skiing – Little Home In The Valley

Freak Flags Flown

December 24, 2025December 24, 2025jono55

Sunday afternoon Robin and I drove down the Million Dollar Highway (US 550) to a point a few miles past Ouray on a scouting expedition. We were checking snow conditions, since in the valley the small amount of snow that had fallen in the past couple of weeks still lingered only in small patches where the sun couldn’t get at it. Otherwise – bare brown ground is the order of the day. What we found? No White Christmas this year, folks.

Higher up, the ski area at Telluride has only a few runs open, mostly blue and green ones. Thrill seekers will just have to wait a little longer to get their kicks. Behind the scenes at Telluride there are labor disputes to worry about as well. So not such good news in the Land of Shiny People for the holidays.

However, the restaurants, liquor stores, and shops that sell expensive things you could easily do without are all open and humming. It turns out that a person can aprés-ski with verve and panache even when they can’t actually ski. Good to know.

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Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming, by Ane Btun

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Our holiday plans are completely local this year. None of our children will be within easy reach, so we’ve invited several friends for dinner on Christmas Day. This group is composed of the sort of people who don’t need any prodding to begin a conversation that will start the moment they come through the door and end only when they have pulled away at the end of it all. Politically we are of similar mind, so there will be no need for wit sharpening. We can toss clichés at one another without fear of contradiction.

While that might sound boring and dreadful, one has to remember that we are living in an area where two-thirds of the voters picked a felon/rapist for President in November of 2024. So feeling slightly more comfortable in flying our freak flags is a treat. A blessed respite.

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Yesterday the temperature here in Paradise hit 68 degrees. Two days before Christmas Eve. In the mountains of Colorado. At times like these I feel sorry for those old-timers whose store of weather knowledge has been rendered nearly useless by climate change. They can’t predict things any more. The game is so changed that all they can do is ruefully shake their heads.

Of course I am also one of the ancients, but I am not so affected as some. As I went through life for the most part I was oblivious to what was going on around me. If I walked out the door and it was raining I might notice that I was wet but didn’t think more about it.

I had other things to think about that I believed more important. Things involving my work and family. I couldn’t do anything about the weather so I ignored it. In this way I was almost the polar opposite of a farmer, whose livelihood was so dependent on sun and rain and temperatures.

I took care of children indoors, and bother what was going on outside. It didn’t touch me unless the power went out in a thunderstorm and we had to somehow keep our machines operating on emergency systems.

So ask me anything you want about the weather … past, present, or future. I will smile and say “I have no idea.” Perhaps this will bring you some comfort if you realize that you are not the only one in that position.

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O Holy Night (Po Hemolele), by Joanie Komatsu & Ruth Komatsu

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God bless the political cartoonists. Actually, God bless cartoonist of any stripe. The best of them have the ability to boil a truth down from a chapter to a page to just the fewest words possible and then place it in a frame and offer it up to us. To me it’s much like when you are cooking and you make a reduction. Heating a liquid until just the right amount of water is evaporated and the contents couldn’t be distilled any further. They become the purest essence of what is contained in the pan.

That’s what the best cartoonists do. One thing I can say about the Cluck Gang, they come up with more than enough fodder for these entrepreneurs to chew on. Every single rock that one turns over has a snake under it, fanged and venomous and ready to go.

One interesting thing about political cartooning. To really get the full benefit from the better ones, the reader has to be reasonably well-informed. Look at this one, for instance.

First of all, the mask and bindings are right out of the movie Silence of the Lambs. The red tie and blonde hairdo identify the person being restrained as Cluck.

The elephant is the symbol of the GOP, and its support of at least one possible pedophile has become obvious from the ongoing Epstein saga.

I know that in the US of A we are supposed to be presumed innocent until found guilty in a court of law. But get serious, folks. If there were nothing rotten about the Cluckster-in-chief in those files wouldn’t they have been released months ago, just to be done with it and regain the narrative? Can you think of any other reason for this drawn-out and clumsy cover-up? Really … I’m asking.

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Tonight is Christmas Eve. I love the story. When you’ve heard it as many times as I have, it gets Crispr-d into your DNA, and it’s hard to stand back and really look at it objectively. To paraphrase Jon Kabat-Zinn , “Wherever you go, there you are, and thy DNA tags along.”

So I enjoy the carols, watch all the Christmas specials on television, send out my cards, purchase my share of gifts … nothing has changed for me for generations now in how I observe the holiday, and I suspect that it never will. For one thing, the tale keeps on being repeated in daily life, with different characters.

