Stardust

There's a horse I've been thinking about buying. I've spent the last few weeks riding some but mostly just hanging out in the pasture with her. I've also been studying natural horsemanship and Equus, the language of horses.

Last night I went out to the ranch and we had a nice chat. I did all the talking. :0) I told her that this morning I'd be back and we'd try a Join-Up. It would be her opportunity to choose me, rather than the other way around, and that would be the final decision.

So this morning I arrived at the ranch bright and early. I went out into the pasture and we said our good mornings. I took her into the round pen, and the ritual began.

I set her to running, which she began with an exuberant kick. Her breathing quickened, her ears perked up, her eyes were wide. I adopted a dominant posture, and kept strict eye contact as she circled me. After a few rounds, I made her change directions. This went on for some time. I was calm and in control, she was excited. And then I saw the first sign: her left ear turned like a radar dish and locked on me. I kept her running, and looked right into her eyes. Then her head turned slightly toward me, and her circle tightened around me - the second sign. Then a slight head bob, and then a deeper one. Still I kept her running, changing directions every 5 or 6 rounds, and kept my eyes locked on hers. Then her lips quivered and she started licking and chewing at the air, and dipped her head all the way to the ground in a sign of submission and acceptance. She was saying, "Okay, I think you might be worthy of being my leader. I'm ready to make my decision."

This was my cue to stop. I immediately dropped my rope, turned my back to her, slumped my shoulders and looked at the ground. I was saying in Equus, "Okay, I'm ready for you to make your decision. Will you choose me as your leader?"

Immediately she stopped dead in her tracks. This was the moment everything was leading up to, the moment that would make or break this budding relationship. There was total silence, except for the wind rustling in the cottonwood trees. I couldn't see her behind me. What was she doing? Was she just standing there? Was she even looking at me? Will she choose me or leave me standing here all alone? It felt like an eternity.

And then I felt it: a puff of warm air on my neck and the little hairs on her nose tickling my ear. My heart skipped a beat. She chose me. She chose me. Her head came over my shoulder and I reached up and rubbed her forehead. I turned toward her and she pressed her face into my chest. I was careful not to look her in the eye, but whispered my thoughts to her as I rubbed her face. After that she followed me around the pen, no leads, no commands. I took her back to the pasture and whispered a few more thoughts to her, smiled, and removed the harness. She ambled over for a drink, turned and gave me a long look, then quick as lightning the dust around her erupted with another exuberant kick and she bolted out across the field kicking and joyous, as playful as a kid on Friday after school.

"Let's do this."

Addendum: Yesterday evening, before this morning's Join-Up, but after I had told her about it, I lay down in the tall grass near this horse and watched her and the rest of the herd graze. The sun had set behind the Rockies and the sky was a dark, liquid blue during those long twilight moments. Cricket chirps replaced those of song birds. Field mice stirred. Toads emerged from their burrows to gulp down grasshoppers, and bats took flight. The prairie dogs had retired to their burrows, and I saw the silhouette of a distant coyote trotted along a ridge on the horizon. The meadow took on a new life, the life of night things. The chill of Autumn was settling on the plains, and the stars were spectacular; just spectacular! They looked like white diamonds tossed across deep blue velvet, and I felt like I was looking into eternity. I thought of the cowboys, the pioneers before them, and the Native Americans before them who must've spent countless nights looking up and dreaming. I thought of all the people who have ever gazed at the heavens and been overtaken with wonderment and awe. Ah, to be so tiny and yet so special as to have a metaphorical milisecond to peer up and into an unfettered sky and gaze deep into the cosmos, and to have the wits to appreciate it is just, well, miraculous. It was a splendid moment, precious and fleeting, and all the world felt right and good.

It was in those moments that I decided, should this horse choose me, I will name her Stardust.

And so it is.

You Can't Hide Your Lyin' Eyes

So the Fourmile Canyon Fire, which has been burning the mountains west of Boulder since Monday, is now officially the worst wildfire in Colorado history - not for its size but for the nearly 200 homes it has so far burned. They're still fighting it but it looks like Boulder is safe. A rain shower last night even cleared the air of the choking smoke.

I'm suffering from a severe lack of purpose. Big news, I know.

