Category Archives: park

bug, park, weather

It Must Be Spring

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Spring must be here even if it did attempt to blizzard again last Friday and Saturday. Why do I say that? Well, when Molly and I were out walking in the park today, I saw my first winged insect of the season. That is a pretty sure sign of the arrival of Spring in the local area. It wasn’t much of an insect as such beasties go, but it was a sign the the masses will be appearing shortly. I could have taken the cognitive leap last week and trusted that the fly I spotted buzzing the sink in the house was a harbinger of Spring, but I worried that it was a false positive since it was still snowing and blowing outside at the time. Fruit flies and other such annoyances seem to hatch out occasionally in the temperate climate indoors. But the bug that flew off today was clearly an outdoor bug.

So with the winds blowing and the temperatures back into the 60s after the attempt to join Denver and environs in the cold and snowy blizzard, a lot of people were out in the park. Molly got a chance to sniff and whine at an incredible number of dogs. Not only that, but there were a ton of kids out in the park doing everything from playing football and catch to attempting to fly kites. The winds were a bit too shifty for good kite flying, but the kids were trying anyway.

Last Friday was the official Arbor Day celebration here in town. Since the city has been a tree city USA winner for the past 21 straight years, you can count on the mayor being out to plant a tree for every Arbor Day. (Part of the criteria for being a tree city is that the forrester has to get printed publicity about trees in the local media every year. So that usually devolves to sending in the picture from the papers with the mayor planting away.)  Given how miserable the weather was here on Friday, there were only a couple of us in attendance at one of the city parks to plant the Elm cultivar. In only 50 or 60 years, it will be big enough to replace some of the beautiful trees we have lost over the last decade to Dutch Elm Disease.

The planting was in a park about a block from where I grew up. Other than the restroom and an old non-working cement water fountain, there isn’t a part of the park that is the same today as it was when I was growing up. The playground equipment has been replaced twice and is currently being replaced for the third time. The merry-go-round and teeter-totters have gone the way of the dokey bird in the mania of litigation fears and ADA accessibility. Even the swings and play sets no longer have sand under them, but have a special wood fiber product called Fibar that is both injury reductive and ADA approved.

Our town is rare in that we are small, rural, and have a lot of parks. Our four largest parks range from 40 acres down to 3 acres. Then we have a half dozen to dozen minor parks that range from a fraction of an acre to a couple of acres. The overall goal is to have every household be within walking distance (with toddlers) of a park. We succeed in general, but there are some areas where we don’t have all the parks we would like.

I will close by asking what the park situation in your area is like?  Do you have easy access to parks and facilities in the parks? How about tennis and basketball courts? Walking paths and nature trails? If not, why not?

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Merry Christmas

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Walking home from the radio show this morning was a winter wonderland. Even at 9am it was still below zero and the hoar frost covered all the trees and bushes. Since the journey to the station and back is only a couple of miles, I usually walk to the park and do a few miles there before returning to the house. That way I get my daily mileage in and get some private time since I don’t (or won’t) answer my phone while walking in the morning. The only bad thing was the breeze that dropped the wind chill down to -35 or lower. Made it painful to take off my gloves to use my cell phone to snap pictures of the wonderland I was walking through. But I did it for you, my loyal readers. So without further ado, here is some what I saw as I wondered the park this morning.




Merry Christmas to All
And to All a Good Night
couples, dog, marriage, Molly, park, trees

Sunny Day in the Park

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Remember the trees of green gold from a week ago shown in this post ? Well now that some real weather has passed through, they are starting to look a bit bare as you can see in the picture to the right and below.  Time to get ready to endure another gray and drear season before the explosion of green returns.

The temperatures the last few days have been getting down as low as 14 degrees at night, but today signaled the return to more temperate weather and it was 76 degrees this afternoon as Molly and I took our walk. You could tell that the cold streak had reminded everyone to enjoy every minute of this unseasonably warm weather – the park was full of people of all ages and types as Molly and I walked around. There were all the standard suspects that I normally see when walking in the park, but there were others I cannot recall ever seeing in the park.

