Taste ALL of the beers!

I wore my pretzels with pride. The theme of my afternoon turned out to be chocolate (surprise). GABF, that was fun.

Hanging on

Snow came last Friday. It wasn't a blizzard, but I took the bus to avoid having to clean my bike and there was talk of chili-making around lunch time. The Flatirons got a pretty dusting, the tenderest plants in the garden lost their fight and I even turned the heat on for a little while. I gathered the last of the zinnias in the night before. One of my cats also stopped eating on Friday.

The sun returned by Saturday morning, but my weekend turned into a whirlwind of visits to the emergency animal clinic (because no animal of mine has ever managed to fall ill during the work week) and a whole lot of anxious waiting. I busied myself tearing down the vegetables, planting crocuses for next spring and watching this year's flower bed residents gather the tail end of their own harvests.

The butterfly smacked at the bee, the mantis lie in wait for both of them and the spider hurried off with his jaws full. It was a beautiful day with a light sense of impending doom.

The local emergency clinic gave back my unimproved cat and a very large bill (but still no answers) as they closed Monday morning and then we were off to CSU, an hour away. If you are ever tempted to take a cat for an hour-long joy ride, let me dissuade you. While the good folks at the teaching hospital poked and prodded my cat, I whiled away a few hours in Fort Collins in the brilliant sunshine feeling ever so slightly miserable. I picked up a copy of Smoke and Mirrors to distract myself, but reading "The Price" might not have been the best decision.

The good news is, one last vet-sponsored sleepover later, I got a mostly normal (though rather shorn) cat back and everyone is back home again. Thanks to Tony at Eco Thrift who gave me a farm-fresh carrot, the girls at White Balcony who distracted me with shiny things and the amazing CSU staff and students who fixed the acute GI issue I brought them.

My friend will knit him a belly cozy and some leg warmers.

Now I just have to deal with the second cat who, after pining away (I thought) in the first cat's absence, claims never to have seen him in her life and growls and hisses at him 24/7. Oh, and when they mention "vocalization and pacing" as a potential side effect of a cat's meds, they're not kidding. There doesn't seem to be an off switch. I love my housemates.

Roaming

Two months of staying put is apparently my breaking point. Wanting to get away from the signs of flood destruction and even more rain at home and the news of self-destruction of our government all over, I pointed Junior south. I drove out from under the clouds after four hours and ate pizza under the Milky Way and the next morning made my way to the land of the antelopes.

The color of the week: gold

The gold extended to the honeycomb that I bought at the farmers' market. I will try it, as suggested in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, in oatmeal over the coming chilly weekend.

While gold was the most prominent color theme, sometimes a little purple snuck in...

Occasionally, there was even red.

Santa Fe seems to have a relaxing effect on me, even if I don't buy into the yoga-pants-wearing, sage-smoke-wafting lifestyle. Most locals are effusively friendly, in spite of their questionable driving skills (the hour ride into and out of town each day was always lively, to say the least). It's a nice place to have little more to do than enjoy the music, nature and art.

Oh, and spending an evening being entertained (for charity) by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer in a little theater owned by George R. R. Martin, with George and Armistead Maupin in attendance was pretty cool, too. When I struggle to find bright spots in my life, I'll remember this evening.

Santa Fe, you won me over, again. And I like your birds.

Because my camera battery was dying, more tiny Santa Fe memories are saved on Instagram, to the right.

End week one

I am now constantly reminded that many of our paved bike paths were designed to double as waterways. The mini wetlands to the right didn't make it, but I'm guessing it would have been worse without them. A trip across town isn't quite what it used to be.

Motivation's been incredibly low this weekend, so I didn't haul debris or sling mud like I thought I might. A friend sent me some photos of trails at a local park as reassurance that the need for assistance isn't going anywhere in a hurry. That made me feel a little better, but this is what made my day...

I was just thinking about him the other day and now he's back. I really needed a Waldo today.

Spoke too soon

So, I was feeling a little disconnected from the flood, being in a dry neighborhood with nothing much to do. I've made no contribution to the growing dumpster mounds that are popping up around town and I haven't had to learn new skills like uncarpeting or turning your house inside out.

I'm part of the club, now.