A couple of weeks ago I had another one of those moments where I decided reluctantly that my life is great, my job is great and I just need to settle in and enjoy it. And I did, mostly. For two weeks. Ish. But I knew it was fleeting. One can have everything in the world, but if one doesn't feel fulfilled then it doesn't matter much.

This much I do know: it isn't just the desk job aspect that I don't like. It's also the core of my job function that turns me off. I'm almost as sick of GIS analysis as I am of staff meetings and TPS reports. Surprisingly, however, I have found some spark of interest in web mapping; that is, making interactive , functional mapping applications for use over the internet. That's what's been keeping me moderately entertained at work lately. As long as I'm in the GIS field I definitely want to take my career in that direction for as long as it can hold my attention. Though still I know it's just a smokescreen; a distraction from the things I truly long for.

Anyway I decided to really try and get my mind off cabins and mountains and horses, but I'm like a mountain man junkie: I can stay clean for a little while but inevitably my thoughts start turning back to the things that consume me. It's a constant battle. That's why I'm blogging at 9AM on a Thursday morning instead of working. The blog is my attempt to help me organize my thoughts and get back to work, instead of heading out to the ranch or "running down to Boulder Horse and Rider - just for a few minutes to see what's new." Yeah right.

Gerard spent several weeks in Western Colorado and Montana this summer for an internship. He and some fellow student researchers were camping in remote parts of the Rockies studying pikas. At first, he said, it was beautiful. That gave way to pain and misery after the first day, because he wasn't accustomed to the rigors of "roughing it" and of spending so much time physically working and hiking. But after a couple of days he physically and mentally adapted and sort of fell into it. From that point on, he said, it was just awesome. I know the feeling. Every time I've been on an extended wilderness excursion or even in a physical working environment I've had the exact same experience. Gerard described Montana as the best. "It's very wild," he would say with a dreamy look in his eye. They saw bear, bald eagles, and heard wolves howling at night. The photos are stunning. Gerard lost 15 pounds during his time in the wilderness and didn't even notice. Mind you that was 15 pounds of "cushioning" he'd put on in the last few years since he pretty much gave up the gym. He looks good. He says at home he eats when he's bored. He exercises little and isn't really motivated to hang out at the gym and go mindlessly through some contrived routine. I very much know the feeling. This is a huge problem in modern Western society. Our lives are too soft and entirely too contrived. I despise the clock and the calendar like you can't imagine.

I once had a professor in college who was an archaeologist. He described a project he worked on where he lived in very primitive, stone age conditions for a month, and he described the same kinds of experiences that Gerard had. Even years ago when I was sitting in his class I was dreaming of how awesome that must've been.

I have another friend who was in the Peace Corps in Africa for two years, and he too described these experiences. He rarely got to call home. While talking to his mom on the phone shortly before his return to the US, she asked what he would be most happy to see upon coming back to the US. He said, "I can't wait to have a microwave again so I can easily heat up some water to take a bath." She paused. "Keith, you know we have hot water that comes out of the faucet here." He had to think about it a moment, then realized he had completely forgotten! I desperately need an experience like that.

In a scientific experiment conducted in Australia, a group (all volunteers of course) of older Aboriginal men who had lived the majority of their adult lives in the city, were asked to try living in the wild for six weeks. These men were all overweight, suffered from high cholesterol and high blood pressure and all the usual stuff. For six weeks these men lived in the Outback: no electricity or running water, no grocery stores, nothing. They had to make, catch, cook and gather everything. In six weeks all the men had returned to a normal, healthy weight and their medical problems had vanished.

I'm not saying life in the wild is all roses. It's the fact that it isn't that makes it so appealing and superior. There's a saying that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Modern society certainly offers a lot, but there is a high price to pay for all this luxury and softness, and I think I'm about tapped out.

Love

I think nothing in the world can make a spirit soar higher, or crush a spirit more thoroughly than love. It's a funny, funny thing.

I watched a movie tonight called Were the World Mine. I haven't smiled that much or felt that light of heart in quite awhile. It seems like these days I'm more serious that ever. Even my mom tells me to lighten up. I feel myself hardening, distancing myself from people ever more with the passage of time. I'm not sure what's going on. I'm not a huge movie buff, but every now and then I'll watch a movie or read a story that just melts my heart. I smile ear to ear and I feel like the world is sunshine and lollipops. It feels good. It reminds me of things, times, that once were. It reminds me that somewhere buried within all of the dark and terrible things that issue forth from humanity, there is also something lovely and precious beyond words.

“One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.”

--James Earl Jones

Sleepless in Boulder

It's shaping up to be one of those sleepless nights. It's a little warm tonight - 72 degrees at the moment - and I think that has something to do with it.

Probably a bigger part is that my brain works hard all day at work and my body gets nothing out of the deal but sitting nearly motionless. I come home mentally exhausted but physically pent-up. I'm working from home the rest of the week. I'll use the two hours a day I'm saving in commute time to get in some morning hikes. I'm also going to do some work in the kitchen "on the side." I have some pork and bison fat that needs rendering into lard and tallow.

Today was my last day in the old office building. Our new building - the LEEDS Platinum certified Research Support Facility - is all ready for us to move in Monday morning. Movers are transferring all of our computers and other stuff over the weekend. It was a tiny bit sad, though the move can be nothing but good. The new building is pretty awesome by any standard, and I'll finally be on the main campus. I also found out today that one of our best GIS programmers, his obnoxious personality not withstanding, is leaving NREL. I was shocked. Can't say I was sad about it. Was an interesting day.

I wish I was fly fishing.

War of the Worlds

I had the most awesome day fly fishing in Rocky. Between me and my buddy Keith we probably caught two dozen or so cutthroat trout, many of which were a good 14 inches or more. It's about a three mile hike up to the Loch where we fished. It's a place of stunning waterfalls and dramatic cliff faces, thick pine forests and clear icy waters. And of course a lot of trout.

The Glacier Gorge area is arguably one of the most beautiful parts of Rocky, and it's the area I spend most of my time in. The hike up to the Loch isn't what I would consider terribly strenuous, but most tourists (thankfully) disagree. It's three miles in with about 1,500 feet elevation gain. And of course it's at about 10,000 feet so the air is a might thin. While fishing, we had the occasional hiker come by and wave, but mostly it was just us fishermen with only the chipmunks and the gray jays to keep us company. For lunch we stretched out in a wildflower-carpeted meadow next to a stream, surrounded by fortress-like walls of sculpted granite, and watched the trout gulp down midges and the honey bees drink up the last of summer's nectar. It was spectacular.

I hadn't been fishing in a long time, but I can see now that this is a hobby that's way overdue. I can't describe the thrill I get from the game. Fly fishing is especially so, because trout are so finicky. One minute hundreds of fish will be feeding en masse, gulping anything on the surface that moves. The next minute, every one of them will stop, drift to the bottom and disappear. Often they'll only be interested in midges, and ignore anything else, then suddenly switch to grasshoppers or flying ants. With trout it's a constant game of trying to guess what the fish want, and then tricking them into taking a fuzzy bit with a hook that more or less looks like whatever is pleasing their palate at the time. Then of course there's the grand finale, the icing on the cake: the moment when a big one takes the fly, and you the fisherman are fast enough to set the hook in the split second before the trout figures you out. The fight is thrilling, and I can't quite explain why. I imagine it harkens back to those hunter instincts our ancestors depended on for millennia before the industrial revolution. I released all of my fish unharmed today, but the thrill of the chase was extraordinarily satisfying.

I also love the smell of a live, squirmy fish, and the way it feels in my hand. Cutthroats are among the prettiest and most vivid of fresh water fish, and I'm always dazzled by their colors. There's something thrilling and primal about going out into nature and having a close encounter with a wild creature. I think that's especially true today with so many of us living such disconnected, ignorant urban lives. I've blogged before about the simple thrill I often get at touching the bark of a tree or of hearing the sound of a stream after being subjected to cube life for an extended period of time. To go out into nature and see something, some beautiful form of life, that lives all on its own and needs nothing from man to survive but to be left alone still amazes me and fills me with delight. Going into the mountains reminds me that I am alive. It reminds me of the real world - the world beyond the artificial urban world - the world that created us, the world in which we have lived for millions of years, and only very recently have forgotten because of the illusions we've created with our cities and our nifty techno trickery. The cities and all they contain could not exist without the green, living world they, like a tick, have imbedded themselves in. How quickly most of us have forgotten our roots.