 Having a friendly hairy beast like Molly with you in the park pretty much guarantees everyone is friendly and open when you see them. It seems like every pet we have had is a “oh we have to stop and pet this adorable creature” magnet. It allows a curmudgeon like me to appear to have social skills.

An elderly couple stopped to pet and talk to Molly. I was impressed with them as we began to talk and I could study them closer. They were in their nineties and had been married for better than 65 years. They said they tried to come to the park to walk each day if the weather wasn’t too cold or icy. In the course of our conversation, it became clear the gentleman had gone blind in the last few years and that the lady could no longer get around on her own without a cane or support. It struck a deep chord in me to see how they had adapted so that they could still walk together. The gentleman supplied his arm to support the lady and the lady supplied guidance and an ongoing travelogue of sights to the gentleman. Together they continued on their way through life. Having been married for 30+ years, I can only hope that my wife and I will be so fortunate in another 30 years.

At the other end of the spectrum, Molly and I ran into a young family. They had a young daughter (I’d guess somewhere between 18 months and 2 years from the unsteady perambulation) who was fascinated with the og (as close as she could come to pronouncing dog). Molly wasn’t quite sure what to make of this strange little person who kept screaming og at the top of her lungs, but was willing to get petted. Mommy and daddy were being kept pretty busy as the daughter teetered and tottered all around, interspersed with demands to pet the og and that daddy pick her up and give her a gee (piggy) back ride. Seeing young families like that makes me smile. I just haven’t decided whether it is a smile of satisfaction because I have already survived that stage and don’t have to face it anymore or if it is a smile of reminiscent envy.

Onwards – I need to get an openID server setup here to test some software, it shouldn’t be hard but it may be interesting. Besides, you noticed the lack of t e e t h in this post? Wonder if Google will?

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Glorious Fall

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Today was beautiful as Molly the dog and I took our walk. The sky was just starting to get that dark and stormy look that precedes winter weather and the trees were still green gold. Probably the very last time this year that this will be the case!
Not only that, but for much of our time walking we had the entire park all to ourselves.  Seems that there just weren’t many people out walking just after 5pm.
As you can see, the path in front of us had no one in sight. It was just us and the grass and the trees.
After a bit (I’m guessing about 5:45 or so) there started to be a few more people and dogs out and about. The next door neighbors and their daughter came and did a mile with their two little dogs. Several other people were walking around as well. Just a nice evening in the community.
The net result was an appropriately pleased Molly.
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Another day, another …

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Yet another day passes and my todo list just gets longer.  Oh well.
I did get a chance to spend time in a park with the warm fall sun this afternoon.  The publisher and the editor of the local daily newspaper wanted to meet and talk, so I suggested we meet in the park.  We all thought the park was a great idea.  Killed an hour talking to them and then had to head back to real work.
Molly, our dog, and I got in our nightly 5 mile walk again tonight.  We try to do 5 miles in the morning or at night.  Gets a bit harder when the snow and ice of winter arrive.  Someday I’ll have to tell about how Molly came to live with us and how she spent a month in the penitentiary being trained by a multiple murderer, but for now it’s enough to add her smiling face.  Not one of her better pictures, but you get the idea.  At least it’s not her mug shot!
I’m still waiting for the first freeze here.  The historical average here is for the first hard freeze to occur on or before October 10th.  I suspect it may be later this year.  Of course, this is Colorado, where the weather is unpredictable.  One year it went from 73 degrees in the morning to 20 below and 2 feet of snow by midnight.  I hated that year since it killed most of my apple trees.
BTW, for those who expressed concern for my lawnmower in my first post, there is good news I forgot to relay.  Three parts costing a total of $6.25 and an hour of my time and the lawnmower is as good as new.  All I have to do now is change the oil and drain the gas when the mowing season finally ends and it’ll be set for the winter.