Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday, M. Hard to believe that we've celebrated fifteen of these together (fourteen of them married). I hope the next fifteen are just as wonderful.

App Trail

Weather permitting, E and I will be hiking another segment of our local stretch of the Appalachian Trail tomorrow. The route has more elevation than last year's hike and is about 2 1/2 miles longer, but I feel better prepared than I was then, both physically and mentally. The one exception is that my knees are still aching from too many moguls poorly skied during the winter.

Human Intel Word Count: 14,700

Bummer on the Weather

We've had perfect weather all week, with blue skies and highs of about 70. We've got a couple of rooms up for a wedding this weekend and suddenly we're looking at 1/2 inch plus of rain today. Someone is going to be frustrated.

Packs of Roving Beavers

I was out walking around the beaver pond a few minutes ago and a woman came along with her lab. Sammy promptly raced off with the lab, down the riverbank and out of sight. As we were trying to get our dogs back, the woman said, "I'm just afraid to leave him off his leash around here."

"We're pretty far from the road," I said. "I wouldn't worry too much, I'm sure he'll come back."

"Oh, I'm not worried about the road. Have you heard about this pond?"

Have I heard about this pond? What do you mean? Are there crocodiles or something? I shook my head.

"There is a big beaver problem."

"What do you mean by a beaver problem?" I asked.

"They've pulled down two dogs and drowned them. Oh, look, there's one right there. And it's on the shore!"

"No, I wouldn't worry about it. I come down here every day, really, and have never had a problem with them. Certainly not with a big dog like your lab."

"But one of the dogs they pulled down was a golden retriever. And look how big they are. You should be careful."

Just then Sammy came back from the river and jumped into the pond. The beaver plopped into the water and disappeared underneath and the woman was quite worried. It surfaced some distance away, swimming in the opposite direction.

"The beaver is probably twenty pounds or so," I said. "Sammy is about eighty pounds. I don't see how it could--"

"I don't know, maybe they team up or something. There are about four of them out there."

Well sure, if beavers now hunt in packs, I guess they might be dangerous. Heck, if there were enough beavers in the water, I might be afraid to enter myself. They might gang tackle me and drag me down to my doom.

All Natural

In yet another reminder that it pays to read food labels before purchase, I glanced at the fruit cup for the little guy's lunch and saw that "ALL NATURAL FRUIT!!!" does not in fact mean that the product is all natural fruit.

It means that the fruit is all natural. The non-fruit ingredients, however...

In Defense of Food

I've been reading In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan, the same guy who wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma.

It's an interesting, witty book and a devastating critique of the nutritionism that is guilty of convincing people to give up the saturated fats in butter for the transfats of margarine, or of convincing people to give up snacking on healthy stuff like nuts and instead eat artificial crap like low-fat Snackwells.

A few of his guidelines, paraphrased:

1. Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
2. Avoid any food with ingredients you can't pronounce.
3. Shop on the periphery of the grocery store, where you can find whole foods and not food products.

Sleepers

We must have the worst sleeping kids in the world. The twins didn't reliably sleep through the night until they were about 3 1/2 years old. We didn't coddle them, either. At six months, the sleep deprivation was so severe that we decided to let them cry it out and bought a room fan that sounded like a prop plane taking off in an attempt to block out some of the noise.

L is just one kid, of course, and at 2 1/2, he's ahead of the twins at the same age. Nevertheless, he goes through stretches of a week or two at a time where he wakes up two or three times a night. Last night he was awake and either crying, talking loudly, or banging on the wall on and off for over three hours.

Oh, and sleeping in? Forget it. The first hint of gray on the horizon and N and L spring out of bed and start making a racket.

Human Intel Word Count: 5,000 words

Gas Prices

We had one room after another cancel for this weekend. It's not usually a busy time of the year and doesn't really pick up until the middle of June, if not later, but still, it's been quieter the last couple of weeks than any time since we've been here.

The cancellations were for various reasons, none of which were ostensibly about the high price of gas, but people rarely give the real reason when they cancel.

I have to admit I'm a little worried, given that we have a business that relies on people driving up to visit from 100-300 miles away and gas prices have doubled since we arrived here. They're not so outlandishly expensive that I think the current price is more than sticker shock that we'll eventually adjust to...if the price stops here. Given my concerns about Peak Oil, I'm not sure it will.

In the short run, we'll be fine. We had a good snow year and will soon finish paying for this year's work projects, leaving a good chunk of money to see us through a potentially bad summer and fall, just in case.

In the long run, our fuel costs at the inn are one of our largest expenses and we've got to eventually pass these along. Guests may be forced to pay an extra buck or two a gallon, but they riot at an extra buck or two for the room. And it doesn't make the industry anymore viable when everything across the board becomes more expensive at the same time people are struggling with the current state of the economy.

