September Sunset

Ah, the days are getting shorter now - a week past equinox, though we still have lots of daylight to lose. It's been an interesting week - bright sunny and clear for a goodly lot of it.

When I looked up out of our study on Thursday (we have these clerestory windows that make our place look three stories high), I saw this:


Glorious blue sky and a tinge of autumn at the top of the tree.
(you are lucky - I removed the ENORMOUS bird poo splattered down the window. I get to see it every time cos there is NO way I am finding a ladder that long just to clean it off)

Then enough cloud shows up to make sunset fabulous.




Can you tell that sunset is my favourite part of the day? Sunrise is good too, at least in winter, but really sunrise is hard to cope with for most of the year. I'm awake for most sunsets :-)

Word of the Week - Ahsum!

Yep, this week's word of the week is ahsum. Some people 'round here make it more of an arsum.

Australians, by comparison, say awsum.

Most people will spell it awesome!

All is flux

Everything changes.

I thought that we live now in a quite civilised place. People here try to be nice to each other and the enviroment, with varying degrees of success.

Turns out it isn't so civilised. Did you know that in Colorado, the employer can tear up a contract and sack an employee with no notice? You have a two year contract? Eh, we don't want you any more, go jump. No need to pay it out or pay compensation. They can tear a person's life apart with no malice intended, it's just business.

DH's employer is shedding 20% of the jobs in the labs. Contract people are the easiest to get rid of. Guess who is on a two year contract?

Sigh. You poor poor Americans.

Painting without pictures - Colorado sunset

Today was a dull day - very little sun as a front was passing by. But oh boy, did sunset make up for it!

Imagine showers falling from one band of heavy cloud. The rain is the sort that don't reach the ground. Earlier in the day, such showers had looked like a grey longhaired tabby cat's fur. But now?

A band of brilliant orange fire stretched across the sky. Filaments of flame dangled and wavered, dancing in the breeze up high beneath the clouds. Everything all around was tinted orange.

To the west of the fire were bands and speckles of pale orange.

The fire cat moved northwards, clearing, leaving the mackerel spotting of the clouds to light up in their turn. Brilliant yellows, oranges and reds, stripes, spots, streaked with deep blue cloud, patches of bright blue sky, puffs of teensy little cumulus.

Totally brilliant. Oh for a camera! But then you would be bombarded with a hundred pictures showing the slow changes in colour.

Equinox, a day late

It's all downhill from here, baby! Actually, it is all downhill from the summer solstice, but eh.

On Tuesday we realised that trees were starting to display their fall colours. You can see an early starter in this pic I took last Friday

(that's our street, looking towards the foothills, ie west).

I am now itching to get into the mountains and go see some aspens in their pretty autumn raiment, but alas DH is in Philadelphia, and even worse, he has the camera so I can't even get any pictures of the trees around here, let alone in the mountains!


The last of the summer flowers are blooming mad(ly) before the first frost hits. That could be any time now. Some years the first snow has fallen by this time of year. The Trail Ridge road, which goes across the top of Rocky Mountain National Pass was closed the other day due to snow.


So it is time to kick back and enjoy the nice weather while it lasts. Enjoy the pretty flowers. Flick as much fleece as possible. Absorb the sun's rays whilst the temps still allow me to wear shorts.


The sun is only hitting about a third of our courtyard now - two months ago the whole thing baked in the hot sun all day long. By midwinter I guess it won't see a jot of sun at all and there won't be much sun on the lower level of our house. Sunset is now getting "early" - 6:30pm and the sun is disappearing behind the foothills.

It has another two hours to pull back! Eeeek! Nights are going to be looooooong and cold. At least the average daily temperature is above freezing during winter, though the nights are below freezing. Time to get making some warm woollies for winter!

Theyrcoming2getu

They are crawling out of the waterways. They are coming2getu. They are LOLyabbies.

That was the weekend that was - Sustainable weekend

What a busy weekend!

I discovered info about the Fort Collins sustainable living fair in a hippy magazine that I accidentally picked up in a cafe. Some of the talks looked pretty interesting. So we hopped on the treadlies and went on up.

Bike valet parking was good and there were a few bikes there too - about 2,000 a day or thereabouts. We grumped cos there was a fee to get in to the fair, but it was only $5 each. They forgot to mention the fee in the article about the fair. (Just like the fair we tried to attend in Seymour earlier this year, but the fee there was something like $20 each! Crikey! The site was 100km/60miles out of town so you had to do some serious work getting there. Do they think hippies are made of money or something?)

