As the end of 2017 fast approaches, it’s a natural time to look back, but it’s also a time to look ahead. Optimists are inclined always to look ahead. Pessimists are just the opposite. History is replete with wars and natural disasters and wrong turns.
Optimists tend to dislike and dismiss pessimists as dour and depressing. Expect the worst and it will happen. See the best in people and good things will happen.

"Sooner or later you come back for that which (is) stored away, and sometimes it isn't there."  

~ Off Ramp, Hank Stuever...Adventures and heartache in the American elsewhere.

What a city!
Last week I had a late night and lost a piece of clothing in the process.
Oh, you're thinking sure, Alan, you're going to tell us you were at the Coachlight Tavern and things got out of hand, right?
Not exactly.
I went to the Ice Park Committee meeting.
And it was quite the blur, so much so that the next day I looked all around for the new black fleece pullover my mother-in-law bought me and couldn't find it anywhere.

It has been four months since I bought MY new colt and the call finally came to go and pick him up. Receiving that call brought a level of excitement that I hadn't felt in quite some time. I was giddy like a little girl anticipating the arrival of a new toy.
We had few days to prepare, two to be exact, and it was too long to wait. I ran to the tack shop and bought a new weanling halter and lead rope. I felt like a new mom buying the "come home" outfit for a newborn.

Feeling any safer in the neighborhood this week? You may not, but there's a good chance your neighbor might be. That's because the Thanksgiving shopping weekend got off to a bang.
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation reports that Black Friday firearm background checks set a record in the state. The CBI InstaCheck team conducted 4,779 background checks for firearms transfers on Friday.
It took 41 employees working a minimum of 10-hour shifts to conduct all the checks.
Talk about rapid fire. That's about one background check every six minutes per employee.

“It’s something we all say does not happen in small communities, although we found out today it does.”
Joe Tackitt, Wilson County Sheriff, Sutherland Springs, Texas, Sunday, Nov. 4, 2017

We eased on down Utah’s “Blue Highways,” drifting like sand in the wind, eddying up here and there without plan nor purpose, living the “good life” like a couple of peripatetic hobos with stolen credit cards.

So, who do you believe?
Chuck Smith, writing for Coloradopolitics.com in July, cited a few studies stating that not only have traffic accidents in Colorado not increased since recreational marijuana has been legalized in the state, they actually have decreased. He went on to say that there was an immediate decline in car deaths following legalization.

If you've missed any of our reporting over the last year or so as it relates specifically to recent sexual assault cases in Ouray County, no worries. A local neighboring publication, printed weekly and tossed hither and thither, took the liberty of lifting our work and ever so gently massaging it into their own last week.
But Alan, you say, you reprint snippets from the Gunnison, Lake City, Silverton and Montrose papers. And you've been known to reprint entire stories from a few of these publications.

Ecocide: “the extensive damage to…ecosystem(s) of a given territory…to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished.”
  ~Wikipedia