When the going gets tough, the tough get going

Going down to South Park, gonna leave my woes behind... gonna see if I can't unwind...
(mumble-mumble-gibberish-gibberish - you really don't want to know what those lyrics are, trust me.)

Well we had us a lovely drive on Saturday, once we finally got a car. I had heard that there was a start up fibre festival in Fairplay at their annual county show.

Then I discovered that Fairplay is in South Park! It still has buildings that indicate it was the local community centre of South Park. We could go to South Park!

Well that decided it, didn't it?

Off we set on a trip to Fairplay, around Denver and through some foothills and up Turkey Creek Canyon (didn't see us any turkeys - see I am learning to talk like the locals! ;-).


(didn't realise my driving was that hairy! Look at the angle the pic is on! Whoopsy! Wasn't me driving, nosiree no! I was not allowed to drive that car one mile, let alone 350...)

Nathan suggested we get one of these for our front yard back 'ome,

but we figured that it would take up the whole front yard, and maybe we'd have to demolish the house too. Also we'd probably need to get a permit from the council. So alas, we won't be getting one and sending it home.

Along the way it occurred to us that maybe we should've brought some rain gear, mebbe even just a jacket since we were climbing up to about 3000m, or 10,000', and it would be colder there.



Up into bigger and bigger hills, along the US 285





Through clouds of smoke belched out by THE most disgusting U-Haul van anyone e'er did see!

And over the last big hill, over the Kenosha Pass, onto the plateau.






My goodness, how magnificent! You really need to click on the pics to see the bigger ones but excuse the reflections. This great wide flat area ringed all around by mountains. We figured it must've been a lake bed or something that was filled up with glacial stuff. But we didn't really know - Wikipedia has a lot of good info on South Park. See? We didn't really know. For whatever reason, that whole basin is pretty darned flat, yet it is surrounded by many lumpy bits.



Up and over one last pass,


Then we discovered the charming little town of Fairplay.



Ahem. They may get lots of tourists hoping to find South Park but umm, yeah.



The county fair and fiber market were interesting, not that I have any pics from it. There are still people who appear to be real cowboys out there, and girls who dress up in tight jeans and purple satin shirts who get to be the county fair queen and princesses. Nathan got to talk to a few fibre ladies whilst I chatted a bit and browsed a lot (but that is for Yarnivorous!). I sorta felt like a real city gal, but I am! Even to the point of skirting the horse and cow dung, but I also had sandals on and didn't want the added extra fertiliser on my feet. Also our rental car, a Corolla, didn't really fit in with the other cars there - like it would've fitted on the back of half of them.


The clouds started pushing in and it was time to move on.

So we said farewell to Fairplay and went in search of new scenes.

What do you do when the dream goes sour?

Oh dear.

DH is hating his job. This was his dream job, the job that he thought would make him a happy man. But there is so much bureaucracy and so many broken links (he has to do online courses and work practices stuff but the links don't work and the help stuff tells him his browser is incorrectly configured but won't help any) and so little actual real help and so much politicking and so few people to talk to that it is all going sour. All he wants to do is quit and go home. This is having major repercussions on his fragile ego.

Of course all this comes to head just at the same time as his boss is away for a loooong weekend and left a whole list of things that have to be done before he gets back.

Sigh.

I so wanted this to work. I so want my husband to be happy. I don't want any more days (and nights) like the last one....

On Social Security Numbers

Everything in the USA is based on your social security number.

Everything.

No credit rating without an SSN.

No loans without an SSN.

No health insurance without an SSN.

No online access to various institutions (eg the credit union) without an SSN.

I can't get an SSN. I am not allowed to work. SSNs are only for those who work. I can get an ITIN which is an Internal Revenue Service number that is for tax purposes (even though I am not allowed to work, go figure!). I am holding off on that until I find out whether I can get a work permit - you can't have an ITIN and an SSN at the same time.

DH can get an SSN but you can't apply for an SSN until you've been here for 10 working days or more, and then it is not issued for at least another four weeks after that. He has applied for his SSN.

This is causing some problems, as you may imagine.

Currently, DH has to nominate which health insurance fund we are to be covered under within 30 days of our arrival (ie real soon now). To do this, he has to provide his, guess what?

You got it! His SSN!

But he doesn't have one.

