Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Breakfast in America

The concept of eating out at breakfast time is still alien to most British people although it’s a tradition they usually enjoy when visiting the States. When my parental units had their 25th wedding anniversary, a US based Uncle offered to take everyone out for breakfast the following morning. He was surprised and not a little disappointed to learn there was simply nowhere he could take us to. Our town didn’t even have a McDonalds in those days, although most of us would rather starve than eat there. Personally, I love the concept of eating out at breakfast time, particularly the fact that my coffee cup is constantly refilled at no extra charge. This is one of my criteria for heaven.

For a rural setting, the Bailey area has it’s share of breakfast choices, although it has to be said, some of them are mediocre at best and most struggle to stay in business for any length of time. I see the Green Valley Grill went up for sale this week. This is no great shock to anyone who’s eaten there since it changed hands a few months ago; iffy food and poor service are generally a death knell, even for well-established eateries, but it’s just another in a long line of eateries which have been unable to make a go of it along the 285 corridor.

The very first local meal I ate, was at the Woodside Grill, in Pine Junction. Serving Chinese & American cuisine, it occupies a prime location near the traffic lights. The back windows afford a breathtaking view of Pine Valley, an uplifting sight for anyone with a soul, but particularly someone in the process of relocating from Phoenix, Arizona, and the building itself is perfectly acceptable as restaurants go. And yet, the food can only be described as….crap. I’ve been to China and, trust me on this one; the food is not Day-Glo orange.

In the first few months of our residency, one of our favorite eateries was “The Crow’s Foot”, situated as you may or may not have guessed, at the foot of Crow Hill. The Crow’s Foot had been in business for some years, but had recently changed hands and while the fare was quite acceptable during our first few visits, over time it became more and more bland, the portions noticeably smaller and the service increasingly erratic.

In addition, the proprietors never seemed to address the issue of the poor lighting, which while it might have been appropriate for romantic candlelit dinners, made the breakfast experience somewhat gloomy. I once overheard the owner telling another customer of his plans to replace the whole lighting system and I understand the capital investment required may not have been available, but in the short term, replacing the 60W bulbs with 100W ones would have helped. As time went on, the quality of the restaurant continued to deteriorate until one day it was announced the original owners were coming out of retirement to take on the business once more. A new name and a new look attracted a lot of attention but sadly, I think the damage had been done and now, only a few months later, it is sitting empty.

Another Bailey landmark, which recently underwent a change of ownership is “Sully’s”, now known as “Tom’s Bailey Station”. In this case the problem lies with the fact that it hasn’t yet decided if it wants to be a diner or a bar. Both sides of the business attract a somewhat loyal following, but even the most dedicated social mixer would be forced to admit, the two groups have somewhat different needs. When I’m bellied up to the bar enjoying a beer, I don’t generally need the smell of breakfast and the babble of family diners to complete the experience. Conversely, when I’m working my way through a plate of bacon, eggs and toast, I can usually do without the pall of blue tobacco smoke and the salty language of the bar’s regulars. They both have their place don’t get me wrong; I just don’t usually enjoy them together.

To be fair, the new owners do seem to have addressed the quality of the service or rather, the lack thereof. Under the old management, the waitresses often appeared too have their minds, such as they were, on other things. It was common for a group of four diners to receive their meals at completely different times so that three people might be finished eating while the fourth was still awaiting their meal. The first serving of coffee often arrived after the end of the food, while the bill regularly came before it. It might not have been your bill, at least not entirely, but it was a bill nonetheless.

Across the street, lies The Cutthroat, which until recently was sold was the Mountain View CafĂ©, an upscale restaurant, serving undisputedly fine cuisine. The pricing was a little rich for our blood except for the most special of special occasions (such as someone else picking up the tab) but the few meals we ate there were pretty spectacular. We took my parents there during their last visit from Britain and after the excellent steaks, had the additional fun of seeing my 72-year old Mum tackle her first ever deep-fried ice cream. I never heard anyone with a bad word to say about the place, but in the end, there just weren’t enough people willing to spend that type of money on a regular enough basis to keep the place afloat. Fortunately, this sale had a happy ending and the new owners transformed it into a quite excellent little breakfast place. Prices are reasonable, portions are generous and the food and service top-notch. I’ve only made it there once so far, but dear wife has become quite the regular.

