Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
OK. About those lodgepole pines. Turns out they’re actually ponderosas. Ponderosas split at the top while lodgepoles go up straight like a lodgepole. So Black Mountain Drive is also Ponderosa. Cue the theme music. The bulk of the pine beetle infestation has been among lodgepole pines though Holly said yesterday that they have begun to jump to Ponderosas, too.
As Goya says in his etching, Anco impari. Still learning.
Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
We now know our neighbors across the street (Eduardo and Holly), next door to the east, (Jude), a door down and to the west across the street (Jim and Roberta), and behind us (Karen). Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe came out, too, to help us celebrate St. Patrick’s day. Ann Beck, the realtor who helped Kate find this house, came by later. With the exception of those times we had the annual Woolly meeting at our house in Andover, we rarely entertained. Kate’s birthdays and the occasional bonfire in our fire pit were about it.
Out here we’ve set a new lifestyle in motion, one more involved with the neighborhood. Thanks to Next Door Shadow Mountain, an online social network for our area, we’ve also communicated with Justin who lives somewhere nearby. He’s offered to mentor us in mountain gardening. He and his wife have an extensive garden.
Different place, new rhythms. As we age, it’s good to have folks around whom we know and who know us.
Kate’s initiated both of these events, so she deserves a big thanks. 
Eduardo is off to Kansas City for a week as plant manager for the uniform company he works for in Denver. He’s a second shift supervisor here. In K.C. he’ll be filling in for the top job.
Eduardo is from Tijuana originally and brought special candies from there.
Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
N.B. The “snakes” that Patrick ran out of Ireland were the Druids, priests of the Auld Celtic faith, so I’m celebrating Celtic heritage today, not Patrick. Though he did have the good sense, when returning to Rome after his missionary work in Ireland, to take several Irish Wolfhounds with him.
We’re getting ready for our second party in two months. That’s approximately two more than we hosted all last year. Today our neighbors Eduardo and Holly, Ann Beck (real estate agent) and Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe will eat corned beef, cabbage and other fixings with us.
This is a holiday I have celebrated at Frank (the Mic) Broderick’s for many years. It’s a Woolly traditional meal and the one tomorrow night will be the first one I’ve missed in a long time. Having a Celtic meal of our own might be the start of a new, Colorado tradition for us.
Just got done mopping the floor, after vacuuming. I can do this now with minimal huffing and puffing though there’s still a ways to go on being fully acclimatized. Kate’s got corned beef in the slow cooker, cabbage and potatoes ready to boil and a mango popover for dessert. I made an Irish soda bread yesterday that looks pretty good.
In a nod to the digital age I just retrieved my Pandora password from my password program on this computer. That way, I can go downstairs, enter it on our TV! (Roku) and provide some holiday appropriate music.
69 degrees here in Conifer, a sunny bright day for St. Patrick’s. Strange. And, when I just checked, I’m very surprised to see that in Andover it will be 71 today. Stranger yet.
Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
Translated ten verses today in less than an hour, the time it has previously taken me to do five. Greg says often the work comes back stronger after some time off. Well, now I believe him.
Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
Working on Latin today. A plateau pole-vaulted. For the first time, I worked from the text in Perseus alone, writing nothing down, looking up words in the usual click-on-the-word style with Perseus, but assembling the translation in my head, then typing it into my Evernote file for Medea and Aeson. This is the private equivalent of sight reading and I’m becoming facile at it, at least in Ovid.
If you were here in the room, I’d ask for a high five. This feels like a culmination, a passing through one of the key doors on my way to the amateur classicist tower. Still a good ways to climb, but I’m far beyond the half-way point. Amazing.
Another positive note. After each night’s sleep and each nap, I get a reading on my resting heart rate thanks to my Basis watch, my 2014 birthday present. Before leaving Minnesota I had my resting heart rate down to a 62-67 bpm average, leaning more toward 62. Which is pretty good for a guy in his late 60’s. After being without exercise for almost two months, I began again last month and my heart rate showed up in the 70-73 range and stubbornly stayed there. Just when I had begun to get frustrated with it, it began to drop. Now, I’m running 67.
Feels like a victory, especially at 8,800 feet.
Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
Drove down Shadow Mountain on Brook Forest Drive. We wondered what it will look like with the snow melted, gone. The mountain scenes change much more often than I would have thought with snow, ice, hoar frost, melting, fog, early morning mists and evening. We have three quarters of a year yet, the Great Wheel yet to turn through spring, summer and fall. There will be green, flowers, dry dusty days with fear of fire and times of aspened yellow.
On to the Wildflower Cafe where we learned that Christa, the tall blond who now recognizes us and brings us coffee right away (we’re their first Saturday morning customers), worked as a bartender at Lord Fletchers for a couple of years while her sister lived in Waconia. The sister moved to Colorado and so did Christa. Minnesota connections abound here: the park ranger for the Pike National Forest from Hastings, a neighbor here from the ‘burbs of Minneapolis. Others whose particulars I don’t recall.
Back up Brook Forest Drive in the oncoming morning, a fierce sun appearing every so often through a notch in a mountain or a small valley, then back into the shade, driving through the Arapaho National Forest.
Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
Selling the house in Andover. We’ve put our best effort into this sale and so far? No offers. Lots of lookers, but no buyers. It’s been four months since we closed on Black Mountain Drive which means for those four months and now a fifth, March, we’ve been paying two mortgage payments. Warren and Sheryl did it for several years and we can sustain it, but we don’t want to.
The longer it lingers, since it has a certain amount of our assets tied up, the leaner and tighter our budget becomes. Not unexpected, but not pleasant either.
There was risk in buying here before we sold the Minnesota house, but it was one we took with our eyes open. I’m glad we made the choice. This house fits us so well. Kate did a great job in finding it. Moving first simplified, by a lot, the whole process of exiting 153rd Ave. NW. And, we got to start our new life here in Colorado.
An interstate move is expensive under any circumstances, especially when you have 20 years of belongings to move. Though we reduced by about a third, we still had a lot to move. The final tally, of course, is not in yet, but even when we add it all up, it will have been worth it.
Why? This was the time to move in terms of our health. We’re still healthy enough to establish a new life. And, moving to Colorado allowed us to accomplish two goals with one move. The first, being closer to the grandkids, was both about seeing them more often and their ages, Ruth, 8, and Gabe, 6. As with our health, this was the time to move to be part of their lives while they still tune into grandparents.
The second goal we accomplished was to move into a place of great natural beauty with space for our four dogs and our mutual creative work. Living in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains means we have a home where the eco-systems vary by altitude and the altitude varies a lot. It also means spectacular vistas, interesting weather and wildlife.
So, we chose and now we live with the choice. Happily.
Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
First Latin session since November 14. Greg and I used Skype and, as a result, for the first time in over 4 plus years, actually saw each other. I’ve moved back into Ovid, Caesar just didn’t keep my interest.
Right now I’m in book VII, translating the story of Medea and Aeson. Aeson is the father of Jason, he of the Golden Fleece, and Medea’s husband. Jason asks Medea to make his father younger, “Subtract years from me and add them to the years of my father.”
The Metamorphoses is like a prism for Greek mythology. Greek myths and epic poetry shined out of the classical and heroic eras into the mind of Ovid. He collected their light, gave it his own cynical twist, then shined the light on to developing Western culture, especially during and after the Renaissance. To read the great poem in his own language and to grapple with making his Latin meaningful in contemporary English plants each one of these stories deeply into my own memory.
Where does it take me? I don’t really know, but I do know that the world of Augustan Rome and the world of Greek mythology has fascinated me since I was little and has not ceased to fascinate me even as I push well into my third phase.
Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
This night, a heavy wet snow. Woke up to three inches of thick white covering the deck. As I do each time it snows, I clear the deck first thing, even before getting the dogs. This is important because the snow compacts in front of the door and the dogs track in the snow from the deck. The stone floor can become slippery beyond our long entrance rug. Clearing the deck fixes most of that.
There was, this time, less snow on the driveway than on the deck. It doesn’t matter out there much at all since today will be 47, Saturday 57 and Sunday 65. The snow will be gone, probably by later today, certainly by Saturday.
I went for my first mountain hike yesterday, following the Upper Maxwell Falls trail into the Arapaho National Forest. Even though intuition told me I would need my Kahtoola spikes, the day was sunny, almost 50 so I put on my Keens, grabbed my backpack with water, compass, map and journal and drove the mile or so to the trailhead.
Where I promptly fell, slipping onto my butt. Sigh. Pay attention to yourself, I said. To myself. Hiking poles, which I had also considered, but left hanging in the garage right next to the truck, would have helped, too.
This is a popular trail and the love it had seen over the last few weeks had created stretches of the trail that were solid ice almost the width of the trail. Fortunately there was crunchy snow just off the trail so that walking on it I could make it some ways back into the woods. About 3/8’s of a mile in, though, the trail turned steeply up and narrowed. This section was not ice, but solidly packed snow that had melted then refrozen. May as well have been ice. In the gear I had for the day that was not passable, so I turned back.
Maxwell Creek burbled under its lacy ice and snow covering. There was an off trail path across the creek and up to a mostly snowless outcropping of rock, a small cliff and several lodge lodgepole pines (above). I wandered over there and began my nature journal sitting back against the large pine.
This is, I think, still on Shadow Mountain though my USGS topographical maps have not yet come in the mail.
This was an exploratory hike, one to assess what I would need when I begin making this a regular habit and for that purpose it worked just fine. Lessons: snowshoes would have worked. To hike in these conditions spikes on the boots plus hiking poles make sense. I’ll need a good pair of winter hiking boots. Learn more about the compass and its use with maps. I need a better back pack and a small camera to take along would be good, too. The nature journal will be another pathway into becoming native to this place.
As I wrote the other day, the combination of spring weather, settling in to the house and acclimatization have made me eager to get out in the woods. And so I have started. This coming winter I’ll be out there with snowshoes and spikes, poles and pack. Now that spring and summer press against the remnants of winter it will be hiking boots, poles and pack. Couldn’t be happier. Like a long running vacation in the Rocky Mountains.
Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
