Category Archives: Jefferson County

Jefferson County, Mountains

Nearby

Leave a comment

Living History Days
Experience the Story of Staunton State Park
SEPTEMBER 8 and 9 10:00-3:00
Activities at the Group Picnic Area

• History of Staunton State Park, Staunton family, and more
• Notorious Reynolds Gang’s hidden treasure hunt
• Local historical organizations with interesting displays
• Ute Spirit Tree Hikes (Times to follow on web page)
• Mountain Genealogists Society
• Square dancing!!
• Sharing /Storytelling with local historians

Take a hayride to join in activities in the Historic Cabin District
• Johnny cakes and lemonade
• Rachael Staunton’s Medicinal Garden
• Trappers and Hunters of the Day
• Indian talking sticks
• Cabin building demonstrations
• Musical performances with Rex Rideout
• Historical games

For more information see the park webpage: https://cpw.state.co.us/placestogo/parks/staunton or http://www.friendsofstauntonstatepark.org. 12102 S. Elk Creek Road; Pine, CO 80470

Cooking, Family, Health, Jefferson County, Judaism, Mountains, Third Phase

Police Treating Blacks Awfully

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                Waning Summer Moon

Gabe and Jon
Gabe and Jon

Gabe opened up his large notebook yesterday and showed me a page empty except for a sort of title: Police treating blacks awfully. This is his project. Jon wanted me to help him with some research so we went up to the loft. I suggested to him that we put his title into google. We did that. He chose several articles ranging from an essay on prison brutality to a Gallup poll on how blacks perceive their treatment by the police.

To put a generational spin on it, he said, “We could just add these to Googledocs.” Oh. Well, ok. Do you know your Google account information? He got up and typed it in, commenting, as Ruth always does, that he doesn’t like my track ball mouse. We then added links to all the articles he chose to a blank Google doc that will show up wherever he has access to a computer. No library involved, at least so far. He will also interview black friends and adults. This is all interesting not least because this project isn’t due until May/June, 2019. Pretty long range thinking for a 10 year old.

Love
Love

Meanwhile corned beef simmered on the stove, awaiting the addition of potatoes, carrots, and cabbage. Sounded good to Kate and these days I try to cook whatever sounds good to her. I still can’t get it moist like Frank does. Gotta ask him his secret. Tasted ok. Today. Corned beef hash. A real favorite for my palate.

Kate had a consult with a gastroenterologist, a Korean/American, Dr. Rhee. He’s going to look at her gall bladder and do another upper GI endoscopy to look for a possible stricture below her stomach. She sounded hopeful, but weary. Easy to understand. This is like torture. Her nausea is episodic, but always looming.

She was tired last night and so was I. She asked me to clean up after the meal and I said,”No.” Felt bad immediately. I was tired, too, but I don’t have her inner fatigue. So, I cleaned up. This is tough stuff because it creates tension where tension only exacerbates.

I’m lucky to be in relationship with such an intelligent and confident woman. Have been. Am. Will be. I see that woman every day; she often doesn’t. Painful.

Muddy BuckThere’s a sort of sneaky self-satisfaction that comes from holding a business meeting on the boardwalk in Evergreen. Alan Rubin and I met at the Muddy Buck in the morning, sitting outside on its veranda, really a wide spot on the couple of blocks long board walk that I mentioned a few posts ago. On a Monday morning discussing the religious school class we start teaching on September 5th, we saw the usual flow of cars on Hwy 74, the main street of this tourist destination portion of Evergreen. This is a place people come to visit for an afternoon or a weekend or a week. And we live here.

 

 

Dogs, Garden, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain

A Great Pagan Morning

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                  Monsoon Moon

By I, Atirador, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons
By I, Atirador, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons Irish Giant Deer

Rigel barking. Gertie and Kep run to the back fence to back her up. There, in the utility easement, just outside our 5 foot fence, a ten or twelve point elk buck, regal and calm. Rigel barking. He walks, slowly, along the fence line, gets to the end of our property, then turns around and walks quietly back. You, dog, are nothing more than a nuisance. Get out from behind that fence if you can.

The Irish Wolfhound, half of Rigel’s gene pool, was a deer hound until the Irish discovered while hunting deer with them that they killed the wolves who were also hunting deer. The Irish deer were very big, weighing between 1,100 and 1,900 pounds, as big as the current Alaskan moose. To the extent that memory of that prey is still in Rigel’s body’s somehow, the elk would have seemed not so formidable. Rigel has always been a predator, Gertie and Kep humor her, but don’t have the same instincts.