Working as I do over an hour from home, weekday breakfasts are generally a protein shake before leaving the house, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich upon reaching the office. Even on the weekends, if I’m cooking for myself my repertoire is generally limited to toast, or something equally exotic. So it’s nice to occasionally splurge and have someone else do the cooking (and the washing up). Even better, the generosity of the portions generally means there’s no need for a big lunch, what could be better than that? Of course, the real kicker is those endless coffee refills. They’ve got me hooked on Breakfast in America.

Is this a great country or what?

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

The Loneliness of the Short Distance Runner

Coming to terms as I am, with the unhappy fact that I’m in my forties and seriously out of condition, I recently embarked on yet another attempt to fight the ravages of time. Plastic surgery isn’t an option, nor is a red sports car or a 19-year old girlfriend. So I took up running. Unlike apparently everyone else in the western hemisphere, I’m not overweight, quite the opposite. My body type tends towards what could charitably be called “lean”, but more truthfully, (and more often) is referred to as “skinny”. Being blessed with a metabolism which curiously, causes me to lose weight when I don’t exercise, my life has been a constant battle to avoid being compared to the “Before” picture in the Charles Atlas advertisements.

I do try to spend as much of my free time outdoors as possible. My dogs all receive regular walks and I even know where my bike is, although it’s a little dusty right now. (Hey come on, we’re just at the end of winter here!) So despite my advanced age and lack of muscular bulk, I am in reasonably healthy shape. All my limbs are attached and I can walk up the 3 flights of stairs at the office without needing the emergency services on speed dial. However, a recent trip to the Doctor’s office showed my blood pressure was, for the first time ever, higher than normal. For the last couple of years, I have been spending far too long chained to my desk and as driving a computer mouse doesn’t tend to raise the heart rate in any way that could be considered healthy, I realize it’s time to take more drastic action.

Like many other people, I was part of the running craze in the early 80s and in addition to a number of shorter races, clocked up six marathons over about three or four years. I was in my teens and early twenties then so was more than capable of sinking five or six pints of a Saturday lunchtime then clocking up a leisurely ten miles before getting ready to go out for the night. Somewhere there’s a photograph of me, in full running gear, sitting on the curb smoking a cigarette and holding a can of beer near mile fifteen of the Bolton Marathon. Sadly, like my vinyl collection and my Morris Minor, those days are long gone.

My first attempt at resurrecting my athletic career came about six months ago but, as these things so often are, was short-lived. For the last twenty years or so the only running I’ve done has been the little panicked trot when the blare of a car horn has reminded me that jaywalking can have its consequences. More to the point however, is that I now live at just less than 9,000 feet and there’s no denying, the air is a whole lot thinner up here. Even the flatlanders down in Denver, a mere one-mile above sea level, are a good 3,500 feet lower than us, yet professional sports teams often cite the altitude as a factor when they receive a drubbing here. So I was well aware I wouldn’t be ready for the Ironman my first week out.

I started with what I thought would be a gentle introduction to the sport, covering only one mile and alternating between running and walking, 100 paces each. Despite my caution, I developed pains in my legs that within a few days made ordinary life extremely uncomfortable. The muscles felt fine but the pains were coming from the bones themselves. Concerned I was suffering from some kind of old-fart bone loss disease, I stopped running just about the time winter kicked in and the early morning temperatures were beginning to plummet.

Until a couple of weeks ago that is, when my doctor, struggling I’m sure to keep her face straight, assured me that bone pain is almost unheard of and what I was experiencing was nothing more dramatic than long unused muscles suddenly being asked to earn their keep. This wasn’t manifesting in stiffness, as I had assumed it would, but the dull ache with which I was so familiar. “Get out there and run.” was her message, “It will do you good”. So, with medical assurance that my crippling bone disease would only be temporary, I decided to give running another chance.

