YCGL - May 12, 2023 - How Can It Be June??? - Draft

 I kind of remember there was a May once, a long time ago, but the calander says two weeks.  Wow.  

We held the Wojahn/Edgar birthday party Saturday, May 27th in Golden, CO where Jere used to live.  Appropriate, one month after Sally's 73rd birthday.  I thought the party was at 3:00, which worked fine.  

I left a little after 10:00, stopped at the RV dealership in Cheyenne and found out that a family had put the money down on the motorhome.  They were to close on May 10th.  I stopped and had lunch at 12:00.   I wanted to visit a friend at Anshultz Medical Center in Denver.  She had been in the Burn unit for over 6 weeks and had been transferred to the physical therapy unit.  I got Anshutz and found her room about 2:00.  That gave me about half an hour I could spend there before leaving for the party. 

Janet has been a friend of ours for a "longggg timmmmmeee", she explained to the orderly when I arrived.  Janet took over her father's florist shop many years ago.  It is certainly the oldest in town.  And Janet has a special skill with flowers.  She has won a number of national floral awards over the years.  She just has the eye for it.  Essentially, any flower arrangement you've seen in our house, especially on Sally's Facebook, have been from Janet.  

Earlier this year, she was boiling a pot of water on her stove.  It must have boiled over, she turned the burner off and somehow, it created a suction under the pot.  As she tried to pull it off, it released and splashed back on to her stomach.  She was stunned and went into her bathroom to take her steaming clothes off.  When she sat down on the side of her tub, she passed out and fell backwards into the tub, hitting the hot water faucet as she fell.  She woke up the next morning in a steaming hot bathtub of water.  When she was getting the clothes off, her skin was pealing with it.  She was able to call 911, they got her to the hospital, they did some triage on her and sent her immediately down to the Burn unit at Anshutz.   She's had a number of skin grafts in the process.  

I texted her a day or two before and set up a time for me to visit.  Before I saw her, I really didn't know what to expect when I walked in.   And when I walked in, it was 100% Janet.  She was in great spirits, we laughed and joked whole time I was there.  I understand she was there a week or so longer but is home now.  

The time passed really quickly and I had to leave for the birthday party. Since Jere doesn't live in Golden anymore, she was staying at a friend's house nestled right up in the foothills west of Denver.  I almost didn't make it there.  Less than a quarter mile from the house was the entrance to the Colorado Railroad Museum.  And it was the Steam weekend when they fire up the steam engines and run them.  Oh, it was tempting....And I should have gone in.  

I thought the party was at 3:00.  When I got there, no one was at the house.  I called Jere and she was at Rob and Liz's house helping assemble the baby cribs.  She gave me the code to get in and I waited in the basement bar until people started showing up.  I could have been at the museum for an hour if I had known.  Oh well.

The party was nice.  Jere had gotten some (a lot) of BBQ from a local butcher shop known for their 'Q and it got basically demolished.  It was really good.  The Spring birthday party is for those whose birthdays are from January to June.  For the whole crowd, it would be Tom, Nick, Keli, Eliza, Lyndon, Robert, Deanna, Lisa and Erik.  Of the group, Lyndon, Robert, Deanna and Lisa were there.  It was Lyndon's 70th birthday, so he got the "famed over-the-hill birthday box".  The box has been around forever, I think for Wilb's 60th in 1995), and I think it was time to die a quiet death.  Sadly, I didn't take any pictures.

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May 2nd was Sally and my 51st anniversary.  Last year, we buried some of Sally's ashes up the hill from the North Fork Campground on June 3rd.  I had been concerned about the snowpack, and there wasn't any.  

This year, I had driven up the road to the campground a couple of hundred yards and ran into snow, so I wasn't sure if it would be open yet.  The highway department had opened up highway 130 between Laramie and Saratoga a few days before Memorial Day, so I knew that was open.  I invited the Bubble to go to dinner at either Bella's in Saratoga or the Bear Bottom in Centennial.  I drove the pickup and got Judy, Susan, Mary and Joe and drove up to the Snowy's.  The weather report indicated that there could be snow and flooding in the region, so we opted for the Bear Bottom after driving up into the mountains.  I first drove to the campground and it was open and people were camping, but there was still snow in the forest, so I just drove around the loop and headed back to the highway.  The highway is always fun to drive after Memorial Day because the snow is usually pretty deep along the side of the road.  There were a few spots where the cut was 8-10 feet, but most of it was open.  However, by the time we got to Lake Marie, the path to the lake was probably 3 feet deep  in snow and it was overcast and we decided to just turn around and go back down.  As we drove down, I saw a moose on the side of the road, so we stopped and took pictures...from inside the truck, which was taller than the moose, not like the tourists in Yellowstone that want to take pictures of their children petting the "cute moose".  (Ask me how I really feel about tourists in Yellowstone.  They think that inside the National Park border that the animals become tame and docile.  They become Darwin Award fodder.)  That's as close as I ever want to be to a moose.  

By the time we got back to Centennial, the sky was spitting and there were swirls, so it was the right decision.  

We had a good dinner there, me having a hamburger and a cup of their green chili, and everyone else had the special, which was prime rib.  Judy gave me a bite of hers and it was pretty good.  We split three pies for desert and called it good.  Which was a good thing, because it was starting to rain when we came out.