All posts by djones

blogversation, sterling

Blogversation – Show & Tell

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Summer from Le Musings of Moi is hosting the Saturday Blogversation again this week. The topic is the rather open ended Show and Tell. The instructions are to pick something to show off to your friends just like the old days of grade school and vlog about it. So without further ado, here is the highly awaited video premier (on this blog anyway) of my bragging point for the day:

Before you ask why I have that rather dyspeptic expression on my face, realize that there was a group of people standing behind the camera making faces to see if they could make me laugh. I was never so happy to finish a spiel in my life. Good editing removed me sticking my tongue out at them.

I hope that this gives you a good idea of the area. Most of the video was taken in the late spring / early summer and was produced to promote the area. I encourage you to visit the Sterling web site  for further information and videos (the normal home of the above video is here.) By the way, the sculpture shown in the video is by local artist and sculptor Bradford Rhea.  He is the sculptor who was commissioned to create President Clinton’s gift to His Holiness John Paul II in 1993. You can read about the experience here.

friday high five

Friday Not So high Five

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Once more the muse of odd things is sitting on my keyboard, threatening me with total giddiness unless I a complete a Friday High Five post. Given my undying fear of things giddy, the fact that my first meeting started at 7:30am and the last finished at 8:40pm, that today was the day we moved Mom from the hospital to the nursing home, and other oddities, here is a completely lame

Five Documents You Might Not Want to Read Too Closely Before Signing

  • Exhumation orders. I see about four of these a year asking that a body can be exhumed from the city cemetery. One doesn’t want to look too closely since some actually list the reason they want to exhume. Reasons like “I want to sell the plot to XYZ for a lot of money. The north 40 pasture is good enough for dad.” It’s even worse when you know the applicant and recognize the reason as truthful. The only interesting ones come from the coroner every 5 years or so. 
  • Cemetery deeds. Do you really want to know who is planning on being buried where? Do you really care?
  • Columbarium deeds. See above. Not only that, some days there are 50+ to be signed after the council meeting. Columbarium spaces are a hot commodity.
  • FAA Airport Funding Acceptances. Three hundred pages of boilerplate requiring your notarized signature 27 times throughout the document. And you get to sign just as many times when certifying the project has been completed.
  • Old Hire Fire Pension Fund Board Notes. This board only meets when one of the beneficiaries dies and we need to assign survivors rights. The board consists of one beneficiary, the city clerk, and the mayor. Last I checked , there were less than 8 beneficiaries and survivors in the plan. I have to hold  a meeting next week to assign the survivors benefits to the widow of the beneficiary who was sitting on the board. So it will be the city clerk and myself. Pretty much guarantees any passing vote will be unanimous.

Hopefully, a better five will present itself later. Off to the land of nod.

loss of innocence, writer's challenge

The Death of Innocence

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I remember the day I lost the last vestiges of my childhood innocence about the world. I was sad and angry and confused and … It was all due to a sequence of events that will remain in my memory as long as I live.

My grandpa and grandma served as hosts to a farmer from Africa one summer while I was in  junior high school. “Kip” was here to learn about our agricultural methods and then bring the best applicable methods back home. Over the course of his stay, Kip talked about his country and his life, usually over Sunday meals with the extended family. Kip was one of those happy optimistic people that always had a smile to brighten your day. He always made your day better for having smiled and said hello.

Kip had learned English in a colonial school while growing up and so spoke with a very refined British accent. The accent was coupled with occasional charming lapses into his native tongue when he couldn’t find the equivalent word in English. (His native langue sounded to my untutored ears a lot like a woodchuck running amok in a snare drum shop.) All this was absolutely captivating to the teenage me who had never been more than 150 miles from our location in the mid-western US. 

Kip was shy at first, but he was a born story teller once you got him going. Kip told stories of his farm, of his wife, of his dreams and his hopes for his children. He told of his tribal mythology and of the natural wonders of his country. He talked of how he missed his wife and family dearly, but felt he needed to learn different farming methods if they were to have a better life. His fellow villagers could only afford to send one person on the program and Kip was it. He would share his new knowledge with his neighbors when he got home as part of the trade for their support. Kip and the other farmers from around his country came here and learned, supported in part under a department of agriculture program for developing nations. Keep in mind this was before cell phones and the breakup of the AT&T monopoly, so there was no way for Kip and the others to phone home. An international call like that would have cost more than Kip’s annual income. So we became the family he couldn’t talk to.

Kip felt like a part of the extended family for that summer stay. I hated to see him get ready to go. I knew I would miss the tales of far away Africa, the stiff British accent, and the beaming smile that Kip always seemed to wear. But it was time for him to return home to his real family and life. We made sure to exchange postal addresses and he invited us to come and stay with him if we were ever to journey to his country. That Sunday he met up with several of his countrymen and headed to Denver to begin the journey home. The whole group gathered in New York City and then boarded a plane for home.

During the time of their flight home, fate altered their lives forever. A coup occurred in their country, changing the accepted ideology of the leadership. When the airplane Kip and his fellow farmers were on landed, they were ordered off the plane, marched to the edge of the tarmac, accused of being “tainted” by their exposure to capitalism, and executed. Of course we didn’t learn all of this immediately. It took a certain amount of time for what had really happened to leak out of the country. Eventually there were news photos of the executions, many by being hacked to death with a machete, smuggled out of the country. Definitely not pretty. There is nothing quite like the experience of looking at newspaper photos of an atrocity like that, hoping against hope that Kip wasn’t one of the victims, and yet expecting to see him in every new picture.

