• Category Archives Colorado

  • My Christmas Wish

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Thanksgiving Moon

    Thursday gratefuls: Last night Kate said as we were going to sleep, I know one of your gratefuls. OK. Your electric blanket. Oh, yeah. She right. And that down comforter on top of it. Plus, the cold bedroom that makes them both necessary and a joy. In the single digits here. Windows open. Our way. The small Animal which created the narrow tracks that look like a tiny wagon had crossed our snowy driveway. The Mule Deer that came by later. My own, for that matter. The wheel tracks of the garbage taken out yesterday morning. Temporary memories. Our mailbox. Bought one that has a door in the back as well as the front. I can get the mail without standing on Black Mountain Drive as folks drive home from work.

     

    Prepping for a Hanukkah post. Advent, too. Yule and the Winter Solstice. Why is our New Year’s in the middle of winter? Kwanza. This is a big holiday month. We need it this year. We also need it to be safe. Hope you have an uncomplicated but joyous holimonth.

    My Christmas wish. Please make DJT disappear from the television, social media, and print. I don’t care if he stays in the Whitehouse until US Marshals come to serve him an eviction notice. I’ve coined a phrase, and I don’t want it to offend those who got PTSD in horrendous circumstances, or to demean them in any way, but Post Trump Stress Disorder is real. His voice, his image, news articles about him trigger me. His careful enunciation of outright lies, his presentation as conman in chief shames our country and has been repudiated. Couldn’t we muzzle him for the next 48 days? I have a wire muzzle for Kepler that out to fit him. Or maybe noise cancelling electronic devices when he opens his mouth?

    Still feeling glum. I don’t have the holimonth spirit. And, I want it. Gonna find that box of Christmas decorations in the garage and lug it up here. String up some lights. Position my small collection of Christmas snowglobes around. Put out ornaments. I’ve got a spruce on our property to cut for a tree. Not a very big one. While I’m decorating, I’ll hit Pandora’s Christmas music stations.

    Oddly, what I miss about Christmas is not the church services, except for the music. I don’t miss the creche. Nor the story of a baby God. I miss the parts of Christmas that make it a family holiday. The tree. The music. The food. That Night Before Christmas feeling. I want to put out a five dollar bill, ok, maybe a twenty, so Santa can go eat at the Rustic Station in Bailey. Get some of those buttermilk pancakes. I’ll put out hay for Rudolph and Dancer and Vixen and all the team. Some milk or whatever elves prefer. This is the Christmas that absorbed so much of the pagan Yule.

    Today’s a Happy Camper day. I’ll see the white tops of the Continental Divide as I drive on 285. Snow sprinkled Ponderosa, Lodgepole, Spruce line the highway. At points along the way, tucked away in the tree are the stone chimneys and fireplaces left over from earlier settlers cabins. Not to far from Conifer High School, on the way to 285, are two cabins from that time, too. They’re dotted all over. Plenty on Shadow Mountain Drive. The road goes up steeply and down dramatically. Mountain roads. Each time I drive here I look at the mountains, scan for wildlife, enjoy the odd mix of businesses and homes, some mansions often high up. Five full years this Winter Solstice and it’s all still beautiful and amazing to me.

    I’m not a small government guy. Not at all. I believe government has the responsibility to keep all of its citizens healthy, educated, housed, and with adequate nutrition. Even so. I want government to recede, go back to its normal presence in our lives. Post Trump Stress Disorder has made me eager to have him gone and to have words and whole sentences, complete thoughts in the mouths of our government officials. Calm. Quiet. At least until January 20th. Please.


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  • The New West

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Thanksgiving

    Wednesday gratefuls: Mountain Waste. Doctors. The one here and the ones out there. Roads. The builders of Colorado Mountain roads. His Dark Materials. Phillip Pullman. Friends. Caregiving. Tsundoku. Collecting books you have not read. William Schmidt. Bill. As he goes through the next 14 days. Tom on December 1st. Carne asada unthawing. Carnitas and beans for supper.

