A handful of horses

On my way north to spend the holiday with my kids and grandkids, I stopped to make some photos of a fence line, a brooding sky, and a little bit of mountain range. These folks must have spied me from their distance and decided to come check me out….

In the first photos with the fence line (not published, but previous to the above image), I couldn’t even see the horses…then they appeared as just dots.

And then they were there, a nice little greeting party come to say Hello.

I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to upload the photos and found that even the ones that captured the horses’ movement were not blurry.

The lighter colored one to the left was actually jumping around and kicking her back legs into the air.

The horses never came closer than probably 50-75 yards from me, so the nearer images were enabled by the zoom feature on the camera.

The below photo was probably taken more than 100 yards away. This horse, below, had something wrong with a back leg and could be seen limping, so she was always lagging behind the rest of the group.

And as always seems to happen when photographing animals, these folks also turned their backs and walked away.

And this last one for context…you can probably discern part of the fourth horse with the far left one…and the golden colored horse is still out of frame, she was that far behind the rest of them.

That’s it folks…I’ve attempted to capture some nice images of horses along the freeway during my dozens of earlier trips to and from Utah, and these are the best to date.

North from Las Vegas

Heading north for the holidays. The expectation was for showers and snow on the route I would normally have taken, US 89 north from Flagstaff, so I went north from Kingman to Las Vegas, and then further toward Salt Lake City for the holidays. My first road trip in a solid year…first photo excursion in the same time…and was gifted with too many things to capture, but here we are.

iPhound art.

Doorway words

Some of them got caught in her sweater as she left

And in the tangles of her yellow brown hair

Others landed on the slats of the open blinds in the window aslant

The heavier ones made it to the floor without floating out in the breeze of her passing

I have collected them, the ones I could find, the letters anyway

As the words themselves came apart in their falling

I planted them, too, in this late Fall, with ashes of hearts

And I hope to sit here in the Spring to watch them

Bloom again in their beautiful and storied shapes

Binding and healing and leaving their scent of nascent life

With stalks of sweet blown dirt and rain to soothe a torn soul

One that left a long time ago in other doorways and then

The mountains are just RIGHT THERE….

I’m pretty sure that I’ve shared this observation in the past, probably when I was living up there…

…but one of the things I admired about living in (and now visiting) Salt Lake City is that the mountains are just…right there!

They are such a presence…such an ever thing up there…turn your head and there they are!

Bridge over the Jordan River

We traveled back to Salt Lake City for the Thanksgiving holiday and I managed to spend some time with an old friend….

Summer Clouds

Caught with my phone’s camera…it was preparing to rain somewhere….

Driving home from work on 7/26/2022…beautiful end of a long day.

What is Professionalism…?

In preparation for a career opportunity several years ago, I considered this word and many of its possibilities. I scanned the internet and found a host of articles about the qualities of professionalism, the top seven or ten characteristics, etc., but didn’t find anything that struck me as being the essence of the word…so I came up with my own…as follows:

“Professionalism is the manner of conduct which exemplifies, enhances, and reinforces the standards of behavior, quality, and performance of the members of a given profession.”

There are, of course, many other things which can be said of the notion, but having considered quite a few of them, I find that they fit within the framework of what I have offered above.

I realize that this post is quite a bit different from my normal fare, but I’m preparing for yet another career opportunity and have been giving the topic of professionalism more focused thought and attention than I have in several years.

Many of my blog-friends and readers have been retired from the working life for several years and come from a variety of careers, so it would be interesting to learn of your ideas about how professionalism was demonstrated in your own career pursuits.

The Wasatch Range Under Snow….

I know winter has fled most of the country for another several months, but it seems that we didn’t have much of one here in the desert…yes, we did have snow on the distant mountains, but they were…distant…and refreshing only to sight and possibility.

So…as we’re on the 27th Day of March and it’s already up to 94 degrees here in Phoenix, I thought I’d share an image from the past holiday season when I was visiting my kids in Salt Lake City. That’s Mount Olympus on the left and the rest of the Salt Lake Valley’s Wasatch Mountains follow on southward.

Another rendering of “The Road Home”

A sketch rendering of the image from the post, “The Road Home.”

A gift from my son, HB.

Ascent

Maybe it’s an appropriate post for the first day of the new year…onward and upward, as the saying goes….

Watson Lake, Prescott, Arizona.