Visiting W's parents, aunt, and cousins at Aunt B's house.
W's parents' house.
E with Grandma.
And with Grandpa. E has the Lego robot fighter he built.
Balancing on rocks at water's edge, at Lake Springfield. The power plant is in the background. Yes just as on the Simpson's, though this is a coal burning plant and not a nuclear one.
The back yard.
Visiting my folks.
E likes the pool.
At C's we went for a walk. Below is a random Petersburg house -- nice but not unique. I like it because it's a quintessential pre-modern central Illinois house.
This is C's house. As a Californian I am jealous. While we were buying a house for hundreds of thousands of dollars, C bought this house for the lower tens of thousands of dollars. Ouch. It needed work, but still. Since bought, with modest remodeling and plenty of fine tuning, it's nearly tripled in value.
The boys settle in to play on-line computer games. (Surprise. Not.)
E shows off his Fruita t-shirt. Attached to the front is a pin given to C by T on Father's Day that states 'Go ask your mother.' E thinks it's hilarious.
Since we've been touring wineries, C and T take us to the Hill Prairie Winery. Outside a group prepares for a wedding. In June the world is expansive, vibrant, and green.
Inside the tasting room it's comfortable and cool. Like a seafood restaurant covering the bases by adding steak and chicken to the menu, Hill Prairie keeps bottles of beer for guests who prefer them. Local tastes run toward sweet wines, but I feel more at home with their Traminette, which is a drier white wine that reminds me vaguely of the Gewurztraminer I tried in Colorado. I buy a bottle to take to M's.
We relax outside with a bottle of beer and some glasses of wine.
The entrance to the Hill Prairie Winery. Since their website picture, they've removed the giant sign and added a porch.
That evening we went to M's and D's. They remodeled the garage, and now it's as comfortable as any small bar or pub.
In the spring and summer the garage door opens for a breeze, though there's also a heater for winter.
When we visit M, we usually spend part of a day trying to shoot targets. Since we're urbanites who are neither police nor gangsters, this means the last time we shot anything was the last time we visited M (or C).
M, a generous host, makes sure we all hit something at least once. In my case 'once' is literal, while G and W fare better.
As you can see, there's a whole lot of nothing surrounding the adobe hills in Delta County. There's probably no safer place on earth for target practice, as long as you're not with Dick Cheney.
It's obvious why rural folks don't understand why city folks are shy about guns. It can be difficult to imagine a place in which, during a single day, it's possible to walk past hundreds of people about which you know nothing... and that if one of those unknown people is crazy and has a gun, tens of people can quickly wind up dead.
M thinks some laws are best fashioned for the local community. He has a point. In the country most people could care less whether a neighbor has a rifle or a hand gun, or whether it's single or multi-shot. In a city most folks would prefer for their neighbors to be gun free, or at least free of small-guns-that-can-be-hidden-and-shoot-fast such as semi-automatic handguns.
BTW, If you just want to look at pictures, click on a picture.
M commandeered the rental van for an outing over the recently opened Kebler Pass to Crested Butte. As the road climbs, the surface switches to gravel. Road dust can cause problems, which dust suppressants mitigate though they have their own issues. I bring this up because, along with water rights and easements, folks here care enormously about "environmental" issues: Specifically, political fault lines have a lot to do with one's livelihood. 
For visitors there is the view, which is incredible.
Tourists may wish to think the view should not change. Hikers would like quiet, imagining an unspoiled, unused landscape. Hunters would like game that is healthy and ever present. Skiers want enough infrastructure to support a jacuzzi in their room and a sous chef in the kitchen.
Some tourists decide to no longer be tourists and to move in.
They must now make a living. Generally this means catering to tourists, or working in a mine or on a farm, or buying and running a ranch or farm. Other options include practicing medicine, teaching, etc. Mainly the choices are 1) tourist industry (skiing, hunting, rafting), 2) local economy (grocer, teacher, banker, real estate agent, IT professional), 3) working for a global interest (mining, logging).
Sometimes there's a crossover. For example fruit farms are mostly local, but wineries need tourists. Mines belong to global interests, but the local economy would crash without miners' paychecks. A restaurateur or boutique owner may prefer dollars from tourists, but won't last through the year without local support.
And the environment runs through the middle. Tourists come for a pristine one, global interests come for a material one, and locals depend upon a predictable, self renewing one.
You would think these folks should get to know each other that, with the exception of far away global interest executives and the actual tourists, they depend upon one another. Because even though the miners work for a global interest, they live with the (and are) locals. Because even though the locals prefer money that tourists bring, the dependable money (for the foreseeable future) comes from miners. The actual tourists and the actual global interests are only passing through, around for the ride while there's a ride to be had.
Everyone benefits from safe mines and environmentally responsible mining practices, and from a beautiful and minimally polluted landscape.
As for global warming, well, that is an important topic. But not one that can be solved by shouting.
Below are choke cherry flowers. The best pie I ever ate was made with dark, ripe, choke cherries. Each cherry has a little bit of fruit and a large pit. It takes a couple of buckets of cherries to get 2 cups of fruit.
We got out to take pictures and walk around.
Even the weeds are pretty.
We got out for another break and to throw snow.
Remnants from an earlier trans-global boom, which lasted less than six years.
These pictures were taken in mid-June. For the western side of Colorado, a LOT of snow fell during the winter.
The last of the snow is melting. Below are ponds created by beavers' activities.
Crested Butte, a skiing and tourist mecca.
A week earlier there were sand bags along the channel, to keep the stream from flooding the streets.
This was taken on the way back to Paonia. There's a lot of water flowing down the mountain.
So many shades of green.
We tried a side trip to Lake Irwin, close to here, but the road was blocked by snow.
We tried another side trip, to Lost Lake. This time we came within a quarter mile of the lake before we had to turn around.
Below is a single yellow flower from a field.
And here is the field with many yellow flowers and a stream. Everywhere we stopped at higher elevations we saw snow and melt water.
This wasn't a good stretch of road on which to stop, or I'd have taken more pictures of the rock face. It looks tortured, with rock tilted in a variety of directions, and squeezed to fracture and fall.
We're close to the paved road, near the bottom of the pass.
My camera battery came to an abrupt halt, making these my last pictures for the day.