    Red Sky in the morning through the Lodgepoles. A western greeting. When it’s red like this, I always think of Louis L’Amour. I’ve only read one of his. It surprised me. The prose was more like Dashiel Hammet. I think it was Riders of the Purple Sage.

    When we moved out here, I expected cowboy hats, western shirts, cowboy boots, maybe guns on the hip. Bars with half-doors on spring pivots. Lotta chaw. I have been disappointed. There is the occasional Stetson. Cowboy boots are the most common of the things I mentioned. Very few western shirts, though attending the Great Western National Stockshow saw many of them. It’s the rodeo guys, the paid cowboy entertainers, who dress western.

    Although. Yesterday when we got our hair done, Jackie showed me pictures of her son’s wedding. The minister, her son and his bride stood on a large boulder. Her proud father, all dressed in black with a black Stetson and belt with silver stood off to the side below as did the small number of wedding guests. The chairs were hay bales with Diné blankets. This western culture lives on among ranchers. It’s more of a rural thing.

    Denver and its metro area, including the Front Range where Kate and I live, is the New West. Skiers, hikers, back country campers, and many millennials have added themselves to the state. In spite of the many bumper stickers like Native, Colorado: We’re full. This change irritates the hell out of “native” Coloradans. Who are, in my opinion, feeling a slight taste of the angst their ancestors gave the Utes, the Apaches, and the Comanches who lived here first. They’re not native here. No one is, in the longview. It took those wandering tribes from Asia a while to populate North America, but even the earliest of them weren’t here 50,000 years ago. But, as we used to say in the first grade, those early nations did have dibs on the land.

    This change in the human population has changed both the physical and political landscapes. The number of hard rock mines here, hard rock mines with toxic runoff and piles of toxic tailings literally dot the mountainous part of the state. After the Indian wars, the settlement of Colorado got a big push from Eastern mining and railroad interests, plus one pulse of gold diggers. Pikes Peak or bust. Most, almost all, busted. There was gold here. And silver. And magnesium. So many minerals that a college, The Colorado School of Mines, has taken a storied place in both the states recent past and mining around the world. The mines, the railroads, even the stockyards that grew up around the ranches and the confluence of north/south rail lines, were not locally owned, nor locally controlled. Colorado was, back then, a vassal state of financiers, industrialists, and railroad owners like James J. Hill.

    That’s the second big lie behind the nativist bumper stickers. These faux natives of Colorado did not “own” it. Those who saw the West, the Rockies in particular, as a source of resources for their own plans, did. They controlled the politics and the wealth. Those so-called natives descended from peasants who worked the land and mountains for Wall Street feudal lords. The New West, the new Colorado, has its own Fortune 500 companies. The space, technology and military presence here makes Colorado a unique blend of highly educated workers and outdoors enthusiasts. It also means that the state has gone from red to purple to blue over the last few decades. Again, a process highly irritating to those who want to close our borders to new residents.

    Kate and I are part of the New West, the new Colorado. So are many of our neighbors. We have moved West as Horace Greeley once urged young men to do. Sort of. Many of us came from the humid east, but many come from Texas and California. Colorado, by a slim majority, became the first state to mandate by popular vote, the reintroduction of wolves. The natives were the chief opposition. The rancher crowd and the hunting oriented outdoors folks. This will not be their first defeat along environmental lines. We also elected a gay Governor, Jared Polis, two years ago, after having been called the Hate State not twenty years ago.

    When I consider all this, I’m not surprised any more at the low relevance of old west motifs. My fleece and plaid shirt, denim and hiking shoes, are the dress of the New West. At least for me.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


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  • Zozobraed

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Radical Change (just take out Trump and I’ll call it radical change)

    Thursday gratefuls: Vote talliers. Reporters. Democrats voting. Republicans (if you can call them that) voting. Lisa Cutter wins. Hickenlooper wins. Wolf introduction proposition in Colorado. Ahead in vote tallies. Biden’s popular vote. 71,750,000! Wow. The next four years. Picking up the pieces, trying to heal. Commitment to that process from me. Glad the vote is over.

