Colorado Lightshow - Rocket Reentry

I was reading an article on the Wired website: Pentagon Unveils Rogue Spy Sat Shoot-Down Plan and stumbled across this vid.

(from the YouTube site)

According to NORAD, this is a Russian SL-4 rocket body that re-entered the atmosphere over Colorado and Wyoming. This rocket body is "space junk" from an earlier launch of a French Satellite on December 27, 2006.

Amazingly, the reentry occurred nearly 60 miles up and 300 miles to the West over the Four Corners area!

Cactus Heart

This was taken last year out at my friend Andy's house, just past the city limits.

Some grasshopper decided to do a little botanical engineering and carved out a heart for his girlfriend. I guess the relationship took off, because there's millions of grasshoppers this year.

I used to date an ol' gal who had a heart like this; no, it wasn't made of cactus, but it certainly was covered in thorns.

Tilted Perspective

I think I was leaning.

Pretty sure I was. I've always leaned a bit to the right, in reality and also politically. I walk pretty straight on the days my back eases up some.

I believe I was focusing more on the light standard than on the background object, the huge Cross.

Whatever, it's a little bit disconcerting, isn't it?

500 Miles - The Proclaimers

I like this acoustic version better than the regular vid.

A toe-tapper in any dialect or language.

Buddy Hollyish, I'd even say.

Archer

This is my pal's dog, Archer, named after the small town near Wichita Falls where my friend's son found him. (Archer City is the home town of Larry McMurtry, the author of Lonesome Dove, Hud, Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show (one of my all-time favorite movies and was filmed in Archer City) and McMurtry won an Oscar for his screenplay of Brokeback Mountain.

Archer will fetch a stick until you're tired of throwing it, and if he gets tired first, he will run off with it and rest a while, but you'd best not leave or he'll come out and drop the stick at your feet and bark until you start playing with him again.

The legs belong to my pal's wife.

Old Truck

This is an old Chevy truck parked out on some land my friend's dad leases and on which he runs a small cow/calf operation. Other than the peeling paint, the old truck looks to be in good shape, with most of the windows intact.

A little metal work, a dab of putty, do what you could w/ the chrome bits, and a heckuva lot of sanding and it'd be ready to paint...

-sigh- Who am I kidding?

Pretty old truck, though.



I wouldn't want to go traipsin' off around there in a another month or so.

That looks snakey as hell to me.

Whomping Willow

Not for sure what sort of tree this is, but it reminded me of the Whomping Willow in the Harry Potter movies/books.

I want to go back down there at a different time of day and take some more photos; the sun was just too low on the horizon to get good detail.