Griswold

The temperature was in the high 40's this morning and it rained all weekend. It's still raining. This rarely happens (the rain, not the cool weather) in Colorado. I spent much of the weekend reading but today I needed to get out so we went to the dairy for milk and hit the antique shops along the way.

I scored not one, but TWO Griswold cast iron skillets that are probably older than my grandparents and possibly much older. Griswold shut its doors in the 50's but made legendary cast iron cookware for generations. So excited was I to use them that I made breakfast for dinner tonight: scratch buttermilk biscuits, uncured bacon from a local farm and yard eggs over easy with a hint of bacon grease. Also, tall glasses of sweet milk just hours from the cow, and plenty of home-churned butter, crabapple jelly and peach preserves that I canned last fall. No better non-stick surface has yet been devised by the hand of man than a well-seasoned cast iron skillet. Even the best modern cookware can't hold a candle to it, especially Griswold. People collect Griswold, and it isn't uncommon for the rarer pieces to sell for hundreds of dollars. I found one on eBay today going for over $800. I didn't pay that much for mine, which were a couple of the more common skillets. Cast iron, besides being supremely non-stick, also give off no toxins, were made in the USA, and will easily last long enough to pass on to your great grandchildren. Some high-end non-stick Calphalon pieces I bought just three years ago are already useless. Junk! Don't waste your time, your money or your health on fancy pots and pans - no matter who makes them or how impressive their revolutionary infused anodized non-stick technology propaganda sounds. It's all garbage! Go drop a couple hundred bucks (easily half what you'd pay for the Calphalon) on a few Griswold skillets in an antique shop or flea market. Clean them up, re-season if necessary, and relax knowing you've bought the last set of cookware you'll ever need.

Reading

It's June 13 at about ten in the morning, and the temperature is 48 degrees and raining. Been this way all weekend.

I finished reading A Walk Across America. I enjoyed it, but the last two chapters were just awful. The author is a terrible writer, but I overlooked that because I was really fascinated by his adventure. Then, surprisingly, this church-avoiding, long-haired, earth-loving hippie type "finds God" when he drops into a mega-revival in Alabama. It was all a little too suspicious and weird, as were the events the followed. For the tale of his adventures, I'd give it 4/5 stars. For everything else - his lack of writing skills, his inability to tell a decent story, and his weirdness to name a a few things - a mere 1/5 stars. He's got a second book which he wrote after walking through Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and ultimately settling for a time in Ouray, Colorado, but it got worse reviews than his first. He's also got a book about Alaska, which more readers seemed to enjoy, and a fourth about some other country which I didn't pay much attention to. I'm not sure I'll be reading anything else by Peter Jenkins.

Seeing as it's cold and rainy - perfect for curling up in my pj's by the fire with a book - I started the next one, The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a very accomplished writer whose books focus on evolution and genetic inheritance. The Blind Watchmaker is one of, if not the, most popular of his books. It's been waiting on my bookshelf for a long time, but I tend to buy books faster than I can consume them. I'm trying to resist the urge to go buy a few new ones today since I've got four or five on backlog at the moment. Sometimes I wish I could lock myself away in a remote and cozy log cabin in the snowy depths of winter and do little more than get lost in my books for a solid week.

FB

Facebook is dead to me. It was really cool reacquainting with old classmates and others from my distant past, but now that the new has worn off and we've all had our OMG-I-CAN'T-BELIEVE-IT'S-YOU moments with each other, my news feed has mostly been reduced news flashes about baby poop, 3rd grade baseball games, shameless solicitations, and way, WAY too much crap about Jesus. I've learned a valuable lesson in all this: if you aren't still in my life today, there's probably a very good reason.

The past week has been warm - about fifteen degrees above average. We've had temps in the 90's. Boulder Creek normally runs at 100-300 CFS (cubic feet per second), but this week it was overflowing its banks at almost 1,000 CFS! The heat caused rapid snowmelt in the mountains. A bridge collapsed just up the canyon from Boulder, creating an unstable dam which collected water and threatened to send a wall of water rushing toward town. Fortunately it was cleared and all is well. A cool front has since come through and water levels are dropping a little as the melt slows. Saturday the high is only going to be in the low 50's. Nice!

That's all for now. I'm hoping to finish reading A Walk Across America before the weekend comes to a close. I'm halfway through it. It's a story of a guy who, in 1974, decided to walk down the East Coast, through the South, and on to the Gulf of Mexico instead of getting a job after he finished college. Just him and his dog. Pretty amazing, the things he experienced. Makes one think. I'll probably comment more when I finish.

G'night!

Insanity

Do you ever feel like life, or at least self-awareness, is really just some cruel game dreamed up by a bored god looking for some cheap entertainment?

Today I learned that there is talk - serious talk, mind you - of detonating a nuclear weapon in the Gulf of Mexico to plug the oil leak. For the record the American government is saying no way, but there are plenty of people who seem to think this is a good idea.

Summer is here. We're actually having record heat this spring, and the rivers are overflowing their banks because the snowpack in the mountains is melting so quickly. I've been passing the time with travel. A couple of weeks ago Gerard and I spent five days in southwestern South Dakota, exploring the Black Hills, Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, Deadwood and other cool places. It's beautiful, South Dakota. The wildlife there is extraordinary - our first morning we weren't a hour out of camp when we saw herds of free roaming bison, pronghorn, mule deer, wild turkey. Later in the day we saw bighorn sheep and a mountain goat. Unfortunately, however, South Dakota doesn't think native predators are as good for tourism as herds of bison, so they've quietly allowed the grizzly bear and the wolf to remain exiled. That means humans have to round up some of the bison every year and ship them off to meat packing plants.

Last weekend we hiked about ten miles through a mountain ghost town called Homestead Meadows. The decaying remains of cabins dot tens of hundreds of acres of open meadow and woodland near Mountain Lion Gulch. It's easy up there to forget about florescent lighting, office cubicles, artificial deadlines, Sara Palin and nuking the seas to plug oil spills.

Tonight when I close my eyes, I will go home.