    Hey there, hi there, ho there. I’m as zozobraed as can be. Two very clear zozobra moments. Talked with Jude, my next door neighbor. He stood at the corner of my garage, me ten feet or so away. His border collies, Zeus and Boo, shuttled between us looking for affection. Kep, on the other side of the fence, barked from time to time. Somehow we got to Covid. “Well, it’s death rate is only 1%, I’ve read,” he said. Death rate is notoriously difficult to calculate and changes frequently. See this NYT article. It was the only in Jude’s comment that grabbed me. It meant that he saw the Covid danger as exaggerated. It isn’t. This NPR article shows that death rates in NY hospitals has dropped from 25% in the early day of the crisis to 7.6% now. Yes, those are the hospitalized. Here are some other numbers 9,500,000 (at least) infected. 233,000 deaths so far in the U.S. That is, for instance, a .025 rate of death.

    Yesterday Ken came to do a fall check on the boiler. He’s a smart guy, on his way to a biology degree until a dui got in the way. We’ve known him the whole time we’ve been up here. He installed our new boiler. More than half Indian, Diné, his point of view is neither this nor that ideologically. An ex-Marine with two sons in the Marines, he has a conservative take, but as he said, “I’m no Biden hater. I think Trump would have been better if he’d kept his mouth shut.” Ken believes that if wolves are introduced to Colorado as prop 114 would trigger that all the Elk and Mule Deer would die. He’s a hunter and claims privileged knowledge. He also believes if the measure passes it would cost nineteen million dollars a year when you count reparation to ranchers and farmers. The proposition itself estimated eight hundred thousand dollars.

    Here’s the zozobra moment for me in each of these conversations. Oh. They’re both working with a different set of facts from mine. These are intelligent men who’ve narrowed their information collection to conservative shock jocks and Fox News. Because I like both of these guys, I allow zozobra to rule me.  Their beliefs, sincerely held, negate my worldview. Yet, here they are, talking to me, the world seems the same, our mutual world, but when we begin to describe it? Nope

    Where, I wonder, would I even begin. In philosophy there is a sub-discipline called axiology. Philosophy websites define it as value theory, but I learned it as the discipline associated with assumptions. A sort of meta-consideration. Now, that could be about values. What’s the value behind this ethical principle? But, I’ve kept it in my intellectual armamentarium as a reminder to check out what folks assume in any argument or belief. Axiology came to mind after talking with both Jude and Ken. A clear assumption, one I have as well, is that our sources are correct. Perhaps a difference would be that I consider sources’ sources. Who said that? What do they believe? What do they support? Do they have a skew in their thinking created by a bias?

    But, since we start from different data realities and since we disagree, the only logical point of conversation is axiological. Why do you trust Fox News? Why do I trust Fauci? Is there a common ground? I ducked this conversation in both instances. Too hard. And, most likely, not fruitful. But. If we don’t have these axiological conversations, how can we learn to see each other?

    I kept moving from foreground to background, my information universe, then theirs. The dissonance and the difficulty in reconciling them zozobraed me. No matter how the election comes out, this same struggle, this zozobra, will play out over and over again. No plan right now. Just wondering.


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  • Colorado

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Fall and the Moon of Radical Change

    Thursday gratefuls: Kate’s stoma site looking good. Rigel off antibiotics. Her gut can relax. Rigel early in the morning, barking as loud as she can. Why? Oh, why. No idea. Mac and cheese with ham. Comfort food. The East Troublesome Fire. The Cameron Fire. The Calwood Fire. Reminding us that climate change is real and not tomorrow.

    Wildfires are us. The West is burning. Precipitation blocked by warming oceans. Trees dried by low humidity, killed by pine bark Beetles. Grasses squeezed dry, lying ready for ignition. Rabbi Jamie’s home in Granby. The East Troublesome Fire. Evacuated. He posted pictures on Facebook. Scary.

    Clouds this morning red from the Wildfire refracted Sun. We have moisture on the way. Hope it comes in time to wet down our Very High fire hazards. The National Forest Service closed the Arapho National Forest, the one in which we live, citing dry Trees and strained fire-fighting resources. This means no Denverites, no other out-of-towners at Lower and Upper Maxwell Falls. Well, it means there should be none.

