Momilies

Friday night was our second freeze in a week.  The first freeze was mild, but it was enough to melt the bush beans into limp piles of leaves, and singe the outer leaves of the summer squash.  The second freeze finished the job.  Thursday night I went to the garden and picked the remaining beans and tomatoes and eggplant.  I picked five finger-sized yellow butterstick squash.  I pulled up the squash vines and tossed them in the compost, and did the same with the eggplant.  Saturday morning, the tomato and pole bean vines were melted as well.

My goal this week is to get all the remaining vines pulled and composted, and apply a nice layer of milorganite, followed by a nice layer of compost.  I will pull the fencing I used, and coil up the hoses, and call this a year.

There were successes and failures.  Successes were definitely the cabbages, the pole beans, the tomatoes, and the summer squash.  The pumpkins were awesome, and I picked five good ones at the end of the year.  They weighed 18, 14, 12, 11, and 11 pounds respectively.  I grew Jack-o-Lantern pumpkins specifically, and they didn’t disappoint.  The parsnips I wanted so badly took all summer to mature, and I only harvested about 3 pounds of them.  As much as I love them, I will probably not do them again.  The beets and turnips did wonderfully, but I probably won’t grow turnips again since I am the only one who eats them.  The corn was fun, but took up a lot of space.  I may do them again, however, because they shaded the peas well.  I picked squash at least three times a week, so I will grow those again.  Everyone in the house eats them, so that’s a bonus.  The three freebie Kohlrabi were easy and tasty, but again, I was the only one who ate them.  The tomatoes were the same – delicious, but we can only eat so many.  I will probably just plant one or two next year. The broccoli never formed blooms, and the peppers didn’t produce anything worth mentioning.

So of course that leaves me wondering what I should plan on planting for next year.  I will do cabbages again, but will stagger their planting so that I can stagger the picking.  I will plant more Savoy, no Stonehead.  The Savoy were the prettiest and tastiest, the Stonehead where the ones the slugs loved the most.  I will most definitely plant more eggplant, as these did very well.  I will look for more varieties.  I wasn’t pleased with the Ichiban, but the White Star were amazing.  I will also plant more peas.  I may opt for bush beans instead of pole beans.  The pole beans produced well, but they took forever to get to a point where they produced anything at all.  I have frozen more than 2 dozen zip-lock bags of them, though, so they were excellent producers.  I will plant cucumbers earlier, so I might actually get more than two stubby ones to harvest. Pumpkins are definitely a go again.

It was a good year.  It was hard work, for sure, but it was a good year.  When frost/freeze was in the forecast, I actually sighed in relief a bit.  The hard work was over.  I can have my winter to rest up and be ready for spring.

Kind of like my garden.

Ten days ago, my town experienced the worst flooding in its entire existence.  City leaders declared this a 500-year flood event, and the damage to our town was moderate to severe.  As of today, most roads are re-opened, and only one area remains evacuated – a trailer park that was pretty much the lowest point in our town.  Only two or three roads are still closed, and those are areas where the flooding obliterated a bridge.  People are mucking out, and the city is helping by providing dumpsters and large pickers and dump trucks.  They are also rebuilding roads.  Less than a week after the flooding, they were laying new road bed, and the next day, paving over that new road bed, on a major east-west route through town.  By Friday, state officials had repaired the breached Highway 119, our major eastern gateway to the Interstate.  City officials have been working to restore complete water resources (we are operating on only 1/3rd of our usual water supply) and using large equipment to route the river back into its channel.  They had the wastewater plant, which had to be shut down during the height of the flooding, back in operation within 48 hours of shutting it down.

This progress is remarkable.  The state, and all of the counties affected, have been active in returning things to normal.  Three major routes into the mountains have massive levels of destruction.  Entire towns are virtually cut off from the rest of the world, including big towns like Estes Park.  With winter weather about to descend on the mountains, the clock is ticking with what can be done before heavy snow arrives.  Even today, the 22nd of September, there is snow above 9000 feet.  Light snow, but still.  The state has committed to having all three of these routes completely repaired by December 1st.  This is an ambitious goal, but knowing my state, it can be done.  Using Federal disaster aid, as well as the state’s contingency funds, they are already bidding out the work and hope to see repairs commence within a week.  Considering we can have snow in my town before Halloween, they’d better get moving.

This past week has been difficult for me on a personal level.  I have been through flooding before, but I’m from a place where flooding is common, even the norm, and affected areas were miles from me.  It didn’t affect my daily routine, I didn’t have to worry about how I was going to get out of town, or back in, or how I was going to get to work.  This time, the flood was right down the street.  I could walk to it.  Places that I visited often were under water.  Routes to my favorite stores were closed.  The specter of only being able to shop at Walmart and not being able to get to work loomed large.  The pictures, videos, and sheer volume of people being evacuated to areas of town that were higher up was overwhelming at times.  It gave me the strangest feeling of claustrophobia.  I watched it rain from my home office window, my daughter watching movies on the tv behind me, and wondered more than once how we would recover from this as a community.  It was a helpless feeling.  A powerless feeling.

As I watch us recover, I’m proud to be a citizen of Longmont.  Our town officials have worked day and night to protect people, and to restore city services as fast as they could.  “Normal” was what they were aiming for, and they did it quite well.  Years of city planning, flood plain studies and control measures, and keeping the best and brightest employed at the civic center had made our recovery steps possible.  There is still much to do, and I still see oddities as I drive about (refrigerators floating in mud, a highway sign sitting on its side between the splits in two tree trunks, a fiberglass bathtub on the side of the road).  Mud drying into dirt means we are under a constant haze of dust as cars make their way around town.  Fencelines are solid with debris, and every rain cloud that goes by makes us all hold our breath.  But “We Are Longmont Strong,” and we will be fine.  We will survive, and we will thrive.  It’s what Coloradans do.

Monday, September 9th, it started to rain.  We hadn’t seen rain in months; our rainfall for Longmont since early June had been a whopping .7th of an inch.  We were all looking forward to a few days of rain, something unusual for this time of year.  Tuesday, it rained again.  Then it really rained on Wednesday.  It rained almost non-stop from before dawn until bedtime, and by 11 p.m. that night, roads were starting to be closed, and flash flood warnings were lighting up our phones.  Earlier that evening I’d met my friends at Panera Bread to do some writing, and when the first of the flash flood alarms starting going off at about 7 p.m., half the phones in the place were screeching the warning tone.

But hey, it doesn’t really rain that much here, so it couldn’t be that bad, right?  And I’m from Missouri.  It takes more than a couple days of rain to really cause major flooding.  Our dirt here is sandy/rocky, it drains fairly well, and even after a hard rain, the ground rarely looks wet even a few hours later.  At 11:30 p.m., I got an emergency notice on my phone from my campus at the University of Colorado warning people to stay indoors, and canceling campus operations for the next day.  At midnight, Tater’s school district canceled school and we got that emergency notice as well.  We barely slept, listening to the rain pounding on the roof and running out of the gutters and alert after alert coming out on our phones.  At 4 a.m. I got up, checked radar, saw the very first of the morning news, and knew we had a problem.

By Thursday noon, every north-south route through our town was closed.  Our town was roughly split into 2/3rds and 1/3rds. Two waterways run through our town, the St. Vrain River, and Lefthand Creek.  The river is not what we Missourians would call a river.  Even during spring runoff, it is still nothing more than a big creek.  It is shallow, runs relatively slowly, and is mostly a drainage ditch for runoff from the mountains.  These last few weeks, it’s been pretty low, as fall approaches.  Lefthand Creek is also a ditch channeling runoff from mountain snows.  It runs just south and parallel to the St. Vrain River, with about two or three blocks of homes and businesses in between.  Lefthand Creek joins the St. Vrain river on the eastern part of town, a confluence I ride by on my bike on a regular basis. So these two slow, lazy run-offs had been swelled to 20 times their normal size, and instead of staying in the ditches they’d been occupying, they started making their own.

Our town was effectively cut off.  We could not go south, or west, or north.  Every river in the area was breaching its banks, and flooding out roads.  We could go east, but pretty soon the highways were closed too.  The Perfect Child barely got home from her overnight shift at work, coming west down the main highway into our town.  She said water was already over the right-hand lane, the west-bound lanes were already under water, and the police were closing the highway behind her.  We were safe where we were, as the northern end of town is higher up by a couple hundred feet.  Evacuations were occurring in neighborhoods closer to the river and in places that had never seen water like this. The railroads shut down, and there was no more train traffic (or train horns).  Our town was eerily quiet.

