C-C-C-C-Cold

It’s supposed to be cold here over the next few days. Bone-chilling, teeth-chattering, face-freezing cold. I knew about the snow, but no one warned me about the unholy temps. It’s supposed to be -12 degrees tomorrow night. I didn’t know that happened in the continental United States. I think I might actually die. In less than a year, I will have experienced my own personal high temperature (119 degrees last summer in LA) and my low (the afore-mentioned -12). Actually I don’t plan on experiencing the negative 12 — hopefully my low will be a snug 70 degrees…maybe a little warmer if you count the extra warmth from the giant quilt I expect to keep wrapped around me all day.

Stewart and I went on a walk today. The snow has been melting during the day and re-freezing at night so our walk was more like ice-skating with a tow rope. I was looking for wild animals but I didn’t see any…they’ve been wandering around areas they don’t usually frequent, looking for food in the snow. We left our garage door open the other day and a neighbor said there was a deer in there, poking around. Probably wanting to borrow our lawnmower. He didn’t find any food and made his irritation known by leaving a large pile of droppings on our walkway.

There’s a local magazine here that just did a story on Colorado cemetaries. There are apparently a lot of graves from the 1800s when the west was wild, and lots of cool history. But this is my favorite story:

A certain J. Dawson Hidgepath began prospecting above Buckskin Joe in 1865, and, desperate for a wife, proposed to every woman he met. Hidgepath died in a tumble on a nearby mountain slope and was buried in the Buckskin Joe cemetary. Soon thereafter, stories say, his skeleton appeared mysteriously at the doorstep of a woman in town. The townspeople reburied his bones, only to have them show up at another woman’s house. Prank or poltergeist? Either way, the fed up locals carted the bones to a neighboring town and tossed them into an outhouse, from which, the legend goes, an echo-y male voice occasionally was heard to plea, “Will you marry me?”

A haunted hockeydauber! Somebody please tell Chris’s grandpa.

The Columbine Courier-week 4

EVERGREEN — On Jan. 1 deputies were called to the 23000 block of Upper Bear Creek Road on a report of a dispute between two neighbors. According to the report, a man called deputies because his neighbor was allegedly harassing him about blocking her driveway with his truck. The man said he parked the vehicle while shoveling snow, and that he was sure the woman could not get out of her unplowed driveway anyway. The two agreed to stay away from each other, but not before the woman accused the man of packing in snow around her car so she would get stuck. The man denied doing that.

CONIFER — Someone apparently stole a large backhoe from a lot that is rented out for storage in the 10200 block of Highway 73. While a deputy was entering the vehicle into the computer as stolen, another deputy spotted the backhoe behind the Safeway store in the 10800 block of U.S. 285. The owner verified the equipment was his, and it was returned to the man with no indication of who might have taken it in the first place. Whoever did take it, however, left an ice scraper inside for the rightful owner.

Oh, Hey…

Yes, hello there…it’s been too long. Sorry about that.

We had a wonderful Christmas, thank you for asking. The kids got waaaaay too many presents and because of the storm, presents kept trickling in until this last Saturday (that would be Jan. 6 — the Thirteen Days of Christmas). Our neighbors don’t have immediate family in the area, so they came over for Christmas dinner, which Chris barbequed. In the snow. Usually when we have friends over, the men feel obligated to hang out outside with Chris as he cooks, so I had to explain to Doug that he was allowed to stay inside with the women and children, where it was warm. But Chris made this awesome pork tenderloin with roast apples and pears — it looked like something you’d see in a picture of a Victorian Christmas. And it was goooooood.

Candy came to visit a few days later. We toured the Coors brewery one day and the next, we were snowed in. We mostly stayed in the house, except for a brief foray outside to try sledding — everyone got cold and wet really fast. I felt bad that she traveled 1100 miles for that but she claimed that the snow was fun and exciting so I think she had a good time. The two of us went snowboarding on Saturday (and left Chris with the kids! Hallelujah!) and came back for dinner to find our neighbor had locked herself out. She came over for a glass of wine while she waited for her daughter to come let her in. By the time Candy left, she was proposing fixing up our basement so she could live in it and hang out with our cool neighbors.

We took Timothy skiing today for the first time. He and Chris attempted a ski day the day after Christmas but after they got to the ski spot, signed up for class, got skiis, waited for class to start and finally figured out which class met where, Timothy was done. He refused to go. They got a raincheck and we all went along today to try again. This time he loved it. We figured he’d take his 2 1/2 hour class and be done for the day. His class ended at 12:30p and at 3, we had to drag him off the mountain to go home. I don’t know about him, but I am exhausted. Good night.