Snake in the Grass

We've seen signs warning us of rattlesnakes at Roxborough State Park.

We've twice been told that we were looking at a rattlesnake. Once, another hiker at Mount Falcon Park warned us that the big pile of coiled reptile under a bush was a rattler. We skittered by too fast to confirm it. A few weeks ago, at Mount Galbraith Park, a trio of teenage Japanese tourists told us that the skinny snake rearing up between two boulders like a snake charmer's boa constrictor was a rattler. I'm no herpetologist, but it looked like a garter snake.

So I guess we'd gotten a little sceptical about ever seeing a rattlesnake out here. But as I led our little party of three (Jim, Hana and me) around a bend on the Eagle Wind Trail at Rabbit Mountain yesterday, a gigantic snake—olive with black markings, at least 30" long—slithered across the trail right in front of me. The rattles looked weirdly like molded plastic pieces popped over the tip of its tail—sort of like fake fingernails. As it passed into the brush, a sound like the shaking of seeds in a dried gourd confirmed the sighting.

So naturally we had a "Ya think?" moment when we paused at the end of the hike to read a little sign at the trailhead that reported that Rabbit Mountain had once been named Rattlesnake Mountain—"for good reason!"

TMT: Too Much Twitter

"You're receiving this email because of your relationship with [name omitted] Orthopedics & Spine Center."

Although our "relationship" consisted of one brief visit after my skiing accident in January, these docs (or, more likely, their marketing people) have been sending me daily emails inviting me to follow them on Twitter.

What kind of tweet could orthopedists possibly send that I would be interested in reading? Updates on the slow progress of some guy's knee surgery? ("wtf, L8 4 t time") Links to x-ray images of bizarrely broken bones? ("IC big $$") Rude comments about the last patient they saw? ("OMG 2 hot")

UG2BK

Stricken by Formophobia

Formophobia n. Paralyzing fear, distress, and nervousness caused by the act of entering personal information into a pre-made template. Making simple tasks such as applying for jobs, school, etc. almost impossible for the affected. (Urban Dictionary)

Until I began to job hunt on our return to the States last year, I hadn't actually filled out an employment application since 1972, when I applied for a student assistant position at the Undergraduate Library (aka the UGLI, a reference to its Soviet Bloc-style architecture). In the professional job search, you submitted a cover letter and a resume. Period. You had your resume typeset by professionals and you typed your cover letter v-e-e-r-r-y slowly, so that you wouldn't make a mistake and have to start over. (Using Wite-Out in a cover letter was verboten, especially for English majors. Maybe engineers got away with it.)

That was so 20th century.

As a job applicant (supplicant?) to a large corporation or a government agency in the brave new world of the online job search, you "will be allowed to attach a resume and cover letter later." This assumes, of course, that you will successfully answer every question on said application before losing (select any or all of the following) your confidence/your patience/your mind.

Fill out enough applications, and you will have to first recall all of your previous salaries and then report them—by the hour, the week, the month, or the year, depending on the prospective employer's way of thinking about compensation. If you held various positions at a single company over a five-year in the 1980s, you have to wrack your brain for the exact month and year when you left your position in Product Development to move to Marketing. You also have to come up with a bland version of your real reason ("homicidal tendencies towards supervisor") for leaving Product Development.

You may be confronted with questions so ridiculous that you conclude that you would rather be homeless than work for anyone stupid enough to ask them. For example, an application for a high tech firm presented a list of computer software products used in the job and then required the hapless applicant to rate on a scale of 1-5 how interested he/she would be in learning each product, with 1 being, for example:"I am not at all interested in learning Microsoft Access" and 5 being: "I cannot imagine anything more thrilling than learning Microsoft Access."

And, then there was today's online application psychodrama, in which I was applying for a different position at an organization to which I had previously applied. I won't get into it, but let me just say that I may be drinking Pinot Grigio directly from the bottle tonight, à la Cameron Diaz in my favorite scene from "The Holiday."

Another Magical Spot

The approach to Roxborough State Park is set in old grazing lands, and doesn't look especially interesting. After the final bend in the road, though, you enter a landscape that looks as though it might be home to creatures from the imaginations of Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, and other great fantasists.

We didn't see any hobbits or even Mr. Tumnus, but nature put on her own magic show in a meadow set against this monolithic backdrop: a huge swarm of tiny sulphur butterflies—so pale a green that they appeared white from a distance—dancing (mating?) above the tall grass. There was no way to capture the scene on camera, so we stood silently, watching in wonder.

Just peachy

Of all the day-to-day things that I miss about living in Brussels, food is high on my list. (Alright, alright, it's number one.) When I learned that we were moving to Colorado, I consoled myself with the thought that we would have access to wonderful Mexican food and excellent beef. (A friend who ate at one of the few Mexican restaurants in Brussels said that the "salsa" was just ketchup.)

Sixteen months and many failed attempts later, we may have found a good Mexican restaurant, but we want to try it a second time, just to be sure. We have yet to eat beef that tastes as good, in its own beefy way, as chicken from Brussels' ubiquitous rotisserie trucks, below.


So, what do we have that rivals the food we ate in Belgium? Strangely enough in this semi-arid state, it's peaches, specifically peaches grown in Palisades, on the western slopes of Colorado's slice of the Rockies. We buy our peaches by the boxload off a small truck belonging to a small orchard; the owners e-mail their fans to let them know when they will be coming to a certain church parking lot in Arvada. The peach line forms early; the tension about whether there will still peaches left when you reach the front of the line is palpable. (It's sort of like waiting in line for Bruce Springsteen tickets, or, out here, Phish tickets.)

But when you bite into a Palisades peach, you wonder why Eve ever settled for an apple.

Sleepless in Arvada

When humans can't sleep, they can read a book, raid the refrigerator, watch reruns of "Law & Order," surf the Internet for stories about celebrity plastic surgery gone bad, or call L.L. Bean to order a new Polar Fleece jacket.

When dogs can't sleep, they pace, pant heavily, and claw their owners' (or "guardians," as the always-PC Boulderites call us) bed.

Hana's insomnia began in late June. The vet attributed it to pre-July 4th fireworks and the violent middle-of-the-night thunderstorms we were having then. She prescribed Valium, which we picked up at the Walgreen's pharmacy under the name of "Hana Dog Gillette." The script was written for six tablets, "which should see you through the holiday," according to Dr. Harris.

The Valium had no effect on Hana. The pacing and panting continued long after the fireworks season and stormy nights had passed.

For a while, Hana slept if Jim or I moved into one of the two single beds in the smallest of our three bedrooms. Hana would wedge herself into the small space between the two beds, or between one of the beds and the wall, and, after some more heavy panting, settle down. We weren't too happy with the Q. Elizabeth/P. Philip sleeping arrangements, but we were exhausted and assumed it wouldn't last long.

It did. And now there's a new twist: After I moved into the tiny bedroom last night when Hana started pacing in our room, Hana followed and proceeded to shuffle around the bed in a continuous U-turn. Because space is tight in that room, sometimes she bumped into the closet doors during her endless journey, interrupting any light doze into which I might have fallen.

Some Internet sites dealing with canine insomnia suggest giving your sleepless dog a lot of exercise during the day to ensure that she sleeps at night. Hana gets two walks a day, and accompanies us on all our mountain adventures. Even after a seven-mile hike (a hike rated "Difficult" in the guide books) near Mount Evans, she was up all night.

What we need for Hana, I said to Jim this morning, is the canine equivalent of a program for Alzheimer's patients recently described in a New York Times article ("All-Night Care for Dementia’s Restless Minds") about the Bronx-based Hebrew Home's ElderServe at Night,

a dusk-to-dawn drop-off program intended to strengthen their decaying minds while sating their thirst to be active after dark.

Participants are fetched from their homes by vans and spend 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. painting, potting plants, dancing and talking — or, for those immobilized by their disease, relaxing amid music, massage and twinkling lights. The patients rest as they need, for a few minutes or a few hours, and return home the next morning fed, showered and, usually, tuckered out.