I'm almost finished effusing over Costco but I have to mention these chips: Rice Work Salsa Fresca. It's not so much about the price, it's just that I haven't seen them for sale anywhere else. They are so good. Two bags good.

I don't get to Denver that often but I do enjoy the ubiquitous web cams.




I realized that rather than make this into a garden blog, I should just start one. The link is upper and left.

I stopped by a Wal-Mart in Englewood today to pick up some cheap army toys for a little friend (special request). After I swiped by credit card, the console asked for my zip code and I just didn't feel like cooperating with their marketing program so I entered a false one. My card was rejected! No way that it was for lack of funds, it's one that I hardly ever use and it worked at the gas station just minutes before. I paid cash and left.

More often than not, I don't provide extra information about myself during retail transactions. Cuts Deluxe doesn't need to know my phone number. Uh-uh. I don't mind them not knowing when my last haircut was. I didn't mind giving the information to my membership retailer, since I trade that for lower costs and higher interest rates and rebates. Maybe Wal-Mart was looking out for my safety by asking for my zip code but I would rather take my chances and not have them know where I live.

More Costco-love.  Isn't this like a modern-day cathedral?  High ceilings, vast spaces, with no piped in music like the smaller stores.  Nothing to distract a person from all the amazing deals like the glasses that Honey got.  The difference in what we would have paid elsewhere covered our membership cost.  I really like the white ceiling bouncing around all the sky light.

The vote is in:
Enough with the cold and snow and grey skies! At least this one feels like a spring snow.

Bravo, Uno! A beagle wins a fancy dog show!

More Costco love, this time for Columbus Italian Dry Salame. Not even sure the cost, but by the time we get to that department, we've saved so much money that it doesn't matter!

I have this perfectly good cold frame that we added onto the south side of the house when we built it but I haven't used it much over the years.

This is the year. I have the seeds and I've signed up for a class with Boulder Going Local, more for the encouragement than anything else, and I'm going to do it!

First I have to confront those prickly thistle remains that thrive in the dry heat and neglect.

Oh, to cold-frame-garden in the mode of Helen and Scott Nearing! I see lots of greens and early carrots in our future.

Why I love Costco:

I had to be convinced to join Costco by my younger who had just moved out to his own apartment. He did a good job of selling me a membership but the card mostly languished in my wallet for several months. Somehow, though, I was infected by Costcolove.

This Gerties's Artichoke Tapenade is something I would never have tried for the price ($11+ for a jar) but Costco offered it to me for around $8 and I took it! We plowed through most of the jar in 1.5 days.

There's more, including their 2# tubs of Krinos Kalamata Olives (pitted, no less!) for around $6. I can't find them for less than $9/lb any where else. So yes, I'm in love. I visit monthly and would go more if it wasn't over the hill in another town.

Gardening this time of year for me is basically

1. making sure the kitchen scraps get to the compost
2. stirring the leaves around
3. getting dear hubby to clean up around his shed
4. picking up stuff in the yard that was deposited by chinooks
5. thinking about how to keep the deer out of my food garden
6. reminding myself that I should use the cold frame this year
7. dreaming up projects for dear hubby to do

Good workout, eh?

Still here. Good thing that asteroid missed us.

I have 5+ years of stickers on my neighborhood Eco-pass and decided to use it today to return home from Denver early.  I've always enjoyed the RTD between Boulder and Denver going back to the days when I was getting to know my husband (before we married).   Something about that metal and diesel smell and being high up off the pavement and knowing that nothing will get in the way.  Sailing up the High Occupancy Vehicle Lane like nobody's business.  And it's only on busses that I overhear conversations like, "I hope you don't have to go to jail....that would be sad."

There's a headline today about disappearing dirt.

"Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil -- the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth."

Yes that is true and has been for decades and something you can do about that is compost!. Just dedicate an area of your garden for a pile of yard and kitchen wastes (no meats or oils) and add to it throughout the year. Keep it moist. You can turn it in order to convert it to soil faster or let it slowly be changed over the years (my preferred method). A quicker alternative during the growing season is to bury the matter right into the soil. The life underground will have it transformed into rich, black soil in a matter of weeks. Or you can buy a fancy plastic bin. (Can't help you there.)


image from www.mytinyplot.co.uk

It's snowing again, those tiny little dry flakes that hardly look like they're there. Kudos to the new back walk that only wants to be swept, not shoveled.
My phalaenopsis, the one that the friend was going to throw out, is blooming again. This year it's a little later in the year. What's up with that? The other outstanding indoor bloom is the white geranium, the kind that old Italian ladies have on their balconies. And my sweet african violets.

When I started spending so much time in LA, I found various community blogs, including blogging.la. It's been a good source for 'local finds' and other miscellanea.

A sister site, denver.metblogs has been around for a while, in a somewhat somnambulant form. The site is supposed to be about life in the various metropolitan areas that the blogs represent. Life in Denver must be a slow, sleepy existence since I responded to the call for more writers 16 days ago. No other new writers have been posted to the authors list. Maybe the flood of applicants was just too much to handle?

I'm really not crazy about stark, brown winter beauty. Yesterday, though, I had to go to east Boulder county and was pulled right into the agricultural version of the season. East on Arapahoe, through the wide open fields - it's like looking out over a dry ocean bed - just earth and sky for miles and miles. The trip back west is just road and stunning views of the Front Range. Thanks to all the Open Space taxing, we'll have fields and old trees to look at for some time to come. Money well spent.

Why, oh why did I schedule myself to start work at 4:30??

I'm doing my own little version of "Nickel and Dimed" to make some extra money for a project I want to do. My first assignment has been pretty fun except for the big yellow tee-shirt and standing all day. This job is limited to the returning student rush so co-workers won't have time to take on the proportions of family and close friends as Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her book. That's the point - go in, get some extra money, leave and travel.

