What a day!

It's been a long and frustrating day!

It started out okay, with a trip to the Bauer Lake inlet, where I caught these two swallows (martins?) perched on their duplex birdhouse.

And the trip to the knee surgeon wasn't bad, either. The bone-on-bone contact and arthritis is evident in my right knee; time to do a replacement. We'll postpone till after the Yellowstone trip and Yearly Meeting at Ghost Ranch in early June so's to have a better recovery period. I have a great nurse who will see to it that we're both out biking as soon as possible.

Delivering our first order of cards to the Open Shutter Gallery in Durango was good, too.

Then the San Juaner came in, filling the valley with windblown dust. I stayed in for a good part of the afternoon, reading over applications for the Friends Bulletin editor position. Unfortunately, the reason I'm still up at 11:30 is that my e-mail went down, leaving me without some of the communication our committee of three needs on this. It's been a frustrating couple of hours, trying to deal with that.

Before that, however, I got to be on the panel for three SWOS senior portfolios, always rewarding. After the portfolio review, there was a ceremony in which all the seniors lit a candle and stood in a circle of solidarity. Candles don't give much light, but you could still see their eyes shining!

Mixed in with all this was a series of phone calls from someone from CNN, who was traveling from the FLDS home community of "Short Creek," the twin cities of Colorado City, AZ, and Hildale, UT, to Cortez to film the Mancos Valley FLDS properties tomorrow. I met with them in Cortez tonight after getting done at SWOS and talked generally about the relatively low impact the FLDS group (however many they are; I've never seen more than two men at a time and no women or children) has had in the community. Whatever they use of the interview is supposed to air on CNN tomorrow - Wednesday - night. 

I haven't been by the FLDS parcels since sometime last fall, so I did a quick run by again on the way to SWOS and did drive-by shooting with the camera. Doesn't look like much has changed, except the fences are painted around the raised gardens they were putting in spring before last, a new shed has been built and the picture from the road through the trees and across an unused field shows building material and a couple of big underground tanks in readiness. 

The last picture is of the buildings, etc., on the second 60-acre tract David Allred bought, probably as an agent for his father-in-law, Warren Jeffs. A comparison with pictures I took while I was still Mancos Times editor in early 2006 shows no change in the structures.

The CNN crew is going up there Wednesday morning; we'll tag along after our stop at Bauer Lake. And now it's off to bed, while it's still Tuesday (barely). tv