The Colorado State Open Thread comes to you this evening courtesy of Mother Nature in her many guises here in the high country. Those of you within the state boundaries of Colorado are lucky enough to be in the state with the highest average elevation of any state in the Union. Indeed, the lowest point in the state is higher in elevation than many states have as their highest point. Feel high, feel proud that you can breathe our thin air and feel good that you’re in the company of so many friendly folk. Well, mostly friendly. We need to get people to be friendly across the state and not just in the blue zones. I’ve experienced more sour attitudes in the red zones of our state and that seems (to me, at least) the way they like things.
On to the diary.
Mother Nature has given me a number of things to take photos of, and I take many of my pictures while I’m out walking the dogs. Unfortunately, I’m walking them much more frequently and purposefully than I have up to this point. Ginger, my Cocker spaniel,
is a lover who was found in a park in Denver when she was just a few months old. She is convinced that everyone and everything just loves her, and for the most part she is right. The only times she gets annoyed or angry is when another dog tries to take her food or treat, and then Ginger has to correct them (and she’s not very lady-like when she does so). She just doesn’t eat as fast as some other dogs, so if they finish their food or treat and then come to see if they can help Ginger finish hers — well, step back! Oh, and I’ve also seen her defend her honor if another dog comes to try and hump her. That is just something up with which she will not put.
Shaggy, OTOH, came to us from the Denver Dumb Friends League and we don’t know his history. We have reasons to doubt that the DDFL received the full picture of his background when he was surrendered. The story was, the daughter was moving out and the parents wanted to downsize and didn’t have room any more for Shaggy. So they surrendered their dog of five years that they bought from a breeder to the DDFL. I could never conceive of surrendering a member of the family, especially one that had been a member for five years, for what appears to me to be a trivial reason. Well, they did say that he had seizures when he got into things he shouldn’t, but they didn’t have him on any medication, or they had stopped his medication. My wife agreed to take him for 30 days of fostering to see if he did need medication or not. He wound up having a seizure the second night we had him. He went onto a generic medication and didn’t have another seizure until last week, more than two months since his first one. Mrs. Colotim had forgotten to give him his medicine the evening before, so she’s blaming herself for it, but we really don’t know if that was the reason.
Shaggy has worse problems, now that he’s used to us, in that he gets excited and has problems calming down and being the lover that Ginger is. Shaggy, if he sees another dog close by, or a deer, or a person, especially someone with short hair, so usually a male, he will bark and he will jump up and down and he will want to go chase them down. That, or he is calm and he’ll be friendly and will be happy to sniff if it’s a dog or nuzzle someone if it’s a person. There is no good way of predicting which he’ll do, so we now have a trainer helping us to figure out how to keep him mellow and under control. Until he is under control, I have to walk him separately from Ginger, since his last walk with her wound up with a doe deer wanting to fight the dogs (probably protecting a fawn) and Ginger’s leash wound up tangled in Shaggy’s tail, which made for an impossible walk and Mrs. Colotim had to come take Ginger off the leash and take Ginger home while I sat with Shaggy until the doe wandered off.
I wind up doing twice as many walks so I get twice as many opportunities to observe nature, take photos and to visit with neighbors or try and run through training routines with Shaggy (and Ginger, though she’s much more mellow).
We have one adult cat, Anni, who is also pretty mellow as cats tend to be, as well as four foster kittens. Those kittens are just about ready to be returned to the DDFL to be fixed and adopted out. They came from a collection of cats and kittens that the DDFL had; they weren’t sure which kittens went with which, so we wound up with two torties (females) and two black and whites (males).
There are plenty more things to talk about, but these are the things you’ve said you’d like to hear about when I’ve done polls, so this is just a household update.
You can talk about the youth minister who received much of his indoctrination in Woodland Park and Colorado Springs (www.dailykos.com/...). Or you can talk about the latest in Colorado Politics (www.coloradopols.com, www.coloradopols.com/…, coloradosun.com), you can celebrate the demise of Shooter’s Grill (though I think Boebert has just changed to the next grift, having milked all she could out of SG), or any other topic of your choice. What’s going on in your world for the summer? Are you doing anything interesting? Have you discovered a new interesting restaurant, place for art, place to hike? kick back and relax? Get your freak on? (Did I just type that?)
Anyway, for whatever you wish to discuss, this is an open thread. I’d like to hear what festivals, events, concerts or other things that might be worth traveling to are going on this summer. The floor is yours...