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Louisville

Sunday. We get to wake up to different birds here than at home. Well, the robins,
mourning doves, house sparrows, starlings, grackles, red-winged blackbirds,
and house finches are the same, but here we have meadowlarks. At home, we
don’t hear meadowlarks from our house in the morning. Here, we’re
surrounded. Meadowlarks, kingbirds, and orioles. We don’t get kingbirds in
Louisville at all. We woke to the sounds of birds singing. Birds singing
and leftover balloons popping in the morning heat. It’s hot already. The day-after-brunch. There were a lot of presents. I got it all on tape.
And let me say that I’m confident these videotapes worked. I backed up and
viewed enough samples to know they’re all there. Time enough for a quiet visit with Larry and Lolly before moving on. It’s a
nice place to stay out there. Larry and Lolly are threatening to move back
there this fall. It was ninety degrees out by the time we left. Ninety degrees outside, and
a hundred inside the motorhome. Fired up the generator and started the
central air. Started the engine and the dash air. It took awhile. Tanked up at a truck stop. We paid 20 cents per gallon less than we did for
the last tank. Guess the annual Memorial Day gas crisis is over. On the way out from Louisville, Rags took his drugs, then went to sleep it
off in the cat box. For the trip home, he stayed awake and his chin didn’t
even get wet. He’s such a manly cat. We’re back to Louisville for three days.

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Fort Morgan

Friday Drank our morning coffee and watched Annie and the squirrels. There are
always a few squirrels around. Red squirrels. They like the maple trees.
And the cottonwood trees. And the phone wires and the blue spruce and our
rooftop too. We have had as many as five squirrels in our yard at one time.
Annie’s job is to keep them all in the air at the same time. At least off
the ground, anyway. This morning was a record six squirrels. Squirrel
juggling. Six squirrels in the air at all times. A quick teleconference to present an audit report to a client board meeting.
This client is a Denver client, but they have board members all across the
state. So we have a phone meeting. I like it better when I’m in a room
with some people and a few others attend via conference call. It’s always
strange when I’m the one on the phone with no one else in the room. I don’t
get much feedback. There is a little shuffling of papers in the background.
Sometimes some muffled conversation I can’t quite make out. I try to speak
at an appropriate pace, and make appropriate pauses, but it’s so blank. It
illustrates how much we depend on expressions, gestures, and direct
interaction to pace a presentation. Off we go. On the road again. As we head down the road, Matt and Kari have
gone back to the Colorado River State Park outside Grand Junction in their
fifth-wheel to hang out there again for a long weekend. Sounds like sunny
hot weather for them. Here is my challenge for this weekend. I have been assigned the video
camera. I have been elected videographer. This would not be cause for
concern, except for having been assigned this responsibility at Jacob and
Yousun’s wedding. For that, I was unprepared. I had no experience with
video cameras. They handed me one and showed me how to use it. It didn’t
look too hard to use. Downright simple, in fact. Almost idiot proof.
Almost being the operative adjective. I went about my assignment thoughtfully, working to capture all the key
events from the best possible angles. I turned it off and on, zoomed and
unzoomed, recorded and paused. I did it all. I left, pleased with having
executed my task so well, considering my lack of experience. Later, I found
out the tape was blank. It’s not possible, but the tape was blank.
Somehow, I taped the entire event, without once properly engaging the record
feature. For this occasion, we came properly armed with our own video camera. We
bought our own, and made sure I was familiar with all the features. I know
I know how to use this one. Motorhome on the toll road, transponder on the dashboard, sixty-five miles
per hour, no traffic. An easy loop around to Interstate 76. Checked the
fuel while we were driving. The last time we tanked up was in Durango. We
still have half a tank. I like that. Out through Eastern Colorado towns. They pass quickly. Lochbuie, Hudson,
Keenesburg, Roggen, Wiggins, and Fort Morgan. Lunch on the road. Judy
prepared it while I was driving. We stopped in Keenesburg for a few minutes
to eat it. An eighty mile day. The motorhome parked next to the hog barn. A wedding
rehearsal. A rehearsal dinner. Lots of happy people. Lots of video.

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Louisville

Thursday. This is it. Last day in town before we head out to the wedding in Fort
Morgan. We were lucky enough to live across the street from Archie for thirty years.
Great old guy. He was always old, even thirty years ago, because he was
always older than us. Young at heart, active, interesting: that was Archie.
We crossed the street and talked to him over the fence for thirty years.
Ultimately, he actually did get old and die. But before he died, his
daughter Lolly, and her husband Larry, and their daughter Jodee, moved down
from Fort Morgan to help take care of him. And stayed. Now we’re lucky
enough to live across the street from Larry and Lolly. Daughter Jodee is
getting married, back at their old stomping grounds in Fort Morgan, so off
we go to hang out with them for a couple days, and see if we can help more
than get in the way. Larry tells me we have a nice flat space to park the
motorhome right next to the barn. The hog barn. I’ve got my Honda legs back under me, and it’s a nice car again. I
particularly like the climate control. What a logical thing to do. Instead
of chasing the changing conditions with the heater controls, trying to find
the temperature you want to be, just pick the temperature you want to be,
and let the mechanism take care of all the details. I wonder why they don’t
offer that on the dashboard of motorhomes. Guess there is too much climate
to control from there. I have to confess. I’ve discovered I’m an elitist. Driving to work
yesterday, to a new client’s office, I wasn’t looking forward to driving
through the middle of Denver to get from our house on the northwest side, to
the client’s office way out east. That’s a lot of driving, and a lot of
traffic all the way. I had allowed an hour for this exercise. Leaving
Louisville, at the top of Murphy’s hill, I realized that the new beltway
would loop all the way around to the north, then east, past the airport, and
south to the neighborhood I was headed for. And the best part is: it’s a
toll road, so there was hardly anyone else on it. My own private road! I
can pay extra and have my own road with no traffic! I’ll take it. We have a transponder in the glove box of every car, so it is painless to
pay. Just throw it up onto the dashboard, the machine reads it as you pass
through, with no slowing down for tollbooths. It was good. And, it only
took half an hour to get there.