Two Percent

Sometimes, I wonder about things.

For instance – the label on this jug says that it’s two percent milk.

Well, then – what’s the other ninety-eight percent? There’s a whole lot of liquid there. If only two percent of it is milk, that leaves a lot of undisclosed ingredients.

It’s Saturday, which means that I did a two hour and fifteen minute ride this morning. The pedaling was easy – even more so because I finally got tired of TrainerRoad telling me that I’m weaker than it used to tell me, and accepted their suggested FTP, which was 31 watts lower than what they told me last month.

The problem with this ride is the saddle. This is nothing new – it’s always hurt me to sit on that saddle for hours. But now there are ads all over Facebook saying that it shouldn’t be that way, and that, with the Bi Saddle, it won’t be. All I have to do is give them a couple of hundred dollars and my hiney won’t hurt any more.

I can’t tell if their guarantee is money-back or not – but I’m thinking about ordering one. I understand that the setup is not trivial; it takes time, and it takes 6-7 rides to get it right. But it would be worth it, if it works.

…okay, that’s done. I’ve ordered it. Watch this space to find out if it worked, or if it was one more thing that didn’t work 🙂

Just finished reading Clancy’s “Executive Orders”. I always like it when John Clark shows up in these books – I know that, if he’s around, then something is about to get straightened out. I’m going to reread “The Bear and the Dragon” now. Do y’all remember, back in the 90s and early 2000s, when Russia was going to be our friend, from here on out?….after decades of worrying about when the bomb was going to drop, we thought that now, those days are over. I don’t keep up with current events, but from what I’ve been able to gather, that’s no longer the case. I wanted to go see the Kremlin, but Ethel says that it’s not a good idea right now. But, at least in Clancy’s books, Ivan Emmetovich gets along with all of those folks.

We’ve been watching the “Mission: Impossible” movies when we’ve been on the bikes together. Currently, we’re in the sixth movie – “Fallout”. Ethel asked a question today that, in fifty years or so of watching MI stuff, I’d never heard before – how, exactly, would Mr. Phelps (and now, Ethan Hunt) tell management that, no, he does not choose to accept this mission?

That was a real head-scratcher.

Okay, I’m gonna go watch our movie until Ethel heads off to work with her pigeon. Saturdays, lately, haven’t been really active after we get off the bikes, because that uses up time and energy. These days, I have time. It’s the other thing that I’m lacking.

Rolling Back

We’ve firmed up our plan for climbing Devil’s Tower – we’re going with Wyoming Mountain Guides on July 11th. We’re doing a trad refresher on the 10th, and then climbing the tower on the 11th. (“trad” in this context means “setting your own protection as you’re climbing, rather than using pre-set bolts in the rock). Here’s a picture from their web site:

I’m giving up on what I’ve been doing for the last two months or so. I moved to a strength training scheme, and rearranged my week to support that. But – it hasn’t worked. I tore a hamstring, and my bench press hasn’t improved at all. So, I give up. One of the things about being sober and aware is that I can say “well, this isn’t working”. So, it isn’t working.

So I’m going back to swim M/W, ride, jog and lift T/TH, Friday off, long ride Saturday, and attempt a short jog on Sunday. Now we’ll try this for a while and see what happens.

Now, a person smarter than I am might say “Gee, Jim, maybe it’s time to give up on working out altogether. I don’t see your contemporaries at the gym.” Well, actually, you do – maybe not a lot of them, it’s true. But I see what happens to Pucketts that don’t work out, and it’s not pretty. (No, it’s not pretty what’s happening to me, either, and I’ve never stopped working out. But, trust me, it can be worse).

We’ve sent off our taxes for 2025. We’ve been using the same tax accountant since 1998 – one of the managers at Fidelity Investments recommended her, and we just kept using her. She’s done our taxes from Utah, Arizona, Utah, Montana, Panama, Alabama, and now from Colorado. (yes, we’ve lived in Colorado before, but that was just half-time, and we kept our legal residence in Arizona at the time). Our taxes are probably getting a lot simpler now, but – well, I just prefer using our old, trusted retainer. Maybe next year, when we have only Social Security, our disbursements from our retirement accounts, and only have lived one place for the whole year, we’ll try doing it ourselves.

