Sedona, Arizona
I’ve cheered up and warmed up since my last post.  However, as you probably figured from the title of this post, life continues to—um—provide fine opportunities for growth, such as:

• the (mostly) nonexistent ice and snow that closed almost everything in New Orleans, but not K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen or Café Du Monde,
• the bad gas from Murphy USA in Del Rio, Texas, which sickened our F-150, but we received the reimbursement for the repairs right away,
• the day after Tom and I completed a hike in the Chisos Basin (The Window), I tripped on  nothing on a little hike and sprained my wrist*, but then when I was icing my hand on the lodge veranda, I saw a Colima warbler
  

  Early morning, Chisos Basin

• my map-reading skills are not tip-top, but we finally got to Mesa campground in the Gila National Forest before total dark.
  

  Mesa campground, Gila National Forest

  The lake was way down from (I assume) the drought and the campground exuded a down-at-the-heel gloom, but I am pretty sure that on my early morning trek to the bathroom, I smelled mountain lion.  I think the scat was fresh, too. (I didn’t photograph the evidence, but here’s some from another hike):

Scat, Saguaro National Park

Scat happens, but sometimes it turns out to be something you’ve been waiting for.

Or, as W. B. Yeats said in a slightly more high-tone way:

I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;…
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

From “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” by William Butler Yeats in The Winding Stair and Other Poems

*I found out yesterday that I sustained a comminuted distal radius fracture.  So much for the power of positive thinking, and, yes, I am typing this with my left hand.
Note: I have more in my mind than I can get on the computer today. Please expect Scat Part II shortly.