This and That

Well, my time in Laramie is almost done, but I have a few more pictures and things to tell about. Last Friday Jane took a day off work and we finally got that photo of the old Territorial Prison building. It was snowing at the time, and the scene is very wintery.

In fact, it has been cold for the last two weeks. One night Jane started a fire in the fireplace in the family room and I enjoyed warming my toes!

The dogs don’t worry about the cold. They are quite spoiled. Here is the black lab society, Krypto and Baron, lounging on the bed. Touchdown the chocolate lab is too old to jump up there, and little Sparky the border collie mix was off somewhere else.

This week has been busy with getting up some of the Christmas decorations. Jane says she should be done by the weekend if she does a little every day and gets at least a little help from the family. They have two trees – a white one in the front window and a green one in the family room. The white one gets only red and white decorations and lights and looks like a big candy cane. Jane calls the green one the “everything tree” and it gets all sorts of decorations on it. They used to have a real tree until Jane realized that the “cold” she got every Christmas started when the tree went up and ended when they took it down. Hmmm….. So now they have two artificial ones instead. Quantity instead of quality, Jane says, but at least they don’t make her sneeze. The first photo is of Pat and Lee putting up the outside lights – always an adventure. The second photo is Pat and Aaron helping with the white tree. Taliesen the little grey canary, had to be moved to put this up, and he isn’t too sure about his new neighbors, the naughty linnies. They keep eying each other from the safety of their cages. (There are four budgies in a huge cage in the back hall, too. The house is full of chirps.)

We went shopping for my next hostess gift. I ended up with a gen-u-ine silk cowboy scarf from Martindale’s Western Store in downtown Laramie, Wyoming. How about that for something western!?

There is one more picture of me here, posing as a cowgirl. I tried to wear Jane’s good hat, but it was a little too big for me. So it is beside me, and I’m modeling the silk scarf. The little fellowon the other side of me is a friend of Jane’s, Jackie the jackalope. The jackalope is a cross between a long-legged, long-eared Wyoming jack rabbit and a pronghorn antelope, which are all over the place out here. You can see them grazing beside the road every where. Folks here like to fool the greenhorns into thinking there really is such a thing as a jackalope, and they still get a few with it now and then! Taxidermists will put together jackalopes to help with the joke. The only thing typically Wyoming missing from the picture is the bucking horse and cowboy, which is on the license plate, the new Wyoming quarter, and everything from the University. I’ll send a window sticker back to Heather with one on it. The bucking horse is Steamboat, and he was a real rodeo bucking horse who lived around the early 1900’s. He had something wrong with his nose, so when he snorted he sounded like a steamboat whistle. He was quite famous, and dumped quite a few riders! Jane says that tumbleweeds and sagebrush are typically Wyoming too, but she doesn’t want them in the house for pictures. They are both quite prickly!

Cowgirl Pris