Ilanarama!

Finished the furnace installation and hookup to the plastic pipes we so laboriously ran through all the aluminum panels we laboriously screwed to the underside of the floor...

...and it works! Warm floor! Warm feet! Warm bodies!

Hah, winter! Do your worst!

well, ok, we need to insulate the roof and the walls and get storm windows and draperies, so maybe you can hold off on the four feet of snow and minus 30 degree temperature for a bit...

I have been following the national do-not-call list kerfuffle with interest but no urgency, since Colorado has a statewide list and law (for which I am profoundly grateful).

Then I read in the paper that if the judge's injunction is upheld, the telemarketing organizations will use this to attempt to overturn Colorado's law on grounds of unconstitutionality. So I guess I have a bigger stake in it than I had thought.

Personally, I agree that exempting political and charitable organizations makes the law a bit dodgy. I wish they were all prohibited from calling.

Finally put together a picture page (with captions, but no real trip report) for our hike up Rolling Mountain a few weeks ago. At 13,693' this is Colorado's 150th highest peak.

My finger still hurts where I smashed it last week.

As part of National Public Lands Day (which is actually next week, but who's counting?) the San Juan Mountains Association sponsored a trail work day at Animas City Mountain on Saturday. This is one of the places that we took catbear hiking when he was here, and it's the place where I'm mountain biking in my icon.

About five years ago, one of my New Year's resolutions that I didn't quite get to was to do volunteer trail work. I've always felt vaguely guilty about using the trails and never doing any maintenance; I also figured it would be a good way of meeting people I might be compatible with, so I signed up for Saturday's work day.

It was a blast. About 20 people showed up, and we were divided into groups for working low, high up, and in the middle -- I ended up in the middle. Our job was to repair silted-in and washed-out water bars, and to build new ones. (Water bars, for those not up on trail vocabulary, are berms of dirt, rock, or wood which angle across trails to divert running water off the trail.) Between hiking around with heavy tools (we used Pulaskis, which have a two-bladed head, an axe on one side and an adze on the other; McClouds, which look sort of like a sideways spork -- kind of a cross between a heavy rake and a shovel, mounted perpendicular to the handle; and Pickmatics, which are pickaxes with an adze blade on the back of the head and a removable handle), swinging the tools, and hauling rocks and dirt, it was a real workout.

My only injury was when I swung a Pulaski a little close to a rock we'd set and mashed my right index finger into the rock. It's achy and swollen today, owie owie owie. Of course my whole body is a little achy today, but nothing that ibuprofen won't cure.

So, I got some exercise and I fixed up a trail that I use and enjoy. I met a lot of nice people, and SJMA and BLM gave us lunch and lots of goodies, including a t-shirt, a water bottle, a bandanna, and a step-above-cheap-garbage multitool pocketknife. Woo!

So, happy Public Lands Day, everyone.

I posted this to mycology but figured I'll stick it here as well, for your amusement.

Over the Labor Day weekend we went backpacking in the Weminuche and to our delight found a healthy number of scaly urchins (Hydnum imbricatum). This is my very favorite mushroom, and it baffles me why books such as Peterson's say it's bitter, because it's so meaty and smoky and yummy. The boletes that we also picked seemed downright bland next to these.

The interesting thing is that for the first time we saw them form a (very large) fairy ring. I didn't get pictures of the whole ring, but you can see (below the cut) part of the arc.

( Hydnum imbricatum yum )

Today I bicycled to the driver's licensing office to renew my license, an act which I think is sort of subversive, considering. Of course they don't have bike racks there.

Perhaps in return for my behavior, my picture on my new driver's license makes me look absolutely gorgeous. I didn't think that it was physically possible to have an attractive photo on a driver's license. Even the clerk commented on how nice it came out.

I like my inlaws, I really do. Except when they (well, my mother-in-law) decides to rant about politics. Last night we had dinner over at the ranch and the conversation went like this:

MIL: Oh, did you see the wedding picture in the paper of [next door neighbor's daughter] and the boy she's marrying?

ME: Yes, they looked like a nice couple.

MIL: They've got so much paperwork to do because he's from England. This country makes it so hard for good people to come over here. Of course, if he was a Muslim, they'd just let him in with no problem so he could plot to blow up more buildings, and we've got to stop those Muslims now or they're going to kill us all so they can make this great country just like their horrible ones over there...[RANT CUT FOR READERS' SANITY]

ME: Um.

MIL: [RANT RANT RANT]

ME: Could you please pass the salad?

I think next time she goes off like this, I'll change the subject and ask, oh, what she thinks about gay marriage. Or something.

One of today's newspaper headlines (not, thank God, front page) was:

The Scoop: Ice Cream is Fattening

Extra! Extra! Stop the presses!
Slow news day, I guess.

I'm going to be in a movie.

The professor at the local college who directed our "Taming of the Shrew" got a grant to do a short movie. I'm in it. I have a small number of lines but a lot of physical actions.

It's a science fiction short called "In the Shadow of Plato's Cave." He's going to submit it to various film festivals when it's done. I'll let people know if it actually gets in, so you all can come see ME! be a STAR! on the SCREEN!

Yesterday, I made hay while the sun shone.

It was actually a fairly boring thing to do, and my heart goes out to the farmers and ranchers who actually have to do this for a living. Me, I'm just trying to be a good daughter-in-law, so I went to the in-law's ranch to help out for a day. (I'll go this afternoon as well).

Hay is basically tall grass. Over the last few days they had cut it and raked it into windrows. Yesterday they had a rented bailer hooked up to the tractor; it drives along the windrows, scooping up the loose hay and shitting it out into nicely tied bales.

My job was to drive the pick-up truck slowly along the rows of bales. The truck pulls a big hay trailer, and the trailer has something attached to its left side called an "iron man", which is a bale-picker-upper thingy that scoops up bales, sends them up an elevator, and drops them to the trailer, where one or two people stack the bales until there is a hugely heavy and unstable load to be taken to the barn.

Then we unload the bales and stack them in the barn. Hay bales weigh around 55 lbs each, so it's a pretty physical job, and itchy scratchy hay gets everywhere. I wasn't planning to help with the stacking, but I got bored just waiting around for the next driving run, so I would climb to the top of the pile and pull bales down to the people loading them on the elevator (sort of a conveyor belt thing). A good workout.

Woo woo. I now know more about rural American life than ever before. I think I'll stick to the 'burbs.