You would think that the health insurance providers for big company like HP would be used to people not having SSNs. After all HP recruits lots of people from overseas. But no they want the SSN first. Someone there has to be able to sort this out, but there is no HR contact number, only a help page and an email contact....

Heaven help Australia if we go down the Australia card path. It would mean all our records would be tied to one number, just like the American SSN. If you lose that number or someone steals it from you (identity theft) or you are new in the country and everything relies on you having that number, what on earth do you do? What if you do not qualify for that number? Do you remain a non-entity, a legal but barely tolerated alien?

Am I to be a non-entity here, simply a subsidiary alien? I quite object to that! Should I start jumping up and down and doing my best Elephant Man impersonation? I am not an animal (nor an alien), I am a human being!

Eh, it won't do any good. I'll just wait and see if I can get a work permit. Only three or so months of waiting to go!

Into the mountains, part deux

Ah, long time, no post pictures!

Three weeks ago, we went up into the mountains. What a lovely drive! So much has happened since then but I figure I should share some pretties with you.

Lots of pretties!


I couldn't figure out which angle to show you as they each highlight different things, so you get both. BTW, excuse the blodges in the pics - the windscreen was pretty dirty and of course all the best pics were taken from a moving car, not when we stopped to line the shots up well....


We drove up the Cache la Poudre Canyon to Cameron Pass.


Now for a lowlander like me, that pass is pretty darned high! It is almost another kilometre higher than the highest point on mainland Australia. No wonder I felt a little dizzy up there! (Don't ask who reverted to driving on the left side of the road. Ooops!)



A little further along the road were the Crags. Totally spectacular! So spectacular that we did not manage to get one picture that really shows their magnificence. This one will have to do (again out of the car as we found a turn around point).


We saw a moose - so did lots of other people. The fact that about 10 cars were pulled up on the side of the road sorta gave it away. It was not at all fussed by the attention.


On the way back down the canyon, we decided to stop and look at the tunnel which brings water from another river (the Laramie?) to the main branch of the Poudre.

Nathan was extremely enthusiastic about going for a little walk. It was a bit uphill. I had to get my all wheel drive legs out just to make it up the grade, which was about 45 degrees in some bits. We climbed and puffed and climbed some more and puffed and glowed a whole lot. But the views were great!


See the road down there? We climbed up from that road!





I thought I'd blow a foofer valve on the last bit of the climb it was so steep! But this is what we saw there - the tunnel outlet. Seemed smaller than I expected, though I know a metre wide pipe can carry an *awful* lot of water.


Last, but by no means least, the Colorado state flower, seen growing at Cameron's Pass.

I so wanna grow some of these! I love grannies' bonnets and this is a very pretty colour combo.

On the t-word and water directions

Those of you who are squeamish about certain parts of the bathroom, go someplace else now.

I've gotta get something cleared up nice and quickly. The third-most common question we get asked (after "Where are you from?" and "Why did you come to America?") is "I'm kinda embarrassed about this but does the water in the toilet go the other way?"

Well to cut a long story short, we don't know. Y'see American toilets freak Aussies out. This Great Big Pool of Water is Scary and Intimidating. The way the water gets slurped down and then sorta floods back up again is completely worrisome. Will it stop before it reaches the top of the bowl? Any toilet Back 'Ome that rises up that far is blocked and therefore of extreme concern. (and the ones that auto flush? Yeah we have them too but having the water only a coupla inches beneath one's nether regions is ahem challenging!)

Aussie toots work by having a much smaller amount of water in the bowl. Like we have 3 and 6 litre flush loos in new houses. That is less than two gallons by a lot. (Old houses that haven't been renovated have like 15 litre or four gallon flushes.) So they work not by sucking and refilling but by dumping new water on the old. Since there is no suck, there is no swirl of water.

Hence we can't say if the water goes the other way.

You might ask well what about the bath then? Well I can't say there either cos it is a while since I've done a bath in Oz and I didn't bother looking to see how the little tornado whirled around.

(BTW, our downstairs toilet also randomly refills the cistern. It is a bit freaky when you hear the toilet apparently flush at 3am when both of you are in bed....)

Soon I will rise up out of the sewer, mebbe even get into the gutter. Or even higher! I have more pics, I just need time to edit them. I am sooo busy at present!

On recycled "bathroom tissue"

Ah, the joys of finding new products in a new country. This is an issue that is, well I'd like to say close to my heart but really it is much closer to somewhere else.

