Drought

Nothing happening, nothing in the forecast.

That “snow” around New Year’s is forecasted at around a half an inch. We have a million Texans stomping up and down on the snow that we have; that half an inch ain’t gonna help.

Speaking of a million Texans – I tried to go skiing on Sunday morning. I saw the worst skill traffic that I’ve ever seen. Two lanes of traffic completely stopped, about two miles shy of the ski hill, on the other side of the pass. I sat in that mess for a half an hour, slowly creeping over the top, until I saw that what was happening was the traffic was being funneled into the ski hill parking lot.

Which was full. And I could see the mob in the base area, with a huge crowd even around the base of the Bonanza lift, which is always – ALWAYS – empty.

So I pulled out and turned around and came back home.

Okay, this is the way that things are.* And there’s no change in sight. Sure, we moved to the San Juan Mountains. But right now, there’s a whole lot more biomass of Texans than there is snow pack. And it’s made worse this year because, as bad as things are here, they are worse everywhere else in Colorado. So all of the tourists are coming here.

So, I’m sitting here with my nice new ski boots, with no planned trip up the mountains.

So, if you live in a ski town and you can’t (really) go skiing, what do you do?

I reckon you do normal, non-skiing stuff. So today will be pretty much the same as a day would be here in April or May, or like a day might be in Alabama. Do my VO2Max ride, go to the inductive Big Book study on Zoom, and go to tonight’s meeting. Act as though it’s a normal day in a normal town.

Of course, we’ve spent a lot of money – and time and trouble – to live in this ski town. But I’m going to assume that eventually, we will revert to the mean. That’s why there’s a mean – because we always, eventually, revert to it.

We have company – our friend Grant is visiting from Montana. And he doesn’t even ski, so he’s not hyper aware of how weird things are. And, to tell the truth, even if there were a normal snow pack, we wouldn’t be skiing much right now – remember, we’re under the burden of a zillion Texans. We can’t even go to WalMart, because the Texans are like a cloud of locust – the shelves are bare Can’t really go out to eat, because we can’t get a table.

Here I sit, waiting for a new normal, because I haven’t had a normal winter in Pagosa Springs yet. But the locals all tell me that this ain’t it, at all. And that’s good news.

* People are telling me that it’s “climate change”, but as far as I can tell, weather has ALWAYS been weird. That’s one of the things about weather – people have always talked about it, and it’s always been weird. And I read the appendix to Crichton’s “State of Fear” twenty years ago. As soon as you only pay scientists for what you want to hear, science is gone.

Again with the Heliskiing? :)

Okay – under the tree (along with a lot of other nice stuff) was an Atomic ski bag – as in, a piece of luggage designed to take one’s skis and other ski equipment onto an airplane – and four printed sheets of paper, each giving the particulars of different heli skiing operations, ranging from northern British Columbia all the way to Anchorage.

Ethel says that she really, really wants me to go heli skiing – now, before it’s too late 🙂

Okay, twist my arm 🙂

I was supposed to go in March of 2020. Y’all remember what happened then, right? Yes, COVID – a few days before my flight was to leave for Juneau, Alaska banned all incoming tourist traffic. Surprise, surprise.

So now it’s six years later, and I still haven’t gone. So she was adamant about the whole thing. She wants me to book the trip, and book it soon.

Well, of course I would love to go heliskiing. But – am I really in shape for this? According to my Garmin, my VO2Max has dropped from 49 to 38 – now I’m supposedly in the “top 25% of my age and gender”. Well, before that, I was in the top 5%. I’ve developed exercise-induced asthma. I’ve given up running because it just got to hurting too much. I’m waiting on an MRI for my prostate cancer and a nuclear stress test to find out why it hurts when I do my VO2Max workouts.

So – would I be able to enjoy it?…or would I be sitting in the lodge, huffing on my inhaler and watching the helicopter take off without me?

So, I”m not in a hurry to do anything. But, of course, booking the trip has to happen before things are booked up. So, we’ll see. I started researching the various options today. They are all ruinously expensive. But maybe Ethel’s hoping that I’ll die in an avalanche while I’m still well insured 🙂

…in other news, Christmas was very nice. Ethel got some things that she wasn’t expecting. I’m hoping that, with this new stuff, she’ll now wear her new cowboy boots more often 🙂 We finished up all of the choir stuff on Christmas Eve, and didn’t get home until almost 9:30 at night. We don’t stay up that late on New Year’s.

