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I woke up this morning to read in the paper that there was a shooting at my brother’s work. I immediately called him, since the vague article suggested there was an employee fatality. He answered, pretty shook up. They sent all the employees home after the shooting at 7:30am. While he wasn’t in the building at the time, he was walking up to it, and heard the gunshots and watched people burst out of the building in panic. He’s OK, but one of his bosses died. The shooter, also an employee, was killed in a firefight with a police officer down the road. There’s a lot of messed up details and he’s pretty upset that someone could go off the rails like that on a pretty good boss. It sounds like there were a lot of witnesses. I hope counseling is provided for all employees who need it. It’s a small community, and it is likely that both people were well known by most of the town.  I hope they support each other with dealing with this unexpected violence.

My gift to you for the holidays is to introduce you to the next hip band: The Igloos. The Igloos, who usually reside north of the Arctic Circle, come down to our less snowy mountains fairly often to play music of their life among the walrii, polar bears, and ice. I highly recommend you check them out. This picture does not do them justice – but with songs like, “The Lemmings, They Cannot Control Themselves” how can you go wrong? They were on KRFC’s live music program today, Live @ Lunch – and harassed the host quite a bit. Can’t say I blame them. He seemed to not understand many things about the land of the Eskimos.

See that? That is the new Big Project. Despite whatever we did or did not learn from running a fire performance LLC, we decided to take on the larger project of organizing a group of people who want “project space”, and making that space possible. What you see to the left is the original bare bones set-up. While it looks a lot more like a workshop this week, it still has a long way to go: we have to balance our budget, we have to get rid of five pallets of cardboard, five exterior doors (old tenants love to leave behind junk), build a loft, and solve issues about what is expected of everyone so there is a strong culture of respect. Luckily, so far we have a truly excellent group of people. I was starting to give up on this city having people who are this high quality, but I’m glad to be proven wrong. Now if only we could find a taker for all those doors…in the meantime, I’ll try to post updates as the space comes together. The Big Project will hopefully allow me to brew root beer for incorporation into the multi-tap kegerator, do tie-dye without risking other people’s floors, and Sam and me to build our other Big Project: a paper incinerator that is also an art piece that is also easy to use and transport, that also meets particulate matter standards, etc. Hmm.

We’ve gotten very little snow here so far this season. Which is a shame, because the most notable thing about the weather has been the howling, gusty winds. Snow is much better than wind – and certainly better for tourist dollars, which the state could definitely use.

So, besides the friends and family and good health that I am naturally thankful for, I ask myself, what ELSE am I thankful for? Seriously? Canadians. For several years now, I have had very positive experiences with Canadians – as friends, neighbors, and generally helpful people. Having camped near some Canadians, they have provided high quality booze, henna tattooing, instructions (to campmates, not me) on Vodka Snorting, stories of long tractor-trailer travels through the Northern Lands, gracious offers of glass recycling, Newfie jokes, and friendship. I’m always glad to see my Canadian friends, and am continuously impressed by their generosity. This is the background that leads into a story from this summer, when I was traveling about the western U.S.

Sam, a friend and I were walking through a casino in Nevada after a week of desert camping when we heard behind us someone muttering (in a Canadian accent) something to the extent about how dirty and desert-weary we appeared. This is not really true, since we had showered, rested, and ate regular food at this point, but sometimes people can still spot things like that. We whirled around to face the accuser, to find a pleasant looking fellow and his friend smiling broadly.

“HEY!” The friendly guy said. “Want some Canadian socks?”

DO I!!!  Sam and our friend pointed at me, and the guy thrust a pair of socks in my hands and walked away. Both teased me about how impressed I am with Canadians, but upon further inspection, these are some of the highest quality socks I’ve ever owned. Sam may argue the point, as he salivates over Smartwool socks, but as a person with simple needs, these socks are excellent. Besides the attractive Canadian Maple Leaf at the top, they are made of a high quality cotton, double-stitched at the toe, and with extra padding along the sole. What a great idea! They have already proved themselves as excellent for staying comfortable through lots of walking and standing, especially in cold weather (you can see they’ve been used quite a bit the last couple months). So, that’s what I’m thankful for. Kind Canadians handing me socks in casinos.

If there was one major difference in voting here than in St. Louis, it was the lack of crazy long lines. This is most certainly due to Colorado’s policy of providing multiple sites and multiple days for early voting. Missouri, however, continues to only allow mail-in and regular poll voting. When we voted in Missouri in the last presidential election, Sam and I waited well over an hour to cast our votes. There wasn’t any particular problem with the machines, ballots or poll workers, but the sheer number of voters crammed into one location for one day made it long and annoying.