The High Dive

Starting a new book is like jumping from the high dive. As I've said before, I can only finish a larger project by producing a certain number of words each and every day. If I don't make this commitment, the shear length of the book means that sooner or later I will get exhausted, distracted, or discouraged the book will languish. Once I put it away for a week or a month I'm unlikely to ever return.

So committing myself to start today means that I'm taking a jump, knowing I will eventually land in the pool, but having no idea if I'll pull off a graceful dive or a painful belly flop.

I'm writing this book a little different, given that it's a collaboration. I'm currently working on a draft of the first three chapters while Jeff puts our rough outline into a more elegant form to give to our agent. We might take some time to rework the opening chapters and the outline based on her comments before returning to the draft.

Human Intel Word Count: 1,700 words

Umbrellas and Semis

Which is a greater risk to life and limb, an umbrella suddenly being opened or a semi barreling down the highway?

I tried to explain that to my golden retriever who shot across the highway in terror when I opened the umbrella, forcing the semi to brake hard to avoid spreading my dog along the pavement for the next quarter mile.

The dog didn't seem to understand the point I was making.

Oreos Cross the Pond

We share so much culture with our British cousins that it's a shock to realize the Brits have never had something so ubiquitous stateside as an Oreo Cookie*. Well, that has changed.

LONDON -- "It's very dark. It's almost black." May Woodward, an office worker in central London, is holding an Oreo cookie in her hands. It's the first time she has ever seen one "in the flesh as opposed to on an American TV show," and she's not sure she likes what she sees. "It's the color of wet mud!" she complains. "And the bit ... looks like toothpaste rather than cream."

She twists and turns the cookie in her fingers, staring at it from every angle with a screwed-up look on her face that seems to say, "Gross!" not "Mmm, cookie time." You could be forgiven for thinking she's handling some dangerous alien element, Cookie Kryptonite, say, rather than one of the best-known biscuits in the Western hemisphere.

She bites, chews, raises an eyebrow, chews some more.

"OK, I get it," she says, finally. "I can see the attraction. It's very sweet." Suddenly she seems to change her mind. "Actually it's too sweet ... it's becoming mushy," she says, alarmed as tentative chewing becomes frantic munching to wolf the cookie down.

The tasters also seemed alarmed that the "biscuits" are often eaten dipped in milk. Who would do that?

*When it comes to lowbrow snacks, I do like my Oreos (loathe fake Oreos), but I prefer a Nutter Butter.

Farmer's Market

The local farmer's market opened for the summer yesterday. It was a beautiful day, warm but not hot, with the mountains fresh and green all around. No tourists in the valley yet (although they're missing some wonderful weather, our spring reputation notwithstanding) but the place was full. There's an extra energy in the air, a good mood that's contagious. It was a long, snowy winter, and while we know how to have fun in the winter, it is great to see the green and the sun again.

If there was one out of tune note (keeping with my music metaphors) it is that the farmer's market is a lot less exciting when you can't go pick out your favorite cookie, pie, brownie, or powdered sugar covered fry bread to enjoy while you browse. I'm trying to cut back on sugar and assorted snacks until I lose some of my hibernation weight.

Warming Up

I've pulled the trumpet out of the case, shined it, cleaned out the spit valves and the mouthpiece, even played a few warm-up notes to tighten my embouchure.*

And yes, this is a metaphor, perhaps inspired by going downstairs yesterday to correct E's repeated misplaying of a B-flat and realizing that my physical ability to play the trumpet has deteriorated to nonexistent.

I'll be starting a new novel in June, which is something different, in that it's a collaboration with my friend Jeff Anderson. It's already been fun to have someone participate in the brainstorming process, but I'm not deceived into thinking two people = half the work. More like twice the work, I suspect.

Jeff has a lot of skills and some excellent ideas and we've got enough of a start that I think it's going to be a great book.

*I had no idea how to spell embouchure, in spite of hearing it thousands of times during my trumpet playing days. It took me a couple of tries to even get it close enough to where Google would suggest the real spelling. And once I saw it spelled, I had a little epiphany, because it must, of course, come from "la bouche"--the mouth--in French.

10,000 Steps

I bought a couple of pedometers in the winter and was dismayed to see how little I walk on a typical day. Once we get snowed in it's difficult to get enough physical exercise (even counting the twice a week I'd go skiing) and the end result is that I've been gaining a bit of weight each winter we've been here. I lose some of it in the summer, but not all.

I've measured some of the reason for the summer weight loss. A pass or two around the beaver pond during the day gets me to 10,000 steps without any extra effort. It wasn't uncommon to pass an entire winter day with no more than 2,000 steps.

Now, to work on the other side of things: my insatiable sweet tooth.

Progress

One of my least favorite physical aspects of the inn is its Tudor style, which is out of place in the mountains of Northern New England. Unfortunately, there was no financial reason to change the exterior when so many other things have a more direct impact on guest comfort.