On the hike down from the lake this evening, I noticed - I always notice - that the trail gets busier and busier the closer one gets to the trailhead and parking lot. The people get fatter. The kids get more numerous. The attitude (mine) gets worse. Just hundreds of yards from the trailhead one will see fat suburban women wearing flip-flops, smoking, and screaming at unruly children who are literally climbing over the "stay on the trail" signs. One will see teenagers with their headphones on and people of all ages pecking away at their iPhones. One will smell a thousand different perfumes, deodorants, fabric softeners, shampoos, cigarettes and other toxic aromas from "real life" in the city. One will find cigarette butts and trash on the ground, and a hundred other signs that the ignorant, uncaring masses have descended upon the "easy" parts of the park to get their snapshot on the family vacation. I push through, and I keep my mouth shut. What, after all, can be done? Why can't these people switch off the city for a day? Why can't these people come into nature with the reverence these wild places deserve? Nature is not some playground for dumping your kids in. In my mind these are sacred spaces, not just that overgrown area outside of your suburban shithole.

It's always like this. All of the prettiest places I've been are being loved to death, most especially by the people who can't come into the country without bringing the city with them. It's always a nasty shock for me after I spend time in a relatively pristine wilderness and then step back into the urban machine. Most people are like predictable, selfish little drones. If you build it, they will come. Give them their iPhones and their fast food and their artificial lives and they will flock to you by the millions. They are mesmerized by shiny things, things that whirr and beep and give offer instant gratification. They like the illusion of material wealth, and the superficial trappings of a civilization that can never have enough.

As for me, if you build it I will leave. A more perfect system cannot exist than that which nature designed. The Earth in all her complexity is a perfect system that constantly creates, destroys, and recycles so that new things may be born: mountains, oceans, rivers, life. Here in the mountains can be found all of the things I could ever need to be healthy and happy: deer, elk, rabbit, bison, pronghorn, fish and turkey for food, shelter and ornamentations. Meat is for eating. Bone is for making tools and weapons. Hide is for shelters and clothing. There are edible and medicinal plants such as service berries, wild raspberries and strawberries, currants, cottonwood, mariposa lilies, yucca, mushrooms, and hundreds more. There are plants for making string, rope and dyes. If one has good food, clean water, a warm safe place to call home and loved ones to share it all with, what more could one possibly want or need? How could an iPhone or a shopping mall really enhance these most basic of human needs and comforts? Instead of sitting alone typing my thoughts on some lifeless, glowing box, I could be sitting around a cozy fire talking with real people; perhaps telling stories or talking about what a great day I had catching fish, and perhaps sharing a good haul of roasted fish with my loved ones. But that is not our world. In our world, some of us step into reality when the weekend comes and we are granted a reprieve from the Matrix. We are allowed, for a short time, to tiptoe through the unadulterated system that truly sustains us. Then on Monday we must go back into The Machine, back into the artificial world where we are told what to eat and how to live and what's fashionable, where we live by the clock and calendar under artificial light, eat toxic "food" and sit mesmerized by television and all it's mind-numbing power.

And now I must go to bed. The Machine is expecting me at 8AM.

Whoa

So my post from last night - too much? I get like that sometimes. Today I went for a nice late afternoon hike in Rocky, through Moraine Park and up to Club Lake. Nothing like a gorgeous hike in the wilderness to clear one's head.

This American Life - not the one by NPR

Why is it that nearly everyone I work with seems content to work 50 hours a week in a cube, making good money that they're happy to blow on kids, daycare, Walmart, processed "food," and all things suburban? Why is it they seem satisfied, if not happy, to trade most of their waking hours for corporate meetings, and pepper their vocabularies with acronyms and buzz words?

Virtually everyone I work with on a regular basis has kids, and that's all the hell they talk about. Little Johnny's soccer game, or the big mass birthday party that 30 screaming kids and their suburban parents are going to attend at that giant corporate pizza warehouse where they serve toxic junk food and lure kids and parents with video games and some high school kid dressed as a giant mouse. Little Susie's baby photos are plastered all over the cube and the screensaver, and always evokes the the same "awwwww" from anyone who happens by. I don't have a problem with kids. In fact I love kids and I love families. What I don't like is that phony, predictable, wholly artificial suburban routine that kids get plugged into from conception. Everyone I work with are like cookie-cutter people, just like the suburban tract houses they live in. They aren't bad people, not at all. I just feel like such a misfit. In my eyes they look like puppets, just cogs in the artificial urban machine.