In Colorado, there’s a two week period where you can vote prior to the election. There tend to be 4-10 voting sites per county and you can vote at any of the locations within your county, between the hours of 8am and 5:30pm (hours differ slightly by county). Despite urging from multiple friends to take advantage of this, I had much more time available on voting day itself, and held off voting until this morning. And it paid off! 30% or so of registered Colorado voters had voted early, (67% in one county) making my trip to the booth smooth and simple. I took longer to fill out the ballot with its dozen amendments than I did waiting in line. Across the county, poll workers were complaining of being bored, because there weren’t that many voters trickling in today. (Turnout overall is still expected to be high, just distributed through early, mail-in and traditional voting). Compare this to reports from St. Louis:

“Problems persist at Velda City city hall tonight, where more than 200 people still waited to cast a ballot as night fell and the closing of polls neared. The wait: still about 5 hours.” – STLtoday.com

Even the exact polling place I used to vote at had long lines. A friend emailed me:

“We waited four hours in line to vote this morning! We arrived just before 6:00. The polling place didn’t actually open until 6:30. And then there were not enough election workers in place to move things along.”

I’m not so much feeling voter outrage as thinking that I’ve observed an easy solution to this. Missouri (and the rest of the non-early-voting country) would be much happier with early voting. It makes it easier on poll workers, on voters who can’t get time off on voting day easily, on people with unusual work schedules, on voters who like to vote early, and even people like me who stubbornly insist on voting the old-fashioned day-of way.  Demand more voting days, MO.

...there was a boy. Despite being as frustrated and annoyed as most 13 year-olds, he went to a camp where he took classes with about 90 other adolescents marked early on as smart kids. Sustained on Dr. Pepper, eye-rolling, an encouraging role in DJing, and new friends, he struck up friendships with several people at the camp, including two kids who lived a hour or two north of his town in the mountains of Colorado.

Those two kids egged on the boy, insisting he return letters, send mix tapes of his high school radio show, and ditch school to meet them for slurpees or other ridiculous activities not usually considered worth driving 100 miles round trip for.

One of the kids had a high school friend who loved designing and making costumes.

Time for college came, and the kids headed to different schools: across Colorado, Utah, Rhode Island….

The second kid reached junior year in college, and needed a roommate. Luckily, the two campmates bumped into each other at an outdoor concert the summer before and mentioned the need for a roommate. Turned out that the costume design friend was moving back to Colorado, and set to start that fall at the same school and needed housing as well. Trusting the camp friend’s judgement without a second thought, the costume designer and the second kid became roommates.

They had many parties, with many great costumes…

And along the way, the original friendships from camp held together – including visits to each other’s schools and more often, invitations for the boy to come to the theme parties. By this time, his DJ skills were definitely developing.

College finished for the kid from camp, and graduation meant a trip away from the state for graduate school. There were tears as what was a very fun household broke up for everyone to go their separate ways. However, the kid from camp came back a few months later to see friends, and in the usual way, gathered together as many friends as possible for a short in-town visit, whether or not they usually hung out together in the kid’s absence.

Somewhere along the way, the costume design girl and the boy from camp had noticed all the neat things about each other – and seemed to share a certain goofiness, an interest in similar music, and it wasn’t long before they started dating.

15 days ago, these two people got married – in a beautiful 1920s ceremony complete with handmade dresses for the bride and her bridesmaids, and guests turned out in bowlers, flapper dresses, and long satin gloves to dance, eat cake, and celebrate most of the night. It is hard to believe that now a lifetime together can happen because of a spark from two people I met 15 years ago and helped introduce to each other.
Congratulations, S & N.

You’re right. I haven’t posted in a while, because it’s hard to know which stuff to post. So let this serve as a jump back into the posting waters, with some generalized updates:

• Both Sam and I are now employed. I am what you might call under-employed, but it works for now and forces some time organizing skills that are worth developing. Also led to an interview for a better job that I don’t have details on yet.


• The garden has gone through two frosts now, and we’ve pulled out most of the greenery. We have a funny system set up to hopefully ripen the tomatoes: a long pole stretched across a chair with the tomato vines draped across it. The tomatoes dangle down, hopefully turning red with a little more support. I wish I could speed up the process with some ethylene. Unfortunately, it’s not sold retail. For the garden plot, the hope is to switch to a sunnier locale next year, meaning that I need to pull out my herbs and sow a winter cover crop to make this plot more appealing. Luckily, I have extra wheat from my uncle to put down – it looks really attractive when it shoots up around Easter, and puts nitrogen back into the soil.