By this spring, however, the lodge (wooden siding and not Tudorish) was in serious need of painting, and it really made sense to paint both buildings at the same time. Because of a good winter, we have a little extra money and I decided to put up new insulation and siding on the main building and change the color of both buildings at the same time. The new color is a sage green that matches the mountains and many of the other buildings in town. I think it looks a lot more crisp and modern than the previous cream-yellow.

The siders are here this week and are already making good progress. The painters for the lodge will come the week after Memorial Day, and the guys are coming to finish the last of the roof late next week. It all amounts to a dramatic improvement in the external appearance of the inn.

We now have to turn some serious attention to carpets and bathroom remodels on the motel side, starting either late fall or next spring. This will probably take us a couple of years. I do feel like I'm finally getting caught up on the deferred maintenance that we inherited when we bought the inn, and that feels good.

Return to the Inn

What's playing on the ipod: Battery, Metallica

L and I flew home on Wednesday. He was fully recovered and though he's a good traveler, fourteen hours is a long time to spend alone with a two year-old who is rather bored of being confined to a car seat, stroller, airplane seat, stroller, airplane seat, and then a car seat again.

Not much was happening upon my return. The painter still isn't painting, the roofer is not roofing, the sider isn't siding, and the grader has yet to do any grading.

We had someone staying for about 10 days who was born in Argentina and grew up in Barcelona. She has a very pleasant, easy-to-understand accent in Spanish. Still, after 10 days, both guests and cheese start to take on a certain odor, and I'm somewhat glad that she and her dogs are checking out this morning. I'd be even more glad if we had any guests coming to replace her*.

Yes, this is the time of the year where the accounts drop. It won't be until the end of June until we start breaking even again. Fortunately, we had a good winter and if summer works out okay we should have some money to do a couple of fall projects as well, and perhaps even pay ourselves a bit extra this year than we have in years past.

*We've had a trickle of other rooms, but just a trickle.

Zion III

We finally got the little guy out of the hospital yesterday. I came early in the morning so that M and the older kids could catch their flight, then waited around for the doctor to come sign him off. The frustrating thing is that by the time the others would have been getting on the plane it was clear that he would have been fine to fly.

He got very bored sitting in bed and was playing with the up/down mechanism, but I couldn't talk him into getting the IV shut off and going out of his room for a bit. Once I did, he didn't want to go back. I pulled him around in a play wagon, then he walked, pulling his own wagon, then he walked up and down the halls, pushing buttons and chatting up nurses and visitors. At last, sometime in the afternoon, the doctor came, just as L was getting sleepy and lethargic. He seemed slightly suspicious that L had not been like this all day, but eventually signed off on his discharge.

Unfortunately, the nurse was now on lunch break, so we had to wait another half hour before she could come, sign us out, and take out the IV needle still in L's arm. L did not want it to come out. Not only was he suspicious of our promises that it wouldn't hurt, but he saw it as a representation of his recovery. Take it out and no doubt he would soon be vomiting again. Oh, and the Bugs Bunny bandaid was stupid. Did they have Donald Duck or Diego?

He had some diarrhea in the night, rolled out of bed, and then thrashed about for the rest of the evening, and this morning he is very fussy. On the other hand, he's eating French toast (everything else, he claimed, would make him throw up), so he must be feeling fairly well.

Zion II

It's not quite as big a disaster as when N spent three days in a hospital in rural Costa Rica after a fall, but this trip is wrapping up in a less than auspicious manner.

We went to St. George with my parents for three nights earlier this week. The idea was to visit Zion National Park, then come back through Bryce Canyon on our way back, and have a day to relax a bit before our flight tomorrow. On Wednesday, however, the little guy started to throw up and could not hold down any water, in spite of a raging thirst that made him beg continually for a drink.

He slept most of the way back on Thursday and had held down a bit of water, plus consumed a lot of ice chips, so I assumed that the worst was over. When we arrived at my parents' house, however, he was very listless when I took him out of the car. Within an hour M was off to the hospital, where they put him on IV with serious dehydration.

It's now Friday afternoon and he has improved, but still is not eating or drinking on his own. No idea when he'll be well enough for them to release him from the hospital.

So, it looks like my Utah "vacation" is getting an extension of several days. M and the older kids will fly back tomorrow as planned, while L and I will stay until next Wednesday, assuming that he gets released by, say, tomorrow.

I'm not particularly excited about this. Apart from the obvious difficulties of caring for a sick toddler, and the delight of flying solo with a cranky, probably still sick child, I've got a lot to do back home, plus some writing-related business to take care of. I've got all of my work here on my thumb drive, but my parents have the latest version of Windows and Word and...well, Microsoft has changed everything just for the hell of it, so that won't be the easiest thing in the world.