Pictures Instead of Several Thousand Words

What follows is a collection of random images gleaned over the last couple months, from various activities. Shots from outings around Montana; trips to Las Vegas, Minnesota, Illinois and North Carolina; some hikes, some goofiness, and even some brushes with death! I may expand more on some of this stuff later, and maybe I won't. Hope you like them.

I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is.

-- Louise Erdrich, Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country

Hay for the Horses

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through the shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
-- The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds --
"I'm sixty-eight," he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."

Gary Snyder -- The Etiquette of Freedom