Why do most of my co-workers get so freakishly excited about HTML 5? Or Python scripting? Or getting on the cover of Wired Magazine? How can anyone really give a f-? What do any of these things really mean in the grand scheme of things? We're born, we have a short time to do something in this world, and then we die. How does suburbia and obsession with technology enhance this formula? Technology is just fashion; what's hot today is forgotten tomorrow. We're a society that's never happy with what we have, and I have to admit I'm a victim too. We're always in pursuit of bigger, better, more, and of course it's never ever enough.

Today I went to the Boulder County Fair alone. I had the best time just hanging out with the livestock and watching the people. Dairy cattle. Sheep and goats. Pigs. Chickens, geese, turkeys, ducks. I loved the dusty air, the bits of hay that stick to everything, the smell of livestock, the sounds of pigs grunting, goats bleating, cows mooing, and chickens cackling. I loved all the young kids fussing over their show animals, the cowboys on their horses, and the farmers carting around their prize-winning vegetables. I loved the atmosphere of the Fair. It had an air of excitement, but moved at a human pace. It was so earthy, so gritty, so genuine. It was so unlike cubeland with its padded walls, florescent lights, sterile environment and retina-frying computers. I'm not a machine, dammit. I can't function by a clock, by pretend deadlines and by someone else's control issues. At the office, an "emergency" is when the Director decides ten minutes before his flight to DC, which happens to be at 5PM on a Friday, that he wants a dozen maps whipped up and arranged in a nice electronic PowerPoint and delivered to him before he boards so he can review it during the flight. At the Fair, an emergency is when Bessie the prize-winning milk cow casually walks out of her stall and saunters into the craft barn, knocking over a few tables. Maybe that's not a fair comparison. I realize every job has its ups and downs and that no job is all smiles. Farmers and cowboys certainly have their share of hardships. But the point I'm trying to make is that it's hard for me to get real concerned when the Director waits until the last minute to throw his weight around, but when Bessie throws hers around, well, that's another matter entirely.

I petted all of the animals at the Fair. The cows were smooth and gentle and had sweet dispositions. They always wanted a bite of hay. The pigs were coarse and hairy, and even when they were asleep, legs sprawled like they didn't have a care in the world, they grunted and jiggled continually. Sometimes they'd wake up and come over to nuzzle me, and they loved being scratched. The goats wanted to jump up and look at me with their alien eyes. The rabbits were soft and timid. The chickens were curious and endlessly entertaining. I walked through pee and poop and mud and all sorts of things as I made my rounds, and it was all fine. It was better than fine. It was wonderful to feel something under my feet, which are usually numb from the flat, unchanging landscape of office carpeting. I found myself smiling for no reason at all, overjoyed I suppose from the rush to my senses. At the office the temperature is always the same. The smell is always the same. The lighting, the texture of synthetic surfaces, even those horrid, ubiquitous ivy plants in the office environment never seem to change. Even the people are part of the furniture. Morning and night, day after day, year after year, nothing changes. Unless you have a window, there is no sense of time at all in the office, no sense of life actually happening. No sunrise. No seasons. No rising and falling temperatures, no thunder, nothing. There is only the incessant virtual ticking of the clock, counting down the moments until the next presentation, the next mind-numbing meeting, the next artificial deadline, time to eat, time to go home. It's always "time" for something. The whole system chips away at my soul, like some cold, unstoppable mining contraption slowly boring into the heart of a mountain.

Who ever thought it would be a good idea to teach or share information by projecting slides on a board in front of a room full of people? What happened to the days when people learned by doing? By getting their hands dirty? I've yet to go to a single conference or presentation where I actually learned anything. Sure, I can pick up a few facts, buzzwords or tidbits of something else useless, but that's not learning. Imagine trying to learn how to butcher a pig while sitting with 300 people in an air conditioned conference room sipping your Starbucks and watching some dork in a suit flash a PowerPoint presentation in front of you with "key concepts" highlighted in cutesy graphics and using words like "proactive," "commoditize," "bottomline," "deliverables," and "enabling." Think you'd be able to do it yourself after that? Of course not. You learn to butcher a pig by getting your hands dirty, by following the lead of someone who knows what he's doing.

