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Life

Before Judy went off the deep end, we were having a perfectly sane conversation about how we do what we do. We had a great time packing up the motorhome, driving up to Monte Vista, meeting a new client, taking three days to do a job, and driving home. The client was thrilled. They don’t get much attention in Monte Vista. I really enjoy what I do.
Usually, the road conversation turns to “when can we retire, then we could full time in the motorhome.” This time the conversation turned to “let’s go full time in the motorhome, work in remote Colorado towns together, work maybe half-time, and I can take as long as I want to retire. That works.

But then Judy took off on a tangent about “Sell the house now. Buy the new motorhome now. Work as long as we want, and just put everything we make into the bank so we can always just do what we want.”

I like the part about redesigning how we do what we do. I can deal with changing things at work. I tell the staff I plan on being on the road six months, or maybe twelve months a year. I give them the option of stepping up to do what I do and I hire all the help they need, or I hire someone to step right in and do what I do in Denver while I go off and audit small nonprofits all over the state. I still own the company. I still have the support staff in Denver. They can do all the scheduling and preparation work. I send the completed fieldwork back to Denver for quality control and copy/binding. I don’t have to have all the equipment on the road with me. I like it. It lets me continue to do what I do, but at a much more relaxed pace.




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Trip

Well, we’re back again. The Monte Vista trip went well. Got to drive down I-25 and turn right into the mountains. A one-turn trip. Monte Vista is a small community in the San Luis Valley. A down home farm and ranch community in a wide-open desert at seven thousand feet. Normal rainfall for them is seven inches a year. They’re having a drought here too, but we drove down into the valley in a rainstorm. The first rain they have had in two years. We located the Mountain Trails Youth Camp, our new client. We parked down the road at the Movie Manor Motel RV park. By being in the RV park, we don’t get the full benefit of the Movie Manor Motel. If you stay in a room, you get to look out over the adjacent drive in theatre and watch the movie right from your room, with the sound piped in. But, alas, we can see the screens (there are two) from the RV park, but we’re not really close enough to get the full treatment. We’re told this is the only motel of its kind in the country, maybe even the world! Imagine that.After our dry-camping adventures, it was nice to hook up and have unlimited electricity and long hot showers. Haven’t been flyfishing yet, but we’re asking around. Everybody loved Annie, although the cowboy guys seemed more stunned than impressed. They acted like they’d never seen a dog with her own carrying bag before. The Youth Camp headquarters are in an old stone and brick church right in town. That’s where we worked. The actual ranch is thirty miles outside of town, half of that on dirt roads, in a beautiful mountain valley on a stream. Three hundred eighty acres, eight cabins, one A frame, two train cars, a new bathhouse, and a new dining hall. Horses. Dogs. And challenge courses. There is a low rope course and a high rope course. They are all really interesting and challenging events that require patience, trust, cooperation, and teamwork. Everything is set up in the forest, strung between the trees. Years of work on the Executive Director’s part to get this all set up. Following him though all of it for the tour was enlightening. Almost everything he showed us got described as “one of his favorite challenges”. Clearly a labor of love. Annie accompanied us on the tour which involved dirt roads, stock gates, barbed wire, mud, hills, trees, horses, and cow patties. Guess which was Annie’s favorite part. Go ahead. Just try to guess. We made it all the way to the end of the tour in pretty good shape. Then Annie lagged behind. Usually she reserves the full, rubbing the shoulders on the ground routine for dead things. Some distant relative passed on the compulsion to grind the scent of dead things into her own coat. This time was different. This thing was never alive. She passed all those other cow patties until she came to this one. This was the cow patty of all cow patties. We looked back up the hill to see her on her back in the grass, all four legs in the air kicking, as she ground her entire body into a fresh, wet, gooey, green, cow patty. We yelled at her to stop. She did. She stopped, stood up, looked at us, looked really pleased with herself, then fell over on her back wiggling and kicking again until forcibly restrained. I should mention that Judy did the restraining. I didn’t get anywhere near her. She stunk. She really stunk. Luckily for us, we had Annie’s bag along with us on the tour. Annie stayed in the bag stinking until we got back to the motorhome for the night. We had to stop at the grocery to get some doggie shampoo. Annie got a midnight bath and blow dry. Not much in the way of birds around here. Once in a while one flies by, but none seem to land. The campground is pretty much just a parking lot in the desert. Tested the satellite system again. It worked perfectly until that big gust of wind came through and blew everything down. So far we’ve just left everything on the ground. It’s so quiet and nice in the evenings we don’t really need any noise from a TV. Not until football season anyway. This time it all worked without Judy having to drive down the road and hold the cell phone up to the walkie talkie again. Did I tell you about Solar Man? We met him last trip when we stopped at a park in Carbondale to dump and fill. He had an old Bounder with six batteries wired in up front, and fourteen solar panels to keep them charged. Said he never had to hook up. He was so proud of it. I mentioned something about the control panel for my setup and he exclaimed: “Oh. You must have a voltage regulator then.” His whole system consists of lamp cord, clamps, duct tape, and half a dozen batteries with a ton of electricity flowing into them. No voltage regulator. No meter. Just half a dozen batteries bubbling away. The cat got out in the motorhome park today. Judy forgot to attach the bunji to the screen door to keep him from opening it. If she is in the house and sees him going for the door, she zaps him with the squirt bottle. Just water, but he hates it and stops whatever he’s doing. Annie stops what she is doing too, if you squirt her with the bottle. But otherwise, the reaction is completely different. Annie stops whatever she is doing to charge the bottle, growling and biting the water. She loves it. So when Rags got out and took off across the parking lot, there wasn’t much Judy could do, except go for the squirt bottle. When she got close enough to threaten him with it, he ran and hid. In the motorhome. Overall the cat is being pretty good. No Giardia the last couple trips. He has been quiet and comfortable. He guards the house all day and plays with us in the evenings. Wednesday is Judy’s normal day to volunteer, so she found a veterans home and an assisted living house. She and Annie were well received. We really like the San Luis Valley. It is a giant desert valley, fifty miles by eighty miles, with water flowing through it and under it from snowmelt and streams from the mountains that ring it. We took a side trip to San Luis Lakes State Park. It was quiet. It was so still we could hear the pelican’s wings as they flew over us. It’s like Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, but with a lake. Lovely. I want to go back. Shamu sure handles a lot better since we had the air bags in the front suspension replaced. We finished the job and moved on to Lathrop State Park outside Walsenburg. Two lakes. Birding opportunities. Nice campground in the pinion/juniper. Picture attached. We had a quiet evening sitting around the campfire, admiring the milky way, watching for satellites, and spotting the occasional shooting star. It was quiet until that crummy cat overpowered the bunji latch on the screen door, slammed it open, and burst out into the night. Oh well. On to plan C. Never did go flyfishing. We did go home, though. Eventually. Here we are.
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Motorhome

