Tonight is the next Rocky Mountain Blogger’s Bash. I’ll be there (barring something unforeseen in the next few hours), as will my daughter. She has to leave early, though, because she’s involved with a local Rocky Horror production.
Archive for the ‘Activities’ Category
Bash!
Saturday, July 7th, 2007Movie night
Thursday, June 21st, 2007I took my daughter to dinner last night, then we went to see Paprika at the Mayan. We really enjoyed it – the visuals were stunning.
Although there really wasn’t much similarity apart from the idea of a device that lets someone enter another’s dreams in order to treat them psychologically, I found myself reminded of the Roger Zelazny short story, “He Who Shapes,” which was later expanded into the novel, “The Dream Master.”
I’d like to see some of Zelazny’s work made into movies, but there hasn’t been a good track record of that so far.
I’ve been better
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007I went on a bicycle ride along the Platte River on Sunday morning with Marion. We rode from Confluence Park down to Littleton. There were some detours – not only was the Platte high with runoff, but there’s some maintenance and development work being done.
Just south of Hampden Avenue, you actually have to take the Bear Creek trail west for a while before cutting back to the Platte River trail on the streets.
The Platte running high has had effects on others besides bicyclists and joggers:
Not to mention the people washed away by flash flooding Monday night.
On the way back to Confluence Park, Marion took a spill. I slammed on my brakes, but apparently couldn’t stop in time. I went over the handlebars, and that’s just about my last coherent memory for about half an hour. I’m told I ran into Marion’s bicycle, but not Marion. That’s a good thing – I outweigh her by a factor of about two. The next thing I recall is sitting beside the trail, with Marion cleaning my face with a wet handkerchief that I’d apparently given her.
She didn’t believe that I’d blacked out, because during the time I was “off-line,” I’d managed to converse intelligibly with her and the people who’d helped us after the accident
Given my injuries (a painful wrist and shoulder on the right, a jammed finger on the left, and a scrape on the right shoulder to go along with the ones on the face and neck), I thought I must have sprawled out on the ground upon landing. According to Marion, though, I’d tucked and rolled. Nice to believe, but I’ll have to take her word for it. After a few more minutes recovering, we rode back to the car. All I remember of that, really, is arriving at the car and putting the bike onto the rack.
I handed my car keys to Marion, because she was in much better shape than I was. After cleaning up and getting something to eat, I went in to the emergency room. I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t blacked out. I ended up spending pretty much the rest of Sunday lying around waiting to find out how badly I was hurt.
Not too badly, apparently. Because of the injuries I reported, they took X-rays of my shoulder, my right wrist, and my left hand. Because they were concerned about other injuries that often happen with bicycle crashes, they X-rayed my chest. Because I reported short-term memory loss, they did CT scans of my head and neck. The only thing they found was slight dehydration, which they determined from one of the blood samples they took.
They did have me see my doctor for a followup, which I did this morning. She gave me a recommendation for treating the road rash (“Plastic surgeons smear Bacitracin on everything they do – it’ll help this, too.”) and told me that fractures often don’t show up on X-rays taken immediately after an accident, so I should come back and request another X-ray if the pain doesn’t go away.
I did get to invoke the spirit of John Cameron Swayze, though … it’s a cliche that a watch with a cracked crystal will be a key clue, because the time at which it has stopped is the time the murderer attacked the victim. My watch, a Citizen that I received as a birthday present in 1984, puts the lie to that. It’s still running. I’ll post the movie if I can get it transferred successfully; when I tried before, it locked up the browser.
Gotta love that. This watch definitely deserves a new crystal.
Happy New Year!
Monday, January 1st, 2007I’m back from a week on the east coast. I spent Christmas with my Aunt Mary (who was thrilled I could make it), then spent a few days in New York City and Binghamton.
It was a good trip, but I’m glad to be back. No real problems, apart from traveling back to Denver. We were scheduled to leave La Guardia about 4pm yesterday, with a connection at O’Hare. Our flight had been listed as on time, but was listed as “delayed” with no time given when we got to the gate. We found a nearby gate with an earlier flight that had been delayed, and managed to get transferred to that one. It was a good thing we did; it was scheduled to leave at 3pm, but didn’t take off until 4:51pm. Our original flight was delayed from 3:55pm to a projected departure at 8pm. If we hadn’t transferred flights, we’d have missed our connection in Chicago.
However, we got back without further incident, and the roads were clearer than we expected. More to come later; I’ve got to get set up to go back to work tomorrow.
Snow day 2
Friday, December 22nd, 2006Yesterday’s post with this title disappeared; I don’t know where. I ended up with 20-26″ of snow in my front yard. I had shoveled my walk when I arrived home Wednesday afternoon, and you couldn’t tell that anything had been done by the time I got up yesterday.
After shoveling the walk, I broke out the X-C skis and wandered around for a while. Learned a couple things about urban Nordic skiing in the process. First, even if your skis are a “back country” model, two feet of soft snow isn’t the easiest thing to get around in. Second, while the packed tracks where vehicles have passed are similar to groomed paths, the fact that the road is cambered makes your feet want to slide out from under you to the side. Apart from that, it was pretty enjoyable, and I found tracks from others who had gone around the lake in the local park before me.
When I came back from that, I dug out my car. I went in to work for a little while this morning, but the office wasn’t officially open – too many people were snowed in, and, if we’d made arrangements to have the lot plowed, it hadn’t happened. I had to park across the street at a 4WD aftermarket parts store. Not much trouble getting around, though, apart from getting stuck for a few minutes because I was a nice guy and backed up to let someone by. It’s a good thing I have a snow shovel, kitty litter, and a manual transmission in my car.
I may post some pictures if I can find the cable for my camera – I have a tendency to mislay such things.
Snow day!
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006When I woke up this morning, the snow had started to accumulate on the street. It was probably only 2″ in depth or so, but the roads were pretty slick.
The office shut down around 1pm. By that time, I-70 east of Denver was closed, as was I-25 south of town. What amused us, though, was that the mall near us had already shut down. Given the importance of the Christmas shopping season to retailers, it’s not what we expected.
I ran a few errands on the way home – I topped off the gas in my car, and bought cat litter and a new snow shovel. I wanted to see if I could find a small one for the car, but I couldn’t. So I bought a new one for the house, and put my old one in the car.
Currently, the snow is 8″ to 11″ deep in my front yard. I can believe that if this runs into tomorrow afternoon, there’ll be two feet or more here. I may have to pull out my cross-country skis if I want to go anywhere in the next couple days. That would be good exercise, certainly. Maybe I’ll ski the local parks this afternoon.
I enjoyed that
Monday, December 4th, 2006Yesterday, that is. A relaxing morning, followed by Navy taking the Commander-in-Chief’s trophy again with a win over Army.
My daughter came along with me, and we joined the local Annapolis and West Point alumni chapters for the game. To my surprise and delight, not only was one of my classmates there, but he was someone I’d actually known (you really can’t know everyone in a class of 736). We hadn’t seen each other since graduation, so we spent some time catching up and reminiscing. Cheryl got to hear several stories she hadn’t heard before (mostly about activities at the 1973 Army-Navy game, as I recall).
In any case, we exchanged contact information, and I’ll try to keep in touch with him – I’m not in touch with too many of my classmates, and I regret that.
In the evening, Marion and I had dinner with a couple of her friends – they’re retired professors who are co-authors of what is, apparently, one of the texts in their field. Nice people.
As I said, a good day. Would that they were all such.
Pleasure and pain
Saturday, November 25th, 2006I went to see the new Bond movie, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Good action, and I liked the characters. One of the things I really liked was that the humorous remarks weren’t played up, and the rampant silliness of the Roger Moore years was noticeably absent. I also was quite taken with the opening credits – it’s nice that they got away from the “floating silhouettes of scantily-clad women” look. Not that I mind looking at scantily-clad women, you understand, it’s just that the look of the opening credit sequence was a well-done and welcome change.
This morning, though, I was flipping through the DirecTV channel guide, and noticed a special “Christmas music” channel. Since it’s after Thanksgiving, I’m willing to listen to Christmas music now. However, the song playing when I selected the channel was Macarena Christmas by Los Del Rio, and it was followed by some rap thing.
Bleah.
Well, that was fun
Saturday, November 25th, 2006Not.
I couldn’t stay asleep yesterday morning – I woke up at 2:45am and couldn’t get back to sleep. Around 4am, I decided to get dressed and see if I could pick up one of the Black Friday deals at Circuit City, which would be opening at 5am.
When I got there at 4:40, I had to park well away from Circuit City – it’s next to CompUSA, and that entire section of the parking lot was full. The line for Circuit City started in front of the store, went past the music store next door, past the bridal store next to the music store, continued all the way down the side of the building and into the back. When I joined the line, it had just started looping back toward the front of the building. By the time the doors opened, the line went all the way back to the front and there was a small crowd directly in front of the doors waiting for the line to disappear.
I went in and headed directly to the section I wanted, then waited for an employee so I could ask for the item I wanted. A few minutes later, a young woman showed up and asked, “Who’s next?” I indicated the lady next to me, and when she opened the display case to get her item, I said, “As long as you’re in there, could I get one of (the item I wanted)?” She replied that I needed instead to get into a particular line for checkout, because they were handing them out at that register. So, I did. A few minutes later, another young woman came by asking which of us in line wanted that item, so I got one.
I was about 5th in line at the time. By the time I was 4th in line, they were down to three remaining. By the time I got to the register, they were out.
After I was done, it took me several minutes to thread my way back to the front of the store so I could exit. By the time I got back to my car (about 5:35am), the section of the parking lot I was in (which had no stores that opened early) was also full, and people were driving around waiting for an open space.
I’m glad I got the item I was looking for, but I don’t think I’ll do that again.
I hope you enjoyed Thanksgiving
Saturday, November 25th, 2006I certainly did. I was invited to dinner with friends (it’s pretty much a standing invitation). Marion couldn’t come (she’s visiting a friend in Florida), so the invitation was passed on to my daughter, who decided to come with me.
I was responsible for bringing a vegetable dish, so I decided to bring a sweet-and-sour broccoli dish I ran across at a holiday party last Christmas season. It’s pretty simple, and turned out well.
I didn’t participate in the conversation much – almost all of the other guests were all neighbors of my friends, and most of the discussion topics involved local zoning issues. Many of the rest were political jabs and one-liners, and I didn’t want to ruin the mood by trying to talk with people who use the phrase “the Bush regime” unselfconsciously.
It was a good meal, though. I like these people, and I don’t see them nearly often enough.