Boulder Boulder

Anu and I finally arrived at my old buddy Mike Jospe’s place in Boulder. The day was long and full of snow, but Boulder was looking delighful on the way in.

Mike went to grade school with my buddy Adam, then to another private school in New Hampshire. On the weekends and holidays, he came back to his parents’ place in Concord, MA, near Weston, and became part of the Weston Boys. He is now a psychological therapist for families with troubled teens, and does a lot of wilderness trekking/experiential therapy as well. We had miles of conversation to attend to.

These are the Flatirons you see coming into Boulder.

This is Mike and Erin’s cute little bungalow. Not quite as bungalowey as those in Oregon and California, but still not a New England Colonial!

Erin was unfortunately (for us) out of town – volunteering at an orphanage in Nepal (and trying to stay out of the political unrest). She is looking to find a role doing creativity and art-based therapy with children there, which she does in Colorado.

And this is Mike’s truck in the cute neighborhood. We walked a bit up the street and through a great well-used park to a small pub-brewery, the Southern Sun, for a snack, then went out on the town to find dinner at Sherpa – a place of a family of Tibetan sherpas. Great food. Kinda like indian.

Sherpas who have died on the mountains are commemorated here. The wait staff are also mountain guides here in the Rockies. It was a great meal and nice to walk about the Pearl St area. Much more lively than what we’d seen in Idaho Falls.

Morning brought us a big surprise! It melted off in about two hours though, which is usual there in Boulder, Mike says.

Had a great breakfast at the local neat-o diner. Anu was surprised when I switched from photographing the meal to catch her copying me.

We went to the Boulder Bookstore – a great big old shop. Seems to have been built into an old hotel or something – there was this upstairs “Ballroom” converted into the fiction section or something. I loved this space! Reminded me of reading rooms at Goodenough College and oddly enough, the state library in Moscow which also had a lot of plants.

Okay, this is kinda cool. You are looking at a liquid-crystal or CRT screen of a digital photo of a page of a book of 18th-century German furniture, of an image from the surface of an old desk which is an inlaid-wood image of some old guy about to enter a fancy building. The whole three-d thing is done with varying toned types of wood and mother-of-pearl. I found this amazing! I would like to take this book and find this building in Germany somehow.

Then in the men’s room, I found this old map of Boulder, a plan really, of Fredrick Law Olmstead’s design to improve the city back in the old days.

I did like this bookstore.

Pearl Street in Boulder is a pedestrianized mall. Love the flowers. I kinda enjoyed the brightening day while Anu went and shopped a lot.

Actually, I also did enter some of the little shops…

I didn’t actually buy a wand. Some of them were over $250. How long does the magical charge last on one of these?

I think the mannequin on the right has the same bust as the one on the left. I did like the shirt on the left a lot.

Cool facades in Boulder. Older-feeling than Portland Oregon.

Erin is giving a few presentations in a coulpe of weeks. Neat to see the flyer up around town.

Great to be with Mike in his stompin’ ground. Actually, wait until after lunch for the pics of when we really stomp around…

The Dushanbe Tea House – a gift from the people of Kyrgyzstan. Great central asian meal. I had a special tea – puerh – which is partially decomposed and full of great things. Like compost tea for your belly.

The whole place was handmade and then disassembled and brought over in pieces then reconstructed in Boulder. Amazing craftwork. A real gem in Boulder.

Then to walk off all the tea and food, we strolled up the Boulder Creek, through this underpass where the walker/bikers are actually below the level of the water in the spring, to head for the hills.

Delightful to be able to just walk out of town into the woods. Or at least hills, since it’s not so very woodsy.

These are the Red Rocks of Boulder.

Who is this guy?

Great view looking out over the city.

Thanks for showing us this cool place, Mike!

Then we headed down the slope back into town. We got back to Mike’s and rested up a bit before heading out to dinner. Yes, we pretty much ate out for four days. But it was all good stuff. Dinner was at Ajai, a south-american inspired place downtown. The caipirinha could have been sweeter, but at least it had decent cachasa.

It was a great day and a half in Boulder. We retired back to Mike’s and chatted about the end of the world as we know it and the arrival of the earth-based society, and how we are going to help it come into being. I’m a little hopped-up on Bill McKibben’s latest, Eaarth. But more on that later.

In the morning, we went back to the same diner for another great meal. We actually had the lucky table and got a free coffeecake. A good omen for the road. Next stop, Denver!

Pete’s place in Idaho Falls

It was a rather lovely day for a drive, although this photo makes it look less pleasant. We had left Portland at about 8am (see the previous post). After the nice lunch stop, we cruised onward and got to Idaho around 3pm.

Along the Snake River now…

Here we are at the Idaho Falls! Not quite Niagara…

Getting dark, and you know how it is with the flash-less iPhone…

We found the one brewpub in Idaho Falls and had a nice dinner and visit with Peter.

Then in the morning, we said good-bye to his little happy house, and we were on our way to Boulder!

Crossing Oregon

A great day to drive east from Portland, and good company too! It was great that Anu decided to join me for a little road-tripping. We left Portland early and got to Hood River around 8am for a quick break at the Dog River Cafe – for breakfast burritos and coffee.

Then we said goodbye to the Gorge and were into the dry basins of the Great North West.

We followed the Columbia River for many hours. It got smaller and smaller. We did find these windmills perhaps we were near Arlington, OR?

Then headed a bit southeasterly, toward Echo and Pendelton OR…still beautiful farm country.

Soon though, we worked our way up into the mountains of the Umatilla National Forest. There was snow up at the highest elevations.

