A couple pictures from this past week. Zion National Park on the left (looking South from Angel’s Landing). Grand Canyon National Park on the right (looking toward Horseshoe Mesa from the Grandview trail as we headed backcountry). I have a bunch of other pictures to post but it might be a few days before I have enough time to get them online.

Now that’s more like it! Finally a day to expose some skin to the sun, open up the house, and spend all day running around outside. Yard work was accomplished, baseballs were thrown, basketballs were shot, shirts were not worn. We even brought the TV out on the back deck for a couple of hours to watch the Final Four while not wasting the taste of summer. Atta boy Spartans.

There are few things in nature that I dislike more than wind. I think everything I’ve ever written on this site about hiking/camping in the wind has been a complaint. Nothing ruins a good game of Frisbee or a walk back up the beach with a surfboard like a gale-force gust. Running or biking into a headwind for any length of time and I quickly trend toward apoplectic.

So strangely enough when an opportunity came up at work to do a side project involving field surveying on a wind farm in Goldendale, WA, I volunteered. Well not exactly volunteered, I guess. I am looking forward to a bump in the upcoming paycheck after putting in 62 hours on the clock this week. I spent all day Monday and Tuesday walking back and forth in steady 30-40 mph winds (atypical bluster even for a wind farm) looking for dead birds or bats. Glamorous, I know. A nice change of pace from the office, even if I was freezing the entire time.

I’m standing in the calmest spot I could find in the picture above and you can still see me poofed out like I’m rocking hammer pants. The towers we surveyed were located above the north canyon wall of the Columbia River Gorge. Gorgeous views when the sky was clear of Mt. Adams, Mt. Hood, and the Columbia River. I’m not sure what was up with the cattle, but we were told to keep an eye on them because they liked to rub up against parked cars. It was so windy I had to strap my helmet to my chin to keep it from blowing away and even with the strap it caught a little air from time to time before snapping back. There were times when I had to lean into the wind like a cartoon character to keep from being blown off my feet.

I woke up this morning to a scene right out of CSI. A couple small pools of blood on Mary’s twill Pottery Barn rug. Blood mist over a square foot area on one section of the bedroom wall, splatters on other areas of the wall. A sticky splash of blood on the door and a long steady trail of drops leading from the bedroom into the hallway. Cue ominous music.

Nora’s ear was dry when we all went to bed last night, but I guess she must’ve scratched it open again at some point, hopped off the bed, and started doing cartwheels around the house. So we spent an hour this morning with a mixture of peroxide and water carefully dabbing up the drops on the floor. The Pottery Barn rug is a goner (but this probably beats pools of blood on the actual carpet), but everything else came out okay. She may be sleeping in the cage tonight.

When you pick a fight with a dog twice your size, don’t be surprised when you get your comeuppance. Nora’s okay, but was none too pleased when I made her sit out on the cold back deck until the blood stopped dripping (she kept doing that ear slapping head shake, which probably didn’t help matters any). Got her mostly cleaned up and neosporined and she was pretty mellow the rest of the night. Should be a rugged little scar on that left ear.