Yule Stock Show Moon
Category Archives: Jefferson County
Pounding, Screeching, Whining
Yule Stock Show Moon
Can you feel the tension creeping out from here? The (we hope) final day of our kitchen remodel is underway. The new countertop is in, the new broom closet (unprimed, however) is in, the microwave and sinks and faucets are in. Various items, punchlist items, are being taken care of. A couple of other custom cabinets are waiting to be installed. Saws whining, drills screeching, hammers pounding.
Todd’s multicultural crew, Michele (French) and Luis (Latino), is here and have been since 8:30 am. Todd’s a good guy, but he’s a big picture schmoozer in a small picture detail oriented business. We hired him and we’re riding the process out to the end, but we could have done better. The price however was right.
Kate left in the middle of the day for more hand/thumb physical therapy. She came back with black kinesiology tape snaking out from the top of her thumb midway up her forearm. Kinesiology tape? Yep. This gave her time away, a spa hour for her opposable digit.
Nextdoor Shadow Mountain, an electronic water cooler, had a woman on yesterday who wrote: “Any recommendations for an electrician?? The company we were using did not show up for a scheduled appointment, and no one has responded to texts, phone messages, or emails.” This is the story here at altitude. Over and over. In all trades and services.
Last week I wrote the heads of three local business schools and suggested there might be a business opportunity up here. No takers yet, but it’s early days.
That’s how we ended up with Todd. He actually showed up.
Meet and Greet
Yule Stock Show Moon
Kate’s at the Bailey Library, a sewing day from 9 to 3 with the Bailey Patchworkers. They make stone soup and work throughout, stopping only for a brief business meeting. Quilting and handwork have been Kate’s entré to local folk. She has been invited to join a needlework group, too. It meets next week. All part of settling in.
Even though we’ve had a bumpy road with many of our house related projects, it occurred to me that even a bumpy start still grounds us in the local culture. We’ve learned about the shortage of folks in the skilled trades, an apparent difference of work ethic between here and Minnesota and had to adjust our expectations about how long projects will take, to get started and to finish. There are local habits and customs, a mountain way of doing things, that we have had to adapt to.
Sometime soon we’re going to start attending services at Beth Evergreen, a small Jewish reconstructionist congregation in Evergreen. They have a more relaxed worship schedule, none during the Christmas and New Year’s holiday time and when they are regular they alternate between Friday night and Saturday morning. I’m looking forward to an opportunity to meet folks.
Quite an Array
Yule New (Stock Show) Moon
Called up our solar array on Alternative Energy Systems. Each of our microinverters, one per panel, sends out a message about its panels performance. 27 panels, 27 graphics with the amount of energy in watts being produced at any one moment. Very cool. Except for the fact that we have snow on the panels and only a few are producing at near optimum. Plus, even with tree cutting we’re still getting some shading. This will take some time, maybe a full year, to assess. The good news is that electricity now comes from the sun through the photovoltaic panels and into our home. (chart from today)
Lights by the Lake. With Latkes
Samhain New (Winter) Moon
Watched several different people, a rabbi, a politician, a cantor, a newspaperman and a Chamber of Commerce woman struggle with lighting a menorah on the shore of Lake Evergreen. We’ve had chinooks for the last few days and though muted at night they still made the bic auto-match flicker and the temporarily burning wicks blink out.
The politician, Tim Neville, is a conservative Republican. He had real difficulty getting the shamas lit. It was as if the winds were saying this one has no light within him. To be fair, others had difficulty, too.
This was a pan-Judaism event with Beth Evergreen, where Kate and I have attended educational classes, Judaism in the Foothills and B’Nai Chaim reform synagogue collaborating. It was not a huge crowd, maybe 75 to a 100 people: a few boys with prayer shawl fringes dangling beneath their t-shirts, two rabbis and a cantor, tables with Hanukkah gelt, dreidels, a two table set up for the latke cookoff* and an adorable two year old girl whose body posture said she was ready to rule the world.
The evening was enough for Kate to say, “I want to join.” She means Beth Evergreen.
I was happy the event took place to a giant fir tree festooned with many lights. That’s my religious tradition, Germanic paganism.
*Kate’s latkes are superior, in every way, to the ones I tried last night.
Mountains and Menorahs
Samhain New (Winter) Moon
A public menorah lighting at the Lake House in Evergreen tonight. Kate and I are going. There’s also a latke cook-off and I look forward to helping assess the entrants. Evergreen is a downhill ride, 7,200 feet to our 8,800. We take county 78, which starts out at county 73 as Shadow Mountain Drive, changes, very near our house to Black Mountain Drive, and then, 2 miles further down mountain toward Evergreen, becomes Brook Forest Drive. It’s a curvy, forested, rocky road with the Arapaho National Forest on both sides for much of the way.
A joy of mountain living is that the quotidian can be extraordinary. On these drives we often encounter mule deer, elk, occasionally fox. Kate saw what must have been a mountain lion, long and catlike, slink away from the road. In the spring snow melt fills Shadow Creek, Deer Creek, Cub Creek with water churning and roiling. As the snow melt wanes, these same creeks become lazy wandering streams and must, in drier years, lose their water altogether at some point.
The flora, seemingly sparse in that only two species of tree, lodgepole and aspen, live in any numbers at our altitude, changes once in the fall to a minimalist palette of gold and green. Once the golden aspen leaves become skirts, the trunks of these trees become bony fingers, white and twisted. In the spring the green leaves return and the mountain views become more uniform for a time.
Black Mountain, Shadow Mountain, Conifer Mountain and all the others around our neighborhood change, too. The flora goes up and down them, different with the seasons, but on display in often vertiginous falls and in huge rock gardens where outcroppings are bare but surrounded by trees. At night the mountain sides light up with homes also up and down, a sort of external dwarfheim, often invisible in the day. Precipitation, especially snow, alters the mountains immediately, sometimes obscuring them, most often painting white over their peaks and valleys.
