The magic of topology...

The magic of topology...  This is awesome!  How to fit a big circular object through a too-small square hole in a piece of paper.  I couldn't figure it out until he showed how it was done...

A little winter trip...

A little winter trip...  Debbie and I drove up to Hardware Ranch yesterday afternoon, through Blacksmith Fork Canyon.  It was particularly beautiful, with clear blue skies and less snow than we've seen for a while.  The red osier dogwood were especially brightly colored, as you can see in the three photos below.  When I took these photos we were about 4 miles west of Hardware Ranch, along the right fork of the Blacksmith River.  The last photo is focused on a teasel seed pod, one of my mom's favorite craft materials.  We have bears, Santas, and reindeer that she made from those seed pods.  She even made a set for our friend and neighbor Tim D., and they are prominently displayed in their house at Christmas time – her gift really meant a lot to Tim and his wife Jeannie...

On the way in we saw just one small group of deer, about six animals.  We parked in the visitor center parking lot and scanned the hills, and found a herd of several dozen elk, and a group of about 25 deer.  Then on the way home we were seeing deer around darned every bend!  We probably saw over a hundred deer in all.  We didn't see any birds, unless you count turkeys and magpies (they're a constant here)...

An unusual snow artifact...

An unusual snow artifact...  The photos below were taken from our deck a few days ago.  This was a couple of days after the snow you see actually fell, and the day was relatively warm: slightly above freezing.  Somehow that made the conditions right for the snow to slide off our roof in those sheets you see, while staying strong enough to stay in one piece up to five feet long.  When I examined them closely, I could see that the side toward me (as I took those photos) was a sheet of crystal-clear ice about a quarter inch thick, while the rest was wet snow.  For a sense of the scale, those beams you see are 10x12s (with the 12 inch side vertical on the top beam).

Dog drawings...

Dog drawings...  I've posted before about Sema Hussein, a young woman from England who makes colored pencil drawings of animals from photographs, for a very reasonable fee.  She's making enough money to put herself through college and pursue the training necessary to become a French astronaut.  Seriously!  This young lady is very talented, and she's made a half-dozen drawings of our cats for us.  The most recent drawing she made for us is of our first two field spaniels.  They passed away a few years ago, and we wanted something to remember them by.  Their portrait is now on our “dog wall” – a wall full of dog art in our dining room, mostly not of our own dogs.  Check it out!