Today I went with Elly to do some errands and get coffee (my main motivation for going). One of the errands was stopping at the thrift store, which, she promised, had tons of cool stuff. I spent about ten minutes browsing through some old clothes, but didn't really find anything that moved me until I got to the books. It is amazing how many mystery and romance books people buy and then throw away. What's more amazing is what I found among all those old Danielle Steele and Patricia Cornwell paperbacks:
Pretty sweet, eh? This thing has to be about 30 or 40 years old, and it's signed by the author, Chuck Jonkel, a famous bear researcher and founder of the Great Bear Foundation.
The best part: it was only $0.10.
Birds I've seen in the past few weeks as the direct result of owning a dog and walking it in the early morning/evening:
These are only the ones I can identify. I have seen many others that I can only describe as "little brown bird in the grass" or "big black bird with white neckline" or "mini black duck."
Other wildlife that we've observed and/or barked at:
So far, I am really loving the Garmin Communicator Plugin. It is one of the best applications of a browser plugin that I have ever encountered. I suppose any browser plugin that allows you to pretend your browser is a desktop application is a great browser plugin. That's what I like best about the Garmin Communicator, anyway. You can plug your Garmin device in via USB, then sit back and let some free web application do its thing with your data. No download-upload nonsense.
Here's a little sample of how I'm using it in WalkingBoss (not live yet):
Elly has been making clothes faster than a five-year-old in a Nike sweatshop lately, even selling some of her stuff to her online friends. Like the wonderful supportive husband I am, I offered to take Tova off her hands one Friday when a deadline was looming especially large.
Tova and I are like the Steve and Bindi of our little universe, except that I don't hump alligators on TV and she doesn't sing weird rap songs about saving the planet. What I mean is, we like to spend every spare minute outdoors in pursuit of some sort of animal encounter. Since poking cats through the cages at PetSmart has lost its allure, we have had to resort to longer and more serious treks. For instance, we spent an entire Sunday afternoon at the Sawhill ponds looking for fox or coyote tracks in the snow. And this past autumn, we lost some pink Barbie sunglasses wading in the Big Thompson in pursuit of rising trout (I've since learned to lash important articles to the kid-carrier with 3x tippet at least).
This time, we resolved to make our Rocky Mountain National Park pass pay for itself by visiting the park for the second time this year. That's right, two times in the park more than seven days apart, and your annual pass has paid for itself. So we got in the car and made the hour drive to the park with some Trentemoller blasting (she likes it more than I do). I had too much coffee and had to stop at the park entrance to use the facilities. Of course, this means an obligatory stop at the park gift shop to squeeze all of the noise-making stuffed birds and read all the books with pictures in them. I was lucky to get out of there with only a bugling elk for $7.
Back in the car, entering the park, just as I was beginning to regret my purchase (as the 37th bugle in as many seconds rang out from the backseat), we came upon three different news vans parked along the side of the road. I pulled over to see what was going on, and across the meadow there was a group of people, some with news cameras, surrounding a few people kneeling in the grass.
Of course we got out, and I asked a fellow onlooker what we were looking at. "They've got an elk down there, and they're asking that everyone be really quiet."
The $7 bugling elk would have to remain in the car, but Tova and I hurried out join the group in the meadow. Sure enough, as we got closer, we saw that they had an adult cow elk tranquilized in the middle of a semi-circle of news people and park officials. One of the biologists held the cow's head up and kept a blindfold around its eyes while two others took samples from all over (Tova asked, "What is he doing to its butt?"). There were injections being made and syringes of blood being drawn. We had no idea what was going on until a news cameraman approached us.
"Do you know what they're doing here?" he asked, pointing the camera directly at us. I mumbled something about having no clue and how we just drove up and walked over. He informed us that they were testing for chronic wasting disease and also trying out a new contraceptive that might help in controlling the herd sizes. I said something about that being cool and interesting, and hoped that no other camera-people would approach me.
Just then another camera guy asked for an interview (I guess, as one of the few tourists there we were great candidates for that evening's soundbyte). I said sure and walked a few feeet away from the elk-watchers so that I could babble at the news camera without disturbing the Animal Planet moment that was taking place a few feet away.
