Yesterday after work we went to the monthly Green Drinks eco-schmooze-fest. It was at the Eco-Thrift recycle/thrift place in Old Town, where a local craft brewery had provided the customary three half-kegs of their beers, and a barbeque had been set up in the loading dock area.

Pat and I were able to have a chat with the local green-focused realtor who is the instigator of Green Drinks events here, and who we have indentified as a potential agent to list the house with here when it is time to sell and move on (to wherever and whatever). She'll probably be here in the next week or so to have a look at the place and chat with us about various marketing issues - what needs to be done and when the optimum time to sell might be. I'm also interested in hearing her views on the general local market conditions. So far Fort Collins hasn't faced the devastation that has gutted housing markets in other regions as the country spirals into a vortex of insolvency and reduced standards of living. I don't expect this exemption to persist however, as evidenced by our being forced to accept a pay reduction on our contracts at the Big IT Company. More on that later.


Pat ponders the Septacycle that seven beer-fueled Green Drinkers later pedaled off for a tour of Old Town.

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Just like Hayward!

I remember when I used to walk the dog around the block in California, finding all sorts of low-life debris like the little scene above. An empty Kools pack and a few condoms, found right around the corner here in wholesome Fort Collins! Of course, in Hayward I would find used condoms in the gutter - artifacts of the hooker business that made of our neighborhood kind of a leafy outdoor bordello in the evening hours. I remember once finding a single red patent-leather stiletto heel lying forlornly by the side of the street. I immediately imagined a girl working in the back seat of some car, feet protruding toes-up from an open window, when perhaps a Sheriff's cruiser may have rounded the corner, spotlight flashing around from side to side. In her haste to rearrange herself and her customer, and perhaps in a pharmaceutical haze, the shoe was left for me to find.



Every year we've been here, the squirrels are something of a plague - they chew many of the new shoots off the big oak tree in the spring as it tries to leaf out, dig up my garden and planters, and sometimes gnaw through the stems of shrubs. I'd hear them jumping on and running around the roof, and chattering at each other over territory (or something). But this spring, I noticed a lot fewer of them. Pat explained it after chatting with the lady next door, when she confided that she has been trapping them (in a humane live trap) and relocating them to a riverbank and woods North of town. Thirty or more so far.

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I need to get on the ball about posting new entries. Things are going to be happening a bit faster soon, as we figure out how to wind down our presence in Colorado, and do more exploring of other places. For the next week, I am going to try posting every day. I'll try to make it worthwhile - for me to find any satisfaction in posting, it has to at least express some original thought and be decently presented. We'll see...

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Over the weekend there was a charity document shredding drop-off event that provided an incentive to do some cleaning out of paperwork that's been piling up around the house. I dragged the big crate of documents accumulated settling my dad's affairs out of the basement onto the front deck, and started going through it for things I felt safe disposing of now, a couple of years later. It was a painful reminder of that experience, and also a meditation on impermanence once again.

After that we went and picked up the Vanagon, which was even more stressful than I had anticipated. Writing a big check to settle a maintenance/refurbishing bill that represented nine weeks of stupifying cubicle busywork was tough, but having doubts about the results made me wish once again that I had never considered starting the project in the first place.

The following morning I headed for the gym early. It was one of those days when they were blasting 80's screechy rock at high volume, and my little ear buds dispensing NPR couldn't blot it out. This gym has seventeen large screen plasma displays (and dozens of smaller screens on the cardio machines), which are usually displaying an array of disturbing stuff that is worse in the aggregate than the indivual programming. Smarmy infomercials, various pro sports, Nascar, freakish reality shows, crime dramas...there is a scene in Man Who Fell to Earth (check last couple of minutes) that gets sort of close to the effect. I don't understand why the gyms assume that everyone who wants to improve their fitness is interested in sports. My interest in team and indivdual athletic activity is way less than zero, and I find the sight and sound of televised sports coverage extremely irritating. There was one screen with a political talk show, but I guess this was a little too cerebral, so a gym staffer walked over with his remote and changed it to one of those 'sportsmen' shows where people torment and kill things for entertainment.

It's time for me to find a more modest gym that works simply for maintaining fitness, without the cultural effluent.



On the way home from the gym I stopped by the nursery, and bought enough vegetable and ornamental starts to populate most of the remaining planter and garden bed spots I have prepped. Got about half of it planted during the balance of the afternoon, and still have more to do the rest of the week after work.

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There was a lot going on this weekend - and not all of it was as planned.

We have been in touch with a doctor from New York who is trying to get a co-housing venture going in Mexico - either in Jalisco or Oaxaca. He flew down to Mexico City a little over a week ago and then rode a bus for nine hours from D.F. to Oaxaca. He was supposed to stop by Denver and Fort Collins on his way home, but with H1N1 on the verge of a global pandemic (and a few other equally good reasons) he decided to spend a few more enjoyable days at Lake Chapala in Jalisco, then return directly to upstate New York.



We went to First Friday and did an abbreviated gallery circuit, of course spending some time at the fun Gallery Underground.