Those who are sensitive to such issues had best go find another blog to read right now - the title should give you an idea of today's topic.

Back 'ome, my local supermarkets carry not just one but four brands of recycled dunny paper. (Gosh I said dunny! Next I will say toot, toilet, loo, lavatory, bog or other such taboo words!) And I reviewed them all in a side by side (so to speak) comparison earlier this year.

Here I've found just one so far.

Golly, it ain't worth it, I can tell you! It is like applying fine grade sand paper (and I am sure would feel like coarse sand paper on bad days). From my Oz experience, recycled bog roll does not have to be like folding up photocopier paper or that really cheap poster paper for little kids and one should not have to martyr various delicate parts of one's anatomy just to be environmentally conscious (but heck, it sure makes you conscious!).

Does anyone have any suggestions for brands other than 7G (name shortened to protect the guilty)? Or should I just give up and go running for the Kleenex Cottonelle cos that sure is soft, or at least the version back 'ome is! Are there issues here with various paper companies cutting down virgin forest like in Oz, or are they all OK? This enquiring mind (and other regions) needs to know! Thanks!

On new lodgings

Once upon a time, Nathan and Lynne moved to Colorado. There they searched for a place to live.

Eventually (ok, the fifth place they looked at, or maybe the sixth), they found a place that looked really nice in a good location. Even better, the placed was available almost immediately, which was *extremely* convenient.

So Lynne and Nathan moved in.

Nice new (secondhand) kitchen - so new it was still covered in construction dust (and the remnants of the previous owner's food gobs. Ick!).

Such a new kitchen that there was no water to the sink. Rather amusingly, when Nathan threw the water from the new tea mugs into the sink, it made a very odd splatter noise, not the tinkle-tinkle of water going down a drain.

Yep, the sink was not plumbed in in any way shape or form.

Alas, alack, Lynne had to take her bike and trailer out to not just one but TWO supermarkets to find a wash tub to do the dishes in - y'see the dishwasher also was not plumbed in and the crockery and glassware and pots and cutlery all had to be washed before they could be used. (I rode 20 miles that day mostly with the trailer - gosh I was tired by the end of it!)

The sink was plumbed in yesterday. Hooray! The dishwasher gets tied down today - it is plumbed in but has not been installed properly yet. Even the washing machine and drier were installed again (they are a bit dodgy but I am assured that the drier will work better now that its exhaust vent doesn't have a bird nest in it).

Then it was shower time.

Apparently showers in a lot of the rentals here do not have shower curtains/rods/screens. That is left to the individual taste of the renter. To an Aussie, this seems totally bizarre. So after we created a flood in the bathroom (I kid you not it was at least half an inch deep by the bath and there was no floor drain), Lynne took the bike and trailer out AGAIN in search of cheap bathmats (check!), some sort of shower rail (check!) and a shower curtain (check!).

In Target, they had adjustable rails - things that Lynne had never noticed before in Oz (nathan says he has seen them). They are designed to be temporary installations. You unscrew them, winding them out to a bit bigger than the gap they have to span, squish them in a bit and plonk them where you want them to sit (eg near the top of the tiles in the shower-bath). Ta-dum! Instant rail to hang a shower curtain on! Considering the number of these things they had available, they are obviously very popular.

So Lynne brought home a rail, shower curtain, new towels, new kitchen towels, new hand towels and a bathmat, and two used bathmats to be used for icky things. Hooray for new things!

But someone forgot to buy pillows. Again. Dangit!

But she did remember to go to Home Depot (I say it dep-o to Nathan and for the sake of the Americans here dee-po for Americans) and buy an extension thing for the shower, which was barely tall enough for the shorter of them to shower under. So at least the bathroom is all in order now!

On our first night here, when it got dark, we discovered that the loungeroom and the upstairs rooms do NOT have lights! Instead there are "light" switches on the walls that turn on and off powerpoints. Y'know when you look at a place during daylight, you don't think to look for lights. LOL So third on the list to buy is floor lamps. This is very possible once Nathan cons one of his mates into doing a spot of shopping. Anything over about four feet long doesn't fit on/into the bike trailer and Lynne feels uninclined to have to bungee-strap (we call them occy straps for octopus straps) things like lamps and brooms/mops to her bike trailer with a nice little flag on the bag to say long load....

