shirley - behind the lens: 12 on August 12

This month's 12 on 12 is coming to you from Colorado. Not quite the depiction of a "normal" day in our lives, but certainly a fun one.

As usual, I woke early today, and headed out to the woods to find something beautiful to capture in the golden morning light. Of course, this was an easy-easy task. I took pictures of stately Aspen trees, wandering fence lines before coming upon a group of deer, one that was particularly curious of me and my camera:

I ran into Chantal (Ged's wife) and she reminded me that the horses would be coming down from the meadow soon. The horses spend the night in the vast meadow and are brought down to the stables each morning by the wranglers. The group galloping out of the woods is quite a sight:

And into the stable area:

After breakfast, Erica and Scott mounted up for another trail ride - Scott is on Diamond this morning:

Erica is on Lightning:

While Erica and Scott are out riding, Brian and I went out and caught grasshoppers to be used as fishing bait. Neither of us had the guts to put the bugs on the hook, so we kept them in a baggie for Scott to deal with later (yuck!). Brian also played a game of Scrabble Slam with Marta:

The cute prairie dogs were peaking out of their holes to catch some warmth from today's copious sun:

After lunch, Scott tried fishing with those grasshoppers as bait.

Alas, still no bites.

What to do on a "hot" afternoon (it's almost 90, but really only feels like 75 because of the low humidity)? Play around in Duling Stream:

Erica and Olivia:

Most of the kids strike a silly pose!

And after dinner, the kids divided into teams for a scavenger hunt. The girls from Boston / the Netherlands - Julia, Doris and Eva - won, but everyone had a fun time gathering items like "Horse toe nails", "horse hair" and "dung" -

Fun stuff!

Note - I took way more than 12 pictures today. To view the rest of my pictures from today, check out my August 12 Flickr set.