If you've never been interviewed by a news cameraman, let me tell you, it is strange. Fortunately, I was confused and boring enough not to make it on the news that evening, but I worried all day that my fifteen minutes of fame would be nothing more than me Mr. Magoo-ing it about how seeing the elk was cool and neat and Gee Whiz! Cool Story Doug Fales.
Tova and I watched for a few more minutes until she was shaking from the cold, and then they let the elk go. We backed away as she stood up, started to trot, stopped, and then turned toward the herd and ran to join it. It was really very cool.
We ran back to the car to get warm and go to McDonald's, where I called everyone I could think of to tell them what we had just seen. I was lucky to have Elly's camera, so I got some great shots.
Here it is on the local news: http://cbs4denver.com/video/?id=38216@kcnc.dayport.com.
Not as cool as a wolf sighting, but still pretty neat to run into this only a hundred yards from the road.
I stalked this guy for about an hour and a half. Actually, I harrassed him with a rainbow warrior, blue-winged olive, and finally a brooks sprout emerger (I think that's what it's called). It's the one that looks like a regular CDC baetis emerger, but the top is made of foam. I couldn't get a good presentation, so I relied on the odds of just slapping it in his face thousands of times until he gave up and struck it. It was a good time.
It was nice and quiet--we saw only deer for the first half and only a handful of people and a raptor on the way down.
The quote of the trip and the week was from Tova: "I don't want to go home--never!"
- Elly got a new bike.
- Tova spent her first night outdoors in the tent.
- We saw the Dinosaur Museum in Fruita.
- Went on a hike in Arches National Park.
Judging from the clouds and wind that I see out the window right now, I think we probably finished the run just in the nick of time.
Here are some pics from that day:
Me before the punishment began.
Tova cheering me on!
Me coming into the finish at the end of lap 4...
Finally, it's over!
It felt so good to get off my feet when it was all over.
Looking back, I feel like this was a good experience, and I'm glad I did it ... but I don't think I'm going to make a habit out of ultramarathons. At least not until I'm old and I have to run slowly. I saw some things that will probably scar me for the rest of my life, including some very time-efficient people who could not bother to take more than 2 steps off the trail to relieve themselves. In fact, they didn't even bother to take their shorts down (and I'm talking numero deuce here--yeah, no joke). It goes without saying that I'm now convinced that ultramarathoners are a really tough bunch of crazy people, and I'm not really at a point where I can consider myself one of them. When I finally get over my post-race laziness and fast food spree, my next race is going to be at most a half-marathon.
Something about this whole hip-replacement deal which is very cool (and which I didn't even think about until tonight) is that the pain that she was living with is instantly gone. I guess the idea of surgery is so attached to the idea of pain in my mind that I had just been assuming it was going to suck for months afterwards. But it makes sense--the parts that were grating together have been cut away and replaced with machined, quality controlled, high precision steel parts (which don't have as many nerves in them). It's definitely a load off of all of our minds, since we could see that she was fighting a lot of pain on a daily basis for the past couple of years. She doesn't know it yet, but we're planning on making her hike some fourteeners this summer as therapy.
I haven't written in a while...let's see...what's happened... Well, last weekend I did my first serious long run in preparation for a long race this spring. It was really surprising to me the difference between how I feel at 1:30 and 2:00. That extra half-hour totally changes things. The hard part about the whole distance thing for me is mental--I tend to get about 90% done and then sort of just give up. I'll still run, just not with the same intensity...and the thing is--I know it's not because I can't, it's just because I know the end is near. I'm working on that, though.
Oh, and here's something else cool that happened this weekend. After my run, Elly and I were just sitting around watching TV when these Superbowl specials came on the Food Network. There was one about tailgating and barbeques and stuff, and within five minutes of seeing it, we both decided that we need to find a rib place urgently. I didn't know any local places here in Boulder (other than stupid chains), so Elly picked up the phone book and found The Rib Place in Longmont. It was awesome! The food was great, and it was nice to get out of Boulder for a little while. The restaurant is in one of those new sustainable neighborhood places. We really liked the houses and apartments we saw, except for the ridiculous price tags. I'm sure they're very nice, but paying $300K for a two bedroom apartment in the middle of the prairie seems crazy to me. Actually, the architecture made us want to move back to Europe more than it made us want to move to Longmont...
I guess that's all I should write for now. This was supposed to be a quick update and it's turning into a novel...