With last week’s snow just a memory, I thought I’d spend this weekend prepping my hiker & equestrian rest stop for the winter. I removed the water tank I used for automatically watering the future shade tree and put a new coat of shellac on the picnic table. I also re-painted the front of my library, which had a lot of peeling paint. I brought my banjo with me, so that I could do a bit of playing after the work was done and shot this photo.

While I was practicing, my neighbor Carl rode up on his horse and we chatted a bit, then he rode off on the trail.

I noticed that two books that were very special to me, Thoreau’s Walden and Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude had disappeared from the library. In their place was a guide to identifying trees in the Sierra Nevada.