…were without incident, but not without irritation: Virtually the entire 200 miles to Denver I had to fight a 30 MPH crosswind, and I was very glad that our good bright sun had dried out the roads before we left Ogallala at 11:00 AM. QBit started getting kennel fever in the great big featureless nowhere that I-76 crosses in northeast Colorado, and Carol had to put him in her lap to keep him from chewing a leg off.
We took a short detour up to Lake McConaughy before setting out this morning, and found that the lake is now two feet higher than we’ve ever seen it, and higher in fact than it’s been since the now-fading drought got serious in 2001. Whatever’s been eating Nebraska’s climate seems to have gotten fixed somehow, and since our atmospheric CO2 level has kept increasing all the while, I can only conclude that–gasp!–climate changes all by itself, in ways that we simply can’t predict because, like the Wizard of Oz admitted in the basket of the Omaha State Fair balloon, we don’t know how it works.
Anyway. The short form is that we’re back in Colorado Springs, where last Thursday’s blizzard shows a bare few remnants in habitual shadows but has otherwise melted into the soil. The house smells like plasticizers (as it always does when we’re gone for a month) but the plants survived, and although we’re exhausted and will be digging out for a day or two, the trip is over and I can get back to work on the book. I’m a little late with Chapter 8, but I’m now 105,000 words in (of about 175,000 words total) and I suspect I’ll make the rest of the deadlines with a little scrambled eggs and caffeine.
Welcome home.
-JRS