A great pagan morning. First the glorious elk, then time spent dividing hosta, finishing what I started yesterday. While doing it, digging up the root ball, separating distinct sections to transplant, hands in the soil, remembering how and what else needed to be done, I greeted a part of myself that has been quiescent for almost four years. The horticulturist. No vegetable and fruit garden. No orchard. No flowers. No bees. I miss him, but the barrier here, unless we buy a greenhouse, is too much for me at this stage of life. Even so, this was a good reminder. Hands in the soil, gardening tools out, used to occupy many, most, of my summer days in Minnesota.

at the start
at the start
in process
in process
Finished
Finished

 

Jefferson County, Mountains

I’ve Seen Fire and I’ve Seen Rain

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                  Monsoon Moon

ECFD LOGOForest service fire danger signs look like the tachometer on an engine revving too fast. And, they’re staying there. Just like the tach, the longer it redlines, the more possibility for something bad. The really big fires this season, the Spring Creek and 416 fires, are still burning though the Spring Creek Fire is at 91% containment after having burned 108,000 acres. The 416, now at 54,000 acres, is still only 50% contained, but the firefighters feel confident it’s under control*.

We have entered the monsoon season though it’s not reached us here on Shadow Mountain. Those late afternoon rain storms have hit some of the western and southern parts of the state, which is good. That’s where the extreme drought conditions have persisted all year.

*”If you see smoke on the 416 fire on a hot day, that’s perfectly normal! Its a big fire and it’ll take a lot of rain or snow to put it out completely. But for now, you have rain and by the end of the week, you will have a LOT of it. Please be careful if you live at the outflow of Dyke Creek, Tripp Creek or in the Falls Creek area. The severity of the burn means there could be severe flooding.” inciweb

Meanwhile, on the Big Island yesterday:

July 14, fissure 8
July 14, fissure 8
July 14, Kapoho bay
July 14, Kapoho bay
July 14, New Hawai'ian island in kapoho bay
July 14, New Hawai’ian island in Kapoho Bay
July 14, island closeup
July 14, island closeup

 

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Work, Jefferson County, Judaism, MOOCS, Our Land and Home, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Sierra Club, The West, Third Phase, Travel, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

A Lunar Month of Significance

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                     Woolly Mammoth Moon

Rustic Ranch, Bailey, breakfast on the Durango Trip. Sweet cream pancakes.
Rustic Ranch, Bailey, breakfast on the Durango Trip. Sweet cream pancakes.

As the Woolly Mammoth Moon phases away toward a new moon, its month, the same lunar month we always have, yet also a different lunar month from any we’ve ever had, all spiraling through space as we follow the sun while orbiting it, I just wanna say thanks for what happened under its gentle influence.

It rose as a new moon, invisible but watching us, on June 13th, the day Mark, Paul, Tom and I headed out to Durango and the 416 fire. It was a trip both across southwestern Colorado and back into 30 years of friendship. Not to mention back to the days of the Pueblo dwellers of Mesa Verde. It was, in a sense, a way to say to each other that, yes, these friendships are for a lifetime. That this lifetime, whatever it may mean individually includes each other–and Bill. When you think about it, affirming the power of our past and honoring the reality of our future, is pretty damned cool.

Ode lays out the trip
Ode lays out the trip

It was also on this same trip that I read the essays about ground projects by Bernard Williams and about setting a rejection goal. The first one affirmed my existential sense that life gets meaning from our intentions and our labor to fulfill them; the second has transformed my writing life. A big, huge, amazing, wonderful thing.

Also under the Woolly Mammoth Moon, Alan Rubin and I began digging in to developing a curriculum for 6th and 7th graders in the Religious School at CBE. This work has affirmed the depth of my immersion into the Jewish world of CBE and reconstructionist thought. It also underscores my continuing fascination, see posts below, with the supernatural, or at least the fruits of humanity’s speculation about the supernatural.

20180415_155755
Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, ballet at CBE

Also under the WMM, I’ve been putting together the Jewish Studies Sunday Sampler series for the 2018/2019 adult education year. This will feature both courses from the Great Courses company and courses from the MOOC aggregator, Coursera plus the odd film or two.

I also met Harv Teitelbaum. He’s the Sierra Club’s lead for their anti-fracking initiative, a big deal here in Colorado. I believe he and I share a similar attitude toward our current political reality and a similar focus on local races while maintaining an emphasis on the Great Work.