Couldn’t pack for this next trip until we got the giant suitcase home from the RV shop in Longmont. Drove up first thing this morning. Bailed Shamu out (spark plug wires caused the sput). Nothing serious.
Of course we wandered over to the showroom since we were already there. Thought we’d go sit in a new Bounder for inspiration. A week before, they had three. Today, none. They sold them all. Right out from under us. There are a couple Fleetwood models just above the Bounder, the Expedition and the Discovery, so we decided to take a look at them. Neither one did much for us. The fireplace was nice, but you give up a lot of storage space for it.

The sales guy took us out on the lot, talked to us about what they had, then left us alone. He suggested we take a look at the Alpha before we leave. We did. Uh Oh. Bounder has a challenger. Walking into the Alpha was like walking into a really nice apartment. They changed the basic design for this one. They put the air-conditioning in the basement and raised the roof over a foot. Raising the roof raised all the windows as well. You can stand in this one and admire the view. It feels different. The outside compartments are HUGE. Big doors. Roll out trays with plastic tubs on them. Plastic tubs three deep. If a person was thinking in terms of a second home, as opposed to a few trips, this would certainly fit the bill.

The price was higher. We’ve been thinking of $100,000 for a gas Bounder, $150,000 for a diesel. The Alpha is listed at $190,000, but they knocked $30,000 off that before we even asked.

We’re also thinking maybe $100,000 is all we want to spend. Diesels don’t wear out very fast. We could wait a couple more years, then buy whatever year Bounder diesel we could get for $100,000.

No hurry.
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Trip

Getting ready for the next trip. Leaving tomorrow for Monte Vista for a week. Then back in town for a week. Then Yellowstone to fish with Bill for a week. Then stay at Yellowstone and fish for another week with Judy.
Plenty of time for Yellowstone to cool down by then. Right?

Sometime, during that second week, I think, Ken and Christie and kids will be passing through on their way to Colorado. Becky and Brian and kids will come up to meet them. It might happen that we all connect at the Pebble Creek campground.

Let’s see. That takes care of July and August. Then we don’t have another trip planned until maybe September.
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Aspen

