Category Archives: Our Land and Home

News of the Strange, Our Land and Home

A Likely Story

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Summer                                                                         Recovery Moon

During the swirl of visits to various doctor’s offices before surgery I was not at my sharpest or most attentive. I lost my ART hat, the blue hat with the red ART. It was from a contemporary exhibit at the MIA and one of my favorites. Tracked it down at Eigner’s Littleton office. I visited him in Lonetree, Littleton and Englewood, so it wasn’t a snap to figure it out. Today I retrieved it.

After that I visited the shiny blue box of IKEA in Centennial. This was for yet another BILLY bookshelf in the birch veneer. While there I needed help and got it from a 57 year old guy who had an incredible story. Just how incredible I’m not sure since I’ve not been able to confirm it, but this is what he told me.

“I was a CEO, got cancer and lost my job. Ended up $1.2 million dollars in debt. Lost my house and lived out of my car for a year.”

“What company?”

“Pittney-Bowes. I’ve tried to get other jobs but the CEO jobs I’ve applied for turned me down because of my illness history and the middle management job interviews end at over-qualified. So now I work 100 hours a week, 40 here at IKEA and 60 at Broadway Pizza which is owned by a friend of mine.”

This guy was completely believable to me with the exception of his lack of bitterness. I mentioned that and he said, “What are you gonna do? You have to take life as it comes.”

When I got home and told Kate about this encounter, she asked why the CEO didn’t have good health coverage. Good question. The more I think about it I imagine this guy was like a few of the psychopaths I’ve met, able to tell a lie so convincingly that you become part of it.

I liked him, felt sorry for him and admired him. Strange event.

Health, Our Land and Home

Crowning Achievement

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Summer                                                             Recovery Moon

Ever since my first crown years ago I can’t get the old gospel hymn, Crown Him With Many Crowns, out of my head when I go to the dentist with a cracked tooth. Aspen Park Dental sits just off 285, snugged in the mountains near the Safeway and a Starbucks. Nice folks. Dr. Higuchi got his degree at University of Iowa. A Hawkeye. Karen, the dental assistant, lives in nearby Pine Grove, and has a Great Dane. We talked about loving big dogs and their short life spans.

Back home to Shadow Mountain where lack of hot water dominated the rest of the morning. This time I found Ken, the only guy with a boiler license working up here. Ken, unfortunately, knows his business. Looks like a new boiler. Interesting reason, too. This high efficiency boiler was not made for altitude. At sea level it’s rated about 85%, not real high, but aiming in that direction. In the mountains it’s about 70%. The reasons relate to different flame setting requirements and difficulties with hard, acidic water. It has developed several problems, the sum of which would be too costly to fix given the likelihood of their recurrence.

Ah, well.

Family, Great Work, Music, Our Land and Home

The First of July

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Summer                                                                  Healing Moon

Hodges Plumbing came out yesterday. They will install the gas line to the generator. Gary or Mike Hodges, I didn’t get his first name, arrived in a red truck and wearing overalls, has a gray handlebar mustache, gets up slowly after visiting the crawl space, and has a train whistle as his ringtone. I liked him.

The generator has to get over to the breaker boxes first, of course, and that’s Eric Ginter’s job. He and 3 other guys will muscle it out of the garage and over to the west side of the house. Eric will install the automatic transfer switch and hook up the generator to it. The automatic transfer switch starts the generator when power goes out in the house and shuts it off when the power returns.

While waiting for Hodges to arrive, I cut down aspen suckers and painted them with an herbicide designed to take out heavy brush and poison ivy. In the wild aspens throw out suckers in a ring around a parent tree. When the suckers grow to a certain size, they throw out more. One of the largest living organisms is an aspen stand which began from one tree*. I’m encouraging certain aspens by not cutting them down, but leaving them enough space to grow large. They are fire resistant, as Jacob Ware, deputy chief for the Elk Creek Fire Protection District, said. “Water, not pitch.”

