Alpha and Omega

The day began with an attempted break in.  In just one afternoon, the girls had enlarged the hole in the barn door to the point that Tessie (the unicorn), on her knees, thought she could sneak into the milking room.  Thwarted, she went off in a huff, but that didn't prevent others coming by to assess their chances, peering in at the milking activities and eyeing the grain bucket.

Regardless of anything else on my agenda, I had to get some plywood.  The twenty-five-mile drive down to Martell is one of the prettiest, especially at this time of year on a sunny day.  The rolling hills are green, green, green!, dotted with old oaks, sprinkled with red Hereford, black Angus, and creamy Charolais cattle, with splashes of bright yellow wild mustard at the sides of the road.  Puffy white clouds in a blue sky overhead.  The old road still dips down into Dry Town, but a new, much wider addition bypasses Amador City and Sutter Creek.  On the way home, with fix-it material cut to size and stuffed into the back compartment of the truck, I stopped in Plymouth (aka Pokerville) for gas (yikes!) and groceries.  Up here, one does as many errands as possible on an outing.  That stop will save me another trip to town in the other direction.  It did, however, get me home too late to make the repairs on the barn door.

Some poor sucker drew the unlucky number at sundown, because it sure was raining on their parade somewhere.  It's not often one sees such an isolated rainfall.  Those puffy whites of the afternoon were getting organized in the west.

Topping up the water trough is my last chore of the day.  Looking up, wisps of clouds were drifting over the face of the full moon and reflecting in the trough.  Although I sometimes feel as though I live on another planet, this isn't Mars.  The second moon is just an aberration of my camera (sure is pretty, though).

It was a good day.