The combination of angry autumn sky and forbidding peaks reminds me of "Lord of Rings." If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you can even see what appears to be a castle turret rising on the far left side of this range, which is between Arvada and Boulder.

He fathered five children, but my paternal grandfather never knew what to say to his twelve grandchildren. How he managed the small talk required by his career, first as a journalist and later as the alumni relations director at a Jesuit university, continues to baffle me.

Nearly 40 years after his death, my verbal memory of Grandpa Pfau comes down to two sentences, repeated throughout my childhood: "You know what our last name means in German? It means peacock!"

Which of course ensured that I would always think of him while visiting a zoo . . .

Through the bushes, we glimpsed a tall bird sprinting back and forth in a large enclosure at the Denver Zoo. From a distance, it appeared to be a stork wearing black cut-offs. Up close, it looked like an exotic amalgamation of many birds, with its eagle's beak, peacock's goofy head plumage, and stork's long, jointed legs. Although its otherworldly appearance recalled Fawkes, Dumbledore's phoenix, its name was oddly prosaic: a Secretary Bird. A native of Africa, it is a raptor, but, unlike eagles and hawks, it pursues its prey mostly on foot. Hence the long legs.

The Denver Zoo owns two of these curious creatures. The runner seems to have been the male of the pair, trying to impress his mate. She turned her back on him and folded herself to the ground in a neat, Origami-like series of steps that totally concealed those unlikely legs and made her look, from certain angles, like a seagull wearing one of those feathery hats currently favored by the British aristocracy.

Gail Collins has replaced Maureen Dowd as my favorite humorous/satiric columnist on the New York Times Op-Ed page. In her picture, Gail looks like someone I could go out to lunch with. At the end of the meal, we'd both order dessert without ever uttering the words, "I feel guilty, but . . ." Maureen Dowd, on the other hand, looks like she would eat me for lunch and then regurgitate a neat little pellet with my non-digestible remains.

Gail's post-election column was classic Collins. Our daughter attends school in and voted (for Obama, duh) in North Carolina, so I e-mailed her this paragraph from the column:

By the way, I believe that during the campaign McCain’s great friend Senator Lindsey Graham said something along the line of promising to drown himself if North Carolina went for Obama. I believe I speak for us all, Senator Graham, when I say that we are feeling extremely mellow today and you do not have to follow through.

Read Gail's entire column at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/opinion/06collins.html?ref=opinion

I was too superstitious to include this quote in Monday's blog.

What Obama said about the race during his conference call to the campaign field offices late Saturday night: "We've got John McCain on his own five-yard line."

Unlike our beloved Michigan Wolverines this football season, Obama's team pulled off the win.