In the evening we went again to Dazzlejazz, having been there last Friday with Tom and Roxann, this time with Jon and Jen. It was a sweet evening. We gave Jon a large gift to help pay down his student loan debt, part of the house sale proceeds. They were both surprised. They asked about my surgery and how they could support Kate. We listened to groups of teen jazz musicians, two jazz bands and a choral group. One tenor sax player really caught my attention, an edgy growly sound.

We drove into the mountains, back home, with Venus and Jupiter in conjunction and a bright full healing moon hanging in the southwestern sky.

*The Pando (Utah) grove consists of about 47,000 tree trunks, and it covers a little more than 100 acres of land. Overall, researchers believe it could weigh 13-million pounds.

Family, Garden, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, The West

Family Plots

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Beltane                                                                 Healing Moon

A new seasonal event. Pine pollen gathers on the black surface of our driveway leaving yellow rings where water gathers in the driveway’s low spots. Sweep your hand across a piece of our Stickley furniture, palms and fingers come up yellow. We have only cross ventilation for cooling. Shake a branch of the ponderosa and a yellow cloud fills the air. All about sex of course. No wonder it’s beautiful.

Into Denver last night to check on Jon’s garden. Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe are in Chicago for father’s day, visiting Jen’s grandfather and grandmother, both great-grandparents. Her grandfather is 96 or so and his wife around the same age. Barb, Jen’s mom, flew out because her mom fell and broke a hip. She’s headed to a nursing home. error correction: Kate says Barb’s mother has a hair line fracture of the pelvis.

Jon grows quite a garden. He has grapes and currants, potatoes and herbs, tomatoes and carrots, peppers, strawberries and onions. Being a gardener of the arid west he has a drip irrigation system which delivers small bursts of water, around two minutes worth, to each plant via a plastic line connected to a small plastic stake with a watering head. Before they left he positioned garden furniture over his more delicate plants because hail can be a problem.

My job is to make sure the irrigation system works, then to make sure that none of the watering heads malfunction and finally to watch plants that might wilt in the heat. There are two main concerns, one is for the health of the plants, but the second is to make the sprinkler system doesn’t send them into another tier of water pricing by running too long. Colorado is not California, but water, especially municipal water, is still a precious resource and priced accordingly.

 

Mountains, Our Land and Home

Still Moving In

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Beltane                                                                New (Healing) Moon

Wow. What a difference having some cash makes. Generator work scheduled. Plumber, electrician co-ordinated for an early July installation and automatic transfer switch ordered. Housecleaner hired. Ikea bookshelves and wire racks for banker’s boxes delivered. Kate’s local quilter’s guild had its annual potluck. Yesterday was busy.

When we had our business meeting last week, it felt very good to see our emergency fund back up close to its longstanding amount. And, we have money to do other things like the generator, get our house cleaned by a pro, install built in bookshelves. We’ll also do some work in the kitchen and in the bathrooms.

However, just to keep things in perspective, Kate’s potluck last night was in a mountain home on or near a summit. It had a view of Pike’s Peak and surrounding mountains. “A multi-million dollar home.” By comparison we live down in the holler.

Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Pace of change picks up

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Beltane                                                        New (Healing) Moon

Very windy this morning on Shadow Mountain. The pines sway and the thick clouds of last night have dispersed. Rain again yesterday and last night.

The sale of the Andover house–still a cause for joy here–has started a cascade of small and large changes on Black Mountain Drive.

An electrician came by yesterday to give me an estimate on installing our generator. I have to schedule a plumber to run the gas line to the west side of the house, then Eric will position the generator and the plumber will connect it. After that the automatic transfer switch goes up and connects to the generator.

Kate’s interviewing a housecleaner today.

Our bookshelf order from Ikea for my loft comes today. Jon will begin to install them when he gets back from Chicago next week.

After the deputy chief of the Elk Creek Fire District gives me a mitigation plan on Thursday, I’ll begin to implement it. Once I know what he recommends, I’ll also call in a stump grinder to clear the many stumps in our back yard. That will make the yard much more useable as an outdoor space.

Still to come: new bed and mattress, kitchen remodel, shower remodels.

All part of settling in. Good to be in a place to do these things.

