Cafe Pasqual’s here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was where we were supposed to have dinner last night, but the weather had other plans for us, so it goes. With so much ice and cold in town and not wanting to encounter more snow before the day is out, we’ll be leaving far earlier than planned. As for Pasqual’s, breakfast can be breakfast, but it’s their exquisite New Mexican cuisine at dinner that draws us in, maybe another time.

Snow mushrooms dot the highway as we make our way south.

I wonder if people who experience this snow thing every season are as enchanted by it as Caroline and I are. I can admit that New Mexico is right on with its state motto, The Land of Enchantment.

Approaching Albuquerque, we entered a heavy patch of fog, but as we emerged, we were greeted by this spectacular 22-degree sun halo. Not wanting to stop on the freeway to take a proper picture, Caroline grabbed the wheel, and I threw the camera out of the window into the freezing air to snap a couple of shots. This is the one that turned out okay.

With the sun being blotted out you can bet my nerves grew brittle at the thought I might have to drive while it’s snowing. In Phoenix, most of us do poorly when it starts raining.

I’ve probably said it a thousand times before, but one can never grow tired of El Camino Family Restaurant. Normally, there are colorful spheres on the center spire in the top middle of the sign; I wonder why they are gone.

Good fortune remains on our side as the weather cooperates for this earlier-than-expected visit to the refuge; we weren’t supposed to arrive until tomorrow morning.

That’s a Northern Shoveler duck. This aquatic cutey with the spoon-shaped bill has a great scientific name, the Spatula clypeata.

If we were real birders, we might be able to tell you what kind of sparrow this was, but I can’t find precisely what type it is, so it’s just a sparrow for now.

The Northern Pintail duck just doesn’t give a …

This nearly lone leaf, still clinging to its branch, shivers in the cold air here at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, where we are spending the last day of the year and the first day of the New Year.

The idea of drinking ourselves into a stupor, ending a year in a haze, and beginning the next feeling as though the past year smacked you upside the head is peculiar to me, to say the least. My New Year resolutions are simple: every day is a holiday, see something beautiful at least once a day (besides my wife), and help as many people as I can in whatever little way that might make their day, an hour, or minute just a bit better.

We must be doing something right by the universe as we are yet to have a bird poop on us. Karma.

Here we are on the last day of the year, ending on a beautiful note with the hope that tomorrow begins in beauty, too.

Tomorrow morning, we’ll be standing right about here for some aviary fireworks.

We could have eaten elsewhere, especially considering we’d eaten lunch here earlier, but I’m not fooling anyone. If we’re in Socorro, we’re eating at El Camino Family Restaurant. Of course, I had the steak Tampico and Caroline the chile relleno plate. I have no recollection of what Jutta had as once at El Camino; I’m blind to the world. This is how we closed out 2006.