Riepe Invades My Space

It's a shocking day when one opens one's e-mail and there sits a charming little gift from the famously tolerant Jack Riepe, writer, humorist and former owner of the very desirable BMW K75 with the rare Sprint fairing, known to his readers as 'Blueballs.'

Jack loves BMW motorcycles and has about as much empathy for dogs as I do for owners of BMW motorcycles whose final drive shafts blow up from time to time for no known reason, and yet those owners remain stubbornly in love with Bavarian machinery. Give me a Labrador over a broken expensive German shaft drive any day.

And don't forget to go to his website "Twisted Roads" at www.jackriepe.blogspot.com and order his new book. He is an ace storyteller.

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Morning Clouds And Light

This time of year my Labrador likes to spend a lot of time on her morning ambles because its cooler before the sun comes up and she puts in a lot of effort to walk as much as she can. For myself I'd rather be tucking myself up for a long morning's sleep after spending the night sitting up working, but if I were to ignore my dog's wishes I'd be turning my back on the likes of this:

By the time the sun has been in the sky a while temperatures will be getting close to ninety degrees and that's just too warm for a small dog in a heavy fur coat. That's when she likes to be indoors where the air conditioning makes the wooden floors cool enough for her to lie down and snore the sleep of the just.

I walk with my head in the air captivated by what the great Everglades photographer Clyde Butcher calls "Florida's mountains."

I am alone in being fascinated by the play of emergent sunlight on accumulated water vapor in the skies. Cheyenne keeps her head firmly to ground and spends the cool of the summer morning trotting back and forth chasing scents through the mangroves. All the pictures will enlarge if you click on them.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad