Category Archives: Family

Family, Mountains, Music, The West, Travel

They Say It’s Her Birthday

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Rebekah Johnson
Rebekah Johnson

Kate leaves tomorrow for Driggs, Idaho. Her sister, BJ, and her long time s.o., Schecky, have bought a house outside Driggs. BJ’s living there this summer while she plays violin at the Grand Tetons Classical Music Festival in Jackson Hole, a short drive away in Wyoming. She’s played this festival for several years. Schecky and BJ currently live in the Beacon Hotel on Broadway in NYC, not far from Juilliard and Lincoln Center where they met. They’ve lived in the Beacon their entire professional lives. Rent control.

Driggs, then, will be quite a downshift in terms of people and energy. Schecky is originally from the west and they’ve both done extensive backpacking. He plays the cello and has a solo career in Europe and Japan. In the U.S. he plays for the New York City Ballet and the New York Symphony.

BJ turns 60 on the 8th, so this is a birthday trip, but a quick one, since I’m leaving Wednesday for Indiana. With the dogs it’s difficult for Kate and me to travel together on these shorter journeys. Since we bought the Rav4, we’ve only had one car, so we rent from Enterprise and leave the Rav4 for whoever’s at home.

Kate’s taking her featherweight sewing machine and will help BJ with window treatments. She made her chili and cornbread for me yesterday, as well as a peach pie from Colorado Palisade peaches which are now in season.

Family, Our Land and Home

The Eyrie

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Shadow Mountain homestead still under construction. Jon added the shelving unit on Saturday that will hold my tea, teaware, coffee and water heating appliances. That will make the winter a more civilized moment up here in what Kate calls Charlie’s Eyrie. A second story loft at 8,800 feet. An eyrie.

 

We added a new gas stove to our kitchen yesterday. Kate’s adventure with thumb surgery will find me happily back at the grocery store and cooking. But, I really don’t like electric stoves. The kitchen will get a complete makeover, but the stove we needed now.

That generator, the project that will not die, will get leveled and stabilized and wired on September 1st. Alpha Electric will install a ceiling fan in our bedroom on the same day. The gas will get attached, an inspector will come, then we’ll be ready for what happened a couple of weeks ago. In the same process we’ll get an estimate on redoing Kate’s bathroom with a walk-in shower. Safer over time. Skylights need repair, too.

The house, even after all this, will still be missing its soul, our art. The walls are bare, waiting a good feel for where we want paintings, sculpture, travel mementos, photographs. Until the art is hung, the house will not feel fully like home.

 

That will leave the external sprinkler system, probably next spring, whatever kind of cover Jon can create for the gap between the house and the garage (too much snow and uneven icy, ground in winter) and garden/bee works. Jon has an idea for the house/garage gap that may include a greenhouse, which would solve the garden works.

My original vision was fully moved in in two years. I still think that’s about the right length of time. We may make 18 months.

This process is, by turns, frustrating and exhilarating. The frustration is dealing with trades people and their shifting schedules, plus the difficulty of accurately assessing their work, both what needs doing and how well it’s been done. The exhilaration is finishing projects, bringing the whole closer to our vision of home. Time and money.

Family

Immersion

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Grandparent immersion finished up yesterday with a trip to the Colorado History Center. This two week time got us all the way here with the grandkid experience, something we had lagged on a bit with finishing up the move, then the prostate cancer. We ate meals together, rode a train, saw Buffalo Bill’s grave, hiked in the mountains, put our hands on the active exhibits at Robot’s Rising and played with toys at the Colorado History Museum.

There was quiet time with dogs, wandering around in the backyard, playing with legos, reading, sewing. We had to learn each others idiosyncrasies and adapt. There were kerfuffles, too, of course. All of this led us to a deeper appreciation of each other.

Mountain living combined with family, that was the goal. We wanted our home to be our home, separate from Jon and Jen’s not only by distance, but by geography. Buying the house on Shadow Mountain accomplished half of our goal.

The other half has had more complications. There was initial resistance to the distance we were from Pontiac Street. And our refrain in that instance is, “We’re 900 miles closer.” I’m not sure how much of that resistance remains, but this past two weeks demonstrated our resolve. There is, too, the change from occasional visitors to full-time residents. This requires fine-tuning our relationships in ways not previously necessary.

We’ve begun this process, but are far from finished with it. I imagine it will take months, if not years and even then the fine-tuning will change as the kids grow older. Us, too, for that matter.

Dogs, Family, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

On the Path

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gabeuppermaxwell300Two hours in the dentist’s chair yesterday. Cleaning, followed by a crown prep and filling two cavities. When Kate came back from the dentist on Wednesday talking about the sticky fluoride treatment she’d received, it made me realize we’ve had no fluoride in our water for over 20 years. Living with our own well.

Took Gabe and Ruth to the Upper Maxwell Falls trail yesterday afternoon. We didn’t make it to the falls, instead wandering off on an alternate trail that climbed through jumbles of boulders and large, rocky cliffs. The regular trail is very popular in spite of its out of the way location. Over the summer there have been no fewer than six cars and often twenty parked at the trailhead.

We examined plants. Ruth found a snake (she wants one for a pet.), but it slithered away Upper Maxwell Falls Trail1350beneath the rocks. We climbed on the rocks and looked out. Nature provides something new, something noteworthy every foot or so. It was a slow hike. Here were lichen, familiar forms from Minnesota. There was a very late blooming Indian Paint Brush, its fiery bloom resting on the ground. The trees, some of them, were huge, trunks so big that Gabe, Ruth and I couldn’t get our arms around them holding hands.

