It's a beautiful day...

Here's the same view I tried to capture at night yesterday... it's a little easier to see now. This is the city of Provo, in Utah Valley. The lake off in the distance is Utah Lake, and part of the Wasatch Range (including West Mountain) is beyond it.

This is my mom's back yard. Her house is on the lower foothills of Y Mountain, which (appropriately enough) has a large white Y painted on it. You can't see it from here; it's hidden behind the stand of trees in the center of the photo.

All that bright green stuff is spurge, a noxious weed. One of Mom's neighbors planted it as a ground cover many years ago, and it got loose and spread up the mountain. It's hard to get rid of, at least in part because it causes contact rashes like poison ivy. If you burn it, the smoke will cause similar irritation. No animals will eat it. Thanks, neighbors!

Not shown: multitudes of magpies, quail, finches, the occasional wild turkey, raccoons, opossums, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, ground squirrels, mule deer and other varied fauna. Mom's backyard is a real-life Wild Kingdom.

A bit of Utah sunset.

The two stacks are part of the Provo Power Company. All through my teen years I looked out the basement window in the evenings and saw the glowing red light of the right-hand stack.