We wandered around in circles trying to find the "blue tent" for the first talk we wanted to go to. The info said it had a blue roof. Ummm, nope! Other info said it had a blue flag! Umm nope! How about a blue sign on the front! Yeah! So we listened to a talk about earth berm and living roof houses by Rob Roy. DH desperately wants a living roof on our house at home but they really are incompatible with rainwater collection - you get some but we need all we can get to water the garden in summer. We later had an interesting discussion with the presenter at his tent.

We split up to attend two different talks - me to see one about sustainable landscapes for Northern Colorado (in a nutshell, we can't stop the wave of suburbia sweeping over No Co, so let's get the best deal for the environment that we can). In his usual fashion, DH managed to demonstrate some lateral thinking in someone else's talk about solar thermal that ended up with him having an extended discussion with a couple of chaps. He now has a new friend to play with and they will build a solar thermal greenhouse for a few hundred dollars not $4,000 as offered in the talk. (Want to know a little more about solar thermal air collection and heat storage? Read this PDF. The name of one of the authors may be familiar....)

We looked around some of the stalls, discovered that the food (where it hadn't run out!) was quite reasonably priced - we are used to being gouged at events, like $3 for a bottle of water that costs $1.50 in the shop but this was a pleasant surprise! $1 for cans of drink and $2-3 for a bit of food. Suddenly it was 6pm and time to go home.

Sunday we backed up for more. DH wanted to go to a talk about electric bikes, ie pushbikes with an electric motor on them, and scored a free tshirt! I went to a talk on solar site analysis, which was a lot more interesting than you might think. I thought I had a fair idea of how a solar professional looks at this stuff but I found out some really good info. The presenter was the best I had seen at the fair - he's worked as an solar panel installer and now as a trainer for 5 years. He knew his stuff and he was relaxed. No stuttering, no stumbling. After the talk he showed us the solar pathfinders he had with him.

(doh! Someone is too lazy to go swap that pic the right way round! Note this is not the recommended way to use a solar pathfinder) They estimate the amount of sun your roof/site will get at any time of the year (ok, not at night-time, obviously, nor when it is cloudy - the maximum amount of sun). It was cool! I want one! I want to go round doing solar site analysis.

We had met up with DH's new friend before the talks started and then wandered around with him for most of the rest of the day. DH chatted to quite a number of the exhibitors and we bailed up the guy who did the solar site talk and DH talked to him for some time. He was cool.

This was just plain odd. Someone recently asked me what was the most bizarre product I've seen here. This has to be it.

A pram for dogs. Yessirree, you can stick your lapdog in the pram and wheel it about like a baby. The lady had just let the dog out - obviously she felt other dogs/people were not a worry. Man, you would have to really like to go for walks pushing a pram. Not so sure it will give the dog much exercise though, and I thought that was half the point!

The last talk I went to I found a little disappointing. It was about new opportunities for green professionals. What it really meant was do an MBA with a sustainable development bent to learn how to market yourself and your stuff, find some venture capital/get a job as a corporate sustainability officer and Go To It! Not quite what I expected. But it was great for people who wanted that.

We ended up having dinner at our new friend's place. He has cats and a fab vegie and fruit garden. One of his cats, Luna, is a real sweetie, and kept asking for attention (and icecream when it came out).

What did I get out of the weekend? First of all, if you want to improve your green footprint, don't go spending $20 grand on a PV (photovoltaic, solar electric) system. Instead, go around your house. What things are always on even if they don't need to be? Pretty much everything that has a timer or a clock or a standby mode is chowing down on electricity even when it is not actually working. Completely turn off the stuff that you can turn off. (In the USA, with no powerpoint switches, this means getting a power strip with a switch you can turn off) What lights can be replaced by compact fluoros? Replace as many as possible. Can you double glaze your windows or even use that storm window film on them? Do you have any gaps or air leaks? How about your house? ;-) Get some caulking or expanding foam and close up any air leaks in your house (I don't recommend using caulking or expanding foam on yourself). How about your old fridge, dishwasher or drier? Can you update them to newer, energy efficient models? Put a programmable thermostat on your hot water heater. Use a low flow shower head. Use a fan rather than a heat pump (normal) airconditioner. Use evaporative cooling rather than a heat pump airconditioner. These things can cut your energy bill in half.

Got any money left over? Look at any of the forms of solar thermal (heating for either your house or your hot water system, solar hot water, solar hydronics, etc). Finally if you are still all cashed up and ready to go, put solar panels on your roof and generate some electricity.

One other thing I gained is the impression that the USA is made of money. Lots of venture capital out there for people with Good Ideas (and maybe Not So Good Ideas). Very different from Australia. Stuff all venture capital there - very conservative!

All in all it was a good weekend for meeting people, making connections and finding out that there is plenty of Good Work being done out there and in particular around here in Fort Collins.