• Our road trip west was wonderful – and included cutting 21 mohawks! But get this: two of the mohawks turned out to be NEXT DOOR neighbors here in town. It was bizarre to meet 1000 miles away and find out we live so close in real life. It also included learning how to provide a variety of services in a pretty urban environment, including lots of bike repair for Sam, and general bartending for all of our friends. It is a great experience to realize how much we all like to fix things.


• I got to meet four bats up close through a volunteer position at the DBG. Wish I had brought the camera – but they were amazing even without it. A neat fact: only New World bats (microbats) echo-locate, and it makes them look like they’re silently screaming. I very much want a bat detector for Christmas, but understand if you’re not interested in dropping $300-$1800 for a hobby device.


• I’ve been tutoring calculus. It’s a good reminder of how much cooler calculus is than the math sections that come before it, and how much fun it is to share with someone else why we need calculus. I think I must be doing a better job than I expected.


• I have an obsession lately with reading and learning about America’s urban decay. That is to say, I am watching The Wire, reading Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and closely following the corruption and replacement of St. Louis’s police chief. Our current city really doesn’t have urban decay – it’s much too wealthy and restrictive for that kind of thing, but St. Louis has it in spades. I’d like to think that there are people in St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, the Bronx, and other major urban centers who are working to improve the education, opportunities, and lives of people who live in crumbling urban areas. I’d like to get back into more of that at some point, even if the overarching point of The Wire is that the situation is hopeless.


• We had a chance to show around an architect friend from Austin recently. Having visitors is fantastic for discovering the area in a new way – she had very different things she wanted to see compared to other visitors, and with the fall color, it was easy to oblige. This is a hint to those of you who might come visit – we are well outfitted to show you around and put you up.


• I’ll end by offering two interesting links that I think reflect my thoughts on the changing political landscape: a meticulously researched poll website called www.fivethirtyeight.com (referring to the exact number of electoral college votes) that gives some very well researched data on how various national and senate elections may go. The second is Flickr’s partnership with the Library of Congress. The set linked to in particular fascinates me. It is all shots of Americans during the Great Depression and just afterwards, showing the poverty, agriculture, industry and lives of citizens during the last period of serious economic turmoil. Flickr and the Library of Congress are asking individuals to tag the photos with any information you might have – if you can identify people, towns, crops, or other information it allows them to have a better understanding of what the Farm Security Administration was recording.

So there – an update – and a likely probability of more updates soon.

These wheeled structures are carrying 3 solar panels connected to 4 seriously sturdy batteries, an inverter, and some other stuff to create power for 40 people, nonstop, for 10 days. It could go longer, no problem, but eventually you want a shower. Bravo to Sam, Lohr, and that friendly red truck, Tuff Cherry, for making it all possible.

It’s not often that I find fiction interesting. When I do pick up a novel, my hopes are that it won’t drag on making me glance at the pile for the next book on my list, which is much more likely to be a non-fiction account of something interesting. I won’t go into my full rant about non-fiction vs. fiction, but it is unusual for me to dwell on a novel and its characters for a while after reading it. That’s what makes Blindness, by Jose Saramago, so different.

Set in an unidentified city, with unnamed characters, and with what would otherwise be an annoying lack of grammar or identification of the speaker in dialogue; the book examines what would happen if an unexplained, very contagious outbreak of blindness broke out across an entire population. Described by those afflicted as a “milky sea”, they are at the mercy of those who can still see, and the quick-spreading epidemic doesn’t inspire charity. This is made all the more interesting to me since my last position dealt extensively with vision – one of the few medical complaints that has as much subjective data to it as objective. Everything we do uses information from sight – especially interaction from other humans.

If such an epidemic really happened, would society survive? We treat blindness in its current forms as a disability, but expect that those with it can lead pretty normal lives, with jobs, relationships, and often a decent ability to live on their own. But if everyone was blind, would this still be the case?

More importantly, in the face of a major crisis, how do those who are determined to keep their humanity and compassion do that against those who would take advantage of each other, with no witnesses so to speak. The results leave me spooked, and yet the book feels completely realistic – some characters are prepared to change their lives to deal with a new and urgent need to depend on others and provide for others in turn even when dignity fails.  And at the other end, horrible, horrible acts are committed when people know they’re not being watched – literally, not seen, not identified and therefore it is almost impossible for these characters to feel guilt.

I also chose to read this book just before embarking on a long road trip/vacation that I think applies. Except for the first time I took this trip, I have been fortunate to be almost completely surrounded by people who express humanity to the fullest: super welcoming, eager to give new people warmth and laughter, work hard together, and solving problems for the good of the group in times of crisis. But this is by far not the norm in any society, and the fragility of group governance is all too obvious if you look around wherever resources are scarce. I am looking forward to the trip, and the confirmation it provides that I can identify and learn from those people who see crisis as a time to improve things, in an environment that doesn’t have any natural consequences for those who choose to instead screw their neighbors.