Saturday morning we went by the shop North of town and visited El Chile, who now has most of his innards rearranged or replaced as planned. Just one more hose needs to arrive to button up the beast, and we can try a few road trips to see how things are holding together. Hard to believe it took nine weeks at the call center to finance all this stuff (most of which is reliability-focused and not visible), but if it reduces the odds that we will be left by the side of the road in some godforsaken place in 110 degree heat or a tropical thunderstorm I guess it will have been worth it.



This morning dawned following a fairly steady rain all night, and the first thing Mdog and I encountered on our morning walk was a few earthworms navigating along the gutter. They always seem to run amok after a decent rain, and get disoriented. Fearing they would get stranded on the broad expanse of pavement in the rising sun, I gathered them up and tossed them back onto a nearby lawn. This seemed like a good deed with which to start the day. Then a few more, then - oh god, the wormanity - there hundreds, then thousands of the navigationally challenged Lumbricus Terrestri. I finally had to confine my benevolence to avoiding stepping on their slimy carcasses.



Later in the morning, we went to one of the men's group coffees at a funky campus cafe. Pay attention when you read that college towns are great for retirement - or just intergenerational living.



Finally, we headed up to the civic center park for the local modest Cinco de Mayo festivities, where I bought a big bag of freshly roasted Anaheim chiles from a cheery guy from Chihuaua for five bucks.

The weekend started off on a worrisom note with Mdog being a little sick for a couple of days, but I spent the morning cooking rice and chicken and sweet potatoes to give her a dietary break, and she seems to be doing better now.

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Today was my dad's birthday. He would have been 79 years old today. I thought of him yesterday, and thought to myself that I would have to remember him today, and maybe give him a little public recognition.

But I forgot about this for most of the day, until tonight I was catching up on an aviation blog I look in on now and then. My father flew from the time he was about 16 years old until he retired from American Airlines after 33 years, 33 days in service, during the 'golden age' of civil air transport. I remember this because I was a passenger on his final flight as a crew member, returning from Hawaii to California. The flight attendants had a contest among the passengers to guess his time with the airline, and they served a cake they brought aboard.

After my father died just before Christmas in 2005, I took care of his afairs as best I could, with the assistance and support of my two sisters. One the the things that needed to be dealt with was the disposition of all his accumulated belongings. I tried very hard not to keep anything for myself, allowing only a few momentos into the box where those things accumulated over the several weeks we spent in the emptying house. I think now that maybe I should have kept a few more items, and feel bad for the way I dispassionately discarded so many things that must have meant something to him.

Earlier this evening, I was out at a cafe with some friends, and for no particular reason, I had a profound flash of realization even as those around me laughed and chatted that there was an end to life - something we all believe we know intellectually, but rarely acknowledge in a personal or complete sense. We fret about the past and anticipate the future balancing hope and regret, seeking reward and avoiding punishment. As though we could occupy ourselves with such frivolous (but seemingly important) nonsense for an eternity, always seeking to get it just right.

Maybe those few moments of clarity were the first remembering today of Dad's birthday. His passing is a sad reminder of how little opportunity we have to find contentment, which escaped him so much of the time. This short remembrance today is my birthday gift to him. I wish he was here to enjoy a goofy card and a phone call. When I had to clean out his desk, I found numerous cards and notes I had sent him over the years. It was a gift to me knowing that he cared enough to save them when the wastebasket was so close at hand.



Feliz cumleaños, papacito.

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Went to two more graduate recitals today, both percussion. Yesterday I also attended two, one harp, one guitar.



This is a great opportunity as graduation approaches each year. The undergraduate and grad students must put together a recital as part of their music studies program. The events draw surpirsingly small audiences, with the recital hall being perhaps five percent full. All performances are open to the public and free. Most of the people attending appear to be students fulfilling educational requirements or family members (some from far away). Forgive me for saying so, but I fear the greater American public prefers to sit on the their sofa eating Cheez Doodles and watching Nascar...



After several performances, I have been facinated by the pieces that were chosen for the recital, and found that even the most obscure or avant-garde is likely to be on YouTube. An amazing musical education repository. For example, the piece piece the guys are playing above is called Rain Tree, by Japanes film score composer Toru Takemitsu. Here it is, performed by an ensemble at the University of Alaska...

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It seems Spring has firmly arrived now. I planted four containers of pansies and alyssum for the front deck today, and Pat mowed the grass in the front and back for the first time since last November. There is a forecast for foul weather (lluvia si, pero nieve no, gracias a Dios...), y por eso it seemed that everyone within earshot had their noisy fume-belching mowers out for their seaonal debut as well, and several neighbors followed that act up with a rototiller session in their backyard veggie plots. We have the virtuous reel-type push mower - ain't we green?

I will need to haul out the box of seeds from last year and hit the nursery soon for my own planting - probably will have carrots, lettuce, chard, beets, and beans in the ground by the end of the day next Sunday. The first round of peas went in a week ago...

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