So the new lodgings are great, but have some teething problems which are mostly readily fixable. After the kitchen is cleaned out (since the last of the work is happening today), we will start playing in the yard, such as it is. It appears despite the strong NO CATS/PETS prohibition here, the previous tenants had a silver tabby (evidence is that there are cat you-know whats in the gravel in our "yard" and the colour of the cat is apparent from the cat hair I've already found in fluff balls on the carpet).

Our visitors so far have commented on the lack of places to sit. Furniture? What is that? One of Nathan's workmates gave us some plastic outdoor chairs yesterday so now we have options to sit on a chair, not just on the stairs or the floor or our mattress (which currently sits on the floor in the living area cos upstairs was Too Hot and a base was Too Expensive yet). What a kind gift! (Chairs are another thing that don't fit into the bike trailer.)

After we get some pillows, a broom and a mop, we will have all the basics! Yay us! Then we can work on the rest. Cool, huh?

No sniping please

All,

Please don't use my blog as a forum for sniping at either me (for my ignorance or because I am being a bit naughty) or at others. If you have issues with me then send me a (nice) email, showing me what I am doing wrong and offering a better way to do stuff.

Y'know why I don't want my blog used as a comments sniping range?

It upsets me.

It admittedly doesn't take much to upset me at the moment. I've moved 17,000 or so kilometres from home. I have no family or good friends here, certainly noone that I feel confident that I can beg favours of. If I ask something of someone, I feel that I am imposing unduly upon them. I am missing familiarity, my friends, my family, my (old) car, my cats, my stash, my favourite foods, a decent loaf of gf/df bread....

We technically had to be out of this hotel today - it is a great way to wake up and find the service charges shoved under the door - but Nathan just fixed us up for another day, cos our lease starts tomorrow.

We have no car. We have to move our meagre accumulation of household goods, two suitcases and one spinning wheel three miles across town on bikes. Yes, I do now have a bike. You try setting up a new house on no money when you can only carry the stuff home in your backpack or your panniers on your (husband's) bike. A bike trailer is beyond our means at the moment, though I can see we will have to afford it and car hire again. It just means that we will have to buy no more stuff for our new place, like chairs. I am not sure how Nathan will cope without a chair. I can sit on the floor no probs but he can't.

Half the time when I open my mouth or do something I offend people here because I don't know The Rules. The Rules here are different to what they are Back 'Ome. Things here are close enough to being like home that every single dissonance, and there are plenty of them, jars a *lot*. It is a version of culture shock, or even the uncanny valley in action.

Now if *I* sound snippy and/or upset, you know why.

Next time - more photos, hopefully. After that? Dunno. I don't know when we'll have net access again. I might have worked my way up to making pithy blog posts again by then.

Into the mountains

Last weekend we took us for a trip up the Poudre Canyon. The Poudre (the way the locals say it sounds like poo-dah, rather like Aussies would say puta for computer but we discover that puta means something else in spanish... ho ho ho is a hint and I ain't talking Santa Claus here, so no more p*ta for us - how the heck were we to know since we don't speak Spanish? The Spanish poppulation of Oz is very small) is the local river. Wikipedia has very little to say about it. It is a wild river, at least at this stage of the year when the last of the melt is still filtering down.

We stopped at the first info place along the way. The info was not so interesting - watch out for ticks, welcome to the Poudre Canyon, etc. The info bay was very like a lot that we see in Oz, except with a GINORMOUS pothole that tried to eat our car. You guys in the USA like big things, doncha? ;-) One particularly interesting thing was this:

some sort of assassin bug. Yep, it has a victim. It's a bug eat bug world out there.

So we travelled on into the canyon. The hills around us started rising up

and we started seeing people on big inner tubes floating down the river.

We had to go through a tunnel

but be careful if you insist on having a rig that is more than 14'3" high!

and the hills kept rising up around us


The types of plants around changed a lot as we drove further up the canyon. It started off being arid type plants - scrubby grasses, not much in the way of shrubs or trees. Then we started getting what I presume are some sort of ponderosa pines and some prairie wildflowers




The Poudre had times when it was quite calm, though flowing swiftly, and times when it was quite quite excited:


We saw lots of white water rafting groups and some kayakers:



(Yes, he is going backwards at this point - he is effectively trying to paddle up stream. It didn't work. He ended up going over a small waterfall upside down and came up about 10 seconds later, going in the right direction this time...)

We kept climbing up and up. It became quite obvious what sort of valley we were driving in:

even though we have very few U-shaped valleys in Oz.

