Arlington National Cemetery

So I arrived in DC just after lunch, got my rental car, and headed immediately to Arlington National Cemetery. What a perfectly gorgeous spring day. Bright and sunny, and all the trees and flowers are in full bloom. I spent the entire afternoon at the Arlington National Cemetery, walking the grounds and taking it all in. I saw the tombs of the unknown soldiers and the changing of the guard, JFK's grave, Lee's house, the Iwo Jima Memorial, and more. I learned the history of the property and all sorts of neat bits of trivia.

I can't tell you how much pleasure I get from days like this. Traveling someplace new, then just strolling around. No real agenda, no pressing deadline, and no one either holding me back or rushing me through. I absolutely need this every so often.

The DC area is a particularly perfect place for this as it turns out, for whatever reason. I spent some time today pondering that among much else. I just feel very comfortable here. I also feel tremendous reverence for this place.

As I mentioned, I witnessed the changing of the guard at the tombs of the unknowns. There was a decent group of tourists gathered. Many were fat, wearing flip flops and beer t-shirts. Typical American tourists. They were sprawled across the steps waiting with cameras in hand. I stood. Way in the back at the top of the stairs. All the monuments and various places in DC have a sense about them that commands respect. For those who can't sense it or choose to ignore it, there are literal signs everywhere telling you do not smoke, do not eat, turn off your cell phone, speak softly or stay silent, and conduct yourself in a dignified and respectful manner. Each time I visit these places I speak not a word, turn off my cell phone, and always dress well. It seems the natural thing to do. But some don't get it until it bites them on the ass. Today I saw it bite them on the ass.

When the Marines came to change the guard, one of them turned and marched right up to the tourists lounging on the steps like beached whales and yelled, in an incredibly intimidating Marine voice, "VISITORS WILL STAND AND REMAIN SILENT!" That's all he had to say. You could FEEL his words. You've never seen tourists stand at attention so quickly.

The changing went off without a hitch and with nary a peep from the crowd. Afterward two of the Marines left and only the new guard remained. A large group of school kids started clowning around and the parents and teachers suddenly took on the demeanor of a group on a stroll at the zoo. The Marine on guard immediately whipped around and yelled with a thunderous roar, "VISITORS! YOU WILL MAINTAIN AN ATMOSPHERE OF SILENCE AND RESPECT!"

Dead silence. Children and adults alike froze in their tracks. It was amazing. The Marine whipped back around and continued his silent vigil. The entire group vaporized in less than a minute. I stood there on the steps, just me, silent and unmoving. The birds were chirping. Flower blossoms and the scents of spring were floating on the breeze. And below me were the tombs and the vigilant Marine whose presence was overwhelming. I stayed for a long while just watching and thinking. I felt a stirring deep inside.

What was it that moved me? What was I thinking about, really? Liberals tend to scoff at things like patriotism and the military, and conservatives tend to idolize them. It's one of the big points of contention between the two groups. I fall somewhere in the middle. I don't believe in blind patriotism, but I do have strong emotions when it comes to having national pride and great respect for our military personnel and traditions.

I really have a lot of thoughts on the matter but this is one topic I have a great deal of trouble putting into words. Maybe some things are best left unsaid. I'm also exhausted from getting up at 4:40AM to catch my flight so I think I'll just call it a night.

Oh, one more thing. I did swing by Mount Vernon but the grounds were closed by the time I got there. What I did see was absolutely gorgeous. So I settled for dinner at The Mount Vernon Inn Restaurant. The building was really neat. The food was okay, but that was made up for by my really cute server, all dressed up in colonial era tights.

Tomorrow is another day.

Fly Away

I'm at the Denver airport, headed for DC again. It's snowing right now, and when I get off the plane it's supposed to be 90 degrees with blue skies. I can't wait.

I'm not actually staying in DC this time. I'll be on a military base outside of DC. The Department of Defense has developed a renewable resource analysis tool and they wanted someone from the lab to come check it out. That'd be me.

I'm going have a car and some extra time so I'm planning on a whirlwind tour of a few hotspots: Arlington National Cemetery, Mount Vernon, etc.

