Nicknames.

We've only had Fergie about three months, but already she's earned a ton of nicknames. I thought I'd document them here before we forget them all:

Fergie
Ferg
Fergs
Fergalicious
Fergie Bean
Bean
Beanie
Beano (when she's gassy)
Silly Bean
Silly puppy

Almond eyes (when she first wakes)

Fergie-poo
Poo (an unfortunate nickname given her gastrointestinal issues lately)
Farty Party

Just Adding On

Just wanted to add on how happy skiing makes me...and for all the same reasons that Erin hates alpine skiing I love it! Speed, the imminent threat of a wipe out (complete with "garage sale"), bumps, trees...all of it!!!!

For the non-locals, I should explain that A-basin is one of the more technical mountains to ski. According to their current trail map, the mountain has terrain of:

• 2,270 verticle feet of slopes; base elevation 10,780 ft – Summit 13,050 ft
• 10% Beginner (green)
  
• 30% Intermediate (blue)
  
• 37% Advanced (black)
  
• 23% Expert (double black)

The East wall is all sheer cliff that one has to hike up in order to ski down (f'ing-crazy if you ask me and missing the point of a "lift ticket").

(click on image to enlarge)


Anyway, I like to stick to the front of the mountain – west side – because it involves the least amount of poling and flat landscapes (the back bowl is OK, but involves way too much work to get to the good snow). My favorite lift is the Pallavicini, where the easiest slope down is a blue (which I would never take) and one can ski from the car to the lift and back. If you ever find your self with me, we'll likely be hitting 13 Cornices, International, East Ave, Timber, Turbo, and Rollercoaster. Put on your hard hats!!!

Ski bums.

Dave is up at Arapahoe Basin today (A-Basin to locals) using another one of the free ski passes we received at an Avalanche game this fall (thanks, Mom & Dad Suss!). His report: A wipeout, fresh powder, and hard work. Best run was the third, an expert level black.

As for me, I'm prepping for class tomorrow night but am procrastinating by thinking about my own skiing a couple of weekends ago - Nordic skiing.


I can't remember the first time I put on skis, probably because they were put on my feet by my mom and dad, sometime during my childhood in upstate New York. I kept at it for years, but unlike most of my family and friends, my skills hit a serious plateau about the time I was in middle school.

As an adult, years of experience and self-analysis have helped me to see that downhill skiing is the perfect foil to my personality. I prefer warm, sunny climes (70-75 degrees), moderate speeds, and low-risk activities. So it makes sense that downhill skiing - being characterized by freezing temperatures, extreme speed, and high risk - isn't exactly the sport for me.

I tried out Nordic skiing on vacation in Austria two years ago, and loved it. You don't get cold because it's such hard exercise, you can go as slow as you want, and the only danger is tipping over or running into another skier (which is tough, because you're going so slowly...although I managed to do this in Austria because no one had taught me how to stop).


Now that we're back in Colorado, I'm learning where you can go to Nordic ski, and taking lessons to learn the different techniques (classic vs. skating). Here's my skis mid-stride while classic skiing (I haven't learned skating yet).

Plus, with Nordic skiing, you get more time to relax and take in the beautiful mountain scenery:

National Western Stock Show and Rodeo

Since 1905, Cattlemen and cowboys from across the USA have been coming to the stockyards in north Denver for the National Western Stock Show and Rodeo. We took a trip out there last weekend to take in the festivities.

The highlight is always the rodeo, which involves a series of events including bucking bronco riding, barrel racing, calf and team roping, and bull riding.


Cowboys waiting for the next rider to come out of the chute.

Bucking bronco.
Bull riding

Dave getting up close and personal with the livestock before the show.

The Rodeo also included two events that I couldn't capture on camera, but you can check out videos at these links:

- Mutton Busting. Kids in helmets riding sheep. I can't imagine the waiver parents would have to sign before their kids do this.

- Monkeys riding border collies - seriously, I can't make this stuff up! Watch the movie here.

After the show, we walked over to the 'Education Hall,' which houses the Stock show portion of the event. Dave perused the $25,000 cattle for sale, dad got some new deerskin gloves, and I bought some pure Colorado alpaca wool down by the llama exhibit.

Before heading home we all had a delicious lunch of pulled pork sandwiches and beer (dee-licious!).

Photographing Fergie.

Now that Fergie is coming out of her shell, it's becoming more and more difficult to get good shots of her. Here are some attempts from our visit to the park last weekend.


Hey, Fergie!
Woo hoo, over here!
Wait, stop! Hey!
Fergie!
Okay, just look over here, Fergie!

Wait, no, sit! Sit!

Okay, nevermind...

Have you ever wondered...

...what a jackhammer directly outside your wall sounds like?

(Listeners' note: for full effect, plug in your headphones and crank your volume to max before pressing 'play'. We'd suggest you hook yourself up to some kind of home appliance to get the shaking and vibrating effect as well, but there's really no substitute for a jackhammer).




This is what is happening at our house between 7:30 and 4:00 every day for the foreseeable future. The picture is what you could formerly see out our bedroom window before they installed scaffolding and a giant yellow garbage chute out there.

