, and his elderly land lady has told him that she will not sell her extra old vehicle just in case something happens to Chris' car and he needs wheels before he graduates the program.

Chris sent me his address before Christmas and I Google Earthed it.  He is renting in a safe, clean, suburb of Calgary where people mow their lawns and grill out and do the other family things that suburbanites do.

My son seems to be in a good place - goals for the future, safe and calm place to live, plans that he is working to achieve.

I think about my child and think perhaps that now he is also in a good place in his head.

Good.

Very good................

I really like this picture.

It was taken last night and yes........while walking with Kory.

After a day that was completely grey, the sun was finally beginning to break through the clouds.

A sky that was alive and constantly in motion, an architecturally interesting open storage building, Cedar Butte in the background.

Some color, but mostly a black and white picture filled with light and shadow and the silence of the desert.

All of these pictures were taken during that same quiet walk last night...........

One of the Twin Buttes again............

During the summer we get a lot of people driving through town.

Their vehicles have plates that tell us that these passing-through visitors are from states all over the country.

Without fail they all do the same thing - they slowly drive the few, empty streets that make up this city with the unusual and seemingly pretentious name, then they stop a couple of times to snap a quick picture of abandoned buildings, before blowing out of town and heading for points more interesting.

This old lubrication building is typically one of those quick stops.

An old cinder block building, the roof is caving in, the ceiling is falling in and all of the windows are broken.

On one side of the Lubrication building is an old, dilapidated camper, and on the other side is the winter-skeleton of a tree.

The entire scene makes stark and compelling subject matter for a picture, and I can fully understand why people take the time to stop..............

It is almost impossible to walk in Atomic City and not see deer.

On this walk, Kory and I found them grazing alongside a privacy fence.............

For a long while I had been looking at the deer.

When I again looked over at the Twin Buttes I realized that they were red.

That could only mean one thing.

At the end of this day the sky had finally cleared, the sun had finally worked its way through the clouds but was already beginning to set in the west.

I turned away from the Twin Buttes to look out over Cedar and Big Buttes.

Yes........the sun was beginning to set, and as I watched it rapidly falling down behind Cedar Butte I knew that the short walk I had anticipated was going to turn into a long walk after all.  I wanted to see the sunset.  

A blog post for another day...................

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.................Jiddu Krishnamurti