Maxwell Creek exerted the magnetic attraction that water has for humans. We went down twice to be closer to it, the first time we crossed over to the alternative trail that we followed. The second time we crossed back to the Falls trail. Ruth talked about some camp counselors who followed a mountain stream to its source, an artesian spring, drinking from it, since “water is never fresher.”

Being in the Arapaho National Forest has its own version of mindfulness, one in which attention leaves the world of the day-to-day and focuses on an interesting rock, a blooming flower, the sound of water rushing over rocks, the view from a boulder. The eye scans for what is new or unfamiliar, being delighted constantly by a patch of cowslip, a bit of lichen on a lodgepole pine, a small squirrel playing peek-a-book around a thin aspen trunk.

Ruth and I are going back this morning, taking Kepler along in his harness.

Colorado, Family, Mountains, The West, US History

All Aboard!

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RR250Colorado’s mining culture, essential to the state’s history, has left imprint after imprint on mountainsides in the existence of mining towns like Idaho Springs, Leadville and Georgetown, in dirty yellow tailings runoff like flooded the Animas River a couple of weeks ago, and  in now tourist oriented railroads that once carried miners, their supplies and their product, often gold and silver in the early days.

The Georgetown loop railroad, a 4.1 mile trip to a 2 mile away destination, exists because the grade between Georgetown and Silver Plume would be too steep, 7%, without it. Ruth and Gabe spent part of their 2012 ride cowering from the blasts of the train’s whistle, but not this year. This year it was “awesome.”

RRGabe250Kate and I are down to our last two days of grandparent immersion, the two week plunge that began last week Monday. Tomorrow I’m taking Ruth and Gabe hiking on the Upper Maxwell Falls Trail, about a mile and a half from our house. Today though, as Ruth said, “Sadly, Grandpop will not be with us.” I have a two-hour marathonman dental session. What a joy.

(Gabe standing on the bridge over Clear Creek, which gives Clear Creek County its name.)

Family, GeekWorld, Science, Weather +Climate

Harm No Human

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Fog this morning. Which reminds me. When we have thunderstorms here, often the lightning strikes and thunder are right on top of us. At 8,800 feet we’re at a height where cumulus clouds live. This gives the storms much more immediacy.

Longmont robotWe went to Longmont yesterday to their municipal museum which has a hands-on robotics exhibit. In one exhibit several buttons allowed control of an animatronics robot. It had a plastic face, with titanium bars for shoulders, arms jointed at the elbows and legs with knee joints. Pressing the buttons would make the robot bow and smile, jiggle its arms, wave in a chaotic fashion. Gabe thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

Another exhibit had several robot muscles, hydraulic powered for the most part, and buttons activated the muscles. It was interesting to see the parts and imagine fitting them into a robot. At one stop you could control lights and sounds using hands and feet. At another a joystick allowed control of a disaster robot as it investigated the site of an explosion.

Both Gabe and Ruth, but especially Ruth, have built several robots using a sophisticated lego kit we bought for them for their birthdays. Yesterday there was an article about purchasing used robots from industry as newer, better robots replace older models. It seems that the age of robots for domestic use, already evident with the Roomba, may be emerging. Asimov we need you now.

 

Family

The G.K.

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chiefhosa300Jon and Jen brought Ruth and Gabe up last night. They’ll be here today, then Tuesday night and Wednesday, Thursday night and Friday. The breaks are so Gabe can go home and get his infusion of factor to get him through the day without joint bleeds due to his hemophilia. It’s a disease you have to pay attention to, but not one you want to make an obsession, though it would be easy to do so.

Today Kate has made a sewing tutorial for Ruth which they’ll work with until 11:30 or so when we leave for Idaho Springs, lunch, and then Georgetown, loop railroad. After the railroad we drive them back to Denver, eat a meal out, then drive home ourselves.

On Monday Kate will go in and pick up Ruth and Gabe from Schweigert elementary. They have a half day of school. She’ll be with them in the afternoon.

Jen’s excited about her new job as teacher partner. It involves work only with teachers, no classroom work for her. She runs a teacher resource center and provides feedback and support to teachers. She had to go through an interesting interview process, two hours in length and in multiple formats, just to qualify for the job.

The sun, emerging now at 6:16 am, lights up Black Mountain, puffy cumulus clouds scud over its peak. We had rain storms again yesterday afternoon and last night. Lots and lots of water. Repairs will be needed for at least two of our skylights. Another matter to coordinate.

Family, Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain

A Green Rocky Mountain August

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Rain continues to come to the mountains. When Kate and I went out early this morning to Evergreen for our business meeting, there was dew on the grass, tips of the spruce needles and faint wisps of vapor rising from the valley floor. The intensity of green reminded both of us of the Midwest, of northern Minnesota. Usually, Shadow Mountain and its neighbors would be taken over by browns and dull greens. Not this year.

Our lives continue, with each small journey through the mountains, to become more and more embedded here, memories filling us up with Colorado. Not in place of Minnesota, no, but adding to those memories. And calling these new ones memories of home.

We visited IKEA and ordered the last of the bookshelves, 5 more. Cybergremlins have attacked our credit card online, not hackers, but ones making it difficult in certain instances to get websites to accept our valid account. As a result, we had to get in the car, drive down the mountain, go south on Hwy 470 along the Front Range, get off at Yosemite Street and proceed to the large blue monument to Swedish efficiency on IKEA way in Centennial. There, we made the exact same order I had to tried to make online, used the same credit card and had a successful experience.

The whole trip reminded us of the real benefits of buying online. The physical moving is left up to the product, not the purchaser. Of course, while wandering the intentionally maze-like corridors of the IKEA store, we did find that wonderful children’s storage and table combination and a probable small table for our breakfast area. That wouldn’t have happened online. On balance I would rather have stayed home and discovered both another way.