Monthly Archives: January 2014

Family, Sport, Travel, US History

Write About Baby Animals.

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Winter                                           Seed Catalog Moon

Gabe, to whom I read some of my blog entry about our trip to the Children’s Museum, asked me, as we were walking away from the MLK Rodeo, “Grandpop, write about baby animals.  About how cute they are and how I love them.”  We’d just seen a Holstein and her calf bedded down for the night in a pen behind the Denver Coliseum.

This was our usually annual visit to the stock show.  (I missed last year with another round of doggy surgery and expense.)  We go walk through the exhibits, look at farm equipment, see livestock exhibitions, admire the Cinch cruel denim ads, the cowboy hats and boots for sale, the cattle stalls and leather vests.  One booth, Colorado Tanners, had hides  and pelts which could be made into anything you want.  Can’t forget the really big belt buckles, lots of’em.

It was busy this year because we came on MLK day.  In the past I’ve tried to hit weekdays when the crowds are smaller.  This time, though, I wanted to take the kids especially to the MLK rodeo with all African-American cowboys and cowgirls.  It was a good choice, as it turned out, but it meant the holiday crowds were there.

106 years old this is the largest stock in the world by number of animals involved.  It’s a big deal and people come from all over to participate.  I always see folks with Iowa State sweat-shirts, for example.

The rodeo announcer distinguished himself as a racist, saying, “There’s one thing about this crowd.  They’ve got rhythm.”  But worse, at another point, when a second announcer described a 24-year old cowgirl as looking 14, the announcer said, “But that never stopped you did it.”  This tarnished the event for me. Which is putting it mildly.

The events themselves though were good.  Calf-roping, considered a high art among the rodeo crowd, was good. (if you weren’t the calf.) So was the bronc-riding and the barrel racers.

When we got back to the hotel, Ruth grabbed me and said, “I don’t want you to go Grandpop.”  Gabe came around the car and gave me a big hug.  So did Jon and Jen.  It was family.  Three generations appreciating each other.  Wow.

Family, Memories, Politics, Travel, US History

DANK

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Winter                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

Dank.  That’s the name of the place.  The medical dispensary that now has a retail recreational marijuana cash register, too.

This hidden store is in a setting of low warehouse and light manufacturing type buildings.  The brick exterior has no sign and the only evidence of its existence is a black and white piece of 8.5 by 11 taped to the window that says: Dank.  Keeping it kind.

Once inside the entry way there is a long hallway with office suites off to both sides.  Only at the far end of the hall, maybe 100 feet away is any human being evident..  Sure enough, DANK is the last office suite on the left.

A colorful sign advertising various forms of marijuana:  loose, baked, oil and kief (a product unfamiliar to me).

A guy in the required knit hat, ear buds and baggy sweater, a couple of days of growth says, “I have to check your I.D.”

As you might imagine, I gave him a look.  The gray-hair and wrinkles?  “Sorry, man.  The state requires it.  I know you’re more than 21.  But I have to check the expiration date.”  General laughter in the room.

Off to the right is a glass vitrine with three shelves holding hand blown pipes and bowls and bongs, artistic.  A roped walkway, ala security lines, held a dozen or so people, mostly young men in their twenties, but there was another older man like me and one woman.

At the end of the line were two cash registers flanking a glass display case with white chocolate with marijuana baked in, chocolate chip cookies, lighters, including a bic lighter, green and with DANK written over a marijuana leaf.  The cashiers served as marijuana sommeliers, answering questions about various strains like indica and sativa, prices per ounce.

To an old 60’s guy this was a scene resonant with memories of bags scored from furtive dealers, parties with just a hint of paranoia.  And here, in this state where my grandchildren live, and in a store not a mile from their home, people bought and sold grass.  Legally.

It was, as we might have said, a trip.

 

General

Ganja Trail

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Winter                                                            Seed Catalog Moon

Back from a failed attempt to find a regular marijuana store. Located several medical dispensaries and one regular store, but it was not open.  The medical facilities are open 7 days a week.  This was not a well-planned effort.  I found a stretch of Colfax (a main street) that had lots of green marijuana leafs on a map served up by weedmaps.com, then drove there trying to spot the stores as I drove.

I’m going to try again around lunch time.  Getting a peek at the first month of the first legal marijuana seems like a travel opportunity.  Actually, I’m gonna go right now because the cleaning lady just came.

 

General

Steve’s Snapping Dogs

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Winter                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

You can take a Minnesotan out of a Minnesota January, but you can’t take the Minnesota January out of the Minnesotan.  Result?  When it was 72 today here in Denver, I left the hotel with my jacket on.  Tomorrow it will be a 6 degree high at home, a 66 degree swing.

