It's Not About Me

Awkward

So, I'm out shopping for a birthday present for my wife and I score a nice outfit at a Coldwater Creek located in a slightly upscale, outdoor mall in our fair village. As I make it a short distance down the sidewalk after my purchase I happen to run into the wife of one of our church's pastors who is also a good friend of my wife. In the joy of my new purchase I shout out, "Hey E..., let me show you what I got Jo for her birthday! The shop's right here." She scrunches her face a bit and says, "Are you sure this isn't going to be a bit awkward?" I'm not getting her distress until I look to my left and find that the store I'm now in front of is Victoria's Secret.

Guess I'm Thumbbody

My brother lives in Fraser, Colorado, a hollow sitting under the Continental Divide, as the jet flies, just three minutes west of Boulder. Bitter cold air drops down off the heights and earns his burg bragging rights as “The Icebox of the Nation”.  On my first visit to town in ’84 he was living in a pink, single-wide that had about three inches of ice on the inside of the window.  I can’t remember how I got there, but I do remember 3am outside a closed gas station, waiting for a Steamboat-bound Greyhound. The temp was an arm-flapping 35 below.

You can imagine the people who reside here are no pansies. This is especially true of my bro and his friends who make their living outside, pouring concrete, setting trusses, clearing snow and fighting fires. (They cross-country ski most every evening to unwind.) Now compare their considerable talents to yours truly – inside, warm, with my greatest muscular effort being to hold up an eyelid while I fish out a mote. I’m not a citified dandy, but neither am I offended that I’m not in their fraternity.  I did get a chuckle though when last year one of the fellows looked down at the duct-taped thumb of my ski glove, smiled and muttered, “Hey, you’re OK.”

Rocky Mountain High

Winter Park is Colorado's oldest ski resort, opening in the winter of '39/40. Initially it wasaccesible only by train from Denver. (Now those must have been some good times!) Now there is a highway that traverses the 11K+ feet Berthoud Pass and the ski area has expanded to include Mary Jane, a "sister" resort. While Winter Park is friendly towards beginner and intermediate skiers, Mary Jane is known for her steeps and bumps. In fact the local's description of MJ has morphed to the registered trademark of, "No Pain, No Jane".

Well, I've always liked this adage and decided to put a sticker to that effect on the back window of my car, just opposite a Copper Mountain badge. It sat their innocently for a couple years, me never thinking of "Mary Jane's" alternative meaning, until this past summer a fellow approached me in a parking lot and asked, "Hey man, where can I get one of those medical marijuana stickers?

Ski Story #19

So, last week I caught up with old med school buddies in Park City, Utah. Initial skiing was mediocre, but the reunion delightful. Day 2 we headed up Little Cottonwood Canyon, home to bodacious amounts of snow, to see if the higher altitude at Alta held better conditions. I had never skied Alta and was struck by the utter glory of its big-wall, craggy, Euro look - and the cold. It was 14 degrees cold and that was in the parking lot.

Maybe it was the OJ and breakfast chai. Maybe it was as my anesthesiologist friend explained, high-altitude/cold diuresis. All I know was that despite going immediately before I caught the first chair, I had to go again by the time we got to the top. After a brief look around I made quick time down to the mid-mountain lodge. Now, most modern ski facilities have a broad shelf above the urinals to place your helmet and mitts, but not so in this circa-60’s building. I was in a wee rush, so I stuffed my gloves into my helmet and hurriedly placed it upside down on the sink counter.  After the task was accomplished I turned around to see that my helmet had rolled into the sink and triggered the only modern device in the lodge, a motion-activated faucet, which was now dumping copious amounts of water into my helmet, soaking my gloves.

If I was younger I would have been furious, but in my mid-50’s the first thought was “Good story, but expensive.”  It ended up not costing a dime however. My helmet dried out quickly under the hand dryer’s torrid blast and a sweet thing at the ski shop counter found a pair of loaners for my hands in the lost-and-found. She told me that I could put my gloves on the heater and that no one would steal them. “We’re pretty trusting around here.” Thanks Utah!

