December

Happy December, all!

As you can see above, we had a wonderful Thanksgiving, filled with good food and great friends! Now we're charging headlong into the holiday season, and looking forward to seeing family and friends back East in just a couple weeks. Until then, here are a few glimpses of our Western holiday season so far!

In addition to our outdoor decorations, I was also the very lucky recipient of a handsewn (and very thoughtfully filled) Advent calendar from Charlotte.

Hilariously, Charlotte and I had a bit of overlap in our first calendar gifts for each other! As a result, we're keeping good track of the remaining days until Christmas (in the photo below, the one candle was playing a bit of catch-up).

Anyway, we hope things are good and festive wherever this might find you. Until our next post, have a great week!

Black Friday

Happy post-Thanksgiving! Today in Laramie, we're enjoying beautiful blue skies but subzero windchills (-11 as of this writing). Winter is off to an early start! However, the sun feels warm and keeps urging us to put our work down.  As a result, Shay and I took a little stroll on the Laramie River Greenbelt Trail earlier. We're very fortunate to have it about a block from our house, and we're over there most days for a walk!

Today, Shay was busily tracking two mule deer that I saw sauntering around near the river.

This gave me time to snap a few photos of our late-fall surroundings for those of you in warmer locations! 

 No Black Friday crowds in these parts.

Stay warm!

Blue Moon

You know the old expression "once in a blue moon"? Well, a blue moon occurs once every 2.7 years on average. Today, we proudly present something even rarer. Check out these red tomatoes, which ripened on the vine! This is the first time we've ever had this happen since moving to Laramie over 3 years ago. They taste divine (so do the cherry tomatoes, which perform more reliably up here at 7,200').

Here's hoping we won't have to wait another 3 years to experience this joyful occasion again!

Howdy!

Hey guys! We're back (at least for now)! We've been busy since our last post on here, but that means we have lots to share, too. When we last met up, we were just married, and coming off a wonderful weekend spent with many of you. 

Since then, we were lucky enough to take a wonderful honeymoon together through California and Oregon...

Spend another wonderful year in the West, exploring our beautiful surroundings while digging in on graduate studies...

And move across Laramie to a new place with a bit more room for gardening, projects, and an office.

However, one of our biggest bits of news from this past year concerns the arrival of a new four-legged friend. Meet Shay, our new family member. She spent 9 months in a shelter in Missouri before it was closed by the state, and was brought to a rescue shelter in Fort Collins, CO. We met her the day after she arrived in Colorado, and brought her with us to Wyoming two days later. Here she is on the day she finally put her shelter life behind her!

 Shay has adjusted happily to the life of a free dog! It's been amazing to watch her learn new skills and commands-she didn't even know her name when we adopted her! She's also gotten much healthier-she couldn't even walk around the block without getting winded when we first got her, and now runs multiple miles on days when she's not busy hiking or helping Charlotte with fieldwork. She's also gained a tremendous amount of confidence in new settings (not too shabby for a dog who spent more than half her life in a small concrete kennel)!

Through it all, she's taught us a lot about patience, persistence, love, and just how much one dog can make us laugh!  

In future posts, I'm guessing we'll have a lot of training and outing updates to share with you as Shay continues to learn and explore, but in the meantime we should share one skill that she didn't need any training for, whatsoever.

Nighty night!