Yesterday when Dave came home he opened the kitchen cabinet and the top to one of my Fiesta dishes came crashing out, dinged the countertop in about five places, and broke. When he left this morning a metal ring from the fire sprinkler in the hallway closet had fallen off the ceiling.

Demolition has begun!

So Proud

As I sit here and watch the proceedings of the inauguration, I can't but help feeling so proud of our country and President Obama.

Even with all that we must still accomplish as a community of people that believe in one another, I can take solace and inspiration in today...yes, we can!



Yes We Can!

(a selection from the victory speech in NH on 9 Jan 2008)

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will
only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come. We've been
asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against
offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been
anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible
odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't
try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a
simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.

Yes we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the
destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail
toward freedom through the darkest of nights.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and
pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the
ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and
prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this
world. Yes we can.

And so tomorrow, as we take this campaign South and West; as we learn
that the struggles of the textile worker in Spartanburg are not so
different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the
hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are
the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we
will remember that there is something happening in America; that we
are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people;
we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter
in America's story with three words that will ring from coast to
coast; from sea to shining sea - Yes. We. Can.

Guitar Heroes.

Michelle and Chris are the lucky owners of a Nintendo Wii, and for Christmas they got Guitar Hero to go along with it. Cheapskates that we are, we don't have our own Wii, but have started entertaining ourselves on weekends by mooching off them.


I'm learning that excelling at this game has basically nothing to do with actual guitar-playing prowess, but is more a function of knowing a song and having good hand-eye coordination.

My interest in video games hit its peak about 1985 with Frogger, and has gone downhill from there; but I have to admit, this game is AWESOME.


It's almost as fun as watching Chris' amazing antics as he plays along to Ozzy...

Towers o' Crab

Ever since Dave saw the episode of 'America's Test Kitchen' last year in which they made crab towers, he's been obsessed with trying the recipe himself. He even found the proper stainless steel rings that one needs in order to layer all the ingredients.

The problem - Dungeness crab is only in season for a few months a year, and is hard to come by in oceanless Colorado. We tried procuring some crab around Christmastime, only to be told by the guys at Whole Foods that the stormy California weather had made it all but impossible to catch crab.

Today, though, we lucked out, and brought a crab home. Here's how they were made:







Dee-licious!

Movie night.

My grandpa Syl gave my mom and dad an 8-mm camera when they graduated from college in 1971, so through the early years of their marriage and my pre-VHS childhood, they recorded many of our family adventures on film. By 'adventures' I mean little more than sledding, playing in leaves, working in the garden, and going to the park, but these films are the most wonderful artifact of my childhood in existence.



I love watching and re-watching these movies, which capture my memories more accurately than VHS. They have a grainy, cinematic quality, silent, and always seem a little faster or a little slower than real time, giving them a dreamlike sensibility that is more consistent with what I remember than the jarring, reality-TV images proffered by VHS.

Every few years, my mom and dad pull out the 'new' projector (by new, I think they mean circa 1985) and the movies. It's been at least five years since the last viewing, and Dave has never seen the movies at all. Rick and I always enjoy watching our tawnier, blonder selves romp around on film in Iowa and New York, with occasional cameos from mom and Prince, the cocker spaniel, and Mark.

Rick and I tease each other over our 1970's outfits - plaid bell-bottomed pants for him, frilly dresses and mary janes for me. Rick doing headstands in the backyard while Prince snooped in endless circles, me doing a flapper dance in my ballet shoes and fringed leotard. I also love how the old movies still capture the essences of my mom and dad - mom shyly mouthing 'Tom' at the camera, and dad waving his arms and doing funny dances.

The 8-mm films last only a few minutes, though, meaning the majority of the night is always occupied by threading films and rewinding them. This task was made inexpicably more difficult by my dad this time, who despite working in a laboratory filled with extremely sensitive items like lasers and liquid nitrogen, seems to lose all motor control when dealing with the projector.

Okay, so it's not dad's fault that the scotch tape last used to splice the blue leaders onto the 8-mm film had degraded to the point that EVERY movie got caught in the threading mechanism, meaning we had to flip on the lights so he could unscrew the projector and pull out the detached leader.

But why, we all asked, did dad seem to not have remembered how to thread the film onto the second reel? Many times during the night we turned on the lights at the end of the movie to a scene like this one:

Don't worry, dad assured us. 8-mm film is very versatile and won't be harmed by a few close encounters with the carpet, or mom's head:

One of the top 10 things....

So, included in the top 10 things that you don't expect to see when living on the 7th floor has to be this!



Just giving all you an idea of what it will be like when visiting us for the next couple of months.

The scaffolding arrives.

I can't remember if we've mentioned it on the blog before, but ever since we moved into our apartment, the building has been under construction. This is because the geniuses at JEDunn forgot to put a waterproofing layer underneath the brickwork when they originally put up the building, leading to significant water damage on some of the west and north-facing units (we face southeast, so our unit was spared). The patio doors also did not have the right water drainage design and would have to be replaced. Before we bought the condo, there was a big lawsuit between the HOA and JEDunn, and the agreement was that JEDunn would remedy their mistake and reconstruct the entire outside of the building.

