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Bicycles in the snow.
January 26, 2010 – 3:38 pm
Don’t you hate it when you ask somebody to get their bicycle out of your yard, take it back home to their own house, in the fall…
… and it’s still there mid-winter?
It’d be even worse if you had to shovel around it.
Fortunately, we haven’t had a banner snow year (thus far), so the abandoned bike hasn’t rusted too much.
And to think: Lance Armstrong lives right across the street. At least he can’t see this from his house. He’d probably come marching across the street and chew me out. (I’m safe for the moment, cuz he’s in Australia right now.)
But my day of reckoning is coming. And so, for now, all I think is:
THANK GOD HE’S NEVER ASKED ME TO JOIN HIM FOR A RIDE!
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Winterskol Fireworks
January 18, 2010 – 11:17 am
Every year for Wintersköl, we have a torchlight descent on Little Nell, followed by a great fireworks display overhead. It’s the one night of the winter when you don’t bring your dog to town. Dogs absolutely hate fireworks.
The rest of us get a big “kick” out of them, but our canine companions hide under beds and desks and whimper.
So, if I could sit down and reason with our family pooch, and after I’d run through all the reasons I could think of, my solace of last resort would be:
THANK GOD YOU DON’T LIVE IN MONTE CARLO!
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When’s it ever gonna be enough?
January 11, 2010 – 9:16 am
The Baltimore Ravens beat the New England Patriots yesterday at Gillette Stadium, 33-14.
Once upon a time, I called the Gillette Company in Boston to ask them: when was foamy shave cream invented? (I don’t remember why I wanted to know.) And they had no answer to that.
Anyway, that made me reflect on all the shave-cream ads I saw on TV as a kid. The model always put the shave cream on about a 1/2 inch thick– at least.
Leading to the obvious question: What good would that do? Anything above the direct surface of the skin would be complete waste.
But the point of the commercials was to train us men to use 1/2 a can of the stuff, every time we lathered up.
THEREBY SELLING MORE PRODUCT.
Just another example of our society reinforcing the need for over-consumption.
Pick your own example.
Which leads me to the obvious thought:
THANK GOD I USE AN ELECTRIC RAZOR THESE DAYS!
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Anyone get the license on that truck?
January 6, 2010 – 9:48 pm
Once or twice a week, in the winter, I walk up and down Buttermilk Mountain, which is our dedicated beginners’ ski area. (Not that you can’t enjoy it, at any level of ski ability. It’d be the most popular ski area around, if it didn’t have to compete in Aspen with 3 other world-class ski areas.) It’s a good workout: an hour up, 45 minutes back down. And I usually wind up helping out one or two folks every time I’m out there, with one thing or another. (I used to work at B’milk, a long time ago, so I know the place pretty well.)
And once upon a time, I learned to snowboard there.
Or, should I say: I attempted to learn to snowboard there.
Cuz it’s harder than I’d realized, not being able to recall learning to ski when I was a little munchkin.
It’s scenes like the above photo, which I see every day in one variant or another, that make me say:
THANK GOD I DON’T HAVE TO LEARN THIS ALL OVER AGAIN!
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Lest we forget…
January 1, 2010 – 12:08 pm
New Year’s is the time for making new resolutions. It should also be the time to remember the past, and put things into perspective.
Last New Year’s Eve, all of downtown Aspen (which is, admittedly, only about 8 blocks long and 4 blocks wide) was roped off– quarantined– because of a bomb scare. And in these terrorist-riddled days, the police can’t be too complacent.
So New Year’s Eve partying was confined to the non-commercial venues. I.e., people’s houses. (One of my kids thought that maybe we should spend the night with friends out in Snowmass, as if the Aspen “metro” area was potentially about to be engulfed in a mushroom cloud a la Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
And as it turned out, the bomb threat had been called in not by some crazed muslim, but by a crazed Aspenite. Long-time Aspenite, with full Aspen-crazy pedigree. (Who killed himself, shortly thereafter.)
Makes you rue the loss of “the good old days.”
As my 15-year-old likes to say: “Just joking.”
At least we can say:
THANK GOD WE GOT THROUGH A NEW YEAR’S WITHOUT ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE GOD-AWFUL-FOR-BUSINESS BOMB THREATS!
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Westward Ho!
December 22, 2009 – 10:11 am
Christmas-time in Aspen. And some people will go to any length to get here.
What with the (not unanticipated) bad weather in various parts of the country, holiday traveling is once again proving difficult. Driving sucks; airports are jammed. But somehow anybody who wants to get here manages to pull it off. It happens every year.
One downside for the kids, of course, is that some of their friends wind up going somewhere else for the holidays, so they’ve got fewer friends to hang out with. But everybody survives. And we all get to go skiing! It might be more crowded than normal, but the snow’s just as good!
It’s supposed to snow a bit, today and tomorrow. Maybe not epic proportions, but 6-10 inches is always welcome. It’ll put a little bit more a smile on everyone’s faces.
And when the new year arrives, sooner or later everyone will manage to get back home, too.
As for me, all I have to say is:
THANK GOD I DON’T HAVE TO GO ANYWHERE!
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