I never did finish jennygel's personality questionnaire, so on with the questions:

Number 6: Favorite smells?

- wife (and no, we won't go into any more detail than that)

- sagebrush

- pronghorn: as much as others call them "stinky goats", I love their pungent, musky sage smell. Especially when you're in a crowded corral with over 30 of them, or have your face shoved in one's neck.

- wet granite

- the smell of elk drifting up through a pine and spruce filled canyon

- ponderosa pine: I love the smell of the pollen, especially when you walk through the trees and clouds of yellow dust shake off the branches. I also love the scent of their bark. Most are vanilla (yes, really! vanilla!), but I've scratched and sniffed some that were chocolate, and a few that are strawberry. A true neopolitan species. By the way, I don't know if I've annoyed anybody with my occasional sprinklings of scientific names (except John, who sometimes does the same thing), but here's a fun and easy one. Ponderosa pine is Pinus ponderosa. And you thought Latin would be tough.

- bacon in the morning, preferably shortly after sunrise, somewhere in the woods.

- heeler feet: All of our heelers have had the same aroma to their feet. I won't tell you what it smells like (it's a food), since that is a secret that the wife and I share. But we have checked a few other dogs of different breeds, and they don't smell the same. And it's not just because they live in our house. We've checked a few other heelers (you want to get a concerned look from a dog, try smelling their feet), and theirs smelled the same.

- hoya: actually a too-sweet smell when they're blooming, but my Mom has one over her kitchen sink. Hoyas smell of doing dishes and talking with my Mom.

- fermented, rotten apples, with a little alfalfa hay: best bait in the world for bighorn sheep. They will run to it like alcoholics. When wrestling them down, you invariably get apple pulp all over yourself and take the smells home with you.