We knew at the time of closing that there was going to be some construction on our building; in fact, that's one of the reasons we got such a great deal on the place (something tells me the previous owner wanted to get the heck out of here before construction hell broke loose). However, Dave and I agree that we were completely unprepared for the scope of the construction that was going to occur.

The process started sometime in June, when we were back in Berlin, so we came back in July to see the entire west side of our 7-story building covered in scaffolding, and then draped in heavy-duty plastic sheeting. The plan was to work counterclockwise around the building, so our unit would be worked on last. The reconstruction process, as far as I can tell, consists of the following steps:

1. Put up gigantic ugly scaffolding.
2. Cover windows on outside with Plexiglas to protect glass so you can (sort of) see out.
3. Drape plastic over scaffolding, thus hermetically sealing you into your unit.
4. Jackhammer every brick off of the exterior to the building.
5. Coat building with yucky-smelling waterproofing layer.
6. Rebrick.
7. Power wash.
8. Remove scaffolding.

Somewhere in there they also come into your apartment through the hallway, rip out the patio doors and edging, and replace them.

No big deal, right?

So far, the construction hasn't impacted us that much beyond waking us up with loud drilling, at 7:30 five days a week, jiggling some of our doorjambs our of alignment (a common exchange between Dave and I: "Is it just me, or did this door used to shut all the way?" "Is it just me, or have I straightened this picture five times in the last week?"), and making it increasingly difficult to get in and out of the building on workdays.

I've had a sense of foreboding for the last six months as I've seen the scaffolding creep around the building (literally, creep - it's taken months). The first scaffolding was taken down just before Christmas, meaning that those people had been sealed into their apartments for six months (and are understandably grumpy about it). Surprisingly, however, when the first scaffolding went up around the outside of our unit this week, I felt a sense of relief rather than anger - probably because this is the beginning of the end, and I don't have to wait anymore.

Dave and I drank our coffee this morning and watched out the window as orange-vested, hard-hatted guys laid down wood planks and metal crossbeams to strengthen the scaffolding structure. It kind of reminded me of that scene in "The Money Pit" when Shelley Long opens her medicine cabinet and finds a hole in the wall, with a construction guy on the other side holding her medication in his hand.

I was going to rush to get some shots of the scaffolding for the blog, but then laughed to myself as I remembered that this scaffolding is going to be there for MONTHS, and there will be plenty of opportunities to document the process. Stay tuned...

Happy New Year!

After a ten-day (mostly) computer-free break to celebrate Christmas and New Year's, I'm back on the job, and back to posting dispatches from our pad here on Clarkson St.

Frankly, I'm glad to have 2008 behind us. It's been tough, living apart from Dave for 5 months, trying to figure out what the heck I was doing at my new job, searching for and buying a new apartment, saying goodbye to Berlin, Dave finishing his MA thesis remotely from Denver, Dave searching for a job, adopting a dog who didn't want to walk AT ALL for her first weeks at our house, getting the front end of my car crunched up in a hit-and-run, finishing the manuscripts for two books. I'm happy to ring in a new year of fresh beginnings for all three of us (Fergie included).

To some details.

Like a crazy woman, I decided to write a book based upon some of the lessons I learned working with teachers in graduate school. It would be a book for secondary science teachers on how to conduct formative assessments in their own classrooms. With the help of Rich, my Stanford advisor, I got a contract from Corwin Press in November 2007, with a draft manuscript to be delivered by Sept. 1st 2008, and a final manuscript due on Dec. 1st. I thought, no problem. It's all in my head, just need to get it out on paper. I procrastinated writing it until May of this year, then scrambled for months to pilot the assessments that were going into it, to write cases, research examples, etc. etc. It's been an interesting process to talk about cover designs, indexing, reprint permissions, and all these other steps I had never anticipated. I did get it finished on time, and it will be coming out in July of 2009.

While working on that book, I was randomly contacted by VDM Verlag, a German publisher of master's and doctoral dissertations, about publishing my thesis from Stanford. The catch was that it would be a print-on-demand volume, and I would need to do all of the book-block formatting myself. It was completely the opposite of the Corwin experience, where I had an editor and all other kinds of people to support me on my way. With VDM, I had to choose some random stock photo for the cover, upload everything myself, and then wait for someone to request a copy of the book, at which point it would actually be printed, for the bargain price of $111.00. It's actually listed on Amazon right now:


I have absolutely no idea who this teacher is and who these children are, and they're not even the right age for what I studied in my book. However, the shot was better than the alternatives, which were kids wearing safety goggles and mixing chemicals or a teacher lecturing in front of rows of desks. At least this shot is more interactive:


In retrospect, taking these two projects on while going through a million changes in 2008 was a pretty dumb idea. I didn't hold it together too well at many points during the process. Thanks to those of you who supported me in getting through the year - especially Dave, for putting up with me even when I was tough to love.