I should point out that Blindness did win the 1998 Nobel prize for Literature, which is an indication of greatness – and that I loved Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, not that the books are similiar, though both examine humanity in crisis. Both are definitely recommended reading, even if you also prefer non-fiction.

There’s a tradition in my family. One that depending on one’s age, or experience of the past year, each member either dreads or looks forward to. When a birthday rolls around, the family member being celebrated gets to pick a dessert they’d like for their birthday “cake”. However, they get NO say in what the cake looks like.

This is an important distinction, because ever since I can remember, the birthday dessert is sculpted, decorated, or manipulated into representing a significant aspect of whatever the given person has gone through for the last year. Some years it’s been a joke, about someone being obsessed with a new sport (a replica of a frisbee golf “hole” filled with chocolate chip cookie “discs”), or deciding a new career path (when I wanted to grow up to be president, it was a perfectly iced presidential seal), or when someone became politically involved in a local topic (complete with picketing lego people around a factory). These examples don’t even begin to cover the creative territory my mom can handle…but suffice it to say there are a great number of interesting scenarios that have been played out on top of desserts in my family.

So saying, when my brother got back from his latest fire fighting trip, he had a pretty good idea of what his birthday dessert might look like. After picking a favorite blueberry crumb cake, he figured it’d be something about his mad chainsawing skills, which have kept him and his crews safe for years now. But it was his descriptions of the scenery that stuck with the rest of us: fighting fires along the Pacific Coast, on steep coastal slopes that made chainsaw work dangerous, and under constant attack from poison oak. In fact, my poor brother came back from his three week stint covered in disgusting looking wounds and rashes from the poison oak, and tales of the necessary prednisone shots that tend to make a group of gruff, overworked and under-rested firefighters a little aggressive. I suppose we were all glad that these risks weren’t as fatal as the fire itself can be, but we did wish that he was given better protection from the issues he did face.

This cake, however, topped a lot of previous efforts. It recreated the steep slope, with the crumbs standing in for the rough dirt and rocks. Instead of candles, my mom covered it with toothpicks, and carefully topped them with foliage made of crepe paper, making it a realistic depiction of a forest that WAS INDEED HIGHLY FLAMMABLE. She even cut up green gummi bears and scattered them around to look like poison oak. When presented with this bizarre cake, which went up quite like a California wildfire when it was lit, we prodded him to do what he does best; to put the fire out, fast. That he did, though bits of ash were still floating down when the cake was cut. Luckily for us, he put out yet another fire, and even more importantly, his weeks of firefighting gave him the healthy appetite required for the clean up.

About this time, spinach bolts, sugar snap plants turn yellow, and tomatoes finally start to show promise. And luckily, even our shady plot is doing the same – a few things refused to come up, but for the most part it has kept my gardening needs and tastebuds fulfilled. It is pretty funny to find a new volunteer sunflower each week – I can only guess the last caretakers loved their sunflowers through the end of the season. They’re tenacious, and take no prisoners when it comes to battling for sunlight. That means most of them have ended up in the compost pile, though I left a couple just for the hell of it.

I should point out, that the cilantro planted at Sam’s request (I completely dislike cilantro) has gone to seed without being used. (Strike that for next year’s plot!) It’s a weird sort of power to be the primary gardener and meal determiner, without having to be the cook. However, I’ll harvest a little coriander (the seeds of the cilantro plant), as they wouldn’t hurt for the occasional recipe that uses the spice.

The tomatoes are starting to turn red, though all the fruits are much smaller than at other plots in the garden. While I am tempted to blame this solely on the lack of sun, neighbors with walls-of-water have tomato plants and fruits of tremendous size. That may need to be a change for next year – Colorado’s shorter growing season requires more gardener intervention of garden conditions.

The shade, however, dominates the plot – meaning that we are getting the most of (and most out of) the greens I planted in huge amounts. We still have plenty of collard greens, but most of the rainbow chard and all of the spinach was recently used in our Spanakopita:

Spanakopita

2 lbs. fresh spinach leaves

½ cup chopped fresh parsley

½ cup chopped fresh dill

2 cups finely chopped green onions

1 ½ tsp. fine grey sea salt

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

3 cups chopped onion

¼ tsp. coarse ground black pepper

½ lb. feta cheese, crumbled (traditionally made from sheeps milk, goat is also good)

14 filo leaves (usually sold frozen, thaw thoroughly!)