By Friday morning, emergency officials had declared this a 500-year flood event. And other communities were much worse off than we were.  We had power, Internet, a warm and dry house, and plenty of food and ways to cook it.  A nearby community, just six miles to our west, was completely devastated.  People In Lyons weren’t able to be rescued until Friday night, when the National Guard came in with high-profile vehicles.  Lyons is the gateway to the Rockies for us, and how we get up into the mountains and to Rocky Mountain National Park.  It is at the confluence of two streams, one of which is the St. Vrain River.  Other towns in the mountains were worse off.  They not only lost power, with buildings collapsed and people dead or missing, but no phone service or any way to reach the outside world.  They weren’t rescued until Saturday morning, by military helicopters.  Estes Park, at the base of Rocky Mountain National Park and built up on both sides of the Big Thompson River, suffered a similar fate.  The only way out of the town was by going west through the park, coming out on the other side of the continental divide (and 50 miles away) in Grand Lake.  The Big Thompson flooded Loveland, the town to our north, cutting it in half too.  Further movement of the water also flooded the Poudre River and river valley, and moved out to the North Platte, which acts as a bit of a delta.  Boulder, where I work and which is only 10 miles from us to the west, suffered severe flash flooding over and over, flooding homes and businesses and washing away the walkways students use to get around town.  Nederland, up in the mountains above Boulder, saw the dam on Barker Reservoir try to bear the weight of the water, which overtopped it and came crashing down the canyon towards Boulder in surges that defied physics.  In that rush of water was debris – rocks as big as minivans, logs and downed trees, and even vehicles.  Two lives were lost in Boulder, and one in the cut off town of Johnstown in the mountains.  One life was lost in flooding south of Denver, near Colorado Springs.  There will likely be more deaths announced, as there are literally hundreds of people not accounted for yet.

Meteorologists are saying that places in the mountains, like the destroyed Johnstown, received more than 13 inches of rain this week.  Boulder had 12.  Estes Park had 14.  Longmont had 9.  These amounts are higher than our average yearly rainfall, all packed into the span of a few days.  I have never seen water rise so quickly, spread so widely, in such a short amount of time.  Even as a Missouri girl, flood-aware that I am, I have never seen something like this.  And people who live here have never seen it.  They are stunned.  They are speechless.  They don’t know what to make of it.

Thankfully, here on Saturday, the rivers have gone down, some of our north-south roads have re-opened, and mountain rescues are slowing down.  We have the National Guard in town, helping with cleanup and posted at the roads that have been closed to keep out people and help direct traffic.  Our police and emergency personnel have been working nonstop since Wednesday night, not able to handle routine emergencies, much less get rest or a shower or food.  I am thankful for their hard work, in our community and in communities all over the Front Range.

Much cleanup and rebuilding lies ahead of us. And the flooding isn’t over, as the storms that sat over us for the past week are now in the counties just east of us, doing the same thing.  And there is more rain in our forecast.  We are hopeful these are the standard Monsoon storms we get this time of year – a quick hit of fat raindrops and then it either dries up or moves on.  We all need a break, for sure.  Roads into the mountains are closed –  large state and federal roads that allow mountain people to get around, and allow those of us on the plains to head uphill for cooler weather or leaf-peeping or hiking.  Many roads are washed out, or undercut so badly that they aren’t safe to drive on.  Bridges are out, and rock slides and mud slides have made other areas impassable.  It is mid-September, and snow will be here within a month.  The roads will need repair quickly, or they will be closed until spring.  Without infrastructure, towns cannot recover. We have local, state, and federal declarations of disaster, but that won’t make time stand still so that we can get everything built back up in time.

I am grateful and thankful that our home was dry, that we had food, electricity, Internet, and each other.  We were never in any danger in our home or in our neighborhood.  Our fear was high as The Perfect Child had to make her way to work and back, and as Klown had to do the same thing on Thursday.  Roads were closing as quickly as the raindrops came down, and it was only a matter of time before every route in and out was inaccessible.  But we made it.  I fixed comfort food, and we rode it out.  My work was closed Thursday and Friday, and Tater is off school until Thursday.  Since her school district covers much of our county, which has been devastated by the storms, there are schools that are out of commission, or the roads to them are impassable.  Hopefully the next few days, and a lot of hard work, gets everything back to what it needs to be for the schools.

Today, the sun is shining, and people are out and about, and roads are reopening.  It is odd how quickly we can get back to “normal” after such devastation.  We will, however, never be the same.  It will be forever different.  No one expected this.  Not even the meteorologists.  When it started raining Monday, no one was worried.  They weren’t worried on Tuesday, either.  What a difference a day and 9 inches of rain can make.

I have now lived through two 500-year floods.  How is that possible for one woman who is barely over 50?

Main Street Closed – one of our major thoroughfares from north to south.

Before and after view of the St. Vrain River at Martin Street.  I took the first picture on September 7th, and the second one on September 13th.

The river that you normally can’t see from this view.

More river pictures.  The smell of diesel fuel was very strong here.

The river further east, near Sandstone Ranch.  Look closely, you will see a pedestrian bridge.  This bridge is where the river should be.  The concrete pathway you see is about 8 foot wide and is part of the St. Vrain Greenway, a walking/hiking/biking trail I ride a lot.  It is mostly washed away, and the river has created itself a brand new channel to the south (I am standing north of the river as I take this picture). The large tree left across the pathway was certainly not there before the flood, and also shows how quickly the water actually went down less than 24 hours after it had likely covered that entire valley.

I don’t recommend buying a car from this dealer on Main Street.  You can see the debris under them, and the log under the white Dodge pickup.  They didn’t have time to get the cars out before the river claimed them.

Welcome to the readers headed over from the FatBottomBiking blog…this is my more general blog and can cover a lot of things.

I weighed in on Saturday to find I’ve lost 11 pounds since May 1st.  After being stuck at 6 pounds’ l0ss for two months, I made a few more changes, and the weight loss continued.  I knew I was losing size.  My clothes fit better, and there is more definition to my form than there was before.  It is subtle, something most people will not notice.  But it’s enough for me to notice.

So what has changed?

First, I gave up all junk and fast food, except for my Diet Coke.  No chips, which I was not a big eater of to begin with, and no McDonalds.  Not much eating out, and when I did I tried to pick healthy instead of fried.  I didn’t give up ice cream, and a cookie once in a while was going to happen.  But I tried to load up on protein and back off on carbs.  I am eating a lot of dairy, and have switched to whole milk from low-fat.  I have read of several studies that indicate that full-fat dairy products can help you lose weight.  I continue to eat more and more fresh/raw foods, or foods that I’ve cooked completely from scratch, so I know what is in it.  This means no convenience meals (frozen dinners and hamburger helper) and no canned veggies.  This doesn’t mean we aren’t eating some processed foods; I’m still buying bread from the store (whole wheat, but the cheap stuff), I”m still using canned cream soups for some of my recipes, and still using Canola oil in my frying pans.  But it is better than I used to eat, and that’s what counts.

I have come to the realization that while the number of calories does somewhat matter, the type of calories matters more.  If I’m eating avocado and fresh fruit and wholesome home-cooked meals, I may be eating as many calories as I was before with the bad stuff.  but the fact that this is the good stuff makes the difference.  We, as a society, are getting fatter and lazier.  We eat it because it tastes good, and don’t think of the consequences.  But I’m finding that I can eat things that taste amazing, and they don’t have consequences.

My improved (not less) eating, along with my weekly bike rides (which are unfortunately down to two now that I’m finally working full time again), have given me the extra bit of shove I needed to see some weight loss.

As far as my clothes, the jeans that fit just right are now too loose.  The jeans that always wanted to crawl up my butt fit fine.  My bras go on easier, and hook at the smallest circumference instead of somewhere in the middle.  The difference in size between my breasts and my belly has increased.  I don’t get out of breath climbing a flight of stairs.  I have enough energy to get through my massive to-do lists during the days and evenings, without feeling like I just want to drop flat and sleep.  My bike rides, which used to leave me completely drained and exhausted, now just energize me and get me through the rest of my busy weekend days.  My knees hurt less, my ankles are more flexible, and I just feel better overall.

These things did not happen overnight.  It has been a struggle for me to reach the minimal weight loss I’ve reached, and to learn what is working and what isn’t.  There are vices I’m not going to give up (ice cream, and Diet Coke).  But there are vices I’ve given up and found that they weren’t all that hard to give up (fast food).  And to see results, finally, even after four long months, is inspiring and just reinforces what I know – that I’m doing the right thing.

Winter is coming, and it means a general slow-down in my activity level as work ramps up (I have a desk job) and my chances to exercise go down.  But I’m going to do my very best to keep up my routine, get those bike rides in, fix my meals from scratch, and aim for that bigger goal.  I’m still 1/3 fat overweight chick.  I may never not be a fat overweight chick.  But I can be not so fat.  And at the very least, I can be in really good shape, and that will be worth it!

A little over a week ago, a friend of mine lost her newborn grandson.  I don’t know the details and will not ask, but I know up until a few days before he was born, her chatter was about how soon the baby was coming, teasing her daughter about all the things she’d have to give up to be a mom, and just generally how thrilled she was to soon be a grandmother.  But the baby did not survive, and there was a funeral instead.

I have, as long as I can remember, had intense reactions to the loss of babies.  I have personally never lost a baby, and I don’t count my two early-term miscarriages in the same category as the loss of a full term baby.  Yet I grieve deeply when someone I know has gone through this.  I don’t even have to know them well.  This friend’s daughter is someone I knew in passing, she is the same age as my son (23) and I remember her having a huge crush on my son when they were both 14 or so.  Another time, the tenant living in my upstairs apartment lost a baby, and I cried for days.  I even attended the funeral and visited the grave several times after that.  There are other instances, as well, but I won’t detail them.

I’d like to say that I am grieving for the mother, or the grandmother, or the father, of that lost baby.  But I don’t believe that is true.  The grief hits me so hard, so deeply, that I feel I can’t breathe, and I cry with an intensity that frightens me.  I don’t understand it.  I don’t understand how I can feel so intensely a loss that is not mine.  Every time it happens, I’m stunned by my reaction.  I can’t stop it, or lessen it, or ignore it.  It happens, without me putting any conscious effort into it.

It makes no sense to me.  I express my sympathy and condolences to the family, I pray for them, but I never share with them the intensity of my grief.  It feels wrong somehow to be feeling as deeply as I feel, for someone going through something I have never gone through, and can never experience.  I cannot in any way understand how that mother feels, as I’ve never been there.  I just know I hurt when it happens.

So sad that a life had to be taken away, before it even began.  And I ache for his mother.

A little over two years ago, I was laid off from a perfectly decent job at a college in Missouri.  I took a lesser-paying job and moved across the country to Colorado.  We have been happy here, but the biggest thing missing was that nice paycheck I used to get.

That was rectified this week when the powers that be decided that things should change within our department.  Two things have happened.

First, a sort of reorganization happened, wherein my boss was made not-my-boss and I was given more freedom and more control over what I do on a day to day basis.  My boss means well, but she can be stifling, micromanaging, distracted, and disorganized.  All at the same time.  It has been difficult for me to step up and do things, as I felt somewhat bullied, but mostly stifled.  I now report directly to an assistant director, who has a decidedly hands-off approach.

Secondly, I was moved to full time status from a .8 position.  For me, this means 40 hours a week instead of 32.  Not only will I have the benefits of more money (8 more hours a week adds up), but I will accrue vacation much more quickly, I will have access to better health insurance at a cheaper cost, and will be an exempt professional staff member.

Two years is a long time to wait for something like this.  It feels a bit like winning the lottery.  I was cobbling together the almost-full-time-job with some contract work and an additional position on campus, hoping to make it to what I was making before I was laid off.  I never quite got there.  Now, I am there.  To say I am relieved is an understatement.

This means we’ll be able to take a trip home to Missouri to visit family and friends.  It means I can start putting away money for the eventual need to replace my car.  It means I can afford some of the dental work I’ve put off, and pay down some bills I have not been able to pay off as quickly as I would have liked.  It means less free time, but a whole lot less juggling of three jobs.  It also means I actually might get caught up at work.  I haven’t been “caught up” in two years.  An extra 8 hours a week to get things done?  Magic!

Maybe I’ll feel like I can coast for a while now.  That might be nice.

Summer is winding down here.  Our nights are consistently in the 50’s, even when the days might still hit 90.  It hit 89 today, and will be 90 or a little more through the end of the weekend.  But the nights, the late sunrises (now at 6:10 a.m.), and the daily afternoon showers all point to fall.  The geese are flocking together in larger numbers, and moving anxiously from one body of water to the next, gorging on whatever they can, in preparation for their flights to the south.  In the early mornings, as the sun first touches the highest mountain peaks to the west, there is a dusting of snow.  The pelicans have already left, and the ducklings are as grown as their parents.  The frogs have stopped croaking at the ponds I ride by, and the bird song has changed.  Leaves are starting to lose their shiny appearance, and early-turning trees are starting to show color.  I love fall.  I love the crisp air, the changing leaves, the pumpkins on doorsteps and the fluffy sweaters and smell of woodsmoke in the air.

But summer has its own charms, when you don’t think about the heat.  This time of summer is when harvest is happening.  The air is ripe with the smell of fresh-cut wheat and hay fields.  Tractors trundle along the country roads I drive, heading from one field to the next to harvest.  The field corn is tall and tassled, and the sweet corn in the stores is juicy and sweet and earthy when you bite into it.  Fresh fruit is abundant in roadside stands and the farmer’s markets.  Our own Colorado Palisade Peaches are ripe and delicious, and cheap.  I never get tired of the daily fruit salads I prepare, and the fresh veggies I saute or put into soups.  The impulse to eat and eat until you can’t eat any more is strong.  It may be a primeval, instinctual desire to store fat for the long, lean winter months, or it may just be that everything tastes so good that you don’t want to stop eating it.

My garden is bursting with the fruits of my earlier labors.  I’m done with weeding and only need to water and pick on a regular basis.  The tomatoes are turning ripe daily, and Ichiban and White Star eggplant are plentiful.  beans are blooming endlessly, and the pumpkins are huge and orange.  Squash bugs failed to kill off my Yellow Butterstick squash, and I pick one or two a day.  There is more than I can eat, realistically.  There are still turnips and beets and parsnips to come, and my sweet corn is ripening slowly.  I have harvested cabbages throughout the last two months.  Only five or so remain of my original 16.  My orphaned plants – broccoli, kohlrabi, and pitiful cabbages, are slow and reluctant.  They may not produce anything for me after all.  It’s time to plant a few winter crops, but I don’t know if I’ll actually get to it.  Time is getting away from me, and our first frost will happen in about a month.  Maybe less.

Soon enough, there will be fluffy sweaters in the morning, cups of hot tea in the evenings, extra blankets on the beds, and golden aspen leaves turning in the wind like the coins on a belly dancer’s skirt.  Peaches will give way to apples drizzled in caramel, summer salads will give way to savory stews and soups, and nights will come early with a sharpness we have mostly forgotten over the long, warm summer.  But for now I will enjoy the smells, sounds, and tastes of summer.  And I will be thankful that a hot day in Colorado is still better than a hot day back in Missouri, where I grew up.  At least I can be outside here to enjoy summer, instead of having to be a hermit indoors.  I am getting plenty of Vitamin D!

Yesterday morning, I had big plans.  The Boulder Count Fair Parade was going to start at 10 a.m., and I was up by 6:30 or so.  I sliced up some fruit and took out ingredients to make blueberry muffins, which would make good snacks at the parade.  I had a big container of fresh blueberries I’d gotten on sale at the grocery store.  Turns out I was out of baking powder, and had no cream of tartar so I couldn’t make my own.

Off to the store I went.  Zipped straight to the aisle where the baking products were, grabbed what was on sale, and got out of there (yes, I paid first).  Jump in the car, stick in the key, turn it…

Click.

Are you kidding me?  Gah!  Called my daughter to come help me push it.  It is a stick and I can usually pop it and start it, at least enough to get it home.  I had fan and lights, so I knew I wasn’t completely dead.  It started right up when I popped it, and I drove straight to Autozone, hoping this was just a bad battery.  But that would have been too easy.  Battery is good, but the starter isn’t getting juice.  Could be a wire, could be a bad starter.  Either way, it had to be towed to the mechanic’s.  Not that I know any here.  I’ve not needed one since we moved here.  And of course, it was a Saturday.  I had to take what I could get.  The car is now sitting at Aubry’s Automotive waiting for a diagnoses.

