Year: 2013

Last night Zack joined his Scout troop down in Denver– they visited Channel 7 News studio to learn about the weather. They met with Mike Nelson, the long-time forecaster there, and he took them on a tour of the station and then they watched the evening news program live.

Zack is such a ham.

Today me, Laralee, and the boys headed down to Niwot to help some people clean up their basement and yard. They had a really nice house that backed to Left Hand Creek. Normally it’s maybe three feet across this time of year; today it was probably thirty feet of raging muddy water. (Where does that water keep coming from? It hasn’t rained in days.)

It’s heartbreaking to see basements that had six or seven feet of water in them. They’re just destroyed.

So Alex and I hauled mud (of course) that had washed up into the yard while Laralee and Zack cleaned inside the house in an attempt to get rid of the mud and other debris.

Just down the street, Alex and I were theorizing about whether the neighbors’ car had been sitting there when the floods came across the road, or if it had actually been washed there in the water.

There were all kinds of people helping in the neighborhood today– inspiring as always. On our way out, we noticed that someone had written “HOLD HOPE” in the sand and mud by the riverbank.

Cool.

The other evening I was driving home, and the moon was rising in the east. It was a full moon and low to the horizon, so it was a brilliant orange. It was amazing, as in Disney’s The Kid screaming “Holy smokes! Holy Moses! Look at the moon!”

Okay, maybe you had to be there.

Regardless, it was really cool so I thought I’d snap a picture. I pulled over to the side of the road (safety first!) and used the only camera I had at hand: my HTC phone. The results were… underwhelming.

Taking shots of the full moon requires some specialized equipment anyway because of the contrast between the moon and the rest of the dark scene. And apparently mobile phones aren’t “specialized equipment” in that way.

Check out this cool bug that Zack and I saw on the screen door the other day. I don’t even know what it is, but it looks amazingly like a leaf.

It’s a big sucker, too.

We ran out of macaroni noodles the other day and I was in the mood for some mac and cheese, so I went to the basement and cracked open one of our old #10 cans. We’d canned a bunch of macaroni and spaghetti a few years ago.

Well, maybe more than a few.

As it turned out, ten-year-old macaroni noodles aren’t too bad.

Ha! Cool.

This is a new one. One of my clients just challenged me to some iOS game called Battle Camp.

I’ve never heard of it, but apparently I can “experience the AWESOME” and do amazing things like “crush bosses”. Uhh.

Too bad I’m an Android guy.

Thom and I are planning to head up to the Tetons next Wednesday for our annual backpacking trip. Last night Dad sent me this weather map, which shows the high temperatures expected that day:

Notice the tiny little cold spot in northwest Wyoming? Yep, that’s where we’ll be. Dad delivered more good news with this analysis of the forecast:

Whee! I don’t mind a little rain while I’m hiking, or an evening in a tent while it rains outside, but it’s not much fun to spend three days in the wilderness while it’s grey, cold, and either raining or snowing. I mean, it’s September!

So, we’ll see how things develop… fingers crossed.

Today JPMorgan Chase bank was ordered to refund $309 million to customers, and pay an $80 million fine, due to unfair credit card billing practices.

They were also ordered to pay $920 million in fines over the “London Whale” scandal.

Oh yeah, and in July they settled for $410 million over accusations they’d been manipulating electricity markets in California and the Midwest.

And let’s not forget the $6 billion the Federal Housing Finance Agency is suing for due to bad mortgage security practices.

The good news is at least some of these greedy and unscrupulous activities are being brought to light, and the bank is being forced to cough up some dough. The bad news is these fines are only a tiny fraction of the bank’s overall profit… small enough that they’re probably just considered the “cost of doing business”. It reminds me of chemical companies who intentionally broke EPA laws by dumping toxins into rivers because the fines were less than the cost of proper disposal. Banks operate on the same principle: they cheat and rob, and then pay some pesky fine, because the profits from their shenanigans far outweigh whatever hand-slap they receive.

Sigh.

Tonight I went out with Alex, three men, and two other teenage boys. We headed over to The Greens, which is a really nice golf-course community in the southwest part of town. I’d been in the neighborhood just to the south on Monday, and clearly these were some of the worst-hit homes in the flood. As we drove down the streets tonight, we saw piles of trashed furniture, carpet, drywall, and of course mud in every driveway and spilling out into the street. There were front-end loaders digging through the piles and dropping them into huge roll-off dumpsters. What a mess.

We hopped out of the van and started asking people if they needed help. To our dismay, we talked to three different groups who were cleaning out their garage or hosing down the driveway or whatever, and all of them said they didn’t need any help this evening. They’d been working on cleanup since early in the morning, and frankly they were just done (it was approaching 7pm). We were sort of bummed, because here we were, ready and willing to help, and it seemed like no one needed us!

Then we came across a couple of women cleaning out their garage. They said they were pretty much wrapping up for the night, but one of them yelled to her husband, who was just hauling a wheelbarrow full of mud from the basement. He dumped the mud in the street, looked at us, and said he appreciated the offer, but he was burned out. He yelled down into the basement to his buddy, who yelled back to say, “Seven guys? Are you kidding me? Let’s get back to work!”

So we did. We spent a couple of hours shoveling mud in the basement into five-gallon buckets, hauling the buckets up through the window well, and then dumping them in the street. After we’d cleared out a lot of the mud on the floor, we attacked the drywall. The water had reached within a few inches of the basement ceiling, so all of the walls were completely ruined. The sheet rock crumbled a bit, so we basically tore the walls down in pieces and then shoveled the pieces into buckets and out into the street.

At one point I was shoveling mud in a dark room (there wasn’t power in that part of the basement) and couldn’t even tell what was in it. There were toys and electronics and books and who-knows-what. I saw a few old LP’s, but they were coated in slimy dark goop and I couldn’t even tell what they were. The guy who owned the house was a bit of a film aficionado and had some old 8mm reels as well as a reel-to-reel projector that must have been fifty years old. It was, of course, ruined. He was sad about it because it had belonged to his father. But he put on a brave face and said that maybe he could clean it up eventually and get it working again. If not, he said, he’d put it on a shelf as a decoration.

The boys were real troopers, hauling all of that mud, and when we finished the family was laughing and shaking our hands and basically in complete disbelief that we’d just been walking around the neighborhood offering to help complete strangers. They took our picture and told us over and over how grateful they were and how awesome we were. It was really cool.

Back home, I asked Laralee to take our picture. It’s hard to tell, but that mud on my jeans and Alex’s shorts is probably a quarter-inch thick. I think our clothes weighed ten pounds more than usual. And I don’t even want to talk about my boots.