Cycling Through Books

Even though I am a fan, bicycle road racing is a weird sport. When I started watching, it seemed like it should be straightforward, like a footrace or a triathlon: everyone starts at the same time and goes as fast as they can to the finish line. But that turns out not to be the […]

Dialing It In

The county’s “town hall” Zoom/Facebook/Wide World o’ Technology meeting on Monday lasted all of eight minutes. Sometimes, these days, there’s just not a whole lot to say about Corona. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I always watch these meetings after the fact, a few hours after they’re recorded but before I leave work. […]

Ol’ Blue

On my 22nd birthday — yes, birthdays had been invented, even back then — my grandparents traded me for my present. They took my car away from me — a car they had sold to me for the promise of always wearing my seatbelt — and replaced it with their pick-up truck, a vehicle I […]

Multi-tasking, Badly

In this year where very little makes sense — right on cue, Na Ki’o shows up to help — schedules have been turned on their heads. And so, while it is not July anywhere in the world, Le Tour de France set off on Saturday and now that we are well-removed from May, preparations are […]

Painting Over the Problem

Yesterday must have been Monday, and this is why: I watered the lawn, a term I use very loosely, you understand, in the rain. There were other Monday indicators, but that was the cap on the day: there I stood, hose in hand, under a sunny sky, getting rained on. For not having a decent […]

Crazy Like a Fox

I was trying not to go here, but here we are again, right in the thick of a political discussion. Although I would argue — perhaps you would not — that this moment has transcended politics and is now in a different realm. One that could be divided into Reality and Unreality. We are not […]

The Area According to Kara

It’s hard to find help when “affordable” housing starts at $258,000. Kara is my business partner, a very sharp woman 20 years my junior whom I first met when I was teaching a mini-unit in journalism at the elementary school across from the newspaper office. She was in the fifth grade. In the years since, […]

Feed the Birds

KT and Nate Lund lived for many years in Gunnison, all of my formative years, before eventually moving to the Pacific Northwest. I did not stay in good touch with them (nor they with me), and I have been led to believe KT died several years ago from Alzheimer’s complications. While I failed at long-distance […]

Business “Assistance”

Today is Day 166 of Pandemia in Gunnison County, if you care to believe our public health officials. (I would ask, why wouldn’t we believe them, but there seem to be many, including the president of the United States, quick to believe the nuttiest of conspiracy theories, who think for some reason that public health […]

Hazy Shade of Summer

We have one airless, mask-free corner at Pat’s Screen Printing. It’s the corner where the printer (since we’re generally down to one person printing at an given time) has to work. Our building is wrapped by another so we have no back door and thus very poor airflow, and the press sits in the most […]