Tag - Colorado

About the Bear

He was a hairy bear, he was a scary bear.

(Ha! Did you see what I just did?  I described him with adjectives!)

The children and I had been at the park across the street and on our way home I saw that bear investigating our neighbor’s tree.  He was three houses from ours, so he wasn’t exactly between us and safety. Still, he was cause for concern.

We stayed on the park side of the street and as we came directly across from him, I waved and said, “Hi!”.  I was hoping to install a “friends, not food” attitude in him.  Well, he took one look at us and took off behind the house.  Before we reached home, we saw him re-emerge from behind another house about two doors down from ours on the other side.  He crossed the street and disappeared behind those houses.

Once  home, I did a little bear safety research.  Turns out that I did the exact right thing in waving my arms and making noise.  That’s when I found out that bears can open lever-handled doors and get in windows.  But generally, they’ll only do that if they smell food, but not humans.

Tami Nomad asked me what to do if a hairy, scary bear is lurking around your door. Beats me!  There are lots of things to do to make your home less inviting to bears, mainly keeping your garbage out of reach, keeping pet food inside, and cleaning your grill clean.  If they don’t smell it, they won’t bother you.

At least in theory.

Mountain Lions, Coyotes and Bears…

We’ve been living in Colorado for one year now, can you believe it?  It’s a little different, living  in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, especially for someone who grew up near the ocean.

Here are some of the things we’ve learned this year:

1.  Do not leave your trash cans out on the curb the night before pick-up or bears will get into them.

2.  Only mountain newbies forget to drag the trashcans back to the house after trash pick-up and leave them out over night.  Bears will check to make sure they are really empty.

3.  Don’t forget to close your garage door at night, especially if you have a chest freezer full of deer meat.  Bears will get at your freezer and steal your meat.  This happened to a neighbor.

4.  The police are very reluctant to come and assist with the removal of a bear eating deer meat in your tree.

5.  That lovely rubbed-oil lever-handled door knob you just installed in your back door?  Bears can open it to get at the kitty treats inside.  And by kitty treats, I mean the actual cats.  Keep yer backdoor locked, ya flatlander!

6.  The dry creek behind the house is not actually dry and is a great attractor of wildlife.  Like a spotted fawn and it’s mother…

and a raccoon out late at dawn and needing a nap.

7.  Where there are deer, there are mountain lions.

8.  Did I mention the bears? Here’s one at our neighbor’s house a couple of months ago.

9.  The dogs we hear howling at night sometimes are not dogs.  They are coyotes.  They live in the bluff across the street.  This one:

All these wildlife spottings have sparked this daily conversation in our house:

Boo: I’m going to get the mail.

Pumpkin Girl and Bip, without hint of irony, sarcasm or emotion: Don’t get eaten by bears!

That’s love, right there.

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This post was brought to you by Mittens the Cat, who wants to remind you to keep your lever-handled doors locked.

Cats are friends, not food.

Sadness

I really was going to write this over the weekend, but Saturday morning I was pulling on my socks and I managed to rip my right index fingernail off, halfway down.  It bled and hurt.  Alot.  So much I cried when I had to get a new bandaid.  Hello?  Band-Aid brand?  Whatever happened to the no-stick pad?  Cuz it stuck and naked nail bed hurts. Really badly!!

So I really can’t use that finger much, which makes it hard to type and really interferes with my computer games household chores.  But I’m here now, hurty finger and all, making about 12 typing errors per sentence, but here it goes…

One of the most striking things about our new home was the view.  All the people that traipsed in and out of our since we moved in, the locksmith, carpet cleaner, movers, furniture repair guys…all of them commented about the view.  Of all the windows that face the back yard, only the bathroom and bedroom had window treatments.  It was just too beautiful to block.

Well, the city, in its infinite wisdom decided that the dry creek behind us needed to be cleared of the trees.  Something about improving drainage and delaying erosion.  I’m thinking that tree roots help with erosion, but then again, I’m not in the Army Corps of Engineers.

Now our backyard view is pitiful.  It’s like mighty Samson, shorned, betrayed, weakened and blind.  It hurts to look at.  It hurts to know that this view, this one thing was our home’s crowning glory.  It hurts that it will never, ever look the same again.

Here is the view from the deck, looking to the right of our house, as it was the day we bought the house.
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Here it is now. Make sure you click to make the picture bigger so you can truly appreciate the horror.
rsz_dsc02038I know, I know.  I think the drainage pipe is a nice touch, don’t you?  Reminds me of the L.A. River.

Here is the old view, looking to the left.
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And now…
rsz_dsc02036Oh look – neighbors I never knew I had.

We were spared one single aspen and one other tree behind our house.
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I know they are just trees.  I know that in the grand scheme of life, this isn’t that important.  But I loved those trees.  Looking out our windows brought me such joy.  Sitting on the deck, listening to the wind through the aspens, spying the deer walk along our fence, getting a snack – this is exactly what I thought of when I thought of Colorado.  Even though we were moving to a big city, being surrounded by such Coloradoness was the unspoken dream of my heart.  And I wanted aspens. Imagine my joy at finding all that I wanted.