I came home today to happy, little spores waving at me from the drywall. Now this spot has had a persistent leak since before I moved in and no one's been able to fix it properly, so the damage isn't all brand new. It just took a flood to bring out its nasty side. I've been wanting to rip off the drywall for years to see just what the hell was going on under there, but a pending neighborhood lawsuit always stayed my hand. We settled a year ago, so tonight I got my chance. For two hours, with the help of a neighbor's fan and the right supervision, I took my wall apart.

The corner bead's a bit of a pain, so now I wait to see what the HOA wants to do next. Our management has far more pressing matters at other properties and I have no mold allergies, so I'm in no hurry. Heck, I've likely been living with these guys for nine years without knowing about it. My secret roommates are spores.

In better news, parsnips can swim. Sort of. I had to haul them out of the ground tonight after I found their tops all limp the day before. Some have a few squishy spots, but we'll see what we can do with them. Sadly, the eggplants and tomatoes don't seem to have mastered the breast stroke and only mentioned that they were drowning after five days, so garden cleanup's going to be super early this year.

Can't wait to see what Friday's like...

The name of the game

Today's game is called "find the bike path in this picture."

 

I'm sure it's down there somewhere. You just have to look closely.

Thank goodness for the late summer plows. We could make some interesting sand castles if the materials weren't so questionable.

Arbitrary postdiluvian thoughts:

• Instead of asking "how did your house fare?" try counting the number of towels hanging on the fence and hoses snaking from the basement window to the gutter.
• Riding to work on muddy streets is like cyclocross (which I have never done).
• Riding home from work on dried streets, especially behind a bus, is like being at Burning Man (where I have never been).
• They all talk about the mud. Soon we will talk about the dust. I think I prefer the mud.
• Colorado is aptly named. Just look at the shade of what's covering our streets.
• Four days spent primarily in the house can result in couch sores and/or a fairly clean house.
• Always have sufficient cake on hand for emergencies and remember to ration it. The fourth day can be particularly long without cake.

Where do we go from here?

I took a trip to our neighborhood market on Friday. I passed two closed roads, a drowned school, lots of people hauling carpeting outdoors, kids swimming in pools of water and other unknown liquids, and streams still flowing across yards that didn't have streams before. The market is barely a mile from my house.

Crestview students won't be in class here for a long time.

While kids played in the water below, helicopters above ferried other kids off the mountainsides.

If you look carefully at the hillside, you'll see the slides that brought the new soil to the east side of the street.

This is my "almost home" view. I thought it was particularly pretty this spring when all the late snow left the hills exceptionally green. It's a sight that nearly always makes me smile. I've bumped up the contrast here to make the slides more obvious.

We were asked to avoid going out because we needed to make room for the first responders. I watched long convoys of National Guard vehicles stream past every day and I am in the flight path between the airport and the mountains. Chinook helicopters made my house vibrate. Because I was without my own personal flooding, I checked with friends around town to see if anyone needed help. Fortunately for all of them, none did, but that left me stuck inside for a few days, feeling pretty bored and useless. It's a weird and uncomfortable feeling being surrounded by so much disaster yet disconnected from it.

Saturday I felt slightly better having broken in to a neighbor's house to turn off the gas stove he accidentally left on and then released a gold finch who was trapped in some netting (not mine) in the garden, but I still haven't directly offered any flood help. My trip further in to town that day revealed families and neighbors helping one another remove ruined furniture, the Crestview parents emptying out the school, the Waldorf school parents drying out toys in the parking lot, and the Quakers drying out the meeting house. It looked like everyone had come together and had things in hand. I'm guessing by the look of things online that other opportunities to help will be forthcoming.

Our skies have been all over the map since Friday morning.

The morning after (Friday, AM)

All quiet on the western front (Friday, PM)

Um, whatcha doin', thunderhead? (Saturday, PM)

And the animals have been all over the map, too. Confused crayfish are popping up in parking lots. Slugs are multiplying exponentially. Peacocks have gone astray (I will stop by their house tomorrow to see if they made it back). And there are toads all over.

And Sunday it rained. And we all sang, "Rain, rain go the f*ck away" for the hundredth time. Tomorrow we go back to work. And we start putting things back together one day at a time.

Note: I have a bunch of video from the last few days, but have yet to edit it down to a postable size. I'll work on that.