Reading: Bud, not Buddy

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

House:

12 June 2000: Fire on the Mountain

Dot Org has a view of the mountains from (tee hee, I still don't know their names) the peaks of Summit County, Mt. Evans, and Devil's Head (which RDC and I now malalprop into "Devil's Thumb" after reading Into the Wild) nearly but not quite to Pike's Peak. Another building, which I have suggested asking not so politely to move, blocks our view of Pike's Peak. When the realtor came to the office the Tuesday of Offer Week for the three of us to do paperwork, he was impressed by our view. We're not even that high up. In fact Hateful Inc. was on a lower floor, but since it was in DTC, which is higher than downtown, it had a better view. I don't think we have that super a view, actually; after temping all over downtown I know what the mountains look like from the 30th or 40th floor. I also know what the mountains don't look like from the east side of buildings or from buildings blocked by other buildings, so I like our view just fine. If I miss Pike's Peak I can look at it from the library or the museum.

Anyway, around 2:00 this afternoon Tex came to my office and announced laconically, "Forest fire." From over my cube wall I can see into CoolBoss's office and out her southwest windows. I gophered for a second before we went into her office. The smoke rose nearly in a column in the still air, widening a few degrees before it dissipated over Jefferson and Park Counties. It has been four years since the Buffalo Creek fire: long enough for juicy new growth, not long enough for lots of tindery undergrowth to accumulate. We watched smoke the Buffalo Creek fire surge into the sky from the Mary Reed building at DU one night when we went to a play. Now we'll watch again: this fire affects the same area.

When I got home from work I told RDC. We're still radio- and television-less. I can manage without television, even during an Olympic summer, until with fall comes a new season of ER, but we really should have a radio. We're going to set up the stereo in the living room Real Soon Now but I'd like at least NPR in the kitchen and dining room for Blake and us. We worked in the yard, weeding the patio (whose bricks were planted over soil, not plastic) and trying to restore our dead grass, and then I went for a swim. I figured if Cook Park (by the old apartment) was opening today, all the muni pools would open, but I couldn't rouse a human at Congress. So I drove, unwilling to bike to disappointment and planning to continue on to Cook if I had to.

I did not have to. Congress Park's pool was open. Clean (the first day of the season) and cool and fifty meters! Color me happy. Cook Park is 25 yards and Eisenhower 25 meters. Fifty meters means only 20 laps per k. Fewer turns for me, the non-flip-turner, to waste time on. It's only open swim in the evening for the first week, with a ninety-minute lap swim starting a week today (in contrast to Cook's 45 minutes). I am so happy. I did a couple of laps but mostly just enjoyed the water. I got my core temperature down. I asked a friend to go for a nightswim with me once and she didn't understand why. The point of swimming, for her, is the contrast between the heat of the sun and the cool of the water, to refresh oneself sunbathing. The point of swimming for me is to return my body to its natural element, but living in a city and swimming in a pool, I'll accept reducing my core temp and frolicking.

Backstroking, not frolicking, I noticed even without glasses that smoke filled the southern half of the sky.

Swimming for me means that all is right in the world, forest fires or not. It restoreth my soul. I returned bouncing to the house. RDC hurried me out of the shower: "There's a whole family of magpies in the backyard!" Still in my "Eeek! a drop of water!" mindset, I missed whole seconds of magpie romping while I turbaned myself. I hied myself to the back windows, where RDC and Blake were watching a magpie couple try to teach their five youngsters how to eat our cherries. The babies were nearly full-grown in the body, but their heads were still a little oversized, their plumage still had downy stripes, and their tail feathers weren't quite as long as long yet. They whined and begged but their parents didn't feed them: time for them to learn to forage on their own. A blackbird arrived wanting to share the loot, but even at a third the babies' size the parents didn't like that much and chased it away. While the parents were off, the babies fluttered in the yard. One had the sense to perch on the thick, taut electric cable but another wobbled and lurched on the looser, thin little telephone wire.

They and the squirlkins are welcome to the cherries, which are tart as tart could be. And no wonder the babbies don't know what to do with the cherries; look how big they are! This is taken from my bedroom window. Notice the dead grass.

We watched and watched until the parents herded their flock away and then RDC and I made supper together and ate on the patio (weeded but decorated with fresh magpie poop), watching the smoke. RDC curled his lip over the slightly freezer-burnt frozen ravioli, whose defect he hadn't noticed until he opened the package to dump them in the water. Ooops. We also had baby spinch salad with tomatoes, dribbled with Caesar dressing because that was what was in the house. We sat facing each other over the gateleg table which we've been hauling outside for every meal.

"That meal," observed my husband, "was distinctly lacking in dessert."
"Wasn't it though."

We set off on yet another Quest to find a teak table for the patio. We didn't buy the one from CostCo because we saw it the week before we closed. Two days after we closed, it was gone. It's still on their website, and now that it's been long enough we might consider paying the extra for shipping, we discovered it has a four- to six-week delivery period. Ha. So we went to Cost Plus International Market and found one there. They promised they had "tons" in stock, so we'll go back this weekend and find it again.

Cost Plus is kind of a downscale Pier One, and in addition to furniture and housewares they have international foods. Vegemite. European oddities. Cadbury chocolate. No Smarties, though. Which is fine with me because other Anglophone countries' chocolate sucks, in my opinion. England's Cadbury is just too milky. I understand the EC doesn't want English chocolate labeled chocolate because it just doesn't have enough cocoa in it. Damn straight. LEB brought me back Smarties from Australia once. They come in prettier colors than M&Ms but their chocolate is way inferior. Now, if Belgium made an M&M equivalent, we'd be all set, but Belgium doesn't waste "candy coating" on its chocolate, oh no.

So anyway we bought two kinds of chocolate-coated cookie. My choice was a chocolate wafer with dark chocolate called "Afrika" and RDC's back-up plan was some Cadbury thing called "fingers," cylindrical biscuits narrower than fingers and dipped in chocolate. Home again, we sat on the porch swing, ate cookies, listened to the peacocks cry as they went to roost, and read. I finished All the Pretty Horses for the third or fourth time and he read the Post. (My choice of cookie was far superior, but I shared.)

---

I had bought the Post not because it had anything about the fire (which only started after press time Sunday night) but because Sabrina had told me she and Barbie would be in the paper Monday. I had it hazily in the back of my mind to buy one that day but was sharply reminded of this plan when Minne came in and slapped a section down on my desk. Several weeks ago I had asked Minne to look at the site because she's a web newbie and belongs to a book group, so she knew about the business. And she remembered it, seeing it all over one whole section of the paper! Not the front page, of course, but the "Scene" section, the lifestyles bit that has book and restaurant reviews, Ann Landers, the comics, and a front page, above the fold article about Good Books Lately.