Another big advantage of running in my youth was that in those days I had the money for top quality shoes. Back then we snobs would tell ourselves that a jogger wore clothes worth $100 and shoes worth $5, while with a runner, the opposite was the case. Quality foot ware is vitally important for anyone who wishes to rack up the miles and I’m well aware that the beaten up tennis shoes in which I was running, were not doing my feet, ankles, legs or back any good at all. Unfortunately, I’m now tied to the other trappings of middle age such as a mortgage, two cars and, probably a bigger financial drain, a wife.

I’m also responsible for the economic well-being of several other financial institutions, banks, credit card companies and the like so despite my good intentions, I don’t have the folding money to shell out on a project that, let’s face it, has had a high failure rate for plenty of other people in the past. Luckily, the other night I happened across a shoe store going through the final stages of a closing down sale and was able to snag a snappy looking pair of Reeboks for only about the same amount as my first weekly wage. The uppers are a little stiffer than I would like and they’re blindingly white, but they’ll do.

Which means I have no excuse not to get my butt out of bed and hit the road. Every other day I’ve been setting the alarm for the ungodly hour of 5:30am and after a few brief stretches, have been plodding my way around a one-mile block of my neighborhood. Running the full mile without stopping is out of the question so again; I’m using the run-walk-run approach. This morning I only walked twice, for 100 paces each time and think it won’t be long before I can skip that part altogether. Over time, I’d like to build up to where I can do 3-5 miles comfortably. If you aren’t familiar with exercising at altitude, that’s a bigger achievement than it sounds.

For the moment though, my legs hurt, walking upstairs is a trial and my lungs are producing an astonishing amount of goo. But, I’ll keep at it. You’ll see me in the Ironman yet.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Take me out to the Ballgame

Summer was a wilderness and as far as I was concerned, you could keep it. Being a sports fan in Britain, at least for me, meant following football. Real football, as in soccer, not that pansy stuff with padding and pantyhose, and commercial breaks every two minutes. No, from late August until the early May, I was an avid follower of the beautiful game. However, once the F.A. Cup Final closed out the season, we were cast into the endless, bleak purgatory that was….the cricket season.

In case you aren’t familiar with cricket, and I’m assuming you aren’t, it’s a game invented for those who found the sport of watching grass grow to be too taxing on their nervous systems. Largely due to endless periods of inaction, the games stretched out for 3, sometimes 4 days and even then there was often no winner. For some reason, cricket aficionados seem to have no problem with this. Mind you these are people, who actually understand the concept of the game, which itself, tells you a lot about them. The verbiage is a morass of overs and outs, sticky wickets and short legs, slips and creases, none of which have any connection with what’s happening on the field, which is precious little if you really want to know. How anyone would voluntarily suffer through this torment is beyond me.

Which perhaps makes it all the more strange that over the last few years I have become something of a fan of baseball, a game, which pays more than a passing nod to it’s older, and statelier ancestor. There are an equal number of mystifying expressions such as ERA, RBI and pinch hitter, all designed to baffle the neophyte. Fans share an equally mind numbing passion for collecting statistics and it’s equally rare for the action to ever reach edge-of-the-seat excitement. However, they share positive aspects too. Both games have the same warm, lazy summer afternoon quality, with the smell of fresh mown grass mixed with sun tan oil and beer. And each give pleasure to fans of all ages, from the very young to the very old and all points in between. However, in my not so humble opinion, baseball is head and shoulders over cricket due to the fact that every few minutes something happens, and by the time you go home the game has either been won or lost. Maybe it’s just me but I think that should count for something.