Off to Aspen. Drove right up here. Got reservations for the campground at Difficult, a five mile commute from the Physics Center. We’re not staying in a condo this time, we brought Shamu. We get to wake up to the birds in the forest every morning. Every day at lunch I get to run on the Rio Grande Trail along the Roaring Fork river. The weather has been perfect. 80s during the day and 45 at night. It’s been a good week. We got a stuff-to-fit campsite for the motorhome. A trip around the outside with the wire snips to trim the distorted foliage, and we were all set. We got a nice sunny spot to give our new solar panel a good workout. We added one more this year. Now we have two collectors on a system that will accommodate three. We like to run a fan at night for air movement and background noise. We ran a bunch of other stuff one day too and ran the battery down pretty low. The next day we left everything off all day long, so by the evening, the battery was charged most of the way up! It looks like we could take a totally spent double house battery, lay off it for two days, and completely recharge it. Cool. We can monitor the charging. In the middle of a sunny day it is charging at five to six amps. I get to fly fish almost every afternoon at all my favorite places, and I’ve already found a new favorite section of stream as well. All on the Roaring Fork. Slow shallow clear wide winding meadow stream with lots of cuts and holes. Firm sandy bottom for wading. Filled with trout. The Aspen Valley. What a place to be. The five-day job went very well. We completed it in four. Stayed over Friday anyway, to just hang out and do everything we like to do some more. Annie was a big hit at the Center as always. She gets to go everywhere we go. Went to an interesting public lecture Wednesday night. Our friend Pierre, one of the Physicists gave a talk about neutrinos. They hadn’t invented neutrinos yet when we were all in school. Well, they had been thought up, but not many people believed in them yet. None had been observed or measured. According to Pierre, a trillion of them penetrate our bodies every second and pass right through. Lucky for us, our bodies are mostly empty space and neutrinos are so small, nothing gets hit very often. Neutrinos are so small, and so stable, they really aren’t looking to hit anything or react with anything anyway. They come from lots of places. From the core of the sun, it takes eight minutes to get to us. They’re a lot faster than light, in that regard, because it takes a long time for light to escape the core of the sun so it can even begin the journey to us. This was a public lecture, so he kept it simple. Of course he went way off over our heads early on in the talk, but he is so charming and such an accomplished speaker, that it was a good lecture all the way through. A minimum of mathematical formulas, and generous use of understandable analogies and anecdotes. If you want to know about neutrinos, I guess Pierre is the guy to know. He is one of the inventors of “superstring theory” and “supersymmetry”. He is one of the inventors of the “seesaw mechanism” for light neutrino masses. I have no idea what the seesaw mechanism is. From hanging around the Center, I gather that String Theory has to do with tying together all the different Physical Theories into one comprehensive structure. The concepts you use to describe gravity are different from those used to describe electricity or astrophysics, or particle physics, and so forth. My office-mate this trip, Murray, is a Nobel Laureate, but we never saw him. I’m guessing he’s really really smart though. On our last trip I described crossing the Great Divide on our way through New Mexico. I thought it was funny, because it’s essentially flat desert down there, and the Divide is just not that impressive. However, McKee was kind enough to explain to me that if I really crossed the Great Divide, then I was actually thousands of miles north of where I thought I was, in the Yukon, between the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. So. To the best of my knowledge, I never really left New Mexico that day. When I crossed the divide, I didn’t really cross the Great Divide, I crossed some other divide, that sometimes seems great, but not in New Mexico. We crossed the Continental Divide. I thought this campground looked quiet when we first got here, but I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The birds go off at about 5:30, and they don’t stop yelling all day long. They go till dark. What a racquet! But it’s a horrible place for birdwatching. All these birds making all this noise, but the only ones you can see are the robins. The rest are all little warblers off in the woods warbling their little hearts out. You can’t see them from very far away, but if you go in search of them, they shut up whenever you get close. Contrary little creatures. There are fifty camping spaces carved out of an aspen/oak brush forest with views of the mountains surrounding. Nice spot. We got the satellite TV rig out to test it. We had it installed and tested in Louisville. Everything worked just right, while we were in our driveway. So to test it under actual field conditions, we set it up, pointed it to where the satellite should be …, and nothing happened. No cell phone reception, so we couldn’t call for help. Next time we drove into Aspen, we called the 1-800 help line and they gave us some hints, so back we went to mess with it some more. I set the tripod up on the roof of the motorhome to get a better shot at the satellite. We made progress, but the screen told us we couldn’t actually watch any of the channels until we subscribed to them first. Of course, we have already subscribed. So Judy drove back down the road toward town until she could get cell phone reception, called the 1-800 number again, and relayed instructions to me over the walkie talkie, and I read error messages back to her until they had all the satellites talking to each other in the appropriate languages, and it all worked perfectly. Judy came back and we shut the television off for the rest of the trip. After all, who would want to go out into this wonderful wilderness and sit and watch television? Oops. The sky clouded up for a thunderstorm in the middle of a hot sunny day, and the amp meter went down from 5.5 amps to 0.5 amps. Several cloudy days in a row could send us off in search of a different system. Good thing that doesn’t happen very often anywhere. Oops. Remember that new favorite fishing spot? The wandering stream through the mountain meadow? Well, nevermind. We fished it again. We spent three hours there and did well. We fished this great loop way out into the meadow and back to the road again. On getting out, we read the sign again about not allowing your dogs to run free, and about staying on the established trails, and about no fishing. NO FISHING? Oops. All those fish must have been really surprised to find hooks in their faces. We’re the people who follow the rules. We always keep our dog on the leash when we’re supposed to. We always pack out our trash. We always pick up our dog’s poop. We never make noise during quiet hours. We ditched our gear and snuck back to the car. We read the sign again where we got into the water. Yep. No fishing. We didn’t get arrested, but there are probably wanted posters out on us by now.