Morning in Paradise...

Morning in Paradise...  Well, I had a nice photo from our morning walk to share, but my iPhone's battery chose this moment to croak.  I can't even connect to my computer!  There's a chore for me today: take my phone into the service outfit in Logan.  Oh, well...

Yesterday afternoon, as planned, we headed out for dinner at Maddox.  Debbie tried the turkey steak, and I had chopped lamb.  Both of those were prepared basically like a hamburger patty, and both were very good.  We'd have them again.  But the star of the dinner was our dessert.  Even though we were fairly full, we decided to try their pie.  We've never had it, and several people have told us that it was good.  They lied.  It was way beyond good!  We had a peach pie that was 95% peaches – fresh, with very little sugar added – and 5% pastry.  It was topped with their homemade vanilla ice cream, but the truth is I barely noticed the ice cream.  Those peaches were fantastic!  That was one of the best pieces of peach pie I've ever had.

Then we went for a drive up toward Hardware Ranch.  We were a bit early in the day for wildlife (we thought), but the sun was still well up so we'd thought we'd see the fall color nicely.  Well, we certainly did see lots of beautiful fall color, especially in the upper half of the canyon.  But we also saw quite a bit of wildlife.  Lots of deer, a coyote (not far east of the dam), two beavers working away on their dams (right near hardware ranch itself), two kingfishers (gorgeous birds!), an osprey eating a small fish on top of a utility pole, and a close-up view of a dusky grouse (at right, not my photo).  The latter we finally identified last night.  The first time we saw some of these birds, we thought they were ptarmigan in summer plumage – but that made no sense, as they're way out of ptarmigan territory.  Reading about them we discovered they have a very odd diet: the “needles” of fir trees and pine trees.  Yuck!

When we got home, there was a buck in our front yard.  We've seen this one before, nearly every day for the past few days.  It's instantly identifiable, as one of his front legs is badly injured (looks like something wrong with his knee, from the way he limps). We think he's hiding out in the trees near our irrigation canal, then hobbling the short distance to our alfalfa field to chow down.  He's going to have a tough time this winter, though there's a good chance that someone here will shoot him for the meat before then...