The park info centre, the one that is manned, was really good. We had a good chat with the people who are working there (as volunteers for the summer!). Some people love to talk to us about where we come from and we love to find out how they came to be where they are too. I think we spent most of an hour there. They also have only 4% sales tax, so I bought up big! LOL - 12 post cards and a little book to identify wildflowers. Plus they had the most civilised long drop dunnies I have ever seen - they even came with electric hand-driers and water! And loo paper too! Too much to expect! (I have seen at least two publications highlighting Colorado outhouses now, so I am glad to see that I am amongst friends here.)

I think I'll need the book for the wildflowers....


More soon!

On finding a place to live

Today we signed a lease. The new landlady seems nice. She has said we don't need to pay the first part month's rent until Nathan gets paid next week, which is very helpful indeed. She is putting a new (well 3 year old recycled almost new) kitchen in. It looks great. The guy doing the installation is really friendly and helpful.

It is a nice spacious place, prolly built in the 80s from its style, double garage, open plan, half bath below, full bath above, three bedrooms, one of which runs across most of the width of the place (that will be our study), a loft area, storage in the attic above the other two bedrooms. We don't need to maintain the grass or deal with the sprinklers or anything (we are still freaked out on the watering grass thing). As Chris said, we would know the right place when we found it. Even better, it backs onto Spring Creek bike path - we just go to the end of the cul de sac and there it is! It is only about a mile to two places I can buy yummy me-safe food at.

Excellent!

The landpersons here seem to be a bit more relaxed than the ones at home. Or at least the ones renting to professionals seem to be. It seems that if we wanna do something, we just give our landlady a call and she will say yea or nay (why are yea and nay spelt differently?). You wanna plant a garden! Yippee! Go ahead! (Lynne says yippee too ;-) Hopefully they will still say yippee when they see it....

Now we just need furniture. Habitat for Humanity is looking good for some stuff. I bought some crockery from there. Forgot about other stuff like cutlery. The annoyingest part is that we are shipping across crockery and cutlery but it isn't here yet and probably won't be for at least another week. In the meantime we have to eat off something and with something, and I need to go buy new pots, chopping board, knives.... (The place I now have three 20% off coupons for is looking good.) The furniture place up by the I25 might have great prices but currently they are great prices that are out of our reach. Doh! At least I got to go ont eh I25 and drive at 75 mph - FAST! VROOOM! Our highway maxes are a bit under 70mph I think (110kmh).

Something I noticed here is that there are seemingly very few cheap furniture places. In Oz, I could outfit half the house for under $1000, as long as I don't mind the stuff being made out of pine (radiata pine, the tree that is endangered in its home habitat in California but grown in half of Oz in plantations). OK, it won't last more than 5-10 years if you are careful with it but when you need stuff and can't afford noice stuff, it is handy. Not so here! Well not that I've found so far.... I have one last place to look at, see what they have. Two more places - there is a place that rents out furniture. That could be good.

So today, as expected, is a better day. Still if those of you who commented could hang out with me, that would be great! Also since Nathan isn't hanging around at the moment, I can get to edit some pics and maybe get them online. But don't hold your breath waiting....

Rocky Mountain Low

Happy 4th of July to those that will.

Y'know for some weird reason, I thought that today would be a good day. Someone would invite us out for a picnic and celebrate an important American holiday with us. But nope, we had to make our own fun.

Our own fun involved getting mildy lost in the foothills behind Fort Collins. That was fun, except for the 20 mile an hour zone in the middle of nowhere. (Honestly, what is with these speed limits that are ridiculously low? OK the road was narrow and twisty but 20mph is less than 40kmh and we were nowhere near any schools or built up areas. Even the speeds in town are faster than that!) I was the only person trying to stick anywhere near the speed limit. We then had arvo tea in Old Town and met another Carolyn(ne?). Then we went to Home Depot, just to see what is there. That was all good.