So my heart broke last week, listening to the chain saws and mulcher turning my trees into wood chips.  I’ll admit it, I cried.  As I sat in the office window one night and could see my across the creek neighbors, I realized we would need curtains.  I’ll never be able to sit outside with my coffee and enjoy the beauty of nature.

It’s tough, accepting the things you can’t change, losing the things you love so much.  I’m sure there is a lesson here, but I don’t really want to know what it is right now.  I’m such an Eeyore anyway, always sad about something and now I’m mourning my trees.

Well, I said I wanted snow

We woke up to snow this morning.

rsz_dsc02012This is from my front porch, looking across to the park.

rsz_dsc02015It’s not a lot of snow, but still…it’s October! And it stuck around til lunch time.

Of course, this was the scene, back in September:
rsz_dsc02004(I know it’s hard to see, but trust me, that’s snow.)

So if we wanted snow, I guess we picked the right place to live.

More Colorado Fun

So…life in Colorado continues to be interesting.  On the night we returned from Disneyland, I woke up in the middle of the night to a strange sound.  In my overtired and overly tanned but not quite sunburnt state, I was dreaming that I was hearing the astroblaster from the Buzz Lightyear ride that we’d ridden about two or three times a day for the last 5 days.  When I woke, I heard the sound again and then again.  And then I realized it was that sort of horn sound from a police car.  I was wondering vaguely what might be going on when I fell back to sleep.

Later I learned that two houses down from us, a neighbor had left their garage door open and called the police…not because of a burgular but because a ginormous papa bear had gotten into their garage, opened their freezer and had pulled out and eaten their stash of deer meat, buffalo steaks and ribs.

The lesson here – put your freezer in the basement.

Did I ever mention the three bears we saw walking across the street one day while on our way home from the library?  Philip saw those same bears, a mama and her two cubs, going through another neighbor’s trashcan on trash day.

And then tonight, as I was sitting through an hour and 15 minutes briefing for the parents of Religious Ed students, I learned what the security procedure  is if they have to lock down the campus because of bears or mountain lions.  Apparently, both have been known to cruise around and a mountain lion was once spotted sitting in the tree right outside the church.

And to top it all off, it snowed all day on Monday.  Yes, this past Monday, which just happened to be the last day of summer.   I’m just glad that we have enough room in the children’s closets to store out of season clothes so we were able to get cold weather clothes out without much fuss.

I gotta tell you, I really like it here!

Oh Hail

We started school three weeks ago.  I knew we’d be feeling sad that our house guests had left and Philip was gone, too.  Our Nomad friends had to be moving on to their own brand, new home.  I don’t blame them and even though their visit was a short one, it was a great one!  Unfortunately, their leaving coincided with Philip’s return for Washington, DC.  In a great feat of government efficiency, his employer wanted him to return for an all expense paid (by the taxpayers) trip to undergo a polygraph and psychological evaluation.  Even though he is going to be working the exact same  job that he’s held for the last 4 years, it was important to determine whether or not he is the type of person that would sell our nation’s secrets and then lie about it.  We’re assuming he passed.

So anyhoo, left alone for the first time in a new city, I thought it best to dive into school.  The children were predictably excited to be starting American history with Sonlight’s Core 3.  Their new school books had been waiting for them for about 3 weeks, just taunting them.

Our first day back took forever.  We’ve never taken the summer off  before and I was astounded at how much math knowledge was lost and how much hand holding was needed.  However, Boo and Pumpkin Girl were very supportive and assured me that in a few days, it would all come back to me.

After a late afternoon nap with Bip, I herded everyone in the car to go register Pumpkin for ballet.  It took longer than I’d anticipated because I missed my turn and had to backtrack, and it was rush hour.  Actually, rush hour had nothing to do with it because rush hour traffic here is like normal DC traffic.  In fact, I didn’t even realize it was “rush hour” until after we’d finished with the dance studio and someone piped up that they were hungry.

So we headed off to the McDonald’s near our house 1)because kids can never get enough of McD’s, 2)Bip had been trying to get a beany baby Grimace in his happy meal since we moved here and 3) they have a play area.  Sadly, they were out of beany babies, but we ate there anyway.

After we ate, I let the children play.  I heard a crack of thunder and wondered if I’d remembered to close the upstairs windows at home.  It wasn’t worth worrying about or dragging the children home for, so I turned my attention back to watching people go through the drive through.  Then it started to rain.  Actually, it started to pour.  And you know what – this particular McDonald’s has a skylight-type roof over the play yard and the rain was really loud.  And it got louder and then I noticed the hail bouncing off ground outside.  Just pea size hail, no big deal.  Hail storms don’t really last that long, right?

Right.