 

 

Jefferson County, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, The West, Weather +Climate

Fire

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Beltane                                                                  Closing Moon

Fire mitigation is on my mind. Firewise is a project of the National Fire Protection Association and has wide exposure here in Colorado. They recommend defensible space, 30 feet out from the house no trees, shrubs, fuel. Trees out to 50 feet or so limbed up to 10 feet so fire can’t skip from ladder fuels (shrubs, grass) to tree branches. That’s considered only good sense up here on Shadow Mountain.

And, to show you that no good deed goes unpunished, the very wet, fire repressing May and June (thunder outside right now) we’re having, will nourish grass and shrubs. They’ll make excellent ladder fuels in the dry time of late June and July. Geez.

Our property’s not in bad shape in terms of defensible space. The previous owner seems to have done much of what’s suggested. To make sure though I’m having the deputy chief of the Elk Creek Fire District come out next Thursday to do a fire mitigation assessment.

Still working on the idea of an external fire sprinkler system. I’ve read many websites, pdf’s. Lots of options, including a few that don’t use water, but spray fire retardant chemicals. Managed to confuse myself, so I e-mailed the state coordinator for wildfire mitigation and asked her to comment on their utility. Lots of wind apparently renders them near to useless and high winds accompany most mountain fires.

Also, they need enough water for 3 hours of continuous sprinkling, 2 hours before the fire to create a moist micro-climate and one hour afterward to protect against embers blown back. That’s likely a good bit more than our well can handle which would require an in-ground water tank.

A new place, new challenges. All part of becoming native to this place.

Family, Our Land and Home

A Library

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Beltane                                                                   Closing Moon

Jon came out yesterday with Ruth and Gabe. The kids immediately go to their room, the one with the painted mural, the legos, the reading nook, the small dvd player. There they play. Gabe puts together lego constructions. Ruth, yesterday, made a duct tape messenger bag and watched a video.

Jon’s primary purpose for coming out was to get started on the built in bookcases for the loft. He measured and we looked at bookcases we can purchase through IKEA. He’ll use the bookcases we buy, then put a molding around them so they look like built-in’s. The pedestal cabinets will get a wood top from Paxton lumber and the lower built-ins will have a surface from them, too.

I’m excited about getting my books off the floor and into final places. Mary said all libraries need “bibliographic control” or they’re useless. The built-ins will allow me to achieve bibliographic control again. In addition to her Ph.D. Mary also has a masters in library science.

360 205370_10150977727553020_150695969_nThere will be, too, metal cabinets for my banker’s boxes that contain manuscripts and novel notes, other research. Jon will also adapt the large wooden crates we had built to ship our two largest paintings into dividers to mark off spaces in the loft: workout area, large project area (tables for spreading things out), reading area and writing area.

Jon’s an amazing guy with lots of different gifts, just like his Mom and his kids. I’m lucky to have married into this clan.

Our Land and Home

Coloradan Leaves Home

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Beltane                                                                          Closing Moon

IMAG0650croppedLoaded up Minnesota specific gardening and plant books, some International Ag Lab chemicals, Artemis honey and wild-grape jam for the Vorhees and stowed it 30 minutes later in the trunk of a little white Nissan. Kate, in her Boulder purchased cloth jacket, took off from the Enterprise parking lot just off Wadsworth in Lakewood. She’ll be in Minneapolis tomorrow, sign the closing papers on Tuesday and meet with R.J. Devick, our money manager, on Thursday. Back here on Shadow Mountain Saturday sometime.

She has a cache of audio books, road food, a Travel Pro packed full of clothes and necessaries. Tom’s gift of a large type Road Atlas travels on the backseat along with the Travel Pro, though she’ll likely rely most on Ophelia, her Garmin. No need for it once she finds Interstate 76, at least not to get to Andover and the motel. But to find the Burnet title office and other spots. It’ll be good to have.

Meanwhile the hounds and I are here in the mountainhome. Thunderstorms today and, if the forecasts hit it, right on through June 1st. A very wet chilly May. Not nearly as much of that often bragged about Colorado sunshine.