Lights in Kansas & Colorado

It's 27 degrees outside now, with a wind chill of 15. My patio door is standing open, and a raven just chased Banichi across the backyard. One of the small squirrels is stuffing himself with peanuts and Lovey is on top of the cat-tree talking to the creatures outside. Last night was my first night in my own bed since last Friday; Lovey apparently didn't trust that I wouldn't leave during the night, as she crawled under the covers and then inside my nightgown to sleep for the night. It made turning over very interesting.

There were 28 people at the Snow Thanksgiving yesterday - we were missing sister Frannie, but Kent and his family came from South Dakota, and I was able to meet them. (The last time I saw Kent was at Kathy and Jim's wedding in 1981, and Kent was a senior in high school.) Everything went well, and we even saw a few snow flurries in the headlights of the truck on the way home -

I talked to Jim and Sarah about some of the things Kathy and I had seen on the way to and from Pomona... We both saw a shooting star Monday night in western Kansas; we were about 50 miles from the KS/CO line, and it was slightly to the south of I-70. ... Almost as soon as we crossed over the Colorado line, I started to see a reflection of light off the cloud cover to the west - it was light pollution from Denver that was visible all the way across the eastern CO plains. ...On our way east, in the dark on Saturday night, we saw this incredible light display to the north of the highway. Originally, it looked like a few microwave towers with steady red lights at different heights, and also with a few blinking red lights. Then we realized that it stretched out of sight over the northern horizon, it varied in height, and sometimes there was a small cluster and other times it seemed like long lines - all connected - and it stretched for over 10 miles. We felt as if we were inside Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and joked about power outages and waving mailboxes. Luckily, on our drive back west, we passed this place in the daylight - and saw that it was a wind farm. I've seen photos of wind farms, and I've seen bison and cattle at the base of one of the turbine masts in photos - but the first time seeing the real thing was simply amazing! I've felt short all my life, but here I felt like a pygmy!

I left Brandi last night and go over to Rosie and Remy today. Tomorrow I start with Silver and Smiley; it looks like I'll be driving Kathy and Jim to the airport in Denver on Sunday, where they'll take transport to norther Peru; and then I'll have Suki and Boo until the 14th or 15th of December. I'm going to move my kits over to Kathy and Jim's on Monday -

I hope each and every one of you has a super long weekend!!