On govt efficiency

DH applied for an SSN over two months ago. He was told in a letter given to him at time of application, in writing no less, that it would take four weeks to issue.

DH got his SSN three days ago. A day later he got a letter saying his SSN would be issued within about two weeks..... (love how precise that is!) Admittedly the letter was dated 31 August, but even so it took 10 days, not that far off two weeks, to travel approximately 2.5 miles to get to us! What on earth was it doing in the mean time? Holidaying in Havana? Hanging around waiting for the Official Stamp of the Issuing Officer to be brought out of the safe? Waiting in a back office for some poor monkey to fold it up and put it in an envelope?

The Poudre Trail

On Saturday the forecast was for a nice day, temps in the mid-20s. Sunny and basically a good bike riding day as long as you ignored the possibility of "10-20mph northerly winds" in the afternoon.

So we set out on a ride along the Poudre Trail. The Cache La Poudre is of course the local river.

We found this old suspension bridge fascinating.

It seemed to carry a flume, most probably from the old reservoir behind the pics to the land on the other side. There is no information about it at the site - wonder what it was for?

After we had ridden about 10km, I was Hungry. We stopped off in Old Town at Nathan's fave cafe, Starry Night, where he had stuffed squash with pasta salad and I had plain brown rice with steamed vegies. Ah the fun of a GF/DF diet.

We heard trains tooting lots. It is very common around Fort Collins. Trains toot all day long. There is the train that goes through Old Town, the one that I raced the other day, that has to toot at every intersection, ie continuously. There is a shunting area that crosses two main roads (you oughta hear the fighting about how to fix the problem of cars being stuck for 20-odd minutes at a time! Like dooooods, build a bridge for the cars! Can't do an underpass as it is likely to flood). There is another shunting area that doesn't cross roads but does mean LOTS of tooting at every points.

So we rode along the Poudre Trail and suddenly came upon a train shunting. For the train nuffies out here, I give you one of the grottiest old unloved engines I've ever seen, along with a lovely, well painted one:

The driver hopped out of the cabin and adjusted some points, then the train crept backwards.

Then Nathan said there was another train coming! And there was! The above train was crawling backwards towards the south and this train came from the west:


After 10 minutes of staring at trains and taking a gazillion photos, I decided that it was time to keep riding.

We rode and rode and rode and rode. I forgot to take pics of the river - I thought I would do it on the way back. Best laid plans and all that. Eventually we pretty much cleared town and were out in open space,


surrounded by reservoirs, and with views of the uplift of the Rockies:




and a quarry:

(the conveyor belt was fascinating - about a mile long, no joke! The hole in the ground showed that the soils here must be in part glacial as there are layers of pebbles of varying sizes)

There were critters




and one place even had a red barn!

(I don't know why red barns are noice but they are)

Nathan was getting pretty tired by now but I could see a band of greenery about another mile up the trail, so I rode on ahead. Turns out there is an absolutely fantastic bridge across the Poudre:






I wish I could show you the "film" of riding along the bike bridge but I didn't think to do it as a movie, just as burst mode. The footway of the bridge is made of wooden planks which have curled a bit so the pictures bounce up and down in a most amusing way.

Finally, a picture of the Poudre itself:

We rode back to Old Town for Nathan's afternoon tea (an icecream in a waffle cone) and then home. All in all we rode over 30km, or more than 20 miles. For us that is a long ride!

A rather large canyon

Be warned, this picture is HUGE! But pretty, if a tad overexposed. It is a melange of pictures of the Black Gorge of the Gunnison taken with our teensy little Canon A430, the cheapest camera we could get a year ago. Nathan discovered burst mode and has been using it to create very large multilevel panoramas. Burst mode is helping us flog that little camera even more - we have not had it a year yet and have taken over 8,000 pics on it! Hooray for digital cameras! Imagine paying for the developing of more than 8,000 pics!

We need a car

and a convertible may be fun, but I think we'll pass on this one, thanks!


I'm not too keen on the colour nor on the fact it is a smoking car.

(seen on the I25 Denver bypass)

(BTW, you guys are funny - heh as if I would throw myself and my bike in front of a speeding train! How the heck could I knit and spin if I were dead or severely banged up in hospital? The ding dongs were not going, the train was over half a km away but it was fun trying to race it!)

Things I've learned

Number Two.

Trains are seemingly never-ending here. Each train must be about a mile or more long. Make sure you avoid level crossings when trains are nearby cos you will have to wait and wait and wait.

We drove up to this loco (plus a mate) outside Denver on the way to Colorado Springs

and past so many of these container thingos Nathan couldn't keep count

and eventually we found the other end of the train over a minute later (and we were in a 65 mph zone)

Five locos presumably all slaved together, three at one end, two at the other.