We had some folks over for Christmas Dinner who are locals without any family. Ethel outdid herself on the dinner, and it was a very pleasant experience – apparently, for all involved.

But after all of the stuff we did heading into Christmas, Ethel has declared today a Pajama Day – not leaving the house, not doing any workouts, not really doing anything. So now I’m wearing my pajamas, and heading into the living room to sit down with her. We’ll see what happens.

We’re Number Six!

This morning, on the bikes, we were watching the Tennesse/Alabama game from the Third Saturday in October, when we happened to see these two paragons of honesty and humility:

Yes, that’s right. After so many years of watching fans – of any team – hold up one finger and say “We’re Number 1!” – even if they aren’t ranked – these two young ladies were very glad and happy to proclaim, for the camera, “We’re Number Six!” and hold up one hand and one finger 🙂

…and, if you look down at the graphic, you will see that Alabama was, indeed, number 6 😉

Alabama beat Oklahoma this last Friday, and now they’re playing Indiana on New Year’s Day. Indiana is currently ranked #1. Now, Ethel is, indeed, a Hoosier, but you don’t want to hear what she has to say about the University of Indiana’s football team. Suffice it to say that they didn’t play a very tough schedule – they only played a few teams with winning records.

But the fact that they haven’t been really tested doesn’t mean much. They may still whup up on ‘Bama. In college football, anything can happen.

…who, me? I’ve been busy. Ethel signed us up for the choir for the Christmas season, and we’ve been at practice almost every day. I’m sure that she wasn’t expecting this. I know that I wasn’t. But we’ve only got two more days – St Patrick’s has a Christmas Eve service, but not one on Christmas Day. But it’s been difficult to keep our regular schedule while doing a practice almost every day. Difficult, but not impossible – but, while not impossible, definitely tiring. I’m really tired of choir practice. Especially since it’s one more thing that I’m not good at. I get lost, and then have to listen to the other tenors to figure out what the notes are. It’s a little discouraging.

I did have some good news, sort of – yesterday, I was able to do both sets of 40 pushups with my feet up on the bench, and the swim went well. And today, on the bike, I was able to do the VO2Max workout without any pain. Now, I used the nebulizer before the workout, and I suspect that that was the difference. I’m hoping that this gets me off the hook for the nuclear medicine stress test next week, which – of course – I have to go to Durango to do. I’m also tired of going to Durango.

Haven’t skied in almost two weeks; we haven’t had any snow in almost three. Now, we’ve got better snow than anyplace else – here’s a Facebook posting that somebody did from Park City:

That’s really depressing. At least Wolf Creek has snow everywhere – at least a couple of feet. Now, it will probably rain on us here in Pagosa on Christmas, at 7500 feet, but thank goodness our ski area is three thousand feet higher.

Meanwhile, Jay Peak, Vermont, has plenty of snow. Once again, we picked the wrong town. (I was holding out for Jay Peak, but Ethel said, no, she wanted Pagosa. But I’m not bitter!) And I’m certain that things will straighten out – we may have another low snow year, but the snow will happen. It will happen.

Okay, time for me to go to bed. We were up a little later than normal, watching the first third of “Miracle on 34th Street”. I love that movie – I wind up believing that he really is Santa Claus. I’ve never seen the remake. I have no desire to do so. Why would anybody remake perfection?

Tomorrow morning, it’s lift and swim again, assuming that I have enough gumption. I’m really, really tired of doing stuff, and then having to go do choir practice. And, tomorrow night, it’s choir practice at 6:30, and then the actual Christmas Eve service at 8:00.

Ethel is trying to kill me.

But I’m not bitter!

“We’re All Misfits”

We watched Rudolph the other night, and it was cute having all of our Island of Misfit Toys action figures on the extended hearth under the TV.

We have – by my count – four different instances of Yukon Cornelius, and two Hermies (or Herbies, depending on who’s doing the listening). I collected these over quite a few years. I’ve always identified with the Misfit Toys, because – well, it’s hard to say just why. But I’ve felt that way.