    Speaking of Colorado. Here’s a video from near Telluride.

    Could have been worse. Think if the Jeep with the camera was a tiny bit further along on the trail. The woman who drove the falling Jeep is in a Grand Junction hospital with serious injuries. She bailed just before it went over.

    Then, too. An election is coming. Like Winter. Did I say vote? Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.


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  • Fattening, Not Flattening

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall and the Moon of Radical Change

    Wednesday gratefuls: New wheelchair. #19! Better comfort for Kate. Covid days and Covid nights. With the flu on its way. Hunker down, USA. A gift from Ancient One, Tom Crane. Safeway. Picking up groceries in my jammies. Cool weather ahead. And, snow! Drive down that fire danger. Yeah.

    On the drive down the mountain to Safeway the Sun angle, the brown and gold Grasses, naked Aspen among the Lodgepole sent me back to trips to Aunt Marjorie’s house for Thanksgiving. Over the hills and through the woods.

    Picked up some squash today. Yum. Also, thought I indicated I wanted 5 tomatoes. Got five pounds instead. Chili tonight. Safety wise pickup is the gold standard. As it is in terms of limiting impulse purchases. However.

    The third surge of the first wave has come up hard against the rocky shore of pandemic fatigue. We have fattened the curve, instead of flattening. And, we are at it again. This time though with a broader reach in regions. That dovetails with three accelerants: the seasonal flu, cold weather and more indoor gatherings, winter holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah.

    By the time 2021 arrives two months plus a little from now we might be ready to skip ahead to 2022.

    The fall after college, 1969, Judy and I moved to Appleton, Wisconsin. My bakery job had me up at 4 am as my first Wisconsin winter closed in. The owner, almost joyous for a Norwegian (I now know.), used to sing, “I’ve got my love to keep me warm.” Yeah. But, he was the boss, you know. I can still hear him. Seems like the perfect song now.

    Or, this. The weather outside is frightful, the fire is so delightful, and since we’ve GOT NO PLACE TO GO, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! (caps mine, ya know.)

    Did I forget to mention the election? An election is coming. Like winter. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.

    Local satellite gathers dust from meteor. The Lockheed-Martin works off Deer Creek Canyon Road celebrated as their designed and built OSIRIS-REX blew on asteroid Bennu and collected (they hope) dust in an extended ring.

    There is a robust space industry in Colorado and it will get much bigger if Trump’s Space Force decides to permanently locate its headquarters here. It has a temporary headquarters in Virginia but there are already several sites here: Buckley AFB, Peterson AFB, Schriever AFB with 10 of its fifteen units in the state already.

    Back to writing. Kate read the first half of Jennie’s Dead and her response to it jarred me back to the keyboard. I can’t exercise until next Monday so the time is easy to find. I feel good, like I know I should. Writing buoys me up.


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  • WTF

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall and the RBG Moon

    Thursday gratefuls: Family, near and far. Friends. Ancient and new. ADT. Androgen Deprivation Therapy. It’s not just Lupron anymore. For Charlie H. 27 degrees this morning. The Denver Post. Decompensation in full public view. The orange excrescence. Dez and the wheelchair. Kate. And her anger.

    What a long strange trip it’s being. Geez. Took Kate to Swedish for her thoracentesis. We found the ambulatory care unit hidden down a corridor tacked on to the main building, but leading further, past the ACU. Hospitals are often like English buildings with various floors built at different times, different buildings, too, then all stitched together with elevators and hallways.

    I wheeled Kate into Room 9, really a small stall covered with a curtain, where Alice, the nurse, cared for Kate. Alice. Hmm. They hooked Kate up to the hospital oxygen, took her blood pressure, and her O2 saturation. We’d already decided that I would go eat breakfast, so I left for the cafeteria.

    Where there had been a number of tasty options, there were now breakfast burritos wrapped in tinfoil, fruit in cups, some with yogurt, scrambled eggs in small plastic containers. I went with the breakfast burrito and blueberries buried in yogurt.