When we finally learned for sure what had happened to Kip, I struggled to understand how any group of ‘human’ beings could do that to another person. How could anyone let ideology control them to the point that they could murder a person like Kip. It was this cold-blooded killing of an innocent man, a man with dreams so like my own, that killed my childhood innocence. If the universe would let  a person as nice as Kip be killed over something as unimportant as ideology, it clearly wasn’t a nice place. It wasn’t the innocent place that I had basked in as I grew up, safe with my family. Never again would I have that trust and faith in the fundamental goodness of the universe.

This has been a response to Mama Kat’s writer’s challenge. Go visit her for the prompts and links to the other writers.

council, Tuesday

Tuesday Trivia

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Today was one of those days with odd weather. To start, it was snowy and cold this morning. It was a glorious 10 degrees and had made it up all the way to 18 around noon. We ended up with just a dusting of powder snow, so not enough moisture to measure. I spent much of the day in meetings or waiting for meetings that never happened. A development group was scheduled to fly in to meet about some city owned property, but they were prevented from making it this far north by the wind and snow in southern Colorado. Small planes don’t do real well in snow and high winds. Scratch that meeting. Then about 3pm, the wind started howling here and adiabatic heating quickly took over. The temperature shot up to 50 degrees and the snow all disappeared. Lends credence to that old saying: “If you don’t like the weather in Colorado right now, just wait 15 minutes.”

Got over to visit Mom at the hospital around 6pm and then headed off to the city council meeting at 7pm. It was nice to have a relatively full chamber for the meeting. The exceptional attendance was explained by the presence of two groups, a church and the Girl Scouts.

Many of the attendees were from a local church that came to make a public offer to buy some city owned land for a church. Of course we could take no action on the offer since it wasn’t on the agenda. But they had also supplied it in writing so it will be coming before the council in the future.

Then I got to present the Girl Scouts with a proclamation for Girl Scout Week (March 8-14) in the city. A group of seven Girl Scouts from all age groups were present (along with parents and leaders) to receive the proclamation and give the council some Girl Scout Cookies. Given that L sits on the statewide council, I have already had more than enough cookies, so I and several other council members gave our cookies to be placed in the city staff break room. (Not to mention, no one wants to fill out all the paperwork for accepting a gift. You wouldn’t believe the kind of paperwork the state demands of elected officials to account for any and all gifts.) When I asked the assembled group who wanted to receive the proclamation after I read it, one little cutie piped right up and said she would. It is nice to see kids at that age with the confidence to pipe up and say yes in front of the crowd like that. Really reinforces how effective the organization is in helping the girls succeed in life. I suspect that I will be in the paper once more, this time surrounded by a group of Girl Scouts, most of whom stand barely as tall as my belt buckle. Maybe I’ll get lucky and the photographer will have cut my head off.

Th meeting continued on with other business, and then B from this post used the unscheduled public appearance slot to address the council. A fair amount of time later, we removed the glaze from our eyes and continued on. Obviously the high light of our meeting. {*grin*} Most such appearances wouldn’t be too bad if people had the facts right or even addressed the issue at hand, but that is often not the case.

After the council meeting was done, I headed over to Mom’s to pick up the list of things she wanted that she had given me earlier. I’ll have to take them up to the hospital after the radio show tomorrow morning. I can tell that many of the effects of the anesthetic are fading. She wanted her bag to work on some hand crafts and she was doing the crossword puzzle when I visited earlier in the evening. Both actions are symptoms that she may still be in pain but that her mind has cleared.

Time to head for the bed – 6am comes early.

Uncategorized

Miscellaneous Monday

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I’m running a tad short of time today so I’m taking the easy way out. Mama Kat and others have been touting the LinkWithin widget, so I decided to give it a try. The installation was easy. Just click on the “get this widget” link below and follow the bouncing two step ball.

Now being a techno geek at heart, my real goal was to see if it does a very good job of picking posts out of the archive to link with. Given that I often have a hard time finding the post I want to link to even when I know the wording of the post, this blog could be a challenge to the LinkWithin heuristics. (And see, you just knew I couldn’t resist using heuristic, just like I had to use canonical the last time I talked about search.) By looking at what it does and what the LinkWithin site says, it’s pretty clear that they do a crawl of your archives and then select matches to the current post from the archive posts. Since it takes them some finite amount of time to do that initial crawl, I’d expect that one would see changing selections with each refresh until the crawl was done. I’d also expect that there is some degree of randomness in the selection, so that each display of the blog might get a different set of links displayed.

When I installed the widget, I immediately started a series of refreshes in other browser windows. The earliest refreshes did indeed return pretty much random stuff, but later displays sometimes seemed a bit more on topic. I’m still undecided about the true effectiveness of the links suggested. My experience thus far is that the proverbial “10,000 monkeys typing on 10,000 typewriters for 1 million years will reproduce hamlet” type of randomness seems to be at the forefront in the selection process. If that indeed remains the case over the coming days,  the lifespan of the widget may very short here.

So that is where you all come in. I’m going to leave the widget enabled through the rest of this week and then post a poll to see whether it stays or goes. (Anyone with the widget installed interested in running a multi-site poll?) So pay attention and be prepared for a quiz after class! {*grin*}