The Stanley Hotel at Christmas

Our company last weekend, John and John, were Floridians, one of whom had never even seen snow. So he was just in time for about the coldest weekend on Colorado record, um, ever.

We kept trying to impress on them that this is not normal Colorado winter. -17° at night is too damn cold for anyone! I still don't think they believed us. 

Last Saturday, despite more snow moving into the area, graying out the skies and clouding up any long mountain range views, I chauffeured us up to Estes Park in single digit weather and we checked out the Christmas decorations at the Stanley. 

Bear with me, as John installed Photoshop CS6 on my new computer and I'm a kid in a candy store with filters. I'm currently really interested in learning more about HDR (High Dynamic Range) before our trip in a few weeks to Disney World. So if any of these look a little wonky, it's because I'm still climbing a steep learning curve. 

really? Dunraven gets a stocking?! Must be coal contents.

(Sam hates elevators. A haunted one? Even better.)

 

Sigh. Friday the 13th. 

Why is it so often Colorado schools?

My phone lit up with shelter in place text messages all afternoon. 

(Sam only had one class this morning and was already at work so she didn't end up in lock down.) 

Interior    

Flat light and the white aisles of cotton,
sky like an idea of blue.
There's no space like this,
wide, fraught with God.

The past is not a place
but story upon story gone so far
inside of things it takes a touch
of almost inhuman love to tell them.

To be the wire through which that current burns,
conducting the stone's slow accretion
like a cry, deciphering sunlight,
to pluck sound from the rings of a tree . . .

More than this I want the silence that ensues,
to believe in nothing else but the fact of absence,
striking out again in a hard horizonless country
whose one road releases me like heat as I walk on. 

~Christian Wiman

12/10/13

Have fallen off the blogging bandwagon, among other things. 

So here's a cat video which, let's face it, is why the internet exists anyway.

wordless road trip

 

12/1/13 End of the Thanksgiving Trip

While we usually would have gone home on Saturday, the calendar's coinciding Thanksgiving and the last day of the month conspired to keep us in Dumas through Sunday so that I could hop in and finish out the Saturday service tickets to get them on the November books. Trying that from the road during a six hour drive with a two hour time difference just wasn't going to work.

I did manage a few snaps, at breakfast  before Nick hit the road back to Georgetown, during Bob's sewing lesson with Nell (Costuming 101), and in the backyard with the pups. Last night Sammi, Nell, and I went to the little theater in town to see Frozen and between the tiny screen, the seats being wayyyy back from it, and the inability of the operator to get it in focus (despite me going to talk to him TWICE), I'll have to reserve judgment on my criticism of the film. Still... I can say definitively that this song writing team has nothing on Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. 

Today: road trip!