i love this picture of christine’s dog Kita, with the soft glow of the lights on the tree.

i took Douja for a run with me to the nearby park in christine’s neighborhood and we both had a great time.  i haven’t gone running with a dog in quite a while – not since Mollie? – and Douja was thrilled, especially when i let her stop to see the squirrels up  in the trees.

when we got back to christine’s i spent a lot of time trying to get a picture of douja in front of the wreaths on the door.  it was challenging and i kept worrying that christine would realize that we were out there, but finally managed to get one decent shot.

 

an interruption from our trip – amy and jim went to captiva island and were gone around the same time as i was.  i kept insisting that they had to go to The Bubble Room, a fabulous captiva restaurant where kevin and i had been.  they went and got their picture taken in the same place we did.  nice.

back to denver – a friend of christine’s created this photo and used christine for the model.  and that’s all the details i remember, except that she got if framed and it was sitting in her home office wrapped in plastic, so we opened it and hung it up.

on our second day of running douja was mildly interested in this huge flock of geese, but i decided we wouldn’t run through them and make them fly away.

the funny thing about running with her is that she was just loping along, not running at all, and i tried to go really fast in order to get her to run but i couldn’t keep that up for more than a couple of minutes.

another pose that took a while to capture, but she’s an A+ modeling dog.

…and also very happy.

we didn’t spend a lot of time in the mountains, but we did take a drive on my last afternoon. we passed some quaint little villages and i hope to stop at some of them when i go back…and i hope we get there sooner rather than later.

we were with christine’s sister beth, who needed to stop at a wal-mart.  so we stopped at the wal-mart that was something like 7,500 feet up.  i’ve never been at a wal-mart at such a high elevation.  very noteworthy.

also of course very odd, because going in i’d think i was at my own wal-mart, except mine is nicer.  at this point we were so high up that i suddenly felt exhausted and incredibly thirsty.

next time, no wal-marts (unless i’m out of something critical) and definitely stopping at picturesque mountain towns!

ok then,

mrs. bitterly cold and snow friday hughes.