SOCO?

This past week was a southern Colorado week.

On Tuesday I got a call from my work asking if I wanted to go on an investigations/transfer case with Colorado Humane Society (which is a subset of my shelter.) I said sure, because anything is better than the daily grind. This meant meeting earlier than my usual schedule though.

We drove south for threeish hours. The job was to catch 10-15 cats and two dogs from a tiny house. It was not as bad as previous cases, but it was bad. When people hoard animals it's usually not just animals. The tiny house was very cluttered and since there were so many cats, there was feces literally everywhere. The cats were in the box springs, in the dresser drawers, in the kitchen cabinets. There was hair, vomit and feces in each of those places as well. Very unhealthy. However, unlike other cases, these cats were not mean. They were a bit scared and darted around, so they weren't super easy to catch, but they didn't fight back and many of them were caught by hand instead of traps and nets. We ended up with 11. Luckily, we didn't have to transport them back to the shelter in Denver. Instead, we went further south and dropped them off at a small shelter in Trinidad. I got a new experience, a day "off" work and free lunch. Good times

For the Fourth of July weekend we went where we'd vowed never to go in the middle of summer: the sand dunes.

It was awesome.

prickly pear blossom.

Sure, a bit hot in the middle of the day, but fine if we stayed off the sand. There was about an hour of rain both evenings, but nothing terrible. And we saw the distant and rather pitiful fireworks show put on by Alamosa.










It's one of the very few National Parks that allows dogs, so we brought Zorro along. He wasn't thrilled by being forced to ride in the very back because we had four people. The creek that runs by the dunes was very wide for this time of year, so we had some fun playing in the sand there. The sand was too hot for the dog's paws during the day, so when we went there he wore booties. The one time we actually hiked the dunes was around 8am and the temperature was perfect. I also went barefoot and it was amazing how quickly the sand began to heat up around 9am. Zorro seemed to really love dashing through the sand. He kept treating it like snow or water though; as he ran, he'd dip his head as if to scoop up the sand into his mouth. He always stopped before actually doing that though.  It is a favorite place and it had been too long.

poor abused pup. 

my friends and the dog running the dunes.