The BNSF line runs literally straight through Fort Collins. It goes down the middle of a street in Old Town. It runs through the university. The train has to do 15mph. It takes a VERY long time to get through the old town area and blasts its horn a very great deal. It is pretty obvious when it is about.

This is why last night when I heard the train hooting its horn frantically I rode like the clappers to get across the railway line before the train reached it. I had left the LYS knitty group a bit later than I meant to and it was full on dark, so I'm belting along in the dark with my lights on (but really they are not meant for lighting the street up, more to warn car/truck drivers of my presence. And other cyclists who don't have lights, but that is another story). I heard tooting of a train. Ack. Ride fast! Faster! Must beat the train!

I beat the train by three intersections. Then I kept pace with it despite riding away and then alongside it three roads across. It was fun!

Amazing things I've learned

Number One.

Non-stick pans suddenly turn into stick pans when baking here in CO.

I don't grok it.

Pans that remained non-stick at home without use of any oil are stick-tight pans here. Guess I'll have to get me a can of oil-spray. Sounds so delicious! You guys know what I mean.

A bit of a vertiginous drive

Ah, long weekends. Thanks for the holiday, USA!

We hired a car with cruise control. Oddly enough it got better mileage with my poor foot pumping the accelerator/gas pedal than it did with the cruise on. I figure that the cruise is all the time up, down, up, down and never just sitting in one spot. It felt like that....

Anyway, we drove down the I25 to Denver then around Denver to Colorado Springs, through the Garden of the Gods, up and around a "back way" to a waterfall (no parking! We couldn't even pay our $5 to see a waterfall, dangit), then a late lunch at a lake. The demographics of Colorado Springs are different to Fort Collins (ie I saw lots of Hispanics and blacks - Fort Collins is awfully white - I'd like to find some friends who aren't white cos they often have a different take on life).

Off we went to Canon City (that has a ~ over the n) and Royal Gorge. $23 per person to walk across the bridge. You are kidding me! OK, so you get to ride on the carnival stuff too but we just wanted to go out on the bridge. Let me put that another way, Nathan wanted to go out on the bridge, Lynne is too much of a wuss to get anywhere near the edge. Can you spell vertigo?

You want pics? I have to choose and edit them yet! We only took about a thousand pics on the weekend. Each place will have to have its own post I think.

We stayed in Salida overnight at a random motel that just so happened to have a fridge and microwave. Here starteth the rant.

Back 'ome, all motel rooms come with the basics. What we call the basics are:

• a bed (duh!)
  
• a tv
  
• a bathroom and accoutrements (towels, soap, shampoo, etc)
  
• coffee and tea making stuff (ie a kettle/jug with instant coffee sachets, tea bags and sugar plus cups and saucers)
  
• a small fridge (we call them bar fridges)
  

Imagine our surprise when we discover that many motels in the USA do not have tea and coffee making facilities (they either have a coffee dripolator or you have to go to the lobby) and fridges in the room! What are they? Why do you need to keep anything cold in a fridge? You can buy *anything* you want from our overpriced fridge in the lobby! Except I can't because I have to have a different diet from 99% of the US population, so all that wheat based crap and the milk? Poison! And if you are travelling and want to keep stuff cold overnight so you can have it the next day?

So our motel was not the flashest but at least we could keep stuff cold in the fridge... and heat dinner up in the microwave. Salida's Safeway doesn't have a great selection of GF/DF foods but I got by.

On we went to Gunnison. Nathan had a lovely lunch at a nice little cafe/bakery. The lady at the tourist bureau helped us decide not to go to Crusty Butt (Crested Butte) but so we instead pushed on to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The landscape around the area is fascinating - we are well out of what I think of as Rocky Mountain scenery (big jagged mountains) and into mesa/butte country. DH made many bad Jar-Jar Binks references - mesa hungry! mesa sesa mesa! etc etc. This was all very new territory for us (the landscape, not the punning. Punning is normal). Very different to look at. Very very dry.

Oddly enough, the Black Canyon is up on a plateau that is higher than the local area. We had to drive up a large hill to get to it. The river cuts right through the plateau. Weird, huh? It is certainly worth a bit of vertigo for those of us inclined that way....

By the time we were done at the canyon, it was after 4pm. I drove a LOOOOONG way yesterday. 430 miles, and about 370 of that after 4pm. We got home at 11pm, and with very little speeding (it is hard to not speed whilst flogging down the I70 - there are many steep hills and I had a very new hire car whose brakes I didn't want to ruin). We had thought the holiday traffic would be terrible on the I70 and I25 but guess what? We were so late that it was fine! It was as light as I've ever seen it. Now we know the trick - get home so late everyone else has already gone home. Only it wrecks poor aged bodies the next day....