Breckenridge, Day 1

[I am smart. s.m.r.t. Here's why: I remembered to bring my camera. That's very important, when you're taking a trip. But I forgot to bring along the cord which connects my camera to a computer, so that I can get at the pictures. So, I will post narratives of my adventures for now, and go back and add in pictures later. Keep your eyes peeled!]

This morning, I had to get up very early. I had a 6:15 flight from STL to DEN, and J was kind enough to drive me to the airport. Smooth flight in, and an easy shuttle ride from Denver to Breck with our Ukrainian driver, who dropped me right at the door to Dad's place.

It was nearly lunch time, so we walked down the hill for lunch. We stopped at the Columbine Cafe, where I had some delicious chicken tortilla soup - very creamy and tortilla-y - and an enormous (half-pound!) hamburger. With cole slaw. Which I ate all of. It was an impressive showing. A quick stop at the Mountain Angler secured me a fishing license and scored Dad some new teeny tiny zebra midges. Our last stop was an art gallery where they have an enormous Russian painting of some steel workers for sale for $450,000. I did not buy it.

For our first real Colorado out-of-doors experience, we drove (haha, a real out-of-doors experience) from the house up to Boreas Pass (11,482 feet in elevation according to the sign at the pass). From there, we hiked on up to Black Powder Pass (elevation: 12,159 feet, and something that's not on Wikipedia!), and then a little further up the Continental Divide to an elevation which we very scientifically calculated to be 12,322.39 feet. It was quite a climb, in probably just a little over 2 miles. We did not scientifically calculate distance. And we were right on the Divide! How cool is that? I could have rolled down the hill one direction and, if I survived the tumble out of the mountains and could travel as easily as a raindrop, I would have ended up in the Atlantic Ocean, or I could have gone the other way and ended up in the Pacific. Keystone did not care. He just wanted to chase small animals.

Red and yellow paintbrush

Keystone on our hike, enjoying the great out-of-doors

Looking towards South Park

Me and Keys at the Continental Divide

From our highest point, we could see the Front Range, the Ten Mile Range, and the Mosquito Range. And there was still snow! In August!

Snow! And there was lots more that I didn't take pictures of. This was just the first time I saw it.

This is what clearcut logging looks like, 100 years later

Wildflowers

Columbine, the state flower of Colorado

By the way, the walk back down is much easier. And we stopped on the road so I could snap some pics of the Baker Tank, an old water tank used to provide water to passing Colorado & Southern Railroad trains. Pretty nifty stuff.




And now we're rewarding all our hard work with a salad and bratwurst dinner. Mmmmm....

What I Watched -- Taking Chance

For reasons I can't quite explain, I've always liked Kevin Bacon. Maybe it's because there's a game named after him. Maybe I just really liked a movie he was in. I'm not even sure what the first movie of his was that I saw, actually. Maybe The River Wild? It wasn't Footloose, because I didn't see that until I was in high school. (And no, J, I still haven't seen Animal House.) I loved him in Mystic River. And there's also Murder in the First, Apollo 13, and of course JFK. And on top of all that, he's been married to Kyra Sedgwick for 22 years. Really, what's not to like? (Whoa, that's a lot of Kevin Bacon links. No wonder there's a game named after him. But wait, it gets better. You could spend hours doing this.)

Okay, okay. Enough about him. Maybe I should actually talk about the movie I saw. Switch to a serious tone, because this is a true story, somehow both unhappy and uplifting.

I loved this movie, despite its terrible sadness. There is very little plot - Kevin plays Lieutenant Colonel Mike Strobl, who volunteers to escort the body of a fallen Marine named Chance Phelps back home to his parents. The whole movie is their journey.

During the movie, you never see Chance's face. You see different parts of his body - his hand, his wrist, his feet. But never his face, which implies that he could be anybody - any returning soldier, anyway.

And that's about all I can say: I hope the body of every soldier returning home gets the same respect that Chance did. The movie leaves you feeling that they do.

Voting

The primaries were last week here in MO. In St. Louis County, where I vote, voter turnout was 23.54%.

I'm trying to figure out what this means. Does it mean that we just don't care? Does it mean that no one pays attention to primaries? Surely turnout will be higher in November. Right? That number means that there wasn't even one thing, one race, one issue, that could get more than 75% of people to the polls (which are open 6am-7pm, by the way).

And, as a corollary, would mandatory voting be better? They have it in Australia, where voter turnout purportedly reaches 95%. Maybe that's good, because then people will hopefully at least read up a little bit about what's going on in their government. But what if they don't, and they just pick people because they have funny names? Or they always pick C, because on the SAT that's the most common correct answer? And doesn't it seem sort of counter to our idea of freedom of choice, in every aspect of life, to force people to the polls if they don't want to go?

Isn't it odd that I care so little for politics that I don't even read the news, and yet I vote? Who or what got me to the polls, you may ask. That's between me and my electronic touchscreen :-)

I Shall Not Pass This Way Again

Through this toilsome world, alas!
Once and only once I pass;
If a kindness I may show;
If a good deed I may do
To a suffering fellow man,
Let me do it while I can.
No delay, for it is plain
I shall not pass this way again.

- Anonymous

Reasons not to go to Wal-Mart

I tried to run a quick errand to Wal-Mart this morning on my way to work. It was early in the morning. It wasn't crowded. I needed 3 things: fabric softener, toothpaste, hot dog buns. Don't go to Wal-Mart. Here's why:

1. Cheating. It's one thing to leave one person in line with a cart full of stuff while the other person goes to grab one last thing. It's quite another to leave one person in line holding a couple things, while the person with the cart full of school supplies goes to get a few last things. When I saw the cart coming, I changed lines.