This is not unusual weather for Denver over MLK weekend. I’ve seen it at least three times before.  Still, it’s strange.

Today Ruth took me on a tour of her Museum of Science.  First stop was the space odyssey where we shot large steel bearings into sand to examine  the impact craters, then wondered at a huge iron meteorite, a chunk from Winslow, Arizona.  Such a fine sight to see.

We wandered through Jurassic Park dioramas and saw a Woolly Mammoth skeleton.  Picture available when I get home.

Ruth had been to, and wanted me to see, a health exhibit. A good idea.  You received a plastic, credit card size pass when you entered and as you went to various areas you inserted the card, got your heart rate and ekg read, heart rate under pressure, stride, bone density.  Then, at the end  you stick your card in a slot where your data is read and printed out for you.  Fun.

We then went to Steve’s Snapping Dogs for lunch. Steve’s is a sort of uber hotdog emporium.  A great place.  The clerk has a trip to Shakopee planned in February.  She asked me how it would be.  Cold.

Ruth is impatient to sit in the car like a grown up, a privilege allowed at age 8, only 3 months away for her.

The big game is on now, but I’m going to take a nap.

Asia, Family, Travel

Bristling with Trailer Hitches

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Winter                                                       Seed Catalog Moon

The parking lot here at the Best Western bristles with trailer hitches sticking out into the driving lanes from six wheel pickups.  The side streets have fifth wheel cattle and horse trailers lined up one after the other.  This is Stock Show time in Denver. Big belt buckles, boots and Stetson’s.

It’s also NFL title game weekend.  There are New England Patriot fans and their jerseys, Bronco fans and their orange.  Jon and Ruth took a couple of hours getting home from A-basin due to MLK holiday traffic.

Gabe’s stretched out on the bed watching a large fish and an absurd saggy breasted ballerina.  TV goes off at 9:00 pm.  Thank god.

Ruth and I will hit the Science Museum tomorrow morning and go to Steve’s Snapping Dogs for lunch.  I may miss most of the big game while I nap.

Tomorrow night we go to the Japanese restaurant, Domos.  This is a different Japanese experience, a country food menu.  Should be fun.

 

General

Train Building

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Winter                                                   Seed Catalog Moon

Gabe and I drove through downtown Denver, past Union Station, the 16th Avenue Mall and the REI.  Turning left at the REI we found the Aquarium and passed through their parking lot to the Children’s Museum.

Gabe took the opportunity to show his Grandpop around the museum.  Since it was Saturday the place was full, parents looking stunned as kids ran from hands on this to feet on that.  The first place put nerf balls into a large plastic tube and injected them into a plastic wall where kids could manipulate levers and cranks and chains to make the balls do more things.

Then, over to the train tracks on the waist high (child’s waist) tables.  This didn’t grab his attention.

At last, ironically, we ended up in an era filled with containers of milk cartons, toilet paper rolls, plastic berry holders, wood, plastic bottle caps and cardboard boxes of various sizes.  I say ironically because this is a place where Dad’s were helping their children construct things based on laminated instructions.

Gabe chose the train.  It said, in Spanish, muy dificile.  That meant Grandpop would have a challenge helping.  So, naturally we sat down and began to build a train.  Gabe read the instructions, located the materials and we got quite a long way into it.

We made a boiler, attached it to a piece of wood with a screw, cut out and front for the boiler and attached it with tape.  Then we cut up a milk carton for a cab, attached it with a screw and tape, too.

Finally we put brass fasteners through plastic bottle caps (after punching a hole with a screw.  The wheels.  It took 40 minutes or so and Gabe was on it the whole time.  I helped very little, pushing him to read the directions and make his own decisions about materials.

After that we ate lunch and visited, yes, you guessed it, the toy shop.  A slinky.  That was it.  It was in his age group as he said.

General

Mile Higher

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Winter                                                            Seed Catalog Moon

One mile high.  And I can get higher yet if I can just find one of those spliffy new marijuana shops.  In fact, I plan to find one.  I want a hat or a t-shirt or a sweat-shirt.  Memorabilia from the state where the 60’s finally became legal.  Makes a guy a little sentimental when he thinks of his grandchildren growing up in such a place.

While still on the straight Minnesota side of this journey I had that familiar geezer experience of a hearing a noise that seemed, well, like something I’d heard before.  Yep.  It was my phone, tucked deep in my backpack trilling out its vaguely Celtic ringtone.  I found it.  It was Tom Crane and Roxann.

They had come down to my gate to see me off.  They had a later flight headed to Idaho.  It was great fun to see them both.  In this age of security the old family send off at the jet way is a thing of the last millennia.  Very nostalgic.

