Sometimes the river of the universe doesn't flow in the direction you wanted it to. It's a lot easier to change your expectations than to swim against the current. We realized that what we had intended for this fall was not going to happen easily and that we were moving towards being in the US a lot longer than we had wanted or planned. So, we adjusted and actually started kicking with the flow a few days ago, might as well get it moving faster. What this means is that we spent more than 2 weeks at Westworld in Scottsdale, which was interesting and a lot of fun.

I'm building a web page for our friends Beth and Red, the Too Crazy Ladies, who sell tags and vinyl signs at dog and rv shows across the country to make a living. They aren't in great health and need to cut back on the traveling so we're hoping that they can pick up the slack through the web page. It's not up yet, I'll let you know when it is so you can critique it. Just don't give me shit about all the pink, pink is their color, their trademark, and they like lots of pink. I'm not so fond of it and I've had weeks of staring at a lot of it closely working on this web page, I don't think I can ever feel good about pink.

Westworld is a huge complex for dog and horse shows with multiple covered arenas and acres of practice rings, rv lots and parking. There were several shows there while we there and one of the perks was we had a pass and could go over and watch anything we wanted.

We were parked on a back lot near some stables where they had a team of Perchon draft horses; huge, beautiful horses. At the top is a pic of the team leader, whose stable name is Willy, held by a guy who is almost 6' tall - Willy is a big boy.

I've been playing with the new camera a little in between staring at pink pixels but I only took it over for the dog agility show. This was a huge show with teams from all over the world, the international championships. The rest of the pics here are from that competition. It was amazing to watch the concentration of the dogs and the handlers, they ran the course for time and points. There are rules about where they have to step and they lose points for missing them.

The other great competition is called Splash Dog, the dogs jump off a platform into a long pool after a toy and the dog with the farthest jump wins. Taking pics of it was a good exercise as I had to focus on an area in mid air and hope to catch the dog there. A couple of my shots were just the bottom of the dog as they jumped a lot farther than I expected. The winning jump was over 24 feet!

Building this web page has been a lot more work than I expected. Our friends have a huge number of different things they sell but there is no list of items or prices, it's all in their heads. There was also no useable pictures of anything, so a lot of time was spent organizing what they make, taking pictures of it, working the pictures into graphics in most cases. Really intensive photoshop work. The actual web page design went on in between the photoshop work. I'm not done, not close, but I think I have most of the graphics I'll need and most of the text and prices to go with it. That was another big part, getting the prices down and the descriptions written. I just hadn't anticipated how much was involved and how much time we would need to spend with them to start out.

We left Scottsdale 2 days ago and moved to Tucson where they were working anothe dog show. Some last minute consults and then Mimi and I left yesterday evening around 7pm heading for Albuquerque. This is when we decided to start kicking downstream, so we drove all night and arrived in Alb at 4:45am. We knew we needed to get some engine maintenance done on our RV, Tortuga, as we just hit 90k miles on her. She deserved a good spa treatment as we thought of it. The only place we would consider for this work was Statkus Engineering in Albuquerque, they are fantastic and we trust them. So, at 8:30am after 3 hours of sleep we turned Tortuga over to them for the day. We spent the day doing laundry and shopping for food and dog food. They had Tuga done by 5pm with new rear brakes, new hoses, a new wheel bearing, radiator flushed, transmission flushed, differential oil changed and front suspension checked. I think I have it all.

At 5pm we headed east and stopped at CostCo and WalMart for our Thanksgiving dinner contributions and finally got on the road. At 10pm we pulled into Santa Rosa Lake State Park where several of our friends are staying through the Thanksgiving weekend. We will be here that long as well. I have to try and finish this web site. Our water pump is acting strange and the Lazy Daze factory is sending us some parts here plus my tax lady is sending me my taxes to sign and send off. So, we'll be here until everything arrives and will spend Thanksgiving with good friends in a beautiful spot. I haven't seen it yet by daylight but we are 7 miles north of I40 in an isolated area overlooking a lake with zillions of stars and little ambient light. I may try taking some night pics with the new camera.

I have to admit that I am really behind in answering emails, if you've sent me an email please don't be insulted I just haven't had time to do much besides work on this page and it isn't personal. Who knew life could be so busy when you are retired?