¾ cup clarified butter (ghee), melted

1. Wash and clean the spinach. Discard the stems. Drain and cut the leaves into shreds.


2. Combine the spinach, parsley, dill, green onions, and grey sea salt in a bowl. Let stand for 15 minutes, then press out all of the liquid.


3. Heat the extra-virgin olive oil in a skillet and sauté the 3 cups of chopped onions until soft and transparent. Add the spinach mixture from step 2 and sauté for a few more minutes. Add the feta cheese and black pepper.


4. Place each of 7 filo leaves in a buttered 10” x 17” x 2” baking pan, brushing each leaf with melted clarified butter. Add the spinach mixture from step 3, spread into a thick layer then add remaining filo leaves, again brushing each leaf with melted clarified butter. Cut into 3” x 3” pieces with a sharp knife.


5. Bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes or until golden brown. From greysalt.com

I should note a couple variations on this recipe…for one, we use regular kosher salt – and the washing, tearing, and salting of the greens takes a significant period of time. It’s OK to change the amount of dill, green onion, and use regular butter instead of ghee. However, finding a cooperative filo dough is a challenge. We have yet to find one that works well, although we crudely work with it before it is thoroughly thawed. (It probably would work better if you moved the filo dough to the top shelf of the fridge in the morning, and to the counter at the start of cooking). Be patient with it, and liberal with the butter – it doesn’t want to fold nicely into the dish like you might expect of other doughs.

Through the magic of my clippers and my new left-handed scissors, I successfully turned
this…

into this:

Our visitor decided when I last saw him in April that he wanted a mohawk. Luckily, a drive out to see us gave us the chance to do so. I think he was pretty pleased with the results, as was I.

If you’ve grown up in this state, you know exactly what I’m talking about. But it’s likely that your reaction is different, based on whether you first attended this venue as a child or a parent. Much like St. Louis’s favorite pizza, if you haven’t tried it by age 9, you won’t be impressed. But if you have…oh, the joys of this spot on east Colfax! I have many memories of exploring every nook with my brother, usually arriving after pleading with innocent family visitors to take us there (you know, those visitors who at the end of the trip say, “you’ve shown us such a lovely time, we’d like to take you out to dinner. Where would the children like to go?”). Everything about this place is magical: from the shrieking journey through Black Bart’s Cave, to the hilarious hourly shows featuring the gorilla, his idiot keeper, and the reporter who ALWAYS loses her wig and is pushed into the pool two stories below by the gorilla, to the mining area with sleeping miners, to the crazy helium balloon machine, to the mariachis, to the fire juggling divers to the hourly pinatas to the endless other places to run around while our parents sat at the table and embarrassedly apologized to whichever family visitor we had talked into treating us here, sight unseen.

This all being said, I know lots of people who grew up with this fantastical place and yet feel like it doesn’t hold up to a visit as an adult. I worried about this (as well as memories of the food – terrible – but acceptable to a non-discerning distracted child’s palate). But now we had visitors arriving, complete with a 9-year-old, and no way were we going to disappoint by denying him a visit. And I don’t think it disappointed him, either, since upon repeated questioning, he proudly stated it was the best part of his trip. And it definitely did hold up to an adult visit, mainly because it was almost. the. exact. same.

Seriously, my last visit was easily 16 years ago, and it still had the same look, smell, same sense of the impossible (how does that strip mall location fit seating for over 1,000 and a two-story waterfall all inside??), same cheesy skits, and same scary bits of Black Bart’s Cave. Oh, and same awful food. That being said, any visit by an adult should come requisite with the less-than-normal process of eating a meal an hour or so BEFORE going. Once there, you are required to buy a meal, but simply don’t eat it. Box it up for the pets or something, and only ingest the drinks and sopapillas. You’ll be much happier that way, and you are certain to find cheap, quality Mexican food in the surrounding neighborhood, so this is simpler than it sounds.

It’s amazing that a business that forces its waitstaff to respond with a quick trot to any table that has raised a tiny red flag has remained in business for over 30 years (Sam demonstrates in this picture), but I suppose unlimited trays of sopapillas keep all involved happy. Strangely enough, those of us with strong memories noticed only two changes: the genie in the magic wishing well is far less scary (no, it’s not just that I’m grown up, they really did change it); and the waitstaff has dramatically shifted demographics. As a kid, I remember the staff being full adults, clearly frustrated and rushed, with dark stains under each arm. This time around, all the waitstaff we spoke with were young, hip teens – eager to put a more interesting job on their college applications. This strange shift meant that all of them seemed quite happy, like a self-selecting group of pleasant ironists. This made the biggest significant change easier to deal with: for the first time ever, I had to pay my own way.