by 
Friday we drove to Quitaque to visit Renee. It had been about 18 months since we saw here last, in spite of promises to make the effort to visit more often both ways. Although Renee has been in Amarillo a number of times in the interim, she was visiting an elder sister in poor health and that took up her time.
We took the scenic route to Quitaque which is SH 207 from Claude. It goes down and through the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River below Palo Duro Canyon State Park and is picturesque. It also crosses Tule Canyon. If you haven’t made that drive I recommend it. There isn’t any significant time difference between that route and driving to Tulia and taking a left. We left home about 8:30 and got home after dark.
Renee seems to being doing well. She stays busy with projects and volunteers at a museum in town specializing in the history of the area. It was unpleasantly windy so we stayed in the vehicle when Renee took us on a drive through Caprock Canyon State Park. We stopped at the visitor center and, while Renee went inside to take care of whatever she needed to take care of, I took my camera and walked out to inspect some nearby bison. I didn’t take any pictures because I was on the north side of them. With the sun so low in the southern sky, all I would have gotten would be some bison-shaped silhouettes. Renee said the bison aren’t trouble by park visitors and there haven’t been any incidents. I wanted to leave it and myself intact so I didn’t try to maneuver for a better shot.
The last two Saturday evenings, the neighbors have joined us for dinner and board games by the fire. It seems to me this Christmas season is zipping by too fast. In a couple of weeks, give or take, we’ll be taking down and packing up the Christmas decorations until next Christmas.
Our last moisture of any kind was October 14 and that wasn’t much. It has gotten dry and we are trying to keep things watered. The snapdragons have survived some temperatures down in the 20s so I keep watering them. We water the fruit trees and any other tender plantings. I water the pansies Kari planted by the front porch for her mom’s birthday and they look good. Chris has to give his bees sugar since many days are warm enough for them to be active but there aren’t many flowers around for them to collect nourishment.
I’ve been trimming junipers along the southeast lane. I’ve been working on removing the dead from that stretch for several year and I’m down to three or so left to trim. I try to trim one a week, on Monday or Tuesday, and haul the trimmings off to the chipping site on Wednesday afternoon after spending the morning at Wildcat Bluff. The city closed down the three or four chipping sites around town and consolidated that function out at the dump west of town. It’s a little farther than the site on Soncy I used to use but there are people there to monitor what people are dropping off. Some people would dump building materials and worse at the unattended sites. Now they can’t do that. I think it is a better, more efficient arrangement. They use some of the mulch produced on the sides of the hills that are formed by the dump.