The apartment complex where I currently live in Colorado has a basketball goal on the roof of the garage. That doesn’t sound too bad, but the roof is six stories up. That’s just a wee bit intimidating, so for now I’m shooting from inside twenty feet. :)
I was a little busy making popcorn and missed most of tonight’s sunset, but I managed to catch this photo right before it disappeared.
Back on June 19, 2012, the Sun looked enormous as it set over the Rocky Mountains, just west of Boulder, Colorado.
Still on my bucket list, thanks to meeting a native American shaman several years ago: See the wild horses of the Sand Wash Basin. (Thanks to the AAA magazine for this reminder.)
Several good quotes from this article about Peyton Manning making his free agent decision:
(1) “I don’t know what to do. What does a free agent do?” (Peyton Manning)
(2) “Remember the Patton principle: Make a decision and do it like hell.” (David Cutcliffe to Manning)
(3) It was getting down to decision time. “These are not math problems,” Cutcliffe told Manning, “they don't have single right answers.”
(4) On Saturday night Manning called Dungy to discuss the pros and cons of the three finalists: Denver, Arizona, Tennessee. Then he asked, “Are there any other things I should be thinking about?”
Said Dungy, “I told him it's never going to be 100%. He had so many good choices, it’s going to be 51/49, or maybe 50/50, and then it just comes down to a gut feeling. I told him what [Hall of Fame coach] Chuck Noll told me a long time ago: When you’re making an important life decision, make sure it’s without regard to money, title or position. Make sure it’s about who you’re going to be working with and how much you’ll enjoy being there.”
This is a photo of some nurses in Denver, Colorado, blocking anti-lockdown protests. The image comes from this Twitter page.
I haven’t bought too many statues in my life, but I did buy some of these howling dog/coyote/wolf statues while I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They remind me of Zeus and some other Siberian Huskies I have known.
Today (April 8, 2020) is a day off for me, but I woke up early and went up to the roof of the garage to see the big Moon. This is a photo of the Moon setting in the west, and the Sun rising in the east, within about fifteen minutes of each other.
Here’s another view of that bright star that’s due west over the Rocky Mountains, as seen from my tiny apartment in Broomfield, Colorado.
A great thing about living in this area of Colorado is that there’s a bright star that shines due west over the Rocky Mountains. Every night I open up the shades so I can see it. The only thing that’s on my bucket list is to spend as much time as possible in the mountains to see all of stars up close.
The star is the white dot in the center and bottom one-third of the image, above the roof. It looks more impressive in person. The big white blob in the upper-left is the Moon.
Our sunset on the evening of Thursday, March 26, 2020, had a pastel feel.
On the drive back from Vegas this weekend, the road got icy in the mountains near Vail, so I decided I better pull off and stay at a hotel, or sleep in the car if necessary. I wasn’t happy about it. Even though it was after 2am, I was jacked up on Mountain Dew, and just wanted to finish the last ninety miles to get home.
I got off the interstate at the next exit. The roads were nasty slick, and I slid around the dark collection of motels and gas stations until I saw a skanky motel whose “Vacancy” sign was lit. My car couldn’t make it up the motel’s hilly entrance, so I parked in an open flat area below, grabbed a bag, and walked five minutes in the freezing precipitation to get to the motel entrance, finding footing anywhere I could.
We don’t usually get a lot of snow in the Boulder/Louisville/Broomfield area, but up in the mountains near Vail and Aspen, Colorado, they usually get plenty. This was taken at a rest area near Vail.
~ March 21, 2013, on the drive back from Las Vegas
On the afternoon of March 11, 2020, the number of COVID-19 cases in Colorado increased to 33, from 11 cases two days earlier. A week later, on March 18th, Colorado now has 216 cases.
Also, we were at 160 cases two days ago, so we increased by 56 cases in the last two days.
A side effect of the coronavirus seems to be that the local pharmacy can’t get medication in stock. “Sorry we don’t have that prescription that you ordered four days ago and need to stay alive, but hopefully it will be in tomorrow.”
(If you need a prescription refilled, order it as early as you can.)
After it was pointed out to me several times this past week that I live in a nice area, I was reminded of searching for donuts a few weeks ago. I found a Dunkin’ Donuts about twenty minutes from here that is on a direct path to Denver. Nothing about the area was nice, and the store itself looked old and dirty, and one of the front doors is closed with a chair in front of it and a sign telling you not to use that door.
I mention that because despite of how unattractive the area was, I still saw people with their laptops sitting in some booths there. It reminded me of myself about 15-25 years ago. I occasionally worked in some areas that weren’t pleasant, and I’d take my laptop and/or paperwork and sit in places like that and do my work.
Hopefully one of the morals of this story is that if you work hard, you can get out of situations like that and eventually move to nicer areas. I’m sure there are other morals to be had, but that’s what I have in mind by sharing this story.
As a brief note, late on the afternoon of March 11, 2020, the number of COVID-19 cases in Colorado have increased from 11 to 33 in two days.
Update: We increased to 77 cases by the evening of March 13, and 101 cases by noon on March 14. So coronavirus cases in Colorado are just about tripling every two days in Colorado.
Grocery shopping lately reminds me of the Seinfeld “Can you spare a square?” episode.
Late on March 11, 2020, I just took a look at the stock market. After today’s drop, the S&P has arguably gone back in time to June 1, 2018, as shown in the top image. As shown in the bottom image, you can argue that the Dow Jones (Trump’s “Dow Joans”) has gone back even further, to October, 2017.
This is happening as the Coronavirus (COVID-19) has been hitting the United States over the last 1-2 weeks. Here in Colorado we had 11 cases reported two days ago, and two days later we’re up to 33.
On the evening of March 9, 2020, Colorado now has 11 people with the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). As shown in this image, the two most recent people have no known contact with an infected person, which is pretty scary. You can get up to date statistics at this colorado.gov URL.
On the personal front, I went to the hospital this morning, and I’d guess it was about 1/3 to 1/2 as populated as normal. When I went to have some imaging work done, the technician who was going to do the work was waiting for me when I walked to the Imaging Department, and I was in and out in a few minutes. Later at the grocery store, it was the same, maybe half as full as normal.