I mean, I don’t have a scrap of musical talent, but I keep trying to play all these different instruments. And I’m a mesomorph – a guy who adds muscle and weight easily – but I wasted thirty years trying to be a runner or a triathlete. Misfit all the way.

I have two brothers. They were born within eighteen months of each other. I was born eight years later. So I was even a misfit in my family of origin.

When I got sober, I fit right in to AA at that time and place, because that’s where I learned it. But the longer I’m sober, the less I seem to fit. I’m a Big Book Thumper and a Traditionalist in a time and place where folks pretty much just remember what their sponsors said, and don’t even read the Traditions at their meetings (this has recently changed in one of our meetings, but not everybody does it yet). I’m also the guy going to five or six meetings a week after forty years of sobriety.

There are others like this here – in terms of going to plenty of meetings – but they aren’t stick-in-the-mud dinosaurs, like I am. I reckon that the message that I got was that there is, indeed, a message to get, and we’re supposed to carry that very message, whereas nowadays it seems like the “message” is whatever folks feel like saying on any given day.

This doesn’t just make me a misfit – I think that it makes me unpopular.

Of course, I’d be unpopular anyway. I’m not one of the cool kids. I was just at the grocery store where a lady pointed at me and said “Yeah, he’s in my choir now. He’s some sort of wannabe standup comedian. I feel sorry for his wife.” Of course, now, how do I go back to choir practice? The one thing that I never, ever, want (besides a relapse) if for Kim Puckett to be ashamed to be next to me.

I know people who are cool. It seems that part of being cool is being sure that you are quick to point out those of us who aren’t cool.

So, I’m a misfit. But – I am married to Kim Puckett, and I have a sponsor, and as long as those two approve of me, that will have to be good enough.

(BTW – Kim finally found out what is wrong with Dolly, the doll on the Island of Misfit Toys. It turns out that she cries real tears, and that little girls don’t like that. Well, Dolly, you go right ahead. I feel ya.)

Dry Spell

It’s been two weeks since our last real snow, and there’s nothing happening anytime soon.

That rain on Christmas might give us a little snow, but not much.

Well, I keep telling Ethel that we picked the wrong town, but we’re actually getting visitors from all over, because we’ve got the most open terrain in the state, or something like that. So things are tough all over.

And it will, eventually, pass.

I didn’t sleep well last night; I was up for a few hours, with stuff running through my head. So when I finally got up today, I was in no hurry to start my workout; I didn’t finish lifting and swimming until 12:30, and it took me another 20 minutes to make it home. I decided that I didn’t care how long it took me; I was going to do the whole workout, and swim the whole routine. I spent a lot of social time because I wasn’t in any hurry to get the next set done. And I did, indeed, do what was on the schedule.

My pulmonologist wants a stress test; he told me this yesterday, and it’s already schedule for the 29th of December. Meanwhile, the cancer doc wants an MRI, and Aetna says “no”; the doc has appealed it, but it will take a month to hear from that. I hope I don’t die from cancer during the pulmonary stress test.

It looks like Ethel has definitely decided on the Everest Base Camp trek, for next October. It won’t be cheap, and it won’t be easy – the trek itself should be less stress than Kilimanjaro, but it’ll take forever to get all the way over there. I’m putting off singing “Kathmandu” over and over again until she’s actually booked the trip.

Speaking of booking – today I registered for the Iron Horse Classic on Memorial Day weekend. I’m in the “citizens ride”, which means that I’m not competing or being timed. It looks like I’ll be spending a while in Silverton waiting on Kim Puckett to come pick me up, as the return transportation ain’t cheap, and I think it’s already filled up. But I’ve never minded hanging out in Silverton.

We’re currently watching “The Long Kiss Goodnight”. We’re way ahead on our Christmas movies this year, because I’m too tired to do much more than just sit and watch them, and it ain’t like there’s any skiing to do. Because, as I mentioned, we’re in a dry spell.

Movie Time

A few days ago we opened the Christmas movie season with – of course – Die Hard.

We followed that with Die Hard 2 (of course) and then came Elf*. Then Lethal Weapon, and we just watched White Christmas. Now, here’s a funny thing – there’s not that much Christmas in White Christmas – although the movie opens on Christmas Eve in 1944, in the European Theater of war, and ends on Christmas Eve in 1954, in Vermont. But mostly it’s just amazing music and dancing.