This week marked the start of the 2004 baseball season and yesterday, our very own Colorado Rockies took the field for their home opener against another team with which I have a vague connection, the Arizona Diamondbacks who hail from my ex hometown of Phoenix. Despite the season being less than seven days old, they’ve already played three times with the Diamondbacks taking the honors in two of those games. Despite being one of baseball’s newer franchises the Diamondbacks also have a World Series championship under their belts, largely thanks to the owner’s policy of hocking the team’s future and plunging them into colossal debt when buying the players necessary to achieve this.

I was never particularly a fan of the Diamondbacks, a long and ugly political battle over the taxpayer’s role in the financing of their stadium rather soured me on them from the beginning. However, it was the fact that we had a team in town that inspired me to make the effort and figure out what the game was all about. I tried following the TV coverage, but as I’ve explained, unless you’re up on the lingo and fully cognizant of the subtleties of what you’re watching, it was kind of hard to really get involved. It took a visit to a minor league park where a friend spent the evening explaining exactly what was happening out there and why before I really started to appreciate what I was watching. Once I’d overcome that milestone I was hooked and over the next four or five years, developed what can only be described as a love affair with the game.

Upon moving up to Colorado, I was happy to embrace each of Denver’s four major league teams. Well, not so much the basketball team of course, I’m not quite ready for that level of tedium, but both the football and hockey teams have won their respective national championships not once, but twice within the last decade, a feat which Arizona’s perennial losers the Arizona Cardinals and the Phoenix Coyotes are never likely to achieve in my lifetime, or probably theirs. The transition to becoming a fan of my new hometown baseball club wasn’t quite so easy. The Rockies are, let’s be charitable, not the stuff of which legends are made. (At least, not yet.)

This isn’t entirely their fault. Denver’s famous lack of humidity causes the baseballs to dry out. This makes them lighter and allows them to fly much further, making home runs much easier to score than in ballparks in lower and damper locations. For reasons, which aren’t entirely clear to me, the altitude also adds to this phenomenon. “What’s the problem with that?” I hear you ask, “Isn’t it the same ball for each team”. Well that’s a very good question, but as someone recently explained to me, it means the games tend to be higher scoring when played in Denver. No decent pitcher wants to play for a team where his figures consistently look awful, after all, that could dictate whether or not he makes it into the hall of fame one day. So, the good pitchers choose to play elsewhere and this in turn discourages other top-notch players from making their homes in the Rocky Mountains.

It’s been a problem since the Rockies first arrived in Denver but last year they came up with a creative way to address the issue. The installed a humidifier in which to store the balls. The room temperature is kept at about 90 degrees to keep condensation from forming on the balls, and the humidity is set at 40 percent to mirror conditions at a Missouri warehouse where the baseballs are stored on receipt from the manufacturing plant in Haiti. Statistics have shown that while the Rockies haven’t been winning a significantly higher proportion of games since adding the new feature, double digit games, where one team has scored ten runs or more, have been cut almost in half. Maybe not as exciting to watch, but certainly more pitcher friendly.

There’s still snow on the ground, and a chill in the air, but from my office window I can look over to downtown bathed in early spring sunshine and I know, the boys of summer are back.

Footnote: They won!

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Winter's Not Done Yet

All week we were watching the weather forecast, anxiously hoping that this time, perhaps, we really would get some moisture. After suffering through the driest March in Colorado history (traditionally the wettest month of the year), everyone has been nervously watching the bone dry landscape and wondering when the first really big fire was going to hit. We’ve had a couple of smallish ones already, and 120 Ft Collins residents are only now returning to their homes after the 9,158 acre Picnic Rock fire drove them out 6 days ago.

However this weekend, it was finally looking as though we were going to get some snow. Given my druthers, I would rather have the cold weather while I was in the office, with the sunny warm days reserved for the weekends; I’ve complained about this often enough before. But at this point, weekend or not, I was hoping for the biggest storm ol’ Ma Nature was willing to throw at us. A 3-foot dump, like we had around this time last year would have been ideal, but realistically, that wasn’t going to happen.