So now I’m definite for heli-skiing in Canada, Iron Horse in May, and Devil’s Tower in July. Ethel is still waffling on Everest Base Camp. She keeps saying that she wants to go to Germany, and see where I was stationed. Whenever she says this, I say “Buy a ticket”. But she won’t do that. She just keeps talking about it. I’d go tomorrow, if she’d buy a ticket today. It’s really that simple. Well, okay – I have a lot of medical appointments set up already. But…but….forget the buts. I’d go anyway. Seeing all of these doctors doesn’t seem to have helped me all that much.

So now, I’ll walk into the other room and say “Buy tickets for Europe.” Let’s see what happens.

(Update – she didn’t.)

The Year

Well, it looks like we have our plan for the year – well, mostly.

We finish out the ski season here, and in late March, I go to the outback of British Columbia to do heli skiing with CMH – Canadian Mountain Helicopters – at the Galena lodge.

At the end of May, I have the Iron Horse bicycle event, riding from Durango to Silverton. We’ve been planning on doing the trek through Nepal to Everest Base Camp in the fall – that hasn’t been nailed down yet, though.

And now, we’re going to meet a friend in Wyoming in July, to climb Devil’s Tower.

(this is a stock photo, off the Internet. Since we haven’t done it yet, we don’t have any photographs).

We visited Devil’s Tower back in 2020, when we were doing our COVID walkabout. Looking at it then, I knew that I wanted to climb it, but Ethel hadn’t show any interest. But our friend Grant in Kalispell was interested, and for some reason he finally has stated that he’s ready, so – let’s do it!

We won’t be doing this on our own – we’ll be using a guide. There’s no way that I would attempt to climb an 867 foot tower without having somebody along who knows which way to go 🙂 It’s surprisingly reasonable getting a guide – they’ll even give us a refresher on big-wall climbing in the package. (I haven’t done a multipitch climb since 2004 or so, when my friend Todd and I climbed the West Slabs of the North Face of Mount Olympus in Salt Lake).

So – go heli skiing, ride over two mountain passes between Durango and Silverton, climb Devil’s Tower, and hike 80 miles round trip to Everest Base Camp. That sounds like a pretty good year.

Had physical therapy today. The hamstring is a Grade 1 – or low Grade 2 – longitudinal tear; it’s not as bad as I was afraid it was. So I should be able to recover in plenty of time. I am riding, and I’m lifting with my upper body and swimming, so I won’t get completely out of shape. Which is a good thing, given the year that we’ve got planned.

Still no snow here, and nothing in the forecast. But I’m going skiing tomorrow anyway.

Pagosaversary

Yesterday we celebrated one year in Pagosa Springs. It was our Pagosaversary!

And, as it happens, I joined the local gym the day that we arrived, so I just had to pay my annual dues. It comes out to less than $40/month for the two of us, for a full gym and lap pool a half a mile away. I think that’s a good value.

So we’ve lived here for a year. And we still really like it – well, okay, not having any snow in my yard is weird. But we went skiing yesterday, and most of the Texans have left, and Wolf Creek is a really nice place to call your home mountain.

After skiing with Ethel for a while yesterday, she took off to take Juneau snowshoeing, and I did big bumps laps on the Alberta chair. After that, I told her to go ahead and book my trip. So I’m going to Kelowna, British Columbia, the last week of March, to spend five days climbing into helicopters and skiing down big mountains.

We live in remote southwest Colorado, And Kelowna is a sizable city in the middle of BC. And there is no convenient way to get from here to there. So I’m losing a day on either side of the trip to travel. But, again, I suppose it’s worth it. I’m only doing this once. Might as well go big or go home.