But through it all, we were both cracking the sads. I'm cracking the sads cos I feel isolated - I don't have anyone to talk to during the day and if Nathan is home, he is chatting on the computer, so he fairly much ignores me blathering at him (and I can't get online to email anyone or look stuff up). Yes I should be getting on the phone more and going to meet ups of knitters and spinners but I was told this is a holiday week and not much tends to happen in this sort of week. I'm sorta feeling abandoned and quite alone. Later this week I won't have a car - we can't afford to keep it, it being a hire car and all and us having to pay full on day by day insurance. Anything I do will have to be by bike or by bus. That will be an issue cos we will need to get stuff that can't be carried on a bike (like a set of pots and pans and various kitchen wares. A bed would be handy too but I guess that can be delivered). Also if we get this place we are aiming for, I won't be near any good knitting shops with meetups but I will be close to good supermarkets. Next week we won't have a phone or the internet. We'll be completely isolated. Plus money is an issue. Nathan is getting paid well but we have to pay for a place to live, our food, etc, out of one week's pay, and that just isn't enough. I'm having to use the credit card back 'ome, with all the fees and the exchange rate.

So I'm cracking the sads. I knew there would be bad times. I knew the first month here would be the most challenging as I find my way around town, figure out what is good, what is bad, try to make some connections and some new friends, try to work around a lack of income whilst our outgoings are highest... also no car is going to be a big issue. Much as we would like to do without a car, if we don't have one, we can't go anywhere outside of town, particularly into the mountains, because it is all just Too Far Away.

Nathan is cracking the sads as he frustrated at work cos of the bureaucracy and cos he isn't settled in there yet. Also he sees things that he thinks would be so easy to fix in the world but he can't fix them by himself.

Plus I didn't get to see fireworks cos we were watching Mythbusters and didn't get to a viewpoint in time for anything but seeing a huge line of cars coming from the other direction.

All in all a very frustrating day. May tomorrow be a happier day.

Friendly!

One thing that has continued to impress us so far is how complete and utter strangers are being so friendly to us. OK, it isn't entirely unexpected but the generosity of some folks is amazing.

Yesterday we went to check out a condo/townhome near Old Town. A builder there was working on installing a new kitchen. He found out (pretty easily really - just listen to our accents!) that we are new in town and don't have a whole lot yet, so he offered to put aside stuff from his church's jumble sale and also pick up any large items in his trailer.

We've randomly met two realtors. They do a LOT more work here than realtors at home. Realtors at home will ignore you unless they are going to get a Very Large Commission out of it. Of course they have a vested interest but from an Australian point of view, the first one we made contact with has really gone above and beyond.

People in the shops all want to know where we are from (except the one that charged me $5 more than the sign said and I decided that I didn't want it). Some say, "I know of a place," or, "I have some stuff I am selling," or "You should check out XYZ," etc. Lots of people are very happy to chat. I think it is partly that the Fort Collins lifestyle is still that of a large country town, not a metropolis. It is pretty laid back. Very little honking of horns on the road, unless someone is being a complete idiot (eg sitting through the green light cycle, wondering why all the cars in the other lane are zipping by). The business people we've met so far have been in (at best) smart casual. Nothing like the bloke who was our Oz end moving consultant - he would've been in a three piece suit I reckon if he could've been, instead of a starched shirt, crisp two piece suit and a LOT of aftershave! We've had an invite to go for a bike ride with the head fo a company, all sorts of weird stuff!

Time to go see what today holds!
(and pics soon, once we've worked out how to make a windoze box upload pics to a linux server)

Who put the poo in the Poudre?

Today we took us for a drive!

What fun! What excitement! I drove on the wrong side once (we were at over 10,000 feet, or a fair whack higher than anywhere on mainland Oz), Nathan almost drove off the right side several times!

Beautiful views, wonderful wildflowers (we figure most are native, but some of the same plants are weeds in Oz, so we have to change our viewpoint to go oh, purdy, not oh purdy but it shouldn't be here!), a gazillion photos....

But the important question for the day is who put the poo in the Poudre? At a pull off point in this wonderful wild river, I hopped down some stairs and was greeted with a wonderful sight, not. What on earth is that stuff? It can't be! My god, it is! Like don't people in the USA know not to take a dump at the edge of the river? Especially if they do it right on a rock? We have wombats in Oz. Wombats poop on top of rocks and roots to tell other wombats to rack off, this is my place, go find your own, leading to poo wars where various wombats all claim an area. Wombat poo is cuboid (rather like wombats, which are solid blocks of muscle) and looks dreadfully uncomfortable to pass (which may account for the wombat's rather dyspeptic, or should we choose constipated and grumpy, temperament).

Apart from that, a wonderful day. Coloradoans do *great* rocks. And water. And scenery. Pics later, when they have finally downloaded from the camera :-)