You Can't Get Lost

It's -5° out right now, beautifully clear skies out and a high of +5° later and -11° tonight.  Wind chill is -20°.  I can feel the cold air from the window slide down under my desk, competing with the heat from the register.  Luckily, I got all my errands done yesterday and I don't need to be outside the house today for any compelling reason.  Because this week is going to be one of my busiest of the year.  My Aggregate short course starts at 1:00 today and goes through Wednesday noon.  The annual Wyoming Engineering Society meeting starts in Casper at Wednesday noon and goes through Friday noon.  I'm on a committee there that I need to be at. ("How Can You Be Two Places At Once When You Are Really No Place At All" - The Fireside Theater . The title of a bizarre comedy record that came out in my college days.  The next record was "Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand me the Pliers".  I don't recommend you looking them up on YouTube unless you really ...

I saw an ad on the TV on January 9th for "To Kill a Mockingbird" at the Buell Theater at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.  I had heard and read about the production on Broadway with Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch and he felt it was the role of his lifetime.  It wasn't Jeff Daniels, but "John Boy", Richard Thomas.  That was fine, Richard Thomas is an accomplished actor, but it really was the play I wanted to see, not who played Atticus.  Which was OK, because the play was about Scout Finch, his daughter, and she was excellent.   Anyway, I immediately got on-line and scanned through available seats.  Of all the days that I could go down to Denver, there were maybe a dozen scattered mezzanine and balcony seats available.  And the best one was tonight, on the second night of the production, second row back, three seats off the middle.  (Frankly, I don't want the front row of the mezzanine or the balcony.  My fear of heights inside b...

 So, what do you do in Laramie when there have been two heavy storms, two days of 40 degrees where it has been cold enough to freeze the street gutters full to overflowing onto the sidewalk and then two weeks when it won't get over 29, and most of that not above 24.   Why, you chip the ice out of the gutters.  And not just your own, but your downstream neighbors, because her flooding is affecting yours as well.  And because you live on a block where there are two group homes for mentally retarded adults that walk back and forth between the two houses and they need dry sidewalks.   So... this started Tuesday a week ago, the 10th.  The highs before that had been in the high 20s and low 30s, but Tuesday, the high was in the low 40s and there was significant melting, enough for the water to dam up in the gutter and overflow onto the sidewalk.  My snow shoveler, the teenage girl next door and her father upstream, have been doing a good job of keep...

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! For most (maybe all) of Sally's life, this Christmas Scene has been on a window box in their house or on her Grand Piano.   Jaye showed videos that Wilbur made in the early 1960s and it was there. Sally's Grandfather, John Sykora, made the church in the 1940s, and several of the figures are from that time.  We've added some almost every year.   Now I don't have the piano, so I'm going to have to figure out something.    " 'Twas the week before Christmas and all through the AirBnB..." and I won't bore you with the rest of the drivel I was about to write.  You can just imagine....  I'm sorry. We did this last year.  In years previous, we gathered at Jere and Tom's house.  The five bedrooms and two dens provided enough room for almost everyone to sleep there.  And we would invade and stay for days.  On Thanksgiving, On Christmas, On Dasher, On Prancer...Ok, I'll get off this kick.  Las...