She says that next we’re watching Family Man. That’s an interesting movie – it’s a cross between Scrooge and “It’s A Wonderful Life”.

We did have a white Pearl Harbor day, but the chances of a white Christmas are diminishing as we speak. We’re stuck in a high pressure pattern, and the weather is beautiful, sunny, and blue – and almost all of the snow has melted down here in town.

We’ve got presents under the tree, and we’re singing in the Christmas choir, and we lit the home Advent wreath tonight. So, it’s definitely and really our first Colorado Christmas. Of course, it’s just Kim Puckett and I; we may have some friends over for Christmas dinner, but it won’t be like it has been elsewhere, where we had a busier social life. In Whitefish, for instance, we had a lot of holiday traffic through the house. But we also had fog and clouds, so Ethel prefers this.

I’m aware of what we’re celebrating, of course – the way that I think of it, two thousand years ago, a Child was born. And that Child grew up, and He said some things and He did some things, and some folks wrote those things down, and 1900 years later, some folks read those things and decided to try them almost literally – and, out of that movement, Alcoholics Anonymous was born, and now I’m alive and not even arrested. “So that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

But Christmas is also about tradition – things that are not religious in themselves, but that are part of us identifying who we are by repeating actions and words that have come to mean much to us as a culture, a nation – and a family.

Which is why we’re watching our Christmas movies. I can’t wait for “Muppet Christmas Carol” 🙂

*Ethel really likes that one. I always feel like my IQ is dropping while I’m watching it, but there are some cute moments.

Aging Is For The Birds

I’ve spent a good bit of time like this, after ski days – taking off my boots and sitting there, looking down at them, meditating or ruminating – usually feeling rather pleased with the ski day.

Today was a pretty good ski day, except for the fact that I can’t ski nearly as much as I could just a few years ago. In the winter of 2019-2020, I skied 100 days in a row, and averaged about 15,000 feet of vertical a day – with almost every foot of that vertical being steeps, bumps and trees. Today, I managed just over 10,000 feet, and I hadn’t skied in several days, and it was almost all groomers.

And yet it left me exhausted. So, while I had that mild bit of post-ski glow, I was aware that things are still going downhill, pretty fast.

Now, we said many years ago that, when we were too old to ski, we’d go live in Latin America on the beach. But now we’ve already lived in Latin America on the beach. Ethel won’t go back to Panama. So I’m pitching Cartagena, Colombia. It’s big enough to have all of the service we need, it’s got three – count ’em, three – Episcopal churches, it has local SCUBA diving, and it’s got to have plenty of meetings. But Ethel won’t even consider it. So, here I am, going downhill fast, and watching my skiability decline, quickly, and can’t do anything about it.

Speaking of which – my cancer doc wants me to get an MRI to see if the illness is progressing, but Aetna says no. I just found out tonight that the pre-authorization had been denied. I don’t know what that means – it may mean that we’ll have to do a biopsy, instead. Or it may mean that I’m just supposed to go up to Camp Bird on the Imogene Pass road and wait for death. I’m not sure.

Kim says “Talk to the doctor on Monday. In the meantime, there’s no reason to be upset.” But I am quietly cursing. Yeah, I’m spoiled – for 30+ years, I was a software engineer, which meant that I had a good income and great benefits. If I needed some kind of medical care, it was simply provided.

Now, I’m supposed to just sit here and die.

But I’m not bitter!

Choir Practice

We have choir practice today at St Patrick’s.

We’re (supposedly) only doing this for the Christmas holidays. Of course, I’m not running my life – I have a God, a sponsor, and a wife to do that for me.

It’s not the sort of thing that I’m good at; for the purposes of choir, I’m a tenor, but I was only able to discern that by comparison. I listen to a lot of Clint Black, and I can usually sing the same notes that he does (although it doesn’t sound the same when I sing them) and I read or heard somewhere that he was a tenor. However, I’m not calibrated – if you hit a note on the piano in that range, I can probably hit it with my voice, but I couldn’t tell you what note it is. So sheet music only helps me if I have something else to listen to to remind me where we are.

