Boulder

On my long Western journey I went to Boulder for an afternoon. Pueblo and Boulder should really be more than a two-and-a-half hour drive apart; they're about the same size and located in the same state, but going from the depressed desert industrial town to the mountainous hippie enclave gave me culture shock.

For example, you wouldn't find a "women's bookstore" in Pueblo, much less an oxygen bar. The reason I took a picture of this sign, though, is that it introduced me to the word "smartinis." Whatever a smartini is, I want one.

Lesson

I've observed before that when I blog about needing/wanting something, it's often miraculously delivered to me: a DVD player, a corkscrew, a digital camera. But I wasn't thinking about that history when I blogged last week about how brown and depressing Pueblo and its environs were. Sure enough, whatever gods there be sent me a three-day snowstorm. Maybe you think that's no big deal because you think it snows all the time in Colorado, but Pueblo is no Buffalo: it gets 10 inches of precipitation a year, and when I was a teenager there I wore sandals for most of the winter. (Ok, so some people thought I was crazy, but I still have all my toes).

While pretty, the snow left me stranded at my parents' house doing nothing while I would rather have been somewhere else doing nothing. One plus: I got to go snowshoeing. Allow me to recommend my debut Canon filmaking project, a clip of our dog trying to hitch a ride on the backs of my mom's snowshoes.

The lesson, in case you missed it, is that I need to be careful what I wish for on The Ninth Floor.

Home on the Range

I arrived at the Denver airport (on time) yesterday afternoon to find the place looking somewhat lived in after the snowstorm that closed it down for two days. The line for security stretched around the baggage claim (pretty significant, given the size of the airport), and there were announcements asking people to wait until four hours before their flight to get in line. Four hours!

Two hours down the road, the snow was melted but my sparsely-populated hometown had made international news for its own severe weather: a tumbleweed blizzard. The wind had been high and this summer must have been a bumper time for tumbleweeds, because they piled up so high at the front of my parents' house that they rolled over the roof and filled up the back deck--my mom could only let the dog out the side door. (Disclaimer: I have no idea where this photo was taken. One would think that when tumbleweeds make the international news there should be lots of pictures of them online, but no such luck. However, this could very well be Pueblo West).

Each time I leave Pueblo (it's a little east of Pueblo West, for the uninitiated) I forget just how desolate and depressing this place is. Maybe it would help if I didn't always visit in the dead of winter, when it's brown and windy most of the time, with no natural greenery to alleviate the stark ugliness of the box stores and paycheck loan places and the lonesome stucco houses.