By Friday morning, the storm clouds were gathering and the atmosphere was tense and heavy. As the day wore on, things got steadily more oppressive but it wasn’t until around 6:30, when I was making my way home: that the heavens finally opened and the rain came down. The freeway was of course dry and greasy, so the standing water made the road slick and treacherous. C-470 is an accident black spot at the best of times, but tonight, everyone was taking it easy, inching along as the windshield wipers worked overtime. I can’t remember the last time I had mine on full speed, but that’s what they were doing tonight.

I had to stop at Safeway to pick up a few things for dinner, so I called Dear Wife from the parking lot. I was lightheartedly bemoaning my fate at the soaking I was about to get running from the car to the store, but her news depressed me far more. Our house, only 20 minutes away, was still bone dry. This couldn’t be. The town was being drenched with a major spring thunderstorm, while our neighborhood, in desperate need of rain, hadn’t received so much as a drop. Not good news.

As I’ve said before, Colorado has been in a state of drought for over a decade now. The first year we moved here, we had a couple of scares when major wildfires broke out way too close for comfort. Last winter was considerably wetter and as a result, we got lazy and didn’t address our fire mitigation responsibilities. In a wildfire situation, firefighters will, quite logically, assess the possibility of saving your property. If they deem this potential to be low they will, simply move on to another house which might have a better chance to be saved. Essentially, if you haven’t done a decent job of fire mitigation yourself, you can’t expect the firefighters to do it for you when the emergency happens.

Fire needs fuel to continue burning, so homeowners are advised to remove the contiguous sources adjacent to and near the home in order to create a pathway to the house. The next step is to remove any fuel sources, which may have accumulated on or around the house. Crowning fires, which spread through the treetops, are intense and fast, but ironically it is the little embers falling out of these fires that cause the most damage. Imagine a snowstorm, in which red-hot embers are falling instead of snowflakes. Any surface that can catch these and provide fuel for them can cause the home to catch fire. Gutters, which tend to be full of debris, horizontal surfaces such as windowsills, accumulated fuels under and around wood or flammable structures, or shrubbery growing against the home can all be potential fuel sources. Flowers and short grasses, unless watered frequently, can also be a hazard. Homeowners are also advised, not just to thin trees, but to remove them at least 30- 40 feet from the home to increase the chances of survivability

The previous owners used our property as a weekend cottage; and they didn’t visit much over the last few years. Years of neglect means the overgrown trees and ground debris would put our wooded acre well down any firefighter’s list of savable properties. Although we had a borrowed chain saw sitting in our shed most of last summer, we never used it, which means there’s a lot of work to be done this year if we want to be living indoors next winter. So, you’ll understand why I was disappointed we appeared to be missing out on the rain.

By the time I got home, there was evidence of a slight sprinkling, but not enough to do any real good. We needed a downpour. Frankly, even that would only scratch the surface of the problem; right now we need rainfall measured in feet, not fractions of an inch, but like I said, we’ll take whatever we can get. Fortunately, by the time we headed for bed, the precipitation Gods had finally decided to favor us and we were at last, receiving not rain, but fast falling, wet looking snow. This would do.

Waking on Saturday morning, it wasn’t quite the winter wonderland for which I’d been hoping. However, we did have oh, a good 2-inches or so of accumulated snow sitting on the front deck, with more falling in rather puny looking flakes. Most of us had given up any hope that we would see more snow this winter and as this was the first measurable moisture we’d had for almost a month, nobody was complaining.

It’s only when you’ve gone for weeks without moisture that you can appreciate just what a difference it makes to the landscape. Sure everything was wet and dripping, which under the slate gray sky could easily have been gloomy. But the air had an almost forgotten freshness to it that simply lifted the spirits. The colors were so much more vibrant and the landscape had that fresh washed, clean look to it. Signs of spring were everywhere; particularly now the dampness had brought a number of flowers out of hibernation. And yet, the snow on the ground, welcome though it was, still served to remind that winter ain’t over yet.