All because I wanted to make something with blueberries.

I wouldn’t even think about the blueberries, but this is not the first time I’ve had car trouble related to blueberries.  A while back, oh, about 12 or so years ago now, there was another incident.  Shortly after my divorce, I took the kids, who were then 11 and 8 or so, to the local blueberry farm.  “Local” meaning about an hour away.  It was a bright sunny day, mid-summer, and I had the day off.  The kids and I picked blueberries until we had a good batch of them, probably a gallon or so.  When we got back to the car, it turns out Tony had locked the car, with my keys inside.  My cell phone too.  No one I knew was available to help, or bring me a set of spare keys.  I had no choice but to break a window to get back in.  I asked the farmer for a hammer, wrapped the head in my denim shirt, and tapped the smallest window on the car – the rear non-opening vent window.

Turns out that window is almost the most expensive one on the car, and my liability-only insurance sure wasn’t going to pay for it.  Cost me $225 to replace it some weeks later.

All because I wanted to pick blueberries.

Coincidence?  I wonder.

The last week’s low temperatures have all been in the 50’s.  It is the last day of July, and we are turning the corner towards fall.

I know, it seems early.  It isn’t really.  Not for Colorado.  By the end of August we will have nights that may dip into the 40’s.  Trees will start to turn, subtlety, but they will.  Our chances for moisture will increase.  The pumpkins will start to turn colors.  My pumpkins already have.

This one is about the size of a seedless watermelon.  I have three others, all in varying sizes from this on up to industrial mop bucket size.

I always look forward to fall.  After strings of days in the 90’s, I’m ready for strings of days in the 70’s.  I’m ready for that bit of bite in the air, that crispness that is unique to fall.  That we get it earlier here is just fine with me.  If the last two years are any kind of normal, we shall see snow before Halloween.  I will make my trips into the mountains to see the Aspens turn colors.  I will think about cooking warm soups and stews, and order my firewood delivery.  I will plan for my fall garden, see if I can grow a bit of spinach and some beets.

It has been a good summer.  My mother visited for just over a month, helped me in the garden and around the house.  Between work and my working out, I often run out of time.  Having an extra pair of hands helped tremendously.  My garden would not be nearly so weed-free without her help.  We made several small trips, did some fun things, and I never regret time spent with family while the dishes and laundry languish.  My garden has been reasonably productive, although I wish it were better.  I had hoped to replace much of my fresh veggie shopping with it, but it hasn’t turned out to be that way.  The things I buy at the store are not the things I can necessarily grow here.  My cabbages and squash have done well, and I will plant more of that next year.  Everything else is slow and behind – corn, parsnips, peppers, eggplant, beans, and cucumbers.  I don’t think I’ll even get a cucumber this year.  We have had good beets and turnips, but the family isn’t as fond of those as I am, unfortunately.  My leg recovery continues, although I’m having unusual pain and will be seeing the doctor soon for a checkup.  Tater goes back to school in less than three weeks and I haven’t bought a single school supply.  But she has gotten to swim and swim and swim, and spend time with her sister and her gramma and her daddy and she’s as happy as an almost-teenager can be.  She’s at that weird in-between stage where she’s still a kid, but doesn’t want to be a kid.  Lots of awkwardness there.

But fall looms, and I’m looking forward to it.  My pace does slow then, not as much work to do.  I always say winter is for sleeping.  I look forward to longer, lazier nights, when my “doing” is just some crochet or sewing or writing.  A girl gets tired after a while.

When my mom and I talked about taking a bit of a road trip while she was here, I expressed an interest in visiting Santa Fe.  I know I had been as a child, but I really didn’t remember anything about it.  She had been several times, once in the last 10 or 15 years or so.  She was excited about going.  I looked forward to a couple of days away, which is really all we could afford.

So we loaded up her truck with the bikes, the dogs, and a cooler, and off we went.  The worst part of the trip had to be getting through Denver’s morning rush-hour traffic.  I have mentioned before how much I hate Denver traffic, but rush hour is a complete waste of time.  There is no way to bypass the mess that is downtown Denver.  We left too late in the morning, and it took us almost two hours to go the 60 miles from Longmont to the south side of Denver.  After that, it was pretty smooth sailing.  Until this happened.