2. Idiocy. I arrived at my second line just as the cashier announce the woman's total: $30.54. The woman digs around in her purse for a while and eventually announces that she doesn't have her credit card. She'll have to pay cash. She has $6, and change. So she pulls a few things out of the bag. The cashier removes them from the order. After she's selected 3 or 4 items, the cashier reads the new total: $26-something. "Oh, no, those things I gave you were the things I actually wanted to get!" I changed lines.

3. Deafness. The third line was going OK, until I saw the lady about to put the hot dog buns in a separate bag. So I say, loud and clear, "You can put those all in one bag. Save the plastic." So what does she do? Puts the hot dog buns in a separate bag, takes it off the little spinny bag thing, pulls one handle through the other, and hands it to me. "Or not, two bags is good, too."

For real?

What I Watched -- Coco Before Chanel

I didn't care for this movie much. The last 20 minutes or so are both the most visually interesting and where you see Coco developing from a nobody just arriving in Paris to the queen of an empire that she became. Everything that happens before that is mildly interesting, very predictable, and not at all necessary to the story.

Audrey Tautou did a good job with the acting, though. It seems that Coco's life before Paris was a study in contradictions - she was young but wise, fragile but intense, stubborn but unable to get what she wanted without help. And on the subject of stubbornness, did you know that Coco Chanel never married? She didn't believe in it; according to her, women in love are like begging dogs, and couples are the problem with marriage. Which is not to say she never fell in love. But she stuck to her rule of not marrying.

Bottom line: I wish the first 3/4 of this movie had only taken up the first 1/4, and the last 1/4 had gotten a little more development.

Compton Heights

Monday was a busy day! In addition to having lunch with M, L and I got together after work. Our initial plan was to go to the Rooftop Terrace at the Moonrise Hotel, which is something I've been wanting to do. However, when reading this month's Sauce, I found something more interesting! The Compton Heights Band was playing on Monday night in Tower Grove Park (which is close to L's house!). And playing with them was 9-year-old trumpeter Geoffrey Gallante - seriously, you have to watch this video! You'll never believe it! (And you should probably watch this one too, if only to see the dude's hair.)


Anyway, we had great fun eating and talking and catching up - it had been a while. And who doesn't love brass band music anyway?

Lunch with M!

And yes, I mean an M different from myself. And mom. And the M I visited in Chicago. Lots of girls have names that start with M. And lots of boys have names that start with J. That's something I've learned from this blog.

Anywho, my best high school friend M is in town for a few days from Washington, D.C. We met up today for lunch at J.J. Twig's, and got their famous double decker pizza, which was delightful. And I didn't spill any pizza sauce on my white pants, which was doubly delightful. (I don't do well with white. So why, you may ask, did I buy white pants? Damn good question.)


And we got to talk about all the things we haven't talked about in forever! That was the best part :-)

Feast Magazine

St. Louis foodies are surely familiar with Sauce Magazine, which covers the local food scene, including restaurant reviews, recipes, feature articles on hot ingredients or theme meals (say, Sunday brunch), etc. Who doesn't love that? It's available in various spots around town (though not nearly as available as I would like), and also by subscription.



Apparently it's doing so well that competition has sprung up. There's a new magazine out this past week with its first issue called Feast. I picked up a copy a couple days ago, and have now poked through it enough to offer something akin to a review.






Pros:
- Mouth-watering photography
- Smart move: picked a St. Louis classic for their first cover story (White Barn Burgers, though I've never been there)
- Lots of product reviews: blenders, grill baskets, etc.
- Products are in a huge range of prices. For example, there's a $7.99 grater, and a few pages later there's a $17,595.00 lamp. (Really, $17K for a lamp??)
- Lots of recipes to try for yourself
- Provide lots of "available at..." resources. Places to go: Veritas Gateway to Food and Wine, Provisions, Wine Chateau, Friar Tuck, Winslow's Home, UMA, even Target and World Market!

Cons:
- Many recipes feature totally obscure or hard-to-find ingredients. Witness: pepper jelly, Creme de Violette liqueur, St. Germain Elderflower liqueur, yellow Chartreuse (what is this?), passion fruit concentrate, Domaine de Canton, Flor de Cana, cornichons (I looked this one up), quail egg yolk. I'm pretty sure most of the things on this list that I've never heard of are alcoholic beverages of some sort. But really, how 'bout some recipes we could make without having to run all over town for ingredients
- St. Louis classic for the cover story? Yes. Likelihood that a large percentage of their readership lives in the neighborhood of that St. Louis classic? Not high. Which doesn't mean people won't drive there just to try it; I might (for lunch). But a little pandering to the readers never hurt a magazine.

On the whole, I'd say definitely more good than bad. Honestly, though, a food magazine would have to be really bad for me not to find anything enjoyable in it. Feast has lots to enjoy; unfortunately for the recipes, though, I'm going to be enjoying them with my eyes and my imagination, rather than my taste buds.

Mammoth Moth, Day 2

Remember how I posted about that giant moth yesterday? Yesterday? (Thanks to T for the classification!)

Well, last night I was at the boathouse for our last Learn To Row class. Outside the pedestrian door to the boathouse there is a stand with some flyers and info about the club. The base of it is made of boards probably 4" deep. And this is what I saw:

And look, I found the Wikipedia page for this one myself! (I think. T, verification?)

I'm pretty sure I've never seen moths this big before in my life. And now I see two in one week! Maybe they're giving Starbuck's a run for its money in a bid to take over the world. That could be interesting, actually: "Welcome to Celebrity Death Match! In the blue corner, giant swarming silk moths of all colors and varieties! And in the red corner, the perky, over-caffeinated coffee shop baristas!" Odds?