Category Archives: Pictures

A week spent in Wyoming

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Lander, Wyoming

Lander, Wyoming. A lovely town.

My week mostly consisted of work, and very little sight-seeing. That said, it’s been one of the best weeks of travel I’ve had in a year chalk full of travel. I say this for two reasons:

  1. I’ve been commuting between Riverton, Wyoming, and Lander, Wyoming, two town of about 9000 people and 5000 people respectively, separated by 30 miles of truly beautiful highway which is just endlessly fun to drive.
  2. Both of these town, perhaps due to their remote nature, have not (yet) fallen into the trap that a lot of the small towns I’ve visited seem to fall into — that of having whatever personality they once had canibalized by incoming corporate (and familiar) forces. Everything still seems relatively pure (and maybe a lot of that comes from the fact that both Lander and Riverton have old-school, one-screen movie theaters right on their main street.

I wouldn’t mind coming back.

Aw, nuts.

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A nut on the deck.

There is a situation going on in the backyard right now (actually, it’s been going on for about a week). One of our trees is full of some sort of nut. It is a largish, smooth, green beast of nut that fall from the high branches and hit the roof and our deck with a loud thud. This is annoying, but can be dealt with. However, the nuts attract squirrels. The squirrels eat the nuts on the deck and make cute little piles of the leftovers. Those piles accumulate rather quickly. After about 4 days, the deck looks like this:

The nut aftermath. Four days of squirrels at a buffet.

Annoying? Yes. A pain to clean? Absolutely. Dangerous? Let me tell you, the biggest problem of this whole late-summer nut exodus, is that the squirrels, high up in the trees, find it fun to throw the nuts on the non-squirrels below. Say someone is playing with their dog, they may have the unpleasant sensation of having a siver-dollar-sized nut hurled at the cranium from 50 feet. And let’s also say that you happen to be the dog in this scenario and you are, already, a bit skittish. Well, this nut-pelting just might make it so that you no longer will choose to go outside and need to be drug out by your master. This is not the natural order of the earth.

Here is the tree in question:

A massive tree. Home to nuts, squirrels.

Unrelated backyard difficulties:

There is a raccoon or raccoons living under our deck. They enjoy getting into heated stand-offs with the dog and they do not seem to the be kinds of animals that will just run away — even if they’ve been pelted with, say, a nut, from a worried human standing on the deck. Developing…