Today the United States has its own version of Herod sending out armies to find the Josés and the Marias and the babies and do them harm. We have people who are without homes and must take shelter where they can. We have women delivering their infants in the equivalent of stables where infant mortality is so much higher than in better regulated and managed facilities.

So you can see that the legend is always fresh for me, even if the particulars are altered.

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Here’s a beauty to end the post on. I googled its origins and found that the Scots and the Irish have both claimed the tune as their own. We’ll let them carry on the fight while we enjoy its lovely melancholy, which is universal.

“The Parting Glass” is a Scottish traditional song, often sung at the end of a gathering of friends. It has also long been popular in Ireland, and modern versions reflect strong Irish and North American influences. It was the most popular parting song sung in Scotland before Robert Burns wrote “Auld Lang Syne.”

Wikipedia

The Parting Glass, by boygenius and Ye Vagabonds

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Impostor Syndrome

November 12, 2025November 12, 2025jono55

Yesterday was Veteran’s Day. I am a veteran, so I can legitimately stand up with other vets at public occasions when asked to do so. And although I did serve, wear the uniform, and go wherever the USAF wanted me to go, I always feel a bit of an impostor. Why, you ask?

Because:

I ended up in Nebraska, not Viet Nam.
I was never injured in action.
I was never under fire.
I spent the two years sleeping in my own bed, with my family comfortably nearby.
For me the worst part of national service was the inconvenience of a two-year interruption in my career plans. Pretty puny when put up against the sacrifices made by thousands of my brothers and sisters.

But technically speaking I am a veteran, and if you want to give up your seat at the opera or strew rose petals in my path, go right ahead. I would not be so rude as to correct you.

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Well Come Back Home, by the Byrds

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I have feelings galore about the weekend display of cowardice of many Democrats in the Senate, but Jon Stewart says it way better than I ever could.

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This has been a banner season for those who like political cartoons. At least for progressives. I like them because they cut right through any attempts at subterfuge and skewer those most in need of that attention.

The first one in the series is actually not a cartoon, but the back of a pumping truck seen while waiting for the light to change in Grand Junction this past Monday. It is the line at the top of the truck: “Filled with political promises” that started me laughing out loud.

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No snow as yet at the ski resorts nearby, Telluride and Powderhorn. The owners aren’t hopeful for Thanksgiving, but that’s not too unusual. Robin and I skied Alpine for the first 20 years or so we were together, but tired of the lines and the ever-increasing lift ticket prices. This year they are around $245 for a single day. We still enjoy Nordic skiing, but last year there were only a few days here in the valley that were good for that.

We are pretty demanding of perfect snow conditions, preferring days when the skis glide slower and control is as good as one can get. The idea of plowing into anything solid while wearing thin bits of wood and plastic on our feet is less and less attractive each year. When I lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where several hundred inches of snow fell each year, Nordic skiing was wonderful. By December there were several feet of snow on the ground and new snow fell nearly every day. Going through a forest was almost surreal. All of the underbrush was buried and you moved silently through the trees, which were the only things protruding from the snow.

There was one drawback to this serene beauty, however, and that was that it attracted snowmobiles. Not content with the hundreds of miles of trails dedicated to their use, they brought the smell of exhaust and the deafening roar of their engines everywhere. Each time a line of them passed me I quietly wished I was armed with a rifle of a caliber large enough to pierce the motor of those beasts and send terror into the hearts of the riders. Yes, yes, I admit to violent reveries back then. And the language that echoed in my brain is embarrassing to recall.

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Snow (from the film Brokeback Mountain), by Gustavo Santaollalla

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Surely I Jest

January 8, 2025January 8, 2025jono55

I just read the sort of news item that sends my head spinning. Not that it takes that much to produce a spin, even standing up quickly can do it, but here’s the item I was talking about:

“Scientists estimate that we’ve identified only one-tenth of all species on Earth,” said Dr.
Shannon Bennett, chief of science at the California Academy of Sciences, in a statement.

CNN online

Ten per cent! Holy Statistics, Batman, that’s incredible! What in earth have all of those biologists and zoologists been doing with their time all of these years? Sipping endless lattes on too-long coffee breaks? Making out in the janitor’s closet?