I realize not everyone wants to learn how to butcher a pig. But by the same token, not everyone wants to waste hours of his life in an utterly meaningless conference either. Knowing how to butcher a pig, at least, would be a real skill. How to look good attending a conference is not.

I may have told this story before, but one of my most vivid memories from my youth was sitting at Memaw's house. It was summer. It was hot. I was a kid of maybe 10 or 12 years, and we were in the living room with the television on. The Golden Girls was on, Memaw was crocheting, and the clock above her television was tick-tocking as it always did. Out of nowhere I was struck by a horrible thought that scarred me for life: I'm wasting the precious moments of my life in front of a sit-com, and that vile clock is just rubbing it in my face with every swing of the pendulum! To this day this is why I don't own a clock or wear a watch. But I have to say, office life gives me that same terrified feeling. I don't want to live my life by some artificial timeline in some artificial environment. Dawn and dusk, the cycle of the moon and the changing of the seasons are all I want and need.

It seems such a tragedy to me that all I want is to have a life a little more like people have always had up until a couple of generations ago, but I can't because I'm trapped in the modern urban machine. To own some land, to grow and hunt my own food, to MAKE my own living is what I want. What I want is the classic American dream - a modest but comfortable country home, wholesome food, clean air and water, to laugh with loved ones. I don't want or need anything Made in China, or piles of electronic junk, or stacks and stacks of material things filling my closets and choking the space in my home. I want to get exercise chopping firewood, skinning deer, butchering a hog, tending a garden, mending a fence, building a barn, grooming my horse, and NOT by setting aside one hour a day to "work out" in an expensive gym with bad music and neon lights and a bunch of gym bunnies parading themselves around and wearing their insecurity on their sleeve.

I just think that we were given all we would ever need in life, but that we've somehow set in motion this culture of always trying to one-up the last generation. I know life wasn't a walk in the park 100 years ago or 500 years ago, but it is really that much better today? Maybe 500 years ago you could get trampled by a bison when you were out trying to get dinner. Last year 34,000 Americans were killed when they were "trampled" in their car by someone else's car. Today we live longer but the last few decades are lived with prescription medications and doctor visits. Today old people are no longer revered for their wisdom, but thrown out as obsolete like last year's computer. We're cutting down the world's forests, polluting the oceans, choking rivers, wiping out plant and animal species, filling the skies with smog, filling our food with mercury and a thousand other toxins. Sick or injured people are left to rot on life support for years. Corporations run the world, and nations are still declaring war on each other; only now we have the technology to cause truly global devastation. Have we really advanced that much? When we consider all we're sacrificing for our big screen televisions, or medications and our overabundance of food, are we really coming out ahead? And perhaps the saddest of all is that the vast majority of the world's population still lives in abject poverty. Only the privileged few get the big screen tv's and SUV's, but the whole world is becoming uninhabitable as ecosystems collapse and resources are depleted. We're like a virus consuming our host like there is no tomorrow - and at the rate we're going, there really won't be.

Okay, I'm tired so I'm off my soap box.

I Wanna Be a Cowboy

The ad read:

"Ranch outside Gardiner, Montana is looking for a full time year-round experienced wrangler/ranch hand. You must have excellent knowledge of horses and tack, have general equine medical knowledge, trail clearing and packing, have the ability to maintain neat horse records and report routinely to ranch manager."

I think I'll cry myself to sleep tonight and try not to think about frying my eyes out in the cube farm on Monday.

Or maybe I'll quit the cube farm and find myself a ranch job. We only live once.

I can't think of a title.

Over a month since my last blog post? Is my blog dying? Of course not.

I just got back from a week in San Diego. It was nice. I was there for a work conference, but was able to spend a fair amount of time doing other, less horrifically boring things. San Diego is a fun city. I'll never live there.

Aside from being busy, part of the reason I stopped blogging is because I feel like all I really do is whine about the ranch I'll probably never have, or go on and on about food. What can I say? That's what fills my mind. Mostly. There's certainly more, but even on a blog that nobody reads I can't write about it, because some things need to be kept close.

[sigh]

And with that, I'll take my secrets, pound them way down inside, and shuffle off to bed. Tomorrow is another day.

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.