    Not bad. I stayed in the cafeteria awhile because it was big, airy, very few tables spaced far apart. Not many people. Safer. Weird to think about personal safety in the hospital, but. Covid.

    I find a place in one of those hallways connecting two buildings, no one there, but with a convenient, lonely chair. Kate called after about twenty minutes.

    Come get me. I’m done. Oh. It was before 10:30, the time of her procedure. Huh. I got up and walked down the ACU corridor again, past medical oncology, and cardiac testing reception. Wondered briefly what it was like to spend your working life in such a dismal looking space.

    When I got there, Kate surprised me. The ultrasound tech came and said there is no pleural effusion. What? She had an IV in, four pokes, she has terrible veins, and she looked angry. As well she might. We’d come in Friday evening, about an hour and a half round trip, for a drive up Covid test. Then we’d come Tuesday for the ct scan. Another hour and a half plus the contrast, and a long ride across other corridors and into other buildings to find an available cat scan machine.

    Now we’d come in a third time in six days. Parked. Gotten tested at the lobby with the temperature gun, received green and white pre-screened for Covid wrist bands, checked in, schlepped to the ACU. Kate had been hospital gowned. a sheet gotten for her to cover up, and a nurse had taken four tries with a very sharp needle to insert an IV. Then, nada.

    Alice. Indeed. We’d gone down the hospital looking glass.

    We have an appointment with Taryle for next week. WTF, doc?

    Also, still no wheel chair. We’re renting one. Though. Dez, Lisa Gidday’s nurse, says she’s on it. I believe her.


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  • Bloody Sun

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa and the Labor Day Moon

    Tuesday and Wednesday gratefuls: Kate’s DEXA scan for bone density. Ruby’s a.c. for the drive. Euphoria on HBO. Ruth’s new favorite show. Rigel’s improving appetite. Amber. Mountain Waste. The blood red morning Sun. Teenagers. The complexity of their lives, made even more complex by Covid. The orange excrescence and what he’s showing us about our country.

    The dawn Sun here bleeds for the Fires burning through the West. The clouds show their concern with reflected color. Northern California and the Western Slope of Colorado are aflame. Their smoke and ash foul the Air we breath even up here on Shadow Mountain.

    We live in the Arapaho National Forest, filled with Lodgepole Pine and Aspen stressed by drought, valley meadows with a summer’s growth of Grasses, also dry. The National Forest Service warning signs have pegged their highest mark, Extreme, for weeks now.

    Western life. Punctuated by drought. Rejuvenated by Fire. Relieved by heavy Mountain Snows. For thousands of years. “Go, West, young man.” We did. But we white folk are not nomadic. We do not know where a village can be safe. We just build. Glass and steel. Hardie board and shingles. Permanent. As if there were no fire. No drought. These are strategies of the humid East, dangerous in the arid West.

    As Greeley’s famous invitation flooded the West with people from the East, pushing out, slaughtering the people who knew how to move with the seasons, we made the same mistakes over and over. I’m living in one right now. It’s beautiful here on Shadow Mountain, but this house will burn. And that’s what Lodgepole Pine Forests do. They burn. All the Trees. Leaving fertile ground for a new Ecosystem.

    Humans make mistakes. Often. And the consequences are sometimes horrific. Sometimes wonderful. Human life is one long unintentional adventure in empiricism. Oh, if we do that, this happens. Some of our mistakes lead us to lives otherwise impossible. Like our life here on Shadow Mountain.

    Kate and I understand that we might be living here when the Forests catch Fire. That our home may be temporary. We choose to stay for the same reasons populations of us Eastern folk spotted all over the Mountains and Intramontane regions out here do. It’s beautiful and close to the Wild Life, a reminder of a world not controlled by humans.

    Oh, yes, there’s a paradox. Live where it’s not safe. Why would we do that? We’re mistake makers, non-linear decision makers. We’re human.