This is hail.  I know it looks like snow, but this was July 2nd, and I can assure you there was no snow.  We just missed actually getting hailed on, as the storm was ahead of us and traffic was dead-stopped.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  The hail was small, marble size and less, and it covered the ground, including the road, like a 2 inch layer of snow.  There were even snow plows out moving it off the roads so people could keep going.

The summer, Florida tires on my mom’s truck didn’t know what to do with this icy, slushy mess, so we waited until the road was clear and took off again.  I talked to my dad later, and he said these kinds of hail storms are fairly common in northern New Mexico.

Since traffic and weather had delayed our travel, we didn’t get to Santa Fe until after 3 in the afternoon.  We checked into the motel, got the dogs fed and settled, then drove to old downtown Santa Fe.  We wandered around the shops looking for a place to eat.  We settled for the Blue Corn Cafe.

The food was sort neuvo-Mexican.  I had tamales, and my mom had a wrap sandwich.  The food was good, the waiter was cute, and the bill was not too bad.

We were pretty tired after our trip, so settled in for the night, and got a good night’s sleep.  In the morning, we packed up and hit a Denny’s for breakfast, then headed back to downtown.  We found a shady spot for the truck, so the doggies would be comfortable, and unloaded our bikes.  The downtown area of Santa Fe is not that big, but it was still nice to have the bikes so we could get around a little faster.  It also made it easy for me to go back and check on the doggies throughout the day, and feed the parking meter.

The biggest jewel of the downtown area is St.  Francis Cathedral.  Its stone facade and shady gardens were beautiful against the crisp blue New Mexico sky.  The church is as I remember most churches from my youth – echo-y and expansive.

The crown jewel, however, is the Loretto Chapel, also called the Staircase Chapel.  There are two mysteries surrounding the spiral staircase in this small church – who build the staircase, and how it works architecturally since it has no center support. You can read more about it here. The tiny church couldn’t hold more than 100 people, if they sat shoulder-to-shoulder and held their kids on their laps.  The spiral staircase leads to the choir loft.  Standing in the chapel, I could just imagine the wonderful sounds a choir would have made from up there.

Outside the chapel, there was the biggest cottonwood tree I’ve ever seen.  I posed my mom in front of it.

At one point, we put the doggies in our bike baskets and rode them around with us.  Willy was not sure he wanted to be in my basket, it wasn’t as comfortable as being in the basket on mom’s bike.  But he was a good sport.  He thinks I’m the cat’s meow, so he’ll put up with a lot from me sometimes.

The shops were full of all kinds of goodies.  Like this necklace that seemed way too pretty to wear.

The big shopping, however, was under the promenade of the Palace of the Governors building right on the square.  Native American craftsmen and women were set up on blankets along the sidewalk, selling everything from jewelry to pottery to basketry.  I bought lots of souvenirs there, including a pottery magnet of a spirit bear for Klown, a hand-stamped leather bracelet for the Perfect Child, and a pair of feather-shaped Sterling Silver earrings for me.  Tater got a t-shirt and a mustache necklace from the 5 and dime.  She isn’t old enough to appreciate the good stuff yet.  This is a picture of the promenade.

Of course, shopping wasn’t the only thing to do there.  There was also the great people-watching. One character caught our eye.  He was talking on a cell phone.  Every finger was covered with rings, and his face was almost completely hidden by his beard.  There were turkey feathers in his hat.

On our way out of town, we stopped at a shop painted bright yellow, away from downtown.  The entire outside wall of the shop was covered in metal art.  We spent a half hour going through the shop and all of its goodies.  If I’d had some extra dollars, I’d have bought something there.  Really neat stuff.  The guy running the shop said everything came from artisans in Mexico, even the glasswork and pottery.  Every morning he got out a ladder and hung everything on the outside walls; at night he had to take it all down again.  What an ordeal!

We left about 4 p.m. after a really great lunch at the Plaza Cafe.  We went in originally because they had a sign in the window saying they had sopapillas.  I had a plate of loaded nachos, and I can’t remember what my mom had.  Then we had sopapillas, and the bottle of honey was right on the table so we could make it the way we wanted.  Yum!  I don’t know how we didn’t fall asleep on the way home, but it was neat watching the sun go down over the mountains on our way home.  We passed storms, but no more hail, which I was thankful for.