2007 - The Year So Far, Prior to Fatherhood

It's been quite a year thus far. Danine is getting big- hormones are running all through her system, she's getting some non-trivial pains, and she looks just radiant and lovely. Yesterday, April the 28th, we hosted a wonderful dinner party. We had Danines Project manager from work and her husband, one of my coworkers (at least for a brief time- he came and went very quickly of his own volition) and his wife and his 2 very adorable girls from a prior marriage came, my chiropractor and his wife (I hope to be seeing a lot of them- he plays guitar, chess, and lives literally a block away). Danine's friend Melanie and her husband Ben brought her kids (they have adopted 2 kids) so we had a full house. We played duck-duck-goose, tag, and then I read to Dag's kids (I read them the Tom books- how Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, and then A Near Thing For Captain Najork). Danine cooked a marvelous dinner and I grilled skewered chicken, people brought loads of dessert and wine, and all had a lovely time.

Anyway, yesterday was great, although it was tiring. Slept like a rock.

March was probaly the toughest month for me. I was sick for weeks with an incessant buzzing in my brain, like a 60 Hz buzz from a cheap fluorescent bulb. Then just as I got over that I had a crippling back pain from gardening. On the upside that’s how I met my friend Joe the chiropractor, and I consider it a worth while injury. It certainly has made me wary of staying in shape, so I've been doing lots of time of the elliptical and doing lots of pull ups. I finally wised up and put tape on the chin up bar to make it more graspable- that's made an enormous difference!

Oh, and then at the end of the month the f***ing IRA billed me over $800 for taxes from 2 years ago. A company I forgot I'd worked with never sent me 1099 that year so I underpaid. It has set me back a bit, but thank goodness I've become an aggressive saver! That would have wiped me out a few years ago, but now its just a bank-to-bank transfer from my savings account away. Still, with the baby coming (Ms. Emily Helen!) and putting in new vinyl windows on the upper floor to replace the original 1965 hardware, its a real pinch.

I need to call everyone in the family. I need to get birthday cards for Uncle Matt and Uncle Dan- seeing that their b-days are a and 2 days prior to mine I have no excuse for forgetting them! I need to see if Matt and Irene would like to double with Danine and me, and Matt and i can get sloshed together. Except Danine is preggers so I can't. sigh...


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Dead Bee, No Snow

Bees in February.  We had them in January, too.

I woke up hoping to find a landscape blanketed in snow. Not a huge dumper, but just an inch or two, but some. Over a year and a half of drought makes an inch or two matter incredibly; cover the grass, stop the evaporation loss of the soil, rebuilt the moisture level with a steady drip from melt. Please. The storm came from the west, over the mountains, not pushing up against it, so it was hard to expect much. Hopefully the mountain snow pack has been been pulled up from these near record lows. 

Yesterday I came hope from walking the dog to find a bee frozen and starved to death, clinging to the screen on the porch. It had landed there sometime during the day while it had been out in a fruitless search for nectar and pollen. he trees keep trying to provide some only to have another minor frost come in and kill the buds. Everything should just be asleep, not waking up, exhausting itself, the returning briefly to a troubled and soon to be interrupted torpor. We were finding bees in January. The food supply of the hives must be in terrible shape; instead of sleeping, conserving through a long winter and awakening to a verdant spring the bees awaken in 50, 60 degree temperatures and head out looking for food. The food isn't there, and the hives lose their workers in the next snap of cold, their reserves of honey and food drawn down to replace workers and feed sorties into a barren landscape. 

This is the future coming. I remember the Rocky Mountains as a child. There always seemed to be a mist about them. Last summer we didn't go camping because of the fires; from my office in Boulder I watched one spring from nothing to hundreds of acres in the span of a brief walk. Had we been in a park with one exit could we have escaped? I rather think not.


It's looking like the start of another very hot, very dry year. I just hope the fires aren't as bad.





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