15 minutes through security which Tom who is a multi-thousands of miles a year flier said was pretty good and an on-time liftoff.  In Denver the skiers and snowboarders streamed off the planes and through the airport lugging their extra long baggage and wearing ultra-hip apres ski attire.  They’re ready for a week-end of cold weather sports.  Of course, it was 58 when we landed.  The mountains should take care of that.

Three things here this week-end:  skiing and snowboarding, the Great National Western Stock Show and the Broncos in the NFL title game Sunday afternoon.  I’ve already seen more orange jerseys than cowboy boots and Stetsons.  Denver is happening.

Oh, and I have to go to Radio Shack.  No charger in my kit.  It was on my list and I thought I had two but they turned to be other things.

The rental car is a Ford something, Fusion I think.  A nice car, tight steering, solid feel on the road.  The interior design is a little Transformerish, but functional.

MOOCS, Poetry

Whitman

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Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

Started another MOOC today.  I won’t be taking a certificate in this one, just as I didn’t take one in the Modern/Post Modern class.  This class focuses on Walt Whitman, ModPo piqued my interest in him and his work.

EdX is another of the MOOC providers, this one tends toward the more high brow: M.I.T., Harvard.  The Whitman class is taught by a Harvard professor and I can’t tell you how many times she mentioned Harvard, Harvard’s resources and the number of poets who attended Harvard.  That put me off.  On the other hand she seems to have an interesting pedagogy in play, one congruent with Whitman which involves taking poetry to the streets and to other cities.

I plan to read the poetry, listen to the lectures and let the rest of it wash over me.  In the climate change MOOC I’m going for the certificate which means all the quizes, two exams, required activities.  I haven’t taken a mid-term or a final exam in over twenty years.  Should be fun.

There seem to be more critiques than praises right now popping up about MOOC’s. Expensive to set up and difficult to maintain.  Not as good as professor-student interaction.  Confusing to students and employers about who is certifying a student’s capabilities.  This is the anti-thesis of the revolutionary heavy breathing that began when they came out.

There is a synthesis down the line that will find MOOC’s do a great job of teaching disciplined students, especially such students geographically dispersed.  There will be proctored exams and course series that function like college majors.  A degree may no longer have only one institution behind it, but a coterie, an alliance, an association.

Will MOOC’s replace current colleges and universities?  Probably not.  Almost certainly not.  Will some of them get replaced?  Almost certainly.  Bricks and mortar is not the only way to learn and the more options students have the better for them.  This may not be best for the current geocentric system, but for whom was it built in the first place?  The student.  The issue is the education, its quality, availability and affordability.  If a few campuses have to become housing complexes, that’s no great loss.

 

Family, Friends

Hot Spots

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Winter                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

 

They’re out there on the Front Range, glowing, hot centers of significance framed by the snow capped 14’ers and all the other young bloods of this lifted earth.  Grandchildren. There goes Gabe, moving quickly from train to train, watching for Thomas, looking for something maybe to pick up.  That one, the golden one, that’s Ruth.  She moves deliberately from sewing machine to science fair to art project, might stop by the kitchen to chop up some vegetables.  Or, she might do a stand-up comedy routine.

There are, you know, those maps of the earth at night, lights blazing, cities spreading out like neurons and dendrites.  That’s the way family and friends are.  Bright lights in the nightscape of our lives.  A bright light in Singapore.  Another near the Rub Al-Kahli, the vast sandy empty quarter in Saudi Arabia.  Even in the bright lights of New York there are two stronger ones.  North Carolina.  Indiana.  Oklahoma. Texas. California. Georgia. Mihailesti, Romania. Northern England.

They are visible in the infrared spectrum of the heart.  The heart gives us night vision to find those important to us, no matter where on the spinning globe they might be.

Cinema and Television, Travel, Weather +Climate, Writing

Oh. My.

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Winter                                                                  Seed Catalog Moon

Discovered, thanks to my copy editor, Robert Klein, that I had named one of my characters in an unintentionally humorous way.  Two-arcas Merkin is a character who kills two arcas (bear-like creatures) and becomes known for it.  Turns out, you may know this but I didn’t, a merkin is a pubic wig.  First, I didn’t know there were such things.  Second, as a result, I didn’t know they had a name.  It’s the kind of thing I’m glad somebody caught.  Geez.

(Russian ambassador and President Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove)

The weather outlook in Denver is consistent with what I’ve experienced several times over the Stock Show trips:  50’s, high 50’s.  Always seems weird, but northern moving Gulf air pressed east by the Rocky Mountains brings spring like temperatures to winter Denver often.  Jon likes it.  I don’t.  I like my seasons true to themselves.  Cold winters.  Warm, wet spring.  Hot summers.  Cool falls.