Another Day, January 8, 2002

Well its another day here at the Ranch. After being cooped up in the house yesterday, me and the dogs spent a little more time outside today.

Sugar looking beautiful.

She's hunting something under the snow....

.... what ever it was, it tasted awful! Bluhhh! She kept making this face, bluhhh, bluhhh. I was rolling on the ground laughing.

After that episode, she decides to hunt bigger game and starts to stalk Timber. She starts moving really, really slowly. She slowly inches forward like she's moving in for the kill...

... and she goes for Timber's jugular!

... and she made the kill! ...

... at least Timber let's her think she did. They really have a lot of fun together. Both Timber and Sugars wolf instincts really show through

Timber looking very handsome as he surveys his domain from the hill behind the house.

Evening has rolled around....

The dogs and I are out having fun again, and going to get the mail. The mail trip is one of the highlights of the day for the dogs. They get to ride in the back of the truck all the way up to the mailbox and back. My mailbox is 0.6 of a mile away so it's 1.2 mile round trip.

Sugar joy leaps all the time. She will leap all the way across the field looking like a gazelle... She leaps about two feet off the ground with every bound. Here are a few frames from one leap.

Off to the mail box.. Here's the pond and barn as we go up. The pond has frozen over and is snow covered.

The poor old barn is still standing. The big snow (very wet 18") last March collapsed the roof in the middle. The gable ends are still up, sort of... this will probably be this old barn's last winter.

After getting the mail, we drive on up the road to look out over the Ranch to the Smokies. What a beautiful sun set. The camera really can't capture it. The camera either gets the color of the bright sky, and the mountains are dark...

... or I can get the mountains and the sky is washed out. Oh well.. I guess somethings are only meant to be experienced in person.

As I've mentioned before, the Ranch is near Cataloochee Ski Resort. You can see the slopes from here if I zoom in with the camera...

This is a lone little pine near my house. The snow drifts have almost swallowed half of it!

Here you can see the snow drift in my headlights... We only had about 3-4" of snow, but the wind manages to blow it into 2 foot drifts! This one is about to eat the road. It's always hard to tell how much snow we get because the wind blows it around so much.

Here's a view of my garage as I come back home. I still have the Christmas lights on the Balsam in front of the garage.

Back at home, Jupiter is rising over the house

Ahh, a nice winter evening....