Went down the hill last night to Grow Your Own, a hydroponics shop and wine bar that features local musicians. It’s just at the base of Conifer and Shadow Mountains so very close to our house. Tom McNeill sang. “I’m an old guy,” he said, “and I know old songs.”
He sang the songs of our youth: Oh, Lord Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz, Little Red Riding Hood, Something’s Happenin’ Here, Mamas and Papas, John Denver, Pete Seeger those kind of songs. A reminder of the person who inhabited those days, the me who was out there “singing songs and carryin’ signs.”
Latin today. The Myrmidons from Book VII of the Metamorphoses
I would like to report a minor victory. Patrick came out from Golden. He actually knows Kohler generators. He knows what it will take to fix it. At this point in the generator installation saga I’m agog with wonder.
He says the problem with electricians here in the mountains is that the work dried up several years ago and most of the electricians left. Now when work has begun to ramp up again there are too few of them for too many projects. He hires a lot of electricians as a primary solar installer and says he has a lot of problems, too.
Anyhow, sometime soon we will have a functional generator. Only a year and a quarter into the process. Yippee.
Go now, the snow has ended. This paraphrase of the last words of the Catholic mass sums up life after 18 inches of snow. Things get moving again after the last snow falls and the plows get roads opened and sanded. That last being especially important for those of us who live in the mountains.
Snow storms bring beauty in their wake unlike their wilder cousins tornadoes, hurricanes, derechos. Here are a couple of photographs from this morning.
The snow. A lot more overnight. Beautiful, foggy on Black Mountain. Lodgepole branches white and bowing toward the earth awaiting a wind to slough off the snow. We become snow hermits, watching the flakes fall in our forested backyard, feeling a part of the mountain in a way not possible under other weather conditions.
It’s funny, but the snow, which dominates life when it comes in this quantity, is more important than Cruz beating Trump or Bernie tieing Hillary. We are apart from the lower, literally lower, 48 states, sitting up here on Shadow Mountain surrounded by other peaks and covered in white. The dominant note here is silence. Politics are too noisy, too bright and colorful to matter. And faraway.
This will change of course. In the way of Colorado the roads will be clear soon. The driveway, after I blow it, will also clear. The quiet will last a while though, as will the snow in the yard. Even warmer temperatures won’t touch that in the near term.
Right now our solar panels have a snowy cap maybe a foot deep, so no electricity from them until a melt. I’m going to investigate deep cycle batteries and see if there’s a combination of deep cycle batteries and our generator that might carry us off the grid entirely. That is not yet, however. For now we’re relying on IREA to pump electricity into our system.
My sister wrote me today from Singapore: “I’ve never seen such an election as this one-I can’t stand the thought of the Trump as president-is it possible ??? Just seems to so much press here…”
My answer to her follows. It’s how I see the election right now:
His main appeal is to white folks left behind by the current Gilded Age. Is it possible he could be the Republican nominee? Increasingly, amazingly, it seems so. But the Republican establishment, the old and big money doesn’t want him. What he’s doing is splitting the GOP base. That means he’ll be weaker in a general election.
The new demographics of the U.S. imply that people of color, especially Latinos, and younger voters plus the traditional Democratic base of liberal whites, especially women hold the key to the Presidency. If they turn out, and that’s always the big question with the Democratic vote, no Republican candidate has a chance.
However. Both Sanders (my guy) and Hillary have substantial downsides. Still, in an election in which Trump is the alternative I believe the Democratic base will rally-out of revulsion if nothing else.
It is a peculiar election. The one that bears the most resemblance in recent memory might be when George Wallace ran as a third party candidate. He was a right wing populist, too. He carried Indiana and changed its politics ever after. By encouraging the southern diaspora to vote against their economic self-interests, essentially through racist appeals, he moved those voters out of the liberal union voter camp into what would become Nixon’s moral majority and the Reagan Democrats of later years. Much more conservative. Many of those folks are now in the Tea Party or are rabidly pro-Trump.
“Please be very careful if you are outside tonight and if you have animals. My next door neighbor was outside with her dog about 6 tonight and a mountain lion ran out from under her deck and ran between our houses. She got her dog inside quickly.”
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.
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.
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)