I'm also excited because I've mapped the areas around DC many times, some in detail. It'll be neat to see what the look like on the ground.

Lazy Saturday

I don't think I could ever live in the Pacific Northwest. When the weather is cold and wet I'm useless. The trend the last few weeks has tended toward gorgeous sunny weekdays followed invariably by cold wet weekends. Today is no exception. I've got just enough motivation to curl up on the sofa and take a nap. Don't get me wrong, I love days like this. We get precious few here on the Front Range. But I think if we had them all the time I'd spend most of my life sleeping.

What I really need is a good dose of hot, humid weather. I need one of those scorching August days in Texas when the sun is blinding and the heat takes your breath away. And just when I think I can't stand it any longer, to jump into Barton Springs or the San Marcos River.

Or maybe what I need is a stretch of white sandy beach, azure water and a warm salty breeze.

I've been yearning to travel lately. Someplace warm. I'm always like this in the spring. Even in Texas the weather often couldn't get warm fast enough for me in the spring. But the temperature isn't the only reason I long to roam. Spring in general makes me restless. Sometimes I just get the urge to strike out for a change of scenery and a little adventure.

I don't have any major vacation or travel plans (yet) for the summer but there are a few things on the schedule. I'm going to DC again for work this week, and I've got short recreational trips or work travel scheduled for Houston, Austin and San Diego in the next few months. I'm also going on our annual week-long backpacking trip in Colorado later in the summer. What I don't have on the list is a serious vacation. In my mind at this moment, that means two weeks lying on a tropical beach somewhere drinking pina coladas.

In other news, I'm going back to grad school this fall to finish up my MS in GIS. I've been in Colorado two and a half years and I feel like it's time to finish what I started. I'm excited about the program here. Right now I'm enrolled in a certificate program in Digital Design, which the lab is paying for. I've got so much cartography work these days I felt it would help me create higher quality, professional maps and other visuals to showcase my team's analytical work. It's also giving me a taste of being back in school while working and helping me ramp up for the workload coming this fall.

Maybe I need to treat myself to that tropical vacation this summer before things get crazy in the fall. Flights to Hawaii are pretty cheap right now.

Yet Another Snow Day

Another massing spring storm closed the lab and area businesses today as it dumped several feet of wet snow along the Front Range. I only left home once for a short hike to get some pictures. Above is the view from Red Rocks looking across Boulder Canyon during a brief lull.

You know, back when I worked for the DOT in Texas we got a lot of crazy holidays, like Confederate Heroes Day (known as Confederate Memorial Day in every other state except Tennessee which calls it Confederate Decoration Day.) These days I just get the standard holidays, but it's made up for in snow days. I like the snow days better. Since they're unplanned it's like receiving an unexpected gift in the mail. Plus "snow day" just has a nicer connotation.

I love YouTube

Farmer's Market 2009

It begins.

As of yesterday, NOAA was forecasting a blizzard for today, the opening day of the 2009 Boulder Farmer's Market. Indeed it did snow last night and was still snowing lightly this morning. But the ground is so warm it's not sticking to paved surfaces, or any surface for too long. Note the snow on the trees in the photo.

I had thought I might not even leave the house today if the weather was going to be as bad as predicted. I knew at least one farmer who let me know in advance she wouldn't be setting up her booth. But let's be honest, what are the chances of me NOT getting down to the market on opening day?

So there I was, just minutes before the market officially opened, walking up the trail. "There's a tent! I see one! And there's another one!" I said to Gerard, relieved to know that at least some vendors made it, and excited at what their presence means. It was visual confirmation that spring had come. The season of plenty had arrived.

Fewer than half the vendors who will eventually make up the market were there today, but most don't even have anything to sell yet. In fact only one vendor, Anne and Paul Cure of Cure Organic Farm, had fresh greens - lettuces, spinach and salad mixes which like the cooler weather. Another, Three R's Farm, had tomatoes, but they've always got tomatoes thanks to their year round greenhouse operation. Our mushroom man was there. He's also got a great indoor operation growing baby bellas, shitake, trumpets and many others. The pickle guys of Mountain Valley Canning were there. They buy cucumbers, horseradish, sugar and spices from the other farmers and make the best pickles and horseradish I've ever had. Reuben, our super nice sprout guy was there, and so were the handsome young bread guys of Udi's Bakery, the rancher of Homestead Natural Beef, and lots of pastry-making women. In fact there was a new one today, a German woman with a very heavy accent who makes absolutely heavenly pastries. "She's the real thing," Gerard said after trying her cinnamon crisp. "She's not just trying to pretend she knows German pastries!"

And of course, the taste of the Boulder market is the "Amaizing Corn Tamale" of which I had to partake. Winter is officially over. It doesn't matter if it's still snowing.

It was so nice to reconnect with everyone. The standard greeting on the air was, "Hey _____, how are you!? How was your winter?" I hadn't seen most of these farmers and food artisans since last fall, and the die-hards (like me) were reconnecting with farmer friends throughout the market. I also saw some other Boulder friends and even a co-worker who had driven up from Golden and ran 17 miles on Boulder trails by 8AM. (He likes to come to Boulder to train and shop the market but lives in Golden because it's closer to work.)

I spent more time chatting and catching up than I did actually shopping, and this is one of the things that makes the farmer's market such a wonderful part of local culture. It brings people together. It's a place not just to shop but to meet new people and strengthen bonds of friendship. It builds community, and community is something Boulder does very well. The market is so popular, organizers are currently working on a complete redesign to try and accommodate the crowds and the ever growing list of vendors.

So my kitchen is now filling with the flavors of a new season just as the flavors of fall and winter are almost at an end. The winter squash are all eaten. I've got a few random jars of ketchup, cherry bomb peppers, pasta sauce and others and probably a little too much pumpkin butter. (Note to self: next fall I need way more salsa and a little less pumpkin butter!) I've got a little frozen fruit left, and a few miscellaneous containers of dry goods. Everything else is gone. Of course there's always an ample supply of bison, elk, pork, milk, butter, yogurt, cheese and eggs. But now the house once again is filled with the aroma of fresh green onions scrambled in with our eggs. We've got crisp, spicy salads, tender baby spinach, zippy red radishes, a wide variety of sweet little sprouts and an abundance of colorful Nasturtium flowers on our plates.

The winter slumber is over and the earth is waking up. Welcome, spring.

Life Dot Com

Am I just getting old or is technology really getting ridiculous?

I've got a cell phone but I don't use it all that much. I'm not really a phone talker. I never really have been, though I did love my cell back when I was a social butterfly. These days the phone mainly serves to catch up with mom or the occasional friend.

I've been pondering the iPhone. I'm locked in a contract with my current carrier for a couple more months but I was thinking about switching just for the iPhone. Being the Mac fan I am, it's hard for many who know me to understand why I don't have one yet.

You know, the iPhone plan is ridiculously expensive. What really irritates me is how much the additional text plan costs. By the time you add all the goodies and then slap on the taxes and fees, we're talking a hundred bucks a month or more for a modest plan. For a freakin' phone. It is a very cool phone, I freely admit. Lots of people I know have them. It's a little weird to be going about my day hearing the sound of emails coming into Mail in random places. The other day in a meeting this happened, and I got to thinking about it. Do I really want to be able to check my email anywhere at anytime? Is this really a good thing? Sometimes it gives me this creepy Matrix vibe that we're all so wired in all the time.

I was browsing the iPhone apps. The vast majority of them are time wasters by any rational standard. Others are debatable, though I have my doubts. There's one that keeps track of your spending and calculates tips for you. I can shove a receipt in my pocket and double the tax for a tip in a lot less time than I can pull out the phone, unlock it, launch the app, and type in all those numbers with the little digital keypad. There are apps for tracking oil changes and reminding you of this or that, shopping lists, etc. The other day I was at the bus stop and there were half a dozen people there waiting. No one was talking to each other. Indeed no one was looking up. Every single one of them had their noses buried in an iPhone, Blackberry or some other such device.

You know, try as I have, I've never been able to adapt to things like online calendars and applications to run the minutia of my life. I hate them, in fact, on the whole. Something is always going wrong. Too often it creates more work than it saves. I've still got an old fashioned photo calendar hanging in my office that I keep everything on. It never needs rebooting, it never inexplicably deletes anything, I don't have to click five times to see it. There are no software updates or viruses or upgrade costs, except for the $7 price tag when they go on sale for 1/2 price each December for the upcoming year. My photo calendar just always there, sitting quietly, exactly as I last left it and easy to view at a glance. I like that.

There's a song called Cowhand Dot Com where a cowboy is lamenting the modernization of everything. It's really cleaver and funny, but it always makes me a little sad too. He describes a "fancy" new ranch where cattle are scanned and tracked digitally and laptops and cell phones are a part of daily life. He points out that no matter how fancy the technology, you still have to step in shit. I guess the takeaway message for me is that too often technology has become little more than a distraction, an extra burden in a world that already has enough.

We live on a planet of 7 billion humans. It's hard to find a place where you aren't surrounded by people. And yet more than ever people are reporting how lonely and unhappy they are. We have too much stuff and our lives are too virtual. I'm not knocking the technology. It has brought us some amazing things. I'm knocking the rampant and excessive use of it, the attempt to shoehorn every aspect of humanity into it. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Studies have shown that in 1985 the average American claimed 3 friends they felt they could confide in. Today that number has dropped to 2, with 25% of Americans saying they have no one they feel they can confide in. Just the other day I claimed my blog was often my outlet. Since the 1950's, the percentage of Americans who claim to be happy has been plummeting. I think it's no coincidence that the trend is aligned with the proliferation of television and fast food, the near extinction of the family meal and neighborly neighborhoods, and the plugging in of Americans. How quickly a novelty can become the norm. Industrial agriculture and television step in and destroy major components of our social structure, and within a generation the old ways are forgotten to the ruin of our health and happiness.

I've been considering giving up my cell phone altogether. With Skype, for about $5 a month and no contracts you can still make and receive as many phone calls as you like, and there's any number of services that let you video chat computer to computer for free. The only disadvantage, if you can call it that, is that you can't make calls just anywhere, anytime, unless you are perpetually in the realm of wifi and have access to a device that can use it. I gave up TV years ago and haven't missed it. I watch an occasional episode of the Daily Show or whatever because now everything is online and free. But people always comment when they come into my home for the first time that the living room is so cozy and people-friendly. Then it strikes them, the room isn't centered around a television. It's centered around the people. There isn't a TV to be found in the place.

It isn't my wish to go back to living like the 19th century, though I do firmly believe there are important aspects of that way of life that serve humanity far better than their modern replacements. Cell phones are good. The internet is wonderful. Computers are fantastic. But when I think of how much money and resources we pour into these things, how much of our lives we try to live through them and what we are sacrificing as a result, yeah, I think we've gone too far.

Another Snow Day!

Last Friday's snowfall ended up dumping 15 delicious inches of wet snow in Boulder. Farmers are rejoicing. The lab was closed Thursday and Friday so I got a four day weekend out of the deal.

Most of it had vanished by today, except the mountains of it piled next to parking lots and lawns and mountainsides facing north. But roads, walkways and most of the parks are quite snow-free. Or they were until about an hour ago when another spring snowstorm blew in. There's probably two inches already and forecasters are saying we could get as much as a foot before daybreak. Looks like the winter drought is over and we're all expecting a very green spring. I am a little concerned for all the fruit trees whose lovely white flowers are now brown and drooping.

I really love spring snow. It's pretty. It also delivers a lot of moisture to the soil, which is great for gardens and wildflowers and reducing grass & forest fire threats. Flakes are heavy, chunky and wet. It sticks. Actually it tends to encrust everything, including pedestrians. That part I'm not as fond of. Still, an abundance of sweet spring snow is a good omen. A warm and bountiful summer is right around the corner. The official kickoff, in my mind, is two days from now when the farmer's market commences once again! I hope the weather is nice.