But starting at 4:30 in the middle of winter is working against my phototropic ways.

It's out with the old at what was the Bank of Boulder but lots of Christmas decorations are still up, including my wreaths and the Flagstaff star. That doesn't stop the major greeting card beast from barrelling toward Valentine's Day.

Yes, the red continues, but did you know that Christmas red is different from Valentine's Day red in the greeting card industry? Christmas is deeper, richer, full of meaning while Valentine's is brighter with the promise of the lighter pastels to come with Easter.

One way to get color in the house in the winter - use prisms. Most of mine catch the morning sun. The sun is too low to be broken up in the west window.
I've been reading gardening blogs this winter that list what's blooming in the garden. I can attest that nothing is in bloom in my yard and now that the snow is melting, it's all various shades of brown for a while. Indoors, a few colorful violets and a jewel orchid are blooming with a phalaenopsis on deck. I've been importing bouquets of color from my florist (Costco). The good news is dusk is lasting till 5:30ish.

This is why I'll never have a lush garden. They are totally oblivious to my yappie Scottie.

I haven't walked in this part of the yard for a few days but something has. Some serious digging has taken place around the compost heap.

Hey, more and more I'm liking Lucky's market. After a several year boycott, I was lured into the store last summer by their cheap! produce prices and realized that some - just some - of their stuff is actually affordably priced. I avoid some of the Sunflower brands that are imported since that defeats my purpose of buying local as much as possible. The seaweed salad and asian slaw are bringing me back for seconds. (The reason I boycotted is no longer in the picture.)

The farthest northmost full moon of the season (called the Cold Moon)as seen at 7 am on Christmas Eve. The sun is moving back north and the moon is heading south and soon the ground will be soft enough to dig again.

Lately Puppygirl has taken to waking me up at 6am with the alarm set to 'whimper'. Thank you, dear, for showing me some stunning morning skies.

The first day she did that I saw a blazing blue-white falling star in the dark western sky.The Geminids, I found out later. There is some planet up there - Mars, I suppose, since it's a little orangy. Over in the east, what I thought was Saturn is Venus incandescing in a huge way. The last few days, the bare trees have entertained.

More snow is expected this weekend but we have a few days to enjoy the December thaw.

Seasonal Affective Disorder. Though I don't believe it's a p$ychiatric condition, I do get have some reality on the Colorado winter letdown.

My take on it is: during the warmer months there is so much invitation from Life to join in, appreciate, feel, move, participate, breathe fresh air. Somewhat like a gracious and enthusiastic hostess making sure that all her guests are welcomed and satiated with all the stimuli that Life has to offer.

Come winter, the party is over; the hostess has gone home and it's up to me to provide my entertainment. To invite myself to go outside and get sunshine on my eyelids, to get plenty of fresh air, to make sure the birds are fed and heard. It's not easy being a summer girl in the winter but keeping summer alive becomes a game in itself.

It's been snowing off and on since a couple of days after my return home - even when it wasn't supposed to (like now). It would be knee-high if the first several inches had not melted into the warmish earth. It's all white now and I can't talk about gardening, so I'm just posting a mention of my new favorite blog. She posts great pictures like this one from flickr (posted by macdermotte there).

I'm home again and it's snowing which is fine with me. If I'm going to be in a cold state for the winter, better white than brown. I got a chance to refill the compost heap with bags of leaves that Sugar collected for me and he was able to finish the last bit of our new flagstone walkway before the weather changed.

My trip home on Amtrak was likely my last since they changed the connection point a few hours further down the line. The conversation on this trip was especially notable for me. I talked to 2 different parents who had lost a child, two widows who had lost spouses, a Katrina 'displaced person' and a young man who had just been released from prison after 12 years. The latter made the biggest impression on me. I saw him board at the Flagstaff bus station during the 8 hour connection ride from Albuquerque to Denver. The uniformed escorts didn't have guns, still I wondered if he was going to try to take us a hostages. At a snack stop before Raton, he originated to me that he had just been released and this was his first look at the outside since he was 17 years old. He was delighted to be able to open doors for himself. He was anxious about how his mom would accept him, hoping she would still consider him her little boy. I could tell he was nervous just being outside. When the bus broke down from an oil leak, I met the blind woman who needed to use my cell phone to call her children to come get her. Amazingly, she had to spend some time talking them into coming.

The last two months have shown me a gratifying expanse of humanity and now I'm back in Boulder with the 'most diverse bunch of middle class white people' you'll ever see. The struggles here are mostly internal.

Tom's Tavern is closing. Eating establishments come and go in Boulder but Tom's was there before I married my husband and after, during two pregnancies and as my children were becoming adults. What a legacy. Tom gave us all an authentic sense of belonging and attachment.

Coincident with finishing a major action here, my attention has shifted back to my garden and my dogs. I love this view of Griffith Observatory that twinkles every night plus the palm trees and all the flowers and birds but it isn't mine. And I don't want to make it mine. I thought I did for a while, working out the trips and the living aspect, but I'm happy now to just have it on loan on occasion.
I'll find out soon if the winter pansies I planted have survived the first few snows.
Meanwhile, there is a Los Feliz Christmas festival tonight on Vermont that should be entertaining.

No extrospecting allowed:

Unwind on a contemplative hike

Join city of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) Naturalist Jake Davis on a tranquil, introspective hike from 4 to 5 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 3. Meet at the Chautauqua Ranger Cottage, 900 Baseline Road. The hike will be followed by free hot tea, cocoa and conversation in the Chautauqua Ranger Cottage. For more information, visit www.osmp.org or call (303) 441-3440.