Growth and Change

So, where have I been the past few weeks? I went camping again with Dempsey and the cool girl who now also feeds him treats and is nice enough to let me call her "my girlfriend" . . .

When it comes to the "man's best friend" kind of loyalty, I see where I stand here . . .

The latest trip was the Fancy Pass loop, up in the hills somewhere between Minturn and Leadville. Fortunately the turn for the forest road was before the sinkhole. You can't just cover an old railroad tunnel . . . nice going long retired CDOT engineer.

Again, it turns out that Dempsey is quite the little trooper, very willing to hike for hours over whatever kind of terrain happens to be under foot/paw.  There was quite a variety on the hike with some rockiness over the passes, alpine lakes and meadows, and even some random mining-like equipment left in the middle of nowhere.  We have our next trip planned, sans Dempsey.  We'll be heading to the Mt. Princeton Hot Springs Resort for Zak and Melissa's wedding, some hot springs soaking and possibly another hike up a 14er.

Not surprisingly the garden continues to grow and I keep making new discoveries as the season goes by.  After a slow start, the creeping, viney plants, the pumpkin, watermelon, and cantaloupe finally got to growing and grow they did!  I'll have to get a shot of the area the pumpkin took over towards the northeast side of the garden . . . but at last it did its job and made a pumpkin, well three actually.  

This picture is a couple weeks old and now the smallest of the bunch is up to a whopping five pounds.  The largest is probably big enough to turn into some sort of horse drawn carriage . . .

Ok, maybe not that big, but the pumpkin is way bigger than my hand!

Every once in a while, something gets overlooked in the harvesting walk of the afternoon.  I'm still not sure what to do with oversized vegetables besides start my collection of veggie fetish photos . . .

Look at the size of that watermelon . . .

There's the shot of the pumpkin's supporting foliage.  For reference, that is a second story window in the background . . .

Of the raspberry bushes that were donated to me, a couple survived and one is making fruit by the handful, probably not my hand, maybe a small child's hand . . .

The sunburst cherry tomatoes or whatever they are have been making garden snacks for me and Dempsey daily.  He discovered that he likes tomatoes and cucumbers and if left alone in the yard, he will find the ripe ones and very indelicately harvest them.

More updates to come, but think furniture shopping . . .