This doesn’t affect our travel plans – such as they are – for the Everest Base Camp trek this fall, but Ethel has been shanghied^H^H^H^H^H^H asked to take on the treasurer position at our church, and the budget cycle is in September and October. So that may put the kibosh on trekking in Nepal. Yes, there’s the spring trekking season, but that’s when the farmers in the valleys are burning their fields, and they say that the smoke can get really bad. So we’ll figure it out.

We also want to go to Europe for a while. She wants to see where I spent two years sitting on an M1 Abrams tank keeping the Russians out of Paris, and the beaches at Normandy, and I want to actually jump on trains and just travel around Europe for a while. But I don’t know when we’ll do that. There is only so much time – and there’s only so much money. I have to let our financial advisors refill the tanks after we spend all this money 🙂

Pagosaversary. Funny, we never noted our first year anywhere else. The longest we’ve spent in one home was seven years – that was the first Park City – and the longest that we’ve spent in a single area was eight years – that was Anthem and New River, in Arizona. I’d like to make it here longer than that.

As long as it snows 🙂

A Small Town – But Not My Small Town

There are, of course, some very nice things about living in Pagosa Springs. For instance, last week, when I left the gym, I forgot to lock my locker.

Of course, everything was fine. Nothing was taken, and nobody even bothered to lock it for me 🙂 We don’t worry about such stuff very much here in Archuleta County.

Yes, it’s a small town. And it’s a small town in Southwest Colorado, which – except for the current drought, I really like. (Today it snowed all morning, but it’s been so warm that it just kept melting as it hit). While we’re close to Durango, it doesn’t “lean left”, as folks say. Nobody here has asked me for my pronouns.

But this morning, I had a bit of song lyric stuck in my head as I was getting ready to go to the gym. And it occurred to me that it is entirely possible that nobody in Pagosa Springs had ever heard the song. It’s the old Ray Stevens chestnut, “Jeremiah Peabody‘s Polyunsaturated Quick-Dissolving Fast-Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills.” (Woah yeah).

I was careful not to sing this song while doing my lifting and core routine – however, the gym speakers did play Alanis Morrisette’s “All I Really Want”. I actually have a copy of “Jagged Little Pill”. I hope that she got some therapy, eventually.

But that’s a heck of a juxtaposition, ain’t it? Ray Stevens and the Queen of Angst.

The workout went okay – I was weaker on my pushups and pull-ups than I was last week, but I was a little bit faster on the swim. I wonder if skiing yesterday had any effect. I’m going to have to find a way to ski and also work out. When I look back at my last 100 day year – that’s the winter of 2019-2020 – I see that my working out was hit or miss until the last week of February, when I managed to stick to the plan, while skiing every day, although that all went to heck on the middle of March, when they closed the ski hill and the gym on successive days.

Of course, I was six years younger then.

I haven’t yet booked my heli ski trip. I’m concerned about several things – but, mainly, I doubt my own ability to ski the way that I would need to ski, and keep skiing, to take advantage of that opportunity, Yesterday’s 11,000 feet wore me out. For the aforementioned 100 consecutive days of skiing, back in 19-20, I averaged over 12,000 feet per day – and those 12,000 feet were steeps, bumps and trees, in powder.

That was the year that I was SUPPOSED to go heliskiing in Alaska. I was supposed to go at the end of March. But the day before I left, Alaska closed the doors – something about a global pandemic or something.

Now I’m wondering if I missed my chance.

Winterless

Here’s the tram at Jay Peak, in Vermont.

We’re not there. I’ve tried to get Ethel to go there, but she won’t. She’s so mean and selfish.

Here’s a post from this time last year. I’m not showing you what my back yard looks like now, because it looks exactly like this. Winter just ain’t happening. It’s happening in Vermont, but not in Colorado. Now, I admit, I’m as surprised about this as anyone is. Southwest Colorado has always been a pretty good bet for great skiing and great weather. But not last year, and not this year.

