Brrrr!

It is pretty normal for Alaskans to take a mid-winter break to someplace warm. DL and I decided to go to Montana. :) Long-term readers of this blog may remember one Sammypants. She was the dog of some dear friends of mine from the days of being TAs in the physics department! Well, dear Sammypants finally passed away at the age of 16. I like to think that my Linden was super happy to see her again! I'm not sure about Autumn though... Anyway, we decided to visit the little family in Missoula, which was their hometown, to which they had happily returned.

AL shares a rather uncommon family name with DL. A brief discussion of their family histories, as well as a physical resemblance among DL, AL, and AL's father, make me think that it is more likely than not that they are related. So we were also going to visit cousins!

Ahhh! That mid-winter getaway to a warm, sunny place! :D

(This is from a day snowshoeing at Lolo Pass.)

In Arlee, the hometown of AL (population 602), a Tibetan Monk saw a ridge of hills surrounded by mountains, that reminded him of a sacred place in Tibet that had appeared to him in his dreams. So there he constructed a Garden of One Thousand Buddhas.


Wisdom from a Tibetan master of the Nyingma school of Buddhism, Wisdom from a child in pink:


The splash of pink moves among the stones:


DP, AL, and the Pink One, approaching a pyramid of prayer flags:


DL and I can now use this photo for our holiday cards and let people think we visited Tibet:


The great buddha in the center of the wheel:


I usually take an extra day off when I get home from vacation. This time, it was particularly helpful. I'm super proud of how well we ate all of our fresh food before we left!


So I had to go grocery shopping, and it is also very cold!


Roo and Cricket were super happy to be back on their couch:


Although their kennel takes lovely portraits!


They even get Cricket to pose!


On my way home from running errands today, I saw this sweet boy unaccompanied on the street:


It was on a curved part of the road, so I decided I would only take one shot at catching him. I pulled over and opened my door, and he eagerly jumped in the car! Phew! When I got home, I saw that he had an ID tag, and that his name is Chena. His owner came to pick him up immediately. What a huge schweetie he was!