Spring seems to be winning the current struggle with the remnants of winter. The heaviest snowfall of the season is fast disappearing this weekend under a brilliant sun that rises ever higher in our sky thinned by the mile-high altitude.



This morning when I woke up, I flipped on the radio and on Weekend Edition they were discussing Matt Harding, and how his goofy dancing video postcards became one ot the biggest viral favorites on YouTube, with over 20 million viewings. A founder of YouTube calls it his favorite single posting.

When I first saw this a couple of years ago, in an earlier version, it brought a smile to my face, then a little tearing up at the end. This morning, after I got out of bed and put on the coffee, I woke up the computer and looked up the video on YouTube. So brilliant, and as the images flashed by toward the end, the tears welled up again in my eyes. I thought about the work at the call center, and the sameness of life here, and our deferred vision of looking for new experiences in other parts of the world, and people we would like to interact with. It made everything seem possible again, and filled my consciousness with happy optimism. They were tears of joy, not regret.



I wish every head of state could view and reflect on this four and a half minutes of basic goodness.

Hope you are enjoying your spring.

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Skyarrhea!

We really got dumped on today - I carpooled to work with Pat today in the Xterra so the odds of getting stuck in the snow would be less. Quite a few people left early after news arrived that schools and businesses were closing down mid-day. Pat had some kind of eye problem, I had a difficult day on calls, and later when we warmed up the car for the trip home, and Pat was scraping the ice and snow off the winshield, the wipers cycled and stripped one of the mounting posts when the blade remained frozen to the glass. When we arrived home we both worked at shoveling the heavy wet snow off the driveway, porch and sidewalk, then took the Mdog for a brief walk through the slush and white muck.

We joke occasionally that it's pretty after a snow - something you might admire on a postcard sent to you from some poor shivering schmuck a few thousand miles away.

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It was a pleasant spring weekend a few days ago, and we attended the men's pot luck that gets together every month or so. I think there were around sixty guys there, and this group contains many of our acquaintanes in town. It's one of things we appreciate about life here, and will miss if/when we move on.



Pat emptied out the year-old batch of finished compost for me to use in the vegetable beds and turned over the six month old half-cooked pile. Such is our exciting home life.



Tonight we went to the monthly Green Drinks gathering at a local bowling alley - they gave us free shoes, free lanes, free beer, and free snacks. It was a fun evening.

After a few weeks of no snow, we're supposed to be in for a an onslaught of what I have come to call 'skyarrhea'...perhaps a lot. We may have to share a ride to work in the 4WD to ensure a safe ride home.

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Hints of the promise of Spring are showing up all over now, but there are also reminders that the bleak days of winter are not out of the picture yet.



We've had a run of mid-teen mornings recently, but the afternoon dog walking weather has been pretty good. Looks like this weekend we will have some nice weather that coincides with our precious days off. Maybe time to get outside a bit. I might try to clean all the upholstery in the Vanagon, and we are taking a drive to the shop to touch base with the mechanic before we embark on the major overhaul items we are in the process of planning.

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Today I went to the local airport to check out a new flight training outfit I read about in a local paper. I had only been out to the airport twice since we moved here several years ago, and this is the first time I actually felt like I might troll around and seek an opportunity to climb into an airplane.

I told Pat before I left for the field that I might flounce around the area and see if I could entice someone to give me a ride. I was only joking, but in the finest 'Ramp Slut' tradition, a fellow I spoke to as we both watched the local weekend pilots come and go from the fuel office inveted me to come and see his airplane, and then expanded that to "Let's go fly around a little".



He had a wonderful state-of-the-art Cessna 206, which made me feel like I had been more kin to the Wright brothers than the current crop of pilots. As we taxied out I tried to grasp all the possibilities of the glass cockpit, which exceeded the capabilities of even some turbine twin engine corporate airplanes I flew in years past.



Amazing.. The flying was about the same as what I remember from similar size craft, but the atmosphere of the instruments and navigation was space shuttle class. I would really enjoy that kind of operation.


Arriving back at the Loveland-Fort Collins airport, lining up for runway 33.

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On the way home from work tonight listening to the radio in the car, I heard some interviews of corporate and insurance company people who were going to participate in the President's health care forum.

I already had established a real loathing for the private for-profit health insurance industry, which I understand consumes about a third of all the excessive costs of our disgraceful health care mess. I did a quick scan of health care insurance executive compensation at the AFL/CIO executive salary website, and it looks like most of them draw compensation of between five and twenty-five million dollars a year. Meanwhile, President Obama advises that every thirty seconds someone is bankrupted by exorbitant health care costs, and 45 million Americans are unable to afford any health insurance at all.

Proponents of single-payer universal health care were not even invited to the summit until the threat of noisy protests by their populist supporters outside the Whitehouse gates became known.



One interview I found to be especially chilling, and it brought to mind something I had never considered. A corporate executive was describing why he and his peers would oppose universal health care. I can't remember exactly how he framed this, but it was my impression that his real problem with it was that if everyone had access to affordable health care, how would his kind of company recruit and retain workers? Wasn't this something they could dangle in front of otherwise deserate and vulnerable people, and induce them to come and toil and stay for whatever wages were being offered? God forbid people should have other options.

Good luck, White House crew. You're going to need it.

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The weather recently has been unseasonably warm. But March is known on the front range of the Rockies here as the biggest snow month of the year. So we shall see.



We took the Mdog for a pleasant walk in a natural area in the city Sunday, which was interrupted by threats from a ranger of a $100 ticket if we ever again walked her off-leash ANYWHERE in the city. He was pleasant enough, but the stranglehold this city wants to put on everything is tiresome. For all its folksy earth-friendly artsy small-town charm, I frequently sense an undercurrent of opression and darkness here. Maybe it's just the world (well, the U.S. except for the San Francisco Bay Area) at large.

Work continues to grind along in a now-familiar routine. With the low pay and my general lack of interest in advancing to the next level of technical knowledge, it sure doesn't seem to have a future. I did see a listing for a potentially more rewarding job today that might pay three times the contract rate, but for the time being I'm planning to take a year off after finishing six months at the present location. A bit scary with the remnants of the economy scattered in a reeking wasteland from horizon to horizon.



A couple of weeks ago we went to a concert in a the refurbished old high school, which has been repurposed into a university arts center. The grand world-class organ was officially re-introduced in a program that we found surprisingly uninteresting.



Mona was here for a weekend Buddhist program, and tried to offer me some better perspective as I have been especially irritated and disgusted with the world in recent weeks. She may not have thought so, but it seems to have done some good. While she was staying here those few days, she happened to pick up two books I had been intending to read, and expressed an interest in borrowing them. Naturally, this motivated me to immediately begin reading (or re-reading) them myself. With her and me books can be like toys between kids...as soon as one shows an interest, the other suddenly focuses on the same.


Gratuitous Old Dog Photos

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