But to get back to the story, one of the new identify-ees is a vegetarian piranha which has been named Myloplus sauron after the villain Sauron from Lord of the Rings. To the scientists responsible for bringing it to our attention, the vertical stripe looks like that evil eye in the sky.

Its vegetarian habits are comforting to hear about, and even if it wasn’t, its mouth looks too small to take that much of a bite, really.

For comparison, here is a photo of a meat-eating piranha.

Even I can tell them apart.

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Have You Ever Seen Peaches Growing On A Sweet Potato Vine, by Jake Xerxes Fussell

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A couple of days ago a friend was lamenting the fact that those Disney nature documentaries of decades ago are not more readily available on television. He’s right. They aren’t. Some of them were quite lovely.

It’s not that excellent documentaries are not being made today, and available from several sources, but they are different in tone. There’s a bit more of the horrible in the newer ones. For example, a cheetah not only is shown to be very sleek and very fast but we see it catching its prey and then (we are shown in great detail) what happens afterwards. Much biting and tearing that Disney used to leave out. A more realistic portrayal, to be sure, but lacking the quieter aura of some of the earlier Disney efforts.

[Frank Disclaimer Time: I loved those older films, and grew up watching Walt Disney Presents on Sunday evenings, slurping up everything I saw as gospel.]

On the other hand. Those films were produced at a time when we were more accepting of what was being shown us as True Life Adventures. Some newer revelations have popped up indicating that there might have been an admixture in what was presented, with real stuff being mixed in with … well … fake news.

Looking for an old clip from that series, I ran across this one. Sort of wish I hadn’t found it.

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Robin and I are watching the series One Hundred Years of Solitude on Netflix. It is a film version of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel of the same name. I am enjoying it, although there was a magical quality to the novel that hasn’t quite transferred to the screen, at least for me. I love what they did in creating the village of Macondo. It’s all of what I had imagined, and more.

I’ve read the novel thrice, as new things are revealed each time. If you read articles about “How to write a story,” you will frequently find the advice given that you should construct your opening sentence so as to grab the readers and pull them in. If that’s as important as they say it is, I submit that the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude qualifies as a pretty good example:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Now there’s a doozy of an opening line. You introduce an important character and a second later you announce his imminent demise. If an author does that, they had better come up with something pretty good as followup. I won’t spoil it for you except to say that Marquez does just that.

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I’ll Fly Away, by Ian Siegal

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We did our first cross-country skiing of the season this past Saturday. Our equipment is aging and wasn’t of the most durable quality in the first place, so we drove the relatively short distance to Black Canyon National Park and tried everything out. Good for another year was the assessment.

I’ve mentioned this before, but there is only a single road that runs along the South Rim of the park, about six miles long. Get to the end and you return the same way you came in. One road, no looping, no branching. The park service maintains the road only as far as the Visitor Center, and then the remainder becomes a four mile long ski trail with outstanding scenery.

In winter the park service maintains the road only as far as the Visitor Center, and then the remainder becomes a four mile long ski trail with outstanding scenery. The snow wasn’t in great condition Saturday morning, much crustier than we like. Each year these skinny skis seem more treacherous, as if being guided by diabolical forces that are pushing us toward needing orthopedic care. Our vulnerability is especially felt on this road where there are occasional narrow places that have a half-mile deep gorge very near at hand and no guard rails. Don’t want to go on fast snow anywhere near those narrow places … I may ski poorly but I don’t fly well at all.

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16-20, by Jake Xerxes Fussell

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During the recent political campaign I would watch James Carville on YouTube fairly regularly. He was knowledgeable, cranky, and reliably profane. He’s a smart guy, but he called this latest election wrong.

After pondering things for a couple of months, he delivered an editorial to the New York Times, which I thought was pretty good. There exists the possibility that this time he might be correct as well as colorful. The title of the piece was: James Carville: I Was Wrong About the 2024 Election. Here’s Why.

One line of thought especially caught my attention. He says that we need to take our focus off of Cluck and go after the votes of those working folks that we know the Republican Party is going to throw under the bus just as surely as God made those little green apples. Yes, Cluck is a degenerate and yes, he’s a fascist, but he’s a lame duck degenerate fascist. Is that the aroma of opportunity I smell?

This year the Democratic Party leadership must convene and publish a creative, popular and bold economic agenda and proactively take back our economic turf. Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress and force them to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.

James Carville, NYTimes, January 6

“Force them to oppose what they cannot be for.” I like that. If you ever meet up with a Democrat, point it out to them. They need our help.

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