Down from the mountains

We're back home in the Midwestern humidity.
We rolled out of Alma, Colo. at 4:19 a.m. Tuesday and thrashed our way across Kansas and Missouri before bagging it at midnight at a Motel 6 in Springfield, Ill. The motel began life under another banner, since it was a cut above the standard cheesy Motel 6 layout. It didn't matter much because we immediately fell into bed and my next conscious experience was of Maria rousting me out of bed at 6 a.m. to get back on the road.
Consequently, we arrived home at 9:15 a.m. to find - wonder of wonders - a tree service crew whacking to pieces the first of the three maple trees that have menaced our house for longer than we've lived here.
If you've been following this tedious saga, you know these three trees belong to the town because they stand in the right-of-way of a dedicated alley that also serves as our driveway. It took us four appearances before the town council over a 12-month period to persuade them that the big maple trees are a threat to our home and a liability to the town.
This afternoon, with only the three trunks standing some 15-20 feet high, it is obvious that our fears were justified. All three had branches that were hollow and rotten and ready to snap if subjected to enough wind.
The south side of our house is getting more sunshine than it's seen since the 1940s, but the threat of tree limbs smashing our house, our cars, our motorcycles or ourselves is gone. Likewise, the roosting place for hundreds of birds that showered birdshit on our cars and our neighbors' cars is gone. They will not be missed.
The guy wielding the chainsaw from the bucket truck told us our roof is missing a lot of shingles and is down to the tarpaper around the chimney, so I need to start calling roofers before that problem gets any worse.
Tim and Linda showed us a splendid time during our sojourn in the Colorado high country. We roamed all over Park County, surmounted Weston Pass, dined on filet mignon at Buena Vista, photographed buffalo and fishermen on Tarryall Road and spent the Fourth of July at the Guffey Chicken Fly.
This was the 19th year for this whimsical event in which participants pay $5 each use a bathroom plunger to launch a chicken from a rural mailbox mounted some 12 feet above the ground. The object of the game is to see whose chicken travels the farthest before landing. I think the best distance of the day was something like 42 feet. While chickens don't soar, they can avoid dropping like a pumpkin by flapping their wings to slow their descent.
The animal rights types are presumably appeased by the fact that the rural mailbox is lined with red velvet.
One of the officials wore a PETA t-shirt, but rather than People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, it bore the words, "People intersted in Eating Tasty Animals."
Nevertheless, I saw no serious mistreatment of the chickens. The all seemed none the worse for their startling ejection from the mailbox into empty space. I wouldn't try this with penguins, but chickens seem to handle it just fine.
While we were in Colorado, I spent about 12 hours editing photos from the wedding we shot a week earlier and finally got them posted to our website. Even though I color calibrated our Sony VAIO notebook computer's screen with a Spyder, I worried that the images might not be spot on. Now that I've had a chance to view them on my desktop computer's CRT, I can see some room for improvement in a few, but on balance they're fine.
Even so, I think it would be a mistake to try any serious Photoshop work on the VAIO. It's good for viewing and sorting pictures, but isn't as accurate as a CRT display.