We came to Pagosa for five or six weeks in the winter of 23/24, and the skiing was great – or, at least, that’s the way that I remember it, and that seems to be what this diary says. Right now, here in Pagosa Springs, we’re not wild about the skiing – I went today, and it was better than (say) North Carolina, but there was a lot of, shall we say, firmly packed powder.

But one thing that Southwest Colorado has that Jay Peak will never have – Texans. Lots and lots of Texans. I thought that they would have gone home by now. I was wrong. Now, there are nothing like the throngs of Texans that we had the last two weeks, but there are still plenty, and they fill up the parking lot and the lift lines….and the restaurants, and the stores, and they are all driving all day long everywhere.

Okay, let’s tell the truth and shame the Devil. We won’t be going to Jay Peak, Vermont. We’re going to stay right here. And right here is a whole lot better than (say) Alabama. And who knows? Eventually the Texans will leave, and maybe it’ll start snowing.

But it’s a nice fantasy. Besides, in Newport, VT, I could buy the house I have here for about 200K less. Whups – I forgot. I was going to stop thinking about that.

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.

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!

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….

Nothing Ever Settles

We got back from Alabama last night, and unpacked, and even watched a movie. Time to settle back into a routine, right?

Wrong again. Nothing ever seems to be settled down.

Here’s the living room right now:

For some reason, Ethel didn’t like the fireplace surround – apparently, it didn’t surround the fireplace correctly – so now we’ve bought stone and timber and hired a mason and a carpenter to put up stone and a new mantle. During all of the prep and discussion, the stonemason has been responsive and on time. Now that it’s time to start the job, he’s late.

And we can’t sit in the great room, for at least a week, during the day. We’re great room people – this is where we sit. Where I nap. It’s pretty much the center room of our lives, but we’re now exiled from it, because the fireplace surround didn’t work, and the mason ain’t working, and everything is covered with sheets.

I had to go to the local clinic this morning to get lab work done; I had to get my truck moving outside, at 16 F, with that hard, crusty, thin frost that forms on the windshield and that won’t scrape off very well. Then, when I got home, I got tagged to sit around and wait on the mason before I can do my VO2Max ride, before I can do the rest of the day. Fuss and bother. It was a PSA test, to see if my cancer is acting up. I had to not work out for three days prior, and now it’s time to get on the bike, but I can’t, because the mason isn’t here yet.

We’ve taken the skis in for the first tune of the season. The nice ski techs told me that my Rossignol Soul 7s, that I bought 5.5 years ago, have been worn down too much, and that I’m going to need new skis by the end of the year. Well, gee – Rossignol has quit making Soul Sevens. And there’s nothing out there to say what to replace them with – I mean, if I ask, Google AI is really ready to make suggestions. But Google AI has been so wrong so many times that I really don’t want to trust it.

I hate this. I love those skis.

We’ve got to either put the Thule box back up against the garage ceiling, or put it on Ethel’s car. It looks like it will fit under the garage door, but I know that she doesn’t like the whistling noise that it makes at highway speeds. But we moved to a place that charges $2000 for a double ski locker (the last time we paid rent, at Big Sky, it was $200; we belonged to the Big Mountain Club in Whitefish for about $3500/year) and we didn’t do due diligence – no, wait. That’s not true. We knew that Wolf Creek was going to be building out a locker room, but they couldn’t tell us then how much it was going to cost. Goofed up again. I reckon that I didn’t think “probably seven times the cost of the last locker rental” was a reasonable assumption.

I have a call with my electrocardiologist’s PA today at 11 AM. I’m going to tell her that I can’t run anymore, so I’ve given up on life, and if the doc wants to recommend elder euthanasia, I’m cool with that. But nobody ever wants to do things the easy, simple way.

And now I’m through typing this, and the stonemason hasn’t arrived, or called. So it looks like things are going to be up in the air for a while. – actually, Ethel just called, and he’s going to be a couple of hours, so I’m going to get on the bike.

(UPDATE – Apparently, I didn’t post this yesterday, when I wrote it. Posting it now, a day late).