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  • Water

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa and the Labor Day Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Jon, Ruth, Gabe. All here to celebrate Grandma’s birthday. The specific Animals that gave their lives for our meal: scallops and a tri-tip steak. The heat. When it leaves. Jon and Ruth’s happiness with the gift of Ivory. (our 2011 Rav4). Gabe’s “Air hug. I love you Grandpop.” Rigel at home. The chance to cook for a crowd. Kate. Always Kate.

    Didn’t do much for Kate’s birthday on Tuesday. Lots of stuff going on before, that day, and after. But we hit it yesterday. Grandkids. Scallops. The gift of empanadas from Jon and the kids. Rigel up and about. When they left we both collapsed, as usual. A good exhaustion. Happy to see them come. Happy to see them go.

    Record heat in Denver. Hot up here, too. Not by other spots standards, I know, but we’ve become acclimated to a cooler day.

    You can’t see the Mountains from Denver. Jon. All this smoke and haze, heavy particulates has obscured us. We’re still here. The haze is here and the smell of smoke hangs in the Air like a harbinger. It’s bad further west, but the Wildfire threat is extreme here, too. Humidity at 16. The Ground Water evaporates. The stress on Trees and Grasses grows with the lack of precipitation. A grim reminder that we’re all part of this Ecosystem.

    Ruth said that Animals from the Foothills are fleeing into metro Denver. People have been asked to leave water out for them. Can’t do it here. Habituation. Which kills Animals rather than helps them.

    The arid West is not the humid East. The Mountains are not the Plains. Whether we realize it all the time or not, our lives have Water as a disruptive actor. The lack of it. Water from the Western Slope, for example, goes to Denver through huge tunnels and pipes. The southern burbs of Denver have depleted much of the Aquifer that sits beneath them. Long periods of dryness lead to extreme conditions for agriculture, Wildlife, and our Forests. The Colorado River Compact promises more Water to its downstream users like Las Vegas, Arizona, and Los Angeles than actually flows through it.

    Diane, my San Francisco based cousin, told me about the book, Cadillac Desert, long ago. That piqued my interest in Water. I’ve been fascinated ever since. The way the Plains states like Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and even parts of Oklahoma and Texas have based their economies on the Ogallala Aquifer, an enormous reservoir of mostly ancient Water that underlies them. No Aquifer, no amber waves of Grain, no fruited Plains. The Great Lakes. Now, the Colorado River.

    Consider the Water where you are. It is Life itself. Worthy of your attention.


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  • #244

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Moon of Justice

    Saturday gratefuls: This country. These purple mountain majesties. The lakes of Minnesota. Lake Superior. Evergreen. Conifer. Shadow Mountain. The great plains, rippling wheat. Corn fields of Iowa. Lady Liberty. New York City. San Francisco. Puget Sound. The Colorado River. The Mississippi. The South. New England. The first lighters up there in Maine. Jambalaya. Gumbo. Devil’s Tower. El Capitan. Crater Lake. The Mackinac Bridge. Protests. Alexandria. Muncie. The Big Medicine Wheel. The sacred Black Hills. Cahokia. Carlsbad Caverns. Marfa. West Texas. From sea to shining sea. Haleakala. Waipio Valley. Waimea Canyon. Da Fish House. Denali. Kodiak. Salmon. Grizzly. Wolves. Lynx. Wolverines. An amazing country still.

    244 years old. Lot of candles for that red white and blue cake. Hard times. Like the Civil War. The First World War. The Spanish Flu. The Depression. WWII. Yes, it’s been hard before. Will be again. We navigated the churning, stormy waters of all those. We can get through this one, too.

    A canard? Maybe. Yet, I believe it’s so. Rising out of this fire may come a nation truer to its ideals. No more Trumps. Ever. No more easy white privilege. No more easy oppression of people of color, women, lbgt. A more just economic and medical system. If we do, the pain will have been worth it.

    I love this country. From Route 66 to the hot dog shaped hot dog stand in Bailey. From Coney Island to Puget Sound. From the Minnesota angle to the bayous. It’s my home, my place, the spot on this earth to which I am native. It can be tarnished by the political class, but not erased.