Rocky Mountain Slide

What an incredible time in human history to be alive! First, I get to sit in a chair and zoom 100 miles away to the land of snow. On the journey I can pick from 10,000 songs hiding in a slab the size of a box of candy. Then, I sit in another chair that whisks me to the top of a mountain so that I can fly down over and over. Next, I get to show it to my friends all over the world - that evening! If that weren't enough, I have ibuprofen for the day after. Eat your heart out Andrew Carnegie, Ghengis Khan, Cleopatra, Louis XIV and all y'all, rich, famous and dead.

Actually...

When we lived in NE Oregon I would occasionally take my 4-year old daughter to do weekend rounds with me at the hospital. Some of the older folks would enjoy seeing her young face, some not. If I was seeing a patient who would be less than happy with a busy girl in their room, I would park her at the nurses' station with a coloring book. One morning she sat there and was scribbling away, chattering at the poor night nurse who was trying to finish her charting and go home to bed. The chattering didn't stop when I came back to work on my chart so I listened in with one ear while I wrote. Both of us just had to stop and belly laugh after Lauren had paused in her harangue, looked over at the tired woman and matter-of-factly whispered, "Actually, I'm not a nurse."

2011 Foto Favs

Clay Pigeons, Wallowa County, Oregon

 

Old City Wall, Tallinn, Estonia

 

Storebælt Bridge, Denmark

 

Aft Deck, Eurodam

 

Interstate 84, Idaho

 

After Rockwell

2011 Foto Favs

Wallowa County Panorama

 

 

Kalmar Castle, Sweden

 

Mangia!

 

Hallway, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

 

Gas Pump, Green River, Wyoming

Best o' Twenty-Eleven

Ah, the "best of lists", for a blogger it's like popping ducks on a pond...  As usual, some of this stuff has been around for years, but it's new to me!

BEST NEW MUSIC:

Our new house band - Elephant Revival. Have been enjoying this Nederland, Colorado based group most of the year. Their genre? Try on "psychedelic country" or "transcendental folk" for a starter. I'm thinking maybe "grassgrass". We enjoyed them live just last night along with lots of old and young space-dancing hippies as we groooved to a 3-hour, end-of-the-year concert. You can get a little flavor on this YouTube, "Remembering A Beginning".

 

 

Continuing the alt/grass theme, I've also fallen for the Swedish group, Väsen. Got to see them this past spring touring with Mike Marshall & Darol Anger. This band features national champion fiddle and guitar players plus Olov Johansson on the nyckelharpa which looks like a cross between a fiddle, lap dulcimer and accordion. You'll pick up a decidedly Swedish flavor on this piece, Eklunda Polska #3.

  

 

FAVORITE QUOTES:

"History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes."   - Mark Tain

"Everywhere the human race goes, it drags a bell curve around with it."   - Doug Wilson

"Ignore the environment. It will go away."   - bumpersticker

"If God does nothing random, there must always be something to learn."   - John Calvin

"They lived outside. They lived with horses and cattle and dust and snow and moved all around a country they somehow could not learn to love because another geography was already inside them."  - Mark Jenkins, "Off The Map"

"If you're tired of parties, you go to the wrong church."   - Matt Barley

"When suffering restores us, burns away the empty shallowness,
And softening the heart, to be broken break and poured out wine...
When it rains it pours, turns life into a chalice,
There to nourish every soul, one at a time."

                                           - Phil Keaggy,  "Chalice" 

 

FAVORITE READS:

 

Patrick O'Brian continues to weave a spectacular tale. How can one man know so much sea faring history? How can one man write so many incredible sentences?

 

 

 

An absorbing adventure of a trek across Siberia by bicycle. I learned a new Russian word: "balota" болото (for "swamp"). I also got a peek inside of late 20th century Russia. Not many smiles there.

 

 

 

 

What a perfect storm of men and women that came together in late 18th-century America. Oh that a few stray bands of such weather would blow over us today.

 

 

 

 

RC Sproul walks you through the book of "Romans". A book that has literally changed the world (and more than once).

 

 

 

 

 

SCREEN FAVORITES: I did find Sherlock and Capt. Jack Sparrow to be entertaining. ("You walk like a girl." "You should know!") But really not much to be excited about on the big screen. There were however some jewels you can find in DVD sets such as "John Adams" for starters. Even better is the HBO adaptation of "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" and the BBC's "Foyle's War". 

                                     

Merry Christmas (Eve)! 2011

"With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud.  A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death."  - Romans 8 (The Message)