Highlights

ranch

launch

cattle

I was out walking with a friend yesterday on her ranch in the nearby Purisma Hills, accompanied by two sweet, enthusiastic dogs, one of them a hyper-energetic border collie who put in at least three miles of romping to each one we traversed.  It was a good walk through pretty country, with some fence climbing thrown in to make me feel like a ten-year-old.

My friend raises horses, mostly European warmbloods, and they are beautiful indeed. We looked out at corrals and hay fields, oaks adorned with Spanish moss and crowned with noisy blackbirds, a storybook vista of green hills for miles, with the Santa Ynez Mountains just a blue outline in the distance.

My friend pointed to a steep hill we were about to ascend and told me that the highlight of her life recently had been watching her granddaughter climb that hill for the very first time, and with exuberance.

Unbeknownst to us, a launch from Vandenberg had been scheduled: a rocket bearing a Landsat data spacecraft for observing earth's glaciers, shorelines, and forests.  I  happened to look up in time to see a red glow receding into the distant sky and the rocket trail, feathery white and jagged.  There followed a long period of sound and vibration. It was strange and wondrous.