We have found a new place to live, our mountain home. It suits us now.
2015 Home Project Year
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
A father and son team came over Monday morning to do a site survey. Their task is to create a reliable internet connection between the modem and the garage. Might be wi-fi. Might be hardwired. Hardwired is the preference and that’s what they’ll work on first. Hopefully they can make all the ethernet jacks live at the same time. That would make positioning things in the future much more flexible. They’ll be back next Monday to work.
The kitchen remodel is on hiatus right now, waiting on the countertop’s creation and the arrival of various doors and a large cabinet injured in the first shipment. Kate’s got great ideas for color once the remodel is done. Slowly, slowly.
The December 29th date for switching on the solar panels has me a bit twitchy. The new rule promulgated by IREA (Intermountain Rural Electric Association) goes into effect on January 1st. It makes demand charges for peak load times, evenings here, so high that the result is solar panel investments will not pay out. IREA needs to install our net meter before January 1st for us to be grandfathered in under the old rules, rules that allow our solar investment to go positive in about 12 years. Having the same people in charge of installing our net meter who benefit if it’s done late doesn’t seem like the best thing, but it’s the way it is. And the 29th. So close.
Back to the fire mitigation today. I have some free time and warm weather has melted snow cover from downed trees I need to limb. This is an all winter project, taking advantage of various windows of acceptable weather conditions.
We’ve had a long string of projects this year. Makes sense since we’ve moved into a new house. After 20 years in Andover we’d adapted 153rd Avenue to our peculiar needs and values. Now in some sense we’re starting over. Each step, the bookshelves in the loft, the generator install, the new gas lines, the new boiler, the new stickley table, sealcoating the driveway, fire mitigation work, solar panels, the new bed and tempurpedic mattress, the kitchen remodel and now the loft internet connection have met some priority or another.
A few, the generator, gas lines and boiler, were driven by necessity. The seal coating was timely. The bookshelves, the kitchen remodel and the solar panels on the other hand are projects designed to make our home more responsive to our values. The new bed and mattress made sense given aging bones and joints. The fire mitigation is necessary, but also enjoyable, something I can do.
We are in these ways becoming native to this place, learning its contours and possibilities and just as important, it’s limitations. Home. Black Mountain Drive. On Shadow Mountain.
Where the Wild Things Are
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
A video from 2:30 am today. This is very close in a straight line from our house, though that straight line goes over Black Mountain. The saying here is that if you have deer, you have mountain lions. We have plenty of deer and elk.
The Year of Two Thanksgivings
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Grandson Gabe walked in the door and asked two important questions right away: Grandpop, what’s the password for your wi-fi? This was followed quickly by a pulled down t-shirt. See my new port! It was on his right side, had a small yellow butterfly valve in place temporarily and looked good. The end of a week long saga of hospital, surgery, recovery. That’s what he and his parents did on Thanksgiving day, Thursday.
So, we had a Thanksgiving brunch today: prime rib roast, popovers, squash from Jon and Jen’s garden, a rice dish from Barb, then pecan pie and homemade vanilla bean ice cream.
It was one of those children at the table holiday meals where the kids could hardly wait to get away. God, I remember that feeling. Stuck with the old people talking about grown up stuff. Boring. Really boring. I’m dying here. Let me go, please let me go.
Barb (Jen’s mother) recounted the story of her husband, Henry, and his family’s escape from Romania in 1964. Her father-in-law, mother-in-law and 16 year old Henry plus some other family members got ransomed by a group specializing in getting Jews out from behind the Iron Curtain. Henry’s parents wanted to go Israel. They got a flight to Vienna, then Genoa where they were told it would be six months before they could get papers for Israel.
Henry’s father knew there was a large Romanian Jewish community in Buffalo, New York, so they went there instead. Barb grew up in Buffalo. The rest of the story is Jen, Karen and Andy.
These are the long tendrils that any Thanksgiving meal sends out, connections weak and strong to ancestors who suffered, who triumphed, who slogged out their life and in that way allowed the people around this table to come together.
I’m grateful for each one in that great cloud of past lives who preceded this Saturday Thanksgiving on Black Mountain Drive. Yes, even those we don’t like so much. Without them, we wouldn’t have eaten this meal as a family today.
Oh. And the dogs got the four rib bones with plenty of meat on them. I’m grateful, too, for the doggy ancestors who brought this current pack of ours into existence.
Friday Matters
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Installation mid-point inspection today for solar panels. A steady snow came down when the Jefferson County inspector climbed on our roof with Nathan. What he said I don’t know since I was asleep at the time, but I’m sure we passed. Fortunately the remainder of the installation will take place on Monday, forecast as clear.
Kate and I drove to Home Depot and picked up various items, most relevant to the season. Fuel stabilizer for the snow blower fuel? Yes. Chains for the snow blower? Nope. Lighted, moving deer for a holiday inflection? Yes. Trufuel for the chainsaw? Yes. Clothing hook for the loft bathroom? A nice one from the pine cone cabin shop. Material for decorating the pine cone wreaths we bought at the Conifer High School Christmas boutique? Kate got those yesterday at Target. Lighted fox made from grapevine? Also from Target yesterday. Tire rack for the Michelin Latitudes now awaiting the end of snow? Nope. A normal sweep for this and that.
We had a mid-morning break at Lucile’s, another fine New Orleans food place. There’s a Luciles in Denver, too, but this one is closer to us. Chicory coffee cafe au lait and beignets. Delightful.
The snow has been coming down since sometime around 11:00 and it’s now almost three. This is wet, but not bulky. Pretty though.