Greeley is an alright place. You need to have the right mindset going into anything. Tonight after work Cassie and I decided to saddle up the bikes and go for a ride into town. There is a place downtown called Patrick’s. Its a new bar that is in a 100yr old brick building. They had a bluegrass band called “Reservoir Rd”. I used to live by Reservoir Rd when I was growing up.
After that we went to the Relay for Life down at Island Grove Park. That is where I think most people in Greeley were at the moment.
It was fun. We rode our bikes for about a 5-7 mile round trip and got to see some people in our community. Summer time is great. The temperature was about perfect. I realized that not much has changed in 100years. This was most likely pretty close to what people were doing in 1896 when Greeley was founded.
There was one difference though. I got a page on my cell phone from one of our Unix Admins. Apparently one of the satilite servers at work took a dump and we had to switch to a backup for SSH / HTTP. I dont think that happened alot back then.
“The average American spends more time planning their summer vacation than their life.”
I have heard this phrase and realize that we are not average. Britton and I spend a lot of time thinking about our lives, our future, our goals and what it means to be alive. Life is weird. We do weird things as human beings in this time and space. When we step outside of our daily lives and contemplate our existence it seems to come down to a game of poker. We get certain cards dealt to us (like where we were born, what we look like, the amount of money our family has) and we have certain ways to play those cards. It’s all about comparison because compared to someone who was dealt a crappy hand, we have it made but compared to someone with a royal flush we have little. Usually most people are somewhere in between. I think we have pretty decent cards and we’ve been playing them fairly well. In poker you usually don’t win with the first hand, it’s about how you play the game over time. Life’s both a game of chance (destiny) and skill (free will). In fact, the modern deck of cards is based on Tarot Cards that are used in fortune telling.
We’ve also compared life to Monopoly. It’s a long game and the first part of the game is about setting yourself up for the end of the game -we’d be the Schnoodle dog piece :-). That’s where we’re at. We’re trying to make good investments, keep good jobs and play the game right so that we can do what we want later in the game. In our particular life game, we want to live in Puerto Rico. We would like to have some Colorado income either from a work-from-home job or from some of the investments we’ve made and some Puerto Rican income maybe in the form of a guesthouse. Money in our modern world is so abstract, but is a way to calculate how you’ve been playing the game.
It is so tempting to jump ahead of yourself in these games, but usually to “win” you have to have self-restraint, like Kenny Rogers says, “Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em”. We like our life here in Colorado and we are looking forward to moving to Puerto Rico. Knowing when and how is the hard part. Ever since the Lares deal fell through I have felt like we were even more in Limbo. At least with Lares we knew we had a marker set on that spot, now? It is all ephemeral. To plan out your life farther than a few days is like trying to predict the weather. You might have some idea based on the seasons and what has happened years past, but then again, you can have the coldest June 2nd in history (like we did yesterday). We would like to get everything settled and decided within a year to two years. But it’s hard to say where life, like a current, will take you. Our vision of a winning end game would be to be happy. My working definition of happiness is to have something to do (a daily goal), someone to love and something to look forward to. I have that now and I will work hard to keep that going in the end game. I would prefer to have something to do that I choose to do rather than the traditional office job of little freedom. Golden handcuffs , routine and comfort are hard to break away from- they are the blue pills (Matrix reference). But we are preparing ourselves and trying to live an “examined life” as Aristotle says not just an “average” life.
Even if we play the game of life carefully and examine it from every side, I’d say we’re still “all in” for the ride.
I am almost finished reading “Don’t Stop the Carnival” by Herman Wouk. Wouk also wrote the “Caine Mutiny” and so I was expecting a more serious exploration of life in the Caribbean. Boy, was I wrong! This book is hilarious! If you’ve never read it and you are at all interested in life in the tropics, owning a hotel or just want to laugh out loud, you should read this book. I definitely think I should add it to my list of favorite Tropical books.
Apparently Herman Wouk met a man in real life who told him some fantastic stories about life as a proprietor of a tropical hotel resort in the Caribbean. Wouk encouraged him to write a book about it, but the man declined. So, Wouk decides to go check out the Caribbean and falls in love with it himself. He goes and lives on one of the islands of the US Virgin Islands for some 6 or 7 years. “Don’t Stop the Carnival” is a mixing of the crazy stories both he and this man had while living in the Caribbean. He writes about a New York man with a mid-life crisis who buys a hotel resort in the fictional island of “Amerigo” or “Kinja”. From power outages to piles of ants climbing his body, from kooky toothless gondoliers to glamourous movie actresses, this book has it all. And Wouk does a great job of pulling you into each of the characters’ lives, especially that of Norman Paperman, the protagonist.
The late-May early June harvests here in Greeley mainly consist of garlic, strawberries and lettuce, which is fine with me. We’ve been eating salads and putting the lettuce leaves on sandwiches, using the garlic scapes in all sorts of foods and eating strawberries from the vine. We planted the seeds that have to have warm soil like watermelon, cucumbers, peppers and cantaloupe so we will look forward to their harvest as well. So far everything has been growing great using organic techniques. Here’s a few shots from the yard.
Garlic Scape
This garlic is huge! As thick as my thumb
Lettuce in our garden -mostly volunteers from last year
Strawberries straight from the garden
The girlies in the yard
We’ve seen a fox out back in the land behind our house and are a little bit worried for our chickens since they roam freely. So far the fox hasn’t seen them and I hope it stays that way. We also have eagles and hawks all around. I know why some people build chicken runs with chain link covers!