All hell broke loose and the hail kept coming and grew bigger and bigger.  At some point the noise in the play yard was deafening, so I gathered up the children and took them into the restaurant, which had a normal, quieter roof.  There we watched the hail pound the parking lot and cover both it and the cars with ice.  It was really quite impressive, except for the fact that our car was out there, getting pounded by hail that was now the size of peach pits.

After the storm passed, the  children kept playing while we waited for the ice to melt.  I wasn’t too anxious to see what sort of damage was done to the car.  I skipped my usual iced vanilla latte out of guilt for going out for fast food and getting the car all dinged up.  Turns out, it wasn’t that bad.  A couple of spots may or may not be hail damage, but nothing to get fixed right away.  We’ll probably wait until the car looks more like a golf ball before heading to a body shop.

Upon our return home, we found our upstairs windows open and hail on the (brand new) roof, in the grass and on the back deck.  We wiped up the water on the window sills and went out to play in the ice.  We took some pictures for the blog.

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Monday Musings

Don’t you hate it when you gather up enough energy and motivation to make dinner, just to find out you’re missing one ingredient?

Almost every day, between 2:30 and 5:30 PM, it rains.  Sometimes just a little, but usually it’s a pretty good downpour.

The deer around here are pretty funny.  The mamas like to walk together in pairs, with their little ones.  Just like human mamas.  We saw 2 young bucks out together on a Saturday evening.  They had small antlers that were still fuzzy.  They were probably off to some stag party.

We have a bunny that lives in our backyard.  I wanted to name it Benjamin Bunny, but Pumpkin Girl thinks its a girl, so we’re calling it Cottontail.

With all the wildlife around, yes there are predators.  I’m not too worried, though, because hunting is not allowed within the city limits.

I’ve heard coyotes barking on three different nights.  I’m hoping that in a few years they will be a deterrent to any of our children thinking to break curfew or sneak out of the house.

We’ve been unpacking for 2 weeks now and I’m pretty bored.  The boxes marked “DVDs” had books and at least one box marked “Books” was all DVDs. We can’t find our down comforter.  The Mexican terra-cotta sun that we bought in Nogales when we were newlyweds was packed flat at the bottom of a box marked “fragile.”  It arrived in pieces.

I ordered a new hammock, this time one that will fit 2 adults.  When I went to price them, it turned out that the frame alone was worth twice what we paid for the whole thing.  So we didn’t lose out at all.

School starts here in August.  I’m tempted to get my late sleeping self up early and go to the bus stop that’s across the street from our house and meet some of the neighborhood moms and kids.  I’ll probably end up just chuckling to myself as I hear the bus go by as I’m still in bed.

Ok, enough rambling, there are still boxes to unpack.

Pikes Peak or Bust

You will be happy to know that the rest of our journey west was uneventful, boring even.   From Ohio we got to Missouri and stopped for the night and a swim in the hotel pool.  The next two days droned on as Missouri turned into Kansas turned into Colorado. Hundreds of thousands of miles, or so it seemed, of endless farmlands.  Corn, corn and more corn.  We were focused on our goal, so we resisted the temptation of stopping to see the World’s Biggest Big Mac, the World’s Biggest Prairie Dog, or the World’s Biggest Van Gogh. However, we did ponder the ability of the World’s Largest Prairie Dog to eat the World’s Largest Big Mac. Finally we turned off the interstate and headed southwest, with Pike’s Peak barely visible in the distance.  Colorado slowly began to distinguish itself from Kansas as the Rocky Mountains grew larger and at last we reached our new hometown.

As we made the final turns to our new home, my heart started to beat faster.  It still seemed a bit surreal to be going home- our home – for the first time.

And so here we are.  We’ve seen 7 deer, 2 were in the dry creek behind our house, 3 were in the park across the street and one was in the grocery store parking lot.  Apparently there are coyote in the bluff behind the park, and black bears are not unheard of.  The children have already put a hole in the hammock we bought from the previous owners.

The new roof that the previous owners are paying for is taking like 4 times longer than it should, but at least it’s getting done.  We had the carpets deep cleaned and discovered that they are actually a lighter color than we’d thought!  We also got the locks changed and the cable set up.  All that we need now is our actual furniture and that will arrive on Friday.

The other evening we sat on our deck and enjoyed the cool mountain air.  An occasional breeze stirred up the Aspen trees behind our house and it all felt so right.

It’s good to be home.

Eureka!

On our second day of house hunting, Pike’s Peak was clearly visible, strong and silent and covered with snow.  The rain was gone and the temperatures were mild and we were confident that God would reveal our new house to us, just as he had revealed the mountain.

We were right.

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I’m reluctant to share too many pictures here because the house is still occupied and the pictures are full of their stuff.

But I will show you the kitchen.

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And the view from the dining room into the backyard.

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And check out the staircase –

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And for good measure, this is the park directly across the street.
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We close on June 30th.

As Boo used to say so often, “God has blessed us again!”

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