    Here are my friends, some of my family, the graves of my ancestors. Here are the roads I traveled as a young man, the streets and fields I played in as a child, houses in which I’ve lived, the cities I’ve loved and fought for. This is the land of memory.

    Let’s celebrate #245 with a 46th President. And with 45 in jail or disgraced. Make it so.


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  • Imminent

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane and the Moon of Sorrow

    Saturday gratefuls: Our Kenmore 19 Frostless Freezer. Its good years of service. A good temporary solution to its imminent demise. Crowhill Appliance. Dave, the tech. Seoah’s help. Kate’s smile when Rigel lay down on her quilt. The gift of pleasant days. Pine pollen. Fish. Curtis Spitler Ellis. Gertrude Eliza Ellis. Judy. Raeone. Saturdays.

    Symptoms of a pandemic. Remember all those folks buying toilet paper? Even though Covid doesn’t have g-i effects? Or, the whole PPE scandal with no masks for medical personnel? Out of stock items on Amazon like hand sanitizer, toilet paper? Discovered another one yesterday.

    On Wednesday Seoah told me about an alarm going off in the garage. I spent my usual minutes of frustration trying to find it. Not the cars. What else could it be? Oh. The freezer. Temperature alert. Red light flashing. Uh-oh. Remember those meat bundles I bought from Tony’s? Yep. In danger.

    I looked at it. Opened the door. No frost buildup. The meat might have just started to defrost. I pushed the quick freeze button, shut the door, and the alarm went off. OK. On Thursday it was beeping again.

    We bought this freezer near the time we moved to Andover. That was 1994. It’s been a good mechanical servant for all those days. I even hit it with the car once and it kept on ticking. Had an incident last year when it frosted up. I removed everything, left it open for a day, and the frost melted. I loaded it back up and it continued to work. Until Wednesday.

    Time for a new freezer, it seemed. I started looking first at Consumer Reports. OK. GE makes good freezers. I hunted for them online. Looked at Best Buy. Ah. They have it. $900. Reasonable. Wait. That button changed from yellow to gray. Oh, out of stock. Well, understandable. It’s a good one.

    I checked Lowes. It was out of stock there, too. Appliance Factory. Out of stock. Specialty Appliances. Home Depot. All out of stock. Ok. I looked for one of the others Consumer Report recommended. Out of stock, too. Decided to check for any old freezer. Out of stock. Kate suggested I look for a chest freezer. Out of stock.

    There is nowhere in Colorado that you can buy either an upright or chest freezer. I suspect that’s true everywhere. According to a salesman I talked to, only two manufactures of freezers remain, Amana and Frigidaire. They make all the other brands. Not sure what that means for all the Consumer Reports subtle gradations. Anyhow, they’ve told all their customers there will be no stock again until early to mid-fall.

    That put me in a funk yesterday. I like to solve problems and when I have a problem that seems unsolvable. Not good. Hundreds of dollars of top quality meat in a dying freezer. Damn.

    Went to bed for a nap. See if some sleep might refresh the circuits. While waiting to go to sleep, I remembered the freezer in our refrigerator. It’s a pull-out bottom freezer and has a fair amount of space. I imagined the packages of meat I’d bought from Tony’s. Huh. They should fit.

    My funk lifted. Today Seoah and I will switch the lower value foods stored in the refrigerator with the meats in the dying Kenmore. When I asked Dave, the tech from Crowhill, how long he thought the freezer would last, he said, “A day. A month. Several months.” And shrugged.

    They don’t do compressor repairs anymore. That’s because at $900 to $1,000 they’re more costly than a new unit. If, of course, you can find one. I thought briefly about going ahead, but then realized I’d have a brand new compressor in a freezer over twenty years old. Other stuff in it is old, too.

    We’ll continue using the Kenmore until the compressor ceases to function. If we lose some popsicles, frozen veggies, or tater tots (yes, sue me. I like’m.), that’ll be ok. It was the thought of losing all that meat and not being able to do anything about it…

    And, when Amana and Frigidaire crank back up, we’ll get ourselves a new freezer. Sometime this fall.


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