And I often get lost in the more complicated pieces. So, I try to stop singing then, and just lip sync, until I get back on track. Sometimes I see Ethel leaning away from me, which means that I’m singing the wrong notes and need to shut up for a while. Ethel is also a tenor; she’s really a contralto, I think, but there are plenty of altos and not enough tenors, so she’s on the back row with us guys. As I like to say, she “identifies” as a tenor.

This is an experience that I haven’t had before, and I sort of like collecting those – but, while I’m sitting here typing about all this, I can feel a little fear in my belly, which means that I am scared about singing in the choir; these are folks who know what they are doing, and I’m faking it. Dishonesty always come from fear, and also generates it.

So this morning is lift and swim. I’m also hoping to get in a bit of yoga, as well, but I’ll be doing it by myself, because Ethel has been filling her schedule like crazy since we got home from Alabama. And I’m also sort of planning to look at the local ski shops, to see if they have what I need. We’re planning to go to Durango tomorrow, because they have a lot more inventory than we have here – in addition, there’s one shop that is only open from Thursday to Sunday, and they focus on having last season’s gear, still new in the packages; that’s probably the best place for me to get what I need.

I need new boots, and – yes – I also am going to need new skis, so I might get both at the same time. But, if that happens, the stuff will come back home with us and go under the tree, and I’ll keep skiing with what I have until Christmas. We’re not supposed to get much snow for the next two weeks anyway, so my skis will become my rock skis.

Back when we lived in Park City, the first time, when Silas was about ten years old, he had a short list of chores that he was supposed to do when he got home from school. One of those chores was vacuuming the downstairs hearth, and the rug near the hearth, because we had a fire pretty much every day. He was supposed to use the old vacuum, but sometimes it seems that he got confused, but – for whatever reason – he would use the new vacuum, and he’d get in trouble.

One day Kim was giving him grief about it and finally got him to repeat it, over and over – that he was supposed to use the old vacuum to clean up around the fireplace. And she said, “Okay, Silas, which vacuum are you supposed to use to do this?”

Silas said “The old vacuum”.

“Which vacuum are you never supposed to use?”

“The new vacuum”.

“Are you always supposed to use the old vacuum?”

“Yes, ma’am”.

“So, when do you use the old vacuum to clean up around the hearth?”

“Every day.”

“And, when would you use the new vacuum?”

Silas looked off, pursed his lips, looked back at his mother and said “…when it becomes the old vacuum?”

🙂

So my new skis will be my new skis, until they become my old skis 🙂

Not Granted

Ethel is partially done with her Christmas decorating.

It’s amazing how much Christmas stuff we have, and it’s also amazing how quickly she can get it out and arranged. In addition this year she had me put out some small colored lights on three little spruce in the yard; they look nice, and it wasn’t too much trouble.

I’m not feeling my best this morning – I didn’t sleep as well as I would have liked. I did sleep for six hours before my first waking, but that doesn’t seem to have done the job. I was up for a bit before going back to sleep; I probably got about seven hours total. And that’s not counting yesterday’s nap. But I still feel a little scratchy this morning.

While I was up in the night* I had an interesting thought – a thought that may make me an outcast, an apostate. And it’s this – I don’t think that the Serenity Prayer works as designed.

For those not familiar, the Serenity Prayer – at least, the version used in AA – goes like this:

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

Now, I have no idea how many times I’ve said this prayer. I’m coming up on 15,000 days of sobriety, and – in addition to usage just walking around – it usually gets said at least once at each meeting. So, a lot. On the order, possibly, of 100,000 times.

But I realized – in the middle of the night – that the prayer has never actually worked. I have never, when saying it, been granted serenity – specifically, not the serenity to accept stuff. I have, possibly, gotten the courage to change the things I could, or the wisdom to know the difference. And using the prayer as a mantra has allowed me to calm down, possibly to help me deal with stuff.

But, in order to accept stuff, I’ve had to actually do the work – the Steps – to get to acceptance. I never say this prayer and then feel that warm, gentle release. I have to go through the motions, address the issues.

AAs make much of the serenity paragraph, found on page 449 of the Third Edition, and page 417 of the Fourth***. I’m not going to reprint it here – it’s easily Googleable – but what a lot of folks don’t see (the way that I do) is that that paragraph never says how to accept – it just says that it needs to be done. You have to go back several pages to where the author says that he has to do the Steps to get the relief.