It was getting on past lunchtime so we pulled into Baker City and found the Grand Hotel. There was a whole photo essay of how they renovated it in the last ten years and now it’s the gem of the town.

The menu, however, was not terribly inspiring, but at least healthy.

And the setting was really quite cool. Very gold-rush era.

There was actually a Sheep-Rush at some point out here.

We couldn’t stay at the Grand, we would have to move on if we were to get to Idaho Falls at a reasonable hour. So press on we did.

When up at the Farm

I’ve been up the Gorge visiting the farm during the week and hanging in Portland on the weekends. It’s kinda slow up on the farm. But wonderful.

Let me try this alternative posting method.

Click on this link: Photos of Adam and Kaye’s Farm .

There is a slideshow function over there at flickr. Let me know how it goes. Thanks!

Posse Weekend

So, Adam and Kaye are having a kid in June. This happens to be the first kid of a particular group of old buddies, collectively known as the Posse, sometimes Team Goofy, maybe something else. Prior to each of us becoming such an uncle, to this soon to arrive youngster, we decided to get together for one last run around party weekend. Rather than take a major excursion to the Yucatan, we decided to just head to Portland Oregon and from there to Adam and Kaye’s farm in Trout Lake, Washington, up the Columbia River, in the “Gorge,” at the break in the Cascade Mountains where that major river flows through.

It was a great weekend hanging out with the boys and exploring Ad’s new farm. Here’s some of the pics:

I actually can’t remember where this was, during our pub crawl in the Alberta neighborhood of Portland. We were having a good time. Maybe this was called the Nest, or maybe the Bye and Bye. All good pubs.

We had a few beers and a hooka at a spot on Hawethorne in Portland. Will, in the stealth glasses here is a recording engineer for Interscope records in LA. We’re trying to get him to start a blog so he can make his wisecracks about the music industry to a broader audience. He really knows everything about it. I had been visiting him a few weeks prior. It is great to spend time with old buddies!

Adam here, our host, is a sustainability consultant, working for Nike now. He’s somehow managing to juggle the farm, some corp. sustainability stuff, and trying to position himself in the sustainable agriculture innovation space in the Pacific Northwest.

After a few beers on Thursday in Portland, we gathered the other fellas at the airport and headed out to the Farm on Friday.

It had snowed 9 inches on Weds and Thurs morning, but it was melting off. The place dates to 1890-something and has good water from the valley’s ditch system. It’s beautiful!

We worked on a couple of projects – this structure had been spray painted “henitentary” by someone in the past. Well, Pete and Ad cleaned it out and I helped with a window and now the laying hens are in there nice and snug.

Here’s the temporary housing for the birds with Jeb and Adam getting ready to catch them and put them into the Bird Mover (seen on left).  This one batch of 60 layers are a breed called “Javas.”  The broilers – the meat birds which will only be raised for a few months –  need to move into this structure, thus the layers are moving to the henitentary. As soon as the electric fencing arrives and the snow melts, the two sets will be out on a small pasture in a rotational grazing program.

Jeb was a pro at chicken handling. Usually he keeps his hands full running a small family apparel business. That is, an apparel business of small stature, not clothing for small genetically-related people. And he consults for a great non-profit called “Calling All Crows” – google it. Good stuff linking music fans to new philanthropic efforts to support women in refugee camps and other places where help is needed.

Here’s some of the little chickens in one of the coops. The red light is from heat lamps to keep them comfy. Though this isn’t actually a picture of the, the meat birds area variety called “Freedom Rangers.” I guess you could say that backyard chickening is not just a back-to-the-lander thing. The Tea Party also likes to raise chickens.

There is a rather large barn on the property. What projects will ensue here is a good discussion over a few beers.

Doh! Self-timer estimation snafu!Well, we took a few and this is one of the lesser. Doug- send me a few here!

This is Tank. He and the other two cats had been found in a plastic bag at another farm down the road as kittens last fall. They are doing great at Ad and Kaye’s. He came over while I was working outside and got on top of a small grape arbor and was just hanging out, scratching his head on the slats. I let him climb down me to get back to the ground.

We went out to Hood River, right on the Columbia about 20 minutes south, for beers and pizza at Double Mountain Brewery. The double mountains are Mt. Hood just to the south and Mt. Adams just north of the farm. The weather kept us from seeing either of them on this visit, unfortunately. Doug, who is blurry in this picture, works for the Dept of Justice in DC making sure pending legislation in Congress won’t be illegal, or something like that. He had to stay up for three days to read through the 42-inch high paper version of the health care bill recently. He’s actually kinda blurry in real life too.

Most of the time, owing to the weather, we just hung out in front of the stove cracking jokes and talking about metaphysics. Neil here is a professor of Vedic Studies, Sanskrit and Ethics at the U of Edmonton. He’s traveling to India (for his seventeenth or something time) this summer to produce a movie with his film-maker wife Jillian on the subject of Vedanta and his teacher, Swami Dayananda. Look it up. It will blow your mind. Really.

And then we would do another round of chores – here’s Adam with Pete feeding the five pigs he’s raising for meat. He got a bin of reject pears from an orchard in the valley and is mixing them in with the grain pellets for these critters. They don’t seem to mind the rotting parts of the pears.

Peter is a nuclear physicist at the Idaho Falls National Research Lab doing very complicated math. Or maybe the math is not so complicated but everything around it is complicated. Some of it he can’t talk about because it’s classified. Some of it he can’t talk about because it’s way over our heads. He really just wants to be a farmer, he tells us.

Here’s Lois and Mary the two pregnant goats. Soon there will be a lot of kids around this place!

Thanks Adam and Kaye for hosting us at your farm!