First official day of annual leave. So I did my best to do nothing today. Succeeded pretty well.

Other than repetitive Afghanistan news, there is nothing on daytime tv.

The helicopter crew has not called, as they promised they would last Friday. So I don't know if they are in town, or not. Didn't matter today. Lovely day, with clear skies, but...

Strong winds. Averages around 22 mph, with gusts to 35 mph. Pilots talk about winds in knots, like sailors, and I don't know how to convert. But they consider 20 knots marginal, and 30 knots way too high for our type of flying, and I know the knots are always higher than the mph.

So we couldn't have flown anyway.

Still, the winds were SSW, and chinook. So they warmed our country. Melted some more snow, and dried a lot of things out.

Like the dog scat in the yard.

Hasn't been picked up since the masked heeler came home at Hallowe'en. That's three heelers, averaging two piles per heeler per day for 47 days. Although the masked heeler went quite a spell with no piles, or one pile, a day.

So, estimate 250-260 piles of scat.

Now, bear in mind, this is in the front yard, not the back. There is no doorway opening directly to the fenced backyard, so all the heeler business occurs in the front yard, including the curbing.

Where all the town can see it when the snow melts. Like it has done in the past three days of wind.

So, I picked up the yard. All except the piles half frozen in ice or hard snow banks.

Two-hundred and thirty-five piles. That's a lot of shit. (Yes, I counted. Have always counted. Don't know why. Perhaps it is a habit left over from running deer pellet-group plots on plutonium contaminated ground in Colorado (near you.))

Knees ached for some time afterwards. That's a first.

And the masked heeler enjoyed her more-than-an-hour break outside.