Now, there’s another prayer that I’ve been using lately, and it comes right before that famous paragraph –

“Okay, God. It is true that I—of all people, strange as
it may seem, and even though I didn’t give my per-
mission—really, really am an alcoholic of sorts. And it’s
all right with me. Now, what am I going to do about
it?”

This is a prayer of admission, and then a request for guidance and action. Now, that makes sense to me.

So lately, since we’ve wound up in Colorado – and it’s a great place to be! – I’ve looked back at all of the places we’ve lived, and the things that look like mistakes on my part that caused us to move to all of those places, and go to all that trouble, and lose all of that money. And I’ve had to say “Okay, God, it is true that I – of all people, strange as it may seem, really, really did all of that stupid stuff. And it’s all right with me. Now, what am I going to do about it?” This has given me some measure of peace about all that stuff.

I’ve also been saying, “Okay, God, it is true that I – of all people, strange as it may seem, and even though I didn’t give my permission, and although I thought I was doing all the right stuff to avoid it – really, really have gotten old, fat, slow, and weak, and ill. And it’s all right with me. Now, what am I going to do about it?” While this hasn’t solved the problem, it allows me to at least get some relief.

So I’m asking God what actions to take to change myself. I find this more effective than asking God to change me, without any effort on my part.

…and, of course, now I’m in the situation of “Okay, God, it is true that I – of all people, strange as it may seem, and even though I didn’t give my permission – really, really have broken my ski boot, and now I need new equipment. And it’s all right with me. Now, what am I going to do about it?” 🙂

*in Utah/Mormon culture, this phrase means “wrong or confused”, as in “I think we should rework that database**, or am I up in the night about this?” But when I say it, it means, literally, awake in the middle of the night.

**note that this is a technical, software engineering reference, as that’s where I spent the most time talking to Utah Mormons 🙂

***I’m still a Third Edition guy, but I have to accept that the Fourth Edition did, indeed, happen. In fact, they’re about to come out with a Fifth Edition. I fear for the Republic.

My Animism

Well, that animism is bothering me again*.

The liner in my ski boot has torn; it’s a hard piece of plastic, and so it’s tearing into my ankle when I put the boot on – painfully.

So I went to the ski shop, and they sold me a pair of rental demo boots until I can figure out what I’m going to do. Ethel says that I should get new boots, but that’s something that doesn’t happen quickly, so I have the rentals until that happens. So now I have my old boots and these old new boots (or new old boots). And it leaves me feeling guilty about getting rid of those boots.

I went ahead and threw them away; and while I was doing that, I was talking to God about how these boots don’t have any feelings, so it made no sense to feel like that – but when I trashed them, I still went ahead and told them that I was grateful to them. I had these boots for a long time – Ethel got ’em for me for Christmas either 2013 or 2014.

So I am now on used boots – we’ll see how they do.

I did wind up riding for an hour and a half, and it left me tired. I seem to be going downhill faster than I was. But I’m no longer running the show.

In other news – today, for the first time ever, I went to choir practice. I have never sung in a choir, and it went better than I would have thought. I’ve been told to sing tenor – as in, ten or eleven miles away. 🙂 Ethel identifies as a tenor, although she’s always sung alto. The folks were nice and tolerant and haven’t asked me to go away yet. Of course, they’re good Christians, so they might not get rid of me – but, then, the good Christians in Massachusetts burned folks at the stake, so maybe I’d better not place too much stock in that.

Alabama was in a game with Georgia today. You’ll note that I didn’t say “played a game” because they really didn’t. It was the worst that I can remember seeing Alabama play since before Nick Saban got going. So, they lost the SEC championship in a big way. Oh, well.

I didn’t get in any piano or chanter practice today; again, that bad night of sleep has left me feeling poorly all day. Tomorrow we go to church and I’m supposed to actually sing for real – not just lip sync. I hope to go ski after that, but we only have until 2 PM before our Zoom Traditions inductive study starts. Nobody asks me about the scheduling of these things.

It wasn’t a great day.

*if you don’t know what that means, then hit a dictionary – or you could go to my search window and search for it, and you’ll see it associated with my old car, and my old refrigerator, and my old chair….