My flaxen haired Nordic goddess
My flaxen haired Nordic goddess

It’s been a big, big month for me and I want to say out loud how grateful I am to all of you who’ve made it possible. Yes, Kate, especially you. It’s been a very difficult month for you nausea wise, I know, but you picked up a board membership at CBE and guided the food committee for the Patchworkers. All the time you’ve been supportive, though understandably surprised, at my new commitment to finally, finally, finally submitting my work. You’re the gyroscope in all this, keeping us stable and focused. Thanks, Kate.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Jefferson County, Judaism, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Learning to Teach

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                 Woolly Mammoth Moon

Tu B'shevat Seder, 2018 Religious School, CBE
Tu B’shevat Seder, 2018 Religious School, CBE

I’m neck deep, ok maybe in over my head, in lesson planning, something I’ve not done before. I realized though that I did do a lot of educating over my twelve years at the MIA and I do have good facilitator, process skills. Even so, I’m having to learn about a key moment of Jewish development, the b’nai mitzvah, oddly, a marker of the very same transition Ruth is in right now. There’s as much culture as theology here, a cultural milieu with which I have little familiarity. But I’m picking it up.

Yesterday I finally got an organizational handle on what I was doing. That’s the moment when a lot of study and thinking begins to sort itself out into recognizable components. In this instance it was a religious school year long calendar, each class for which Alan and I are responsible indicated by date. In other columns there are holidays that occur in a particular month, September, for example, has Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and Sukkot; middah of the month, for example, again, September is hitlamdut or curiosity; a column with one of Maimonides 13 articles of faith for each month. There are also Hebrew letters for each class day, a progression throughout the year that will follow the kabbalist’s tree of life and links to the parsha (Torah portion) for each week.

20180315_080213With these elements identified lesson planning will be easier because content can be plucked from any of the columns to enhance a particular class. There’s another move in the process, integrating the b’nai mitzvah curriculum developed by a national organization called Moving Traditions with those classes for which Alan and I have to develop our own lesson plans. Once how we do that is decided and dates for the b’nai mitzvah classes show up on the calendar, we should be able to move fairly quickly to a plan for the year.

I love this stuff, the pulling together of disparate complexities into one whole. This is a big challenge and I like that, too. Not to mention that I really enjoy the people at Beth Evergreen.

Colorado, Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, The West

A long, hot summer

Leave a comment

Summer                                                            Woolly Mammoth Moon

Fire mitigation, May 2016
Fire mitigation, May 2016

Smoky the Bear’s fat index finger points at Very High on all the fire danger forest signs we drive by. In Evergreen the fire station there says Extremely High. The Spring Creek Fire is at 103,000 acres burned and 35% containment. The 416 is at 54,000 and 45% containment. The Weston Pass Fire has closed 285 at Fairplay and is at 12,000 acres with 17% containment.

There’s a lot of low level anxiety here, knowing all it would take is a careless camper, a lightning strike, an automobile accident to put us in danger, too. The big fires are in the southern and southwestern parts of the state where some areas have passed beyond extreme drought conditions, so the fuel load is tinder dry.

Half of the slash, May, 2016
Half of the slash, May, 2016

We are left not with trust, then, but only hope. Hope that fire will not burn down our houses and upset our lives. Once Kate and I decided that if it burns, it burns and we move on, my anxiety level decreased. We chose to live here, chose to build our Colorado life in an area vulnerable to fire.

August 2016
August 2016

Choices, like our psyches, are never only this or only that. We moved here to be closer to the grandkids, yet to have our own life in the mountains, too. That is, we chose to move from the relatively safe from fire Andover (though the occasional derecho, tornado and hail storms were destructive.) to the wildlife/urban interface of the Rocky Mountains. It’s desirability is captured by its adjectives, we are where the wildlife live, yet urban amenities are also close. We have the beauty of the Rockies, the mule deer bucks and does that visit our yard, the elk that bugle in the fall, the mountain lions that cough in the night, black bears and all manner of other creatures. Yet, we also have the existential danger, especially high in early and mid-summer, of fire. Not an either/or, but a both/and.

Life, too, though not a choice we made (but to continue our life is a choice), puts us in an even more dire dilemma. We were thrown by circumstance into the life/reality interface, knowing that the wildfire of our death grows increasingly less contained as we age. At some point it will engulf us, burn out the wild mind that has carried us from birth. I’m ok with that, too. Not that I have a choice.