Category: Personal

Items of personal interest to me, my family and my friends.

Colorado Blizzard of 2006

Bobby

I'm sure the whole world has heard about the Colorado Blizzard of 2006.

2006 Colorado Blizzard

This is the biggest storm we've had here in years. There is a common misconception that the Colorado Front Range gets a lot of snow. I used to work tech support for a tax product and many of our customers were from New York. It was not uncommon for our East Coast customers to assume that just because I lived in Colorado we were constantly under snow, when in fact the opposite is true. Denver has 300 days of sunshine annually – more than most places in the United States including the so called Sunshine State. Most of the time it was nicer where I live than it was in New York City.

This misconception was capitalized during this week's blizzard when a news report interviewed a Honolulu man stranded at Denver International Airport who was angry at being stranded due to Denver's inability to adequately deal with the blizzard. His comment, 'Don't they know it snows in Colorado?' Snows on the Colorado front range are inconsistent, often years go by without a significant snowstorm. It's inpractical from a fiscal standpoint to have a large snow removal budget on the off chance that a major snowstorm is going to roll through.

This week's blizzard has turned out well for me. I ended up being snowed in for a day and a half and my boss offered to let me take a vacation day today on short notice. I don't have to go back to work until after Christmas.

This is by far the biggest storm I've seen in a long time. About 7-8 years ago we had a good storm – I remember driving my Jeep Cherokee around in snow up to the bumper. This is definitely this biggest storm since then. I'm sure it's all because of Global Warming.

I've posted some pictures of the day of the storm. I'll take my camera while I drive around today and add some pictures.

Another Cutlass story

Bobby

I recently posted a story about my 1976 Cutlass, so I thought I'd write about my other near brush with death in that car (that actually precedes the other story). It's the only other notable Cutlass story I can think of (unless I want to write about the all-you-can-eat-ribmobile).

It was the winter of '96 and it was snowing. I had bought a new CD, Actual Miles: Henley's Greatest Hits. I was coming back into town on the main road off the Interstate. This highway comes down a hill and there is a small bridge over a creek at the bottom. Just a slab of concrete with a guardrail on the top. On the way down the hill I was looking at my new CD and not paying much attention to the road. All of the sudden I look up and the car is headed in a very bad direction. I was pointed toward that creek.

In a moment of quick thining I managed to crank the wheel over and get mostly on the road, but my right front tire managed to hit the bridge. I got the car stopped, but it was completely undrivable. The front wheel was seriously flat and the wheel taco'ed. My only choice was to get out and walk the mile or so into town and get back to the house, not a relishing thought on a cold Colorado winter blizzard. It wasn't long before a nice couple in a Forerunner headed out of town had pity on me, actually turned around and picked me up.

When I got back to the house, of course my roomates were all home and gave me a seriously hard time when they found out. One of my good friends lived in the next town over, being a mechanical type he had a wheel for my car. I gave him a call and he drove out and we put a new wheel on my old Cutlass and made it back into town.

I got it fixed and drove it for a while after that. Not sure what it was about that car, but it sure caused me some trouble.

My idea of stupid.

Bobby 6 Comments

It's amazing to me how the Internet, blogs in particular, can bring out the arrogance in us all. Somehow we all think we are smarter than everyone else and anyone who doesn't fit into our social group must be 'stupid'. Now, I am not pointing any fingers – everyone who knows me will gladly testify that I do more than my share of finger pointing and mocking, but a person must be careful.

Found this post today where a woman was making fun of a 'redneck' who wanted to inform her about a problem with the brake lights on her car.

Now I'm not going to give my opinion of who the 'stupid' one was in this situation. I'm not going to make any kind of value judgement about the well meaning gentleman who kindly attempted to help out a stranger. Nor am I going to criticize a person who would make snap stereotypical judgements about a person based solely on the vehicle they drive and their manner of dress while said person is operating an unsafe automobile. Instead I'm going to share an anecdote about my experience with broken brake lights.

1976 Olds Cutlass

About 10 years ago I was living with four friends. I was young, between jobs, and working for my Dad on the farm. Needless to say I wasn't exactly swimming with cash, so my choice of automobile was a 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass. Now it just so happened that the brake lights didn't work in this car. Taillights were fine, but there were NO brake lights. I tried to fix it a couple times, but couldn't ever figure out what was wrong. Not having the money to get it fixed by a professional, I'm ashamed to say, I just drove it that way. The best I could do was try to pull the headlights on when I was coming to a stop to give the drivers behind some warning.

This was all well and good until one fateful sunday morning. I was on my way to church and headed out of town on the main two lane highway. There was a dirt road shortcut I could take a left on, so when I got to the intersection I stopped to wait for traffic to clear. Now this road was busy then (and is even busier now – not that it matters for this story. It was in a semi-rural area at the time and there was a large drop off of 6-10 feet on the right side of the road down into an irrigation ditch, kind of a gully.

While I innocently sat waiting for traffic I failed to notice the car behind me. As I made my left turn I glanced in the rearview mirror. To my horror I watched the top half of a car dissappear in a cloud of dust of the opposite side of the road. Some innocent driver had not seen my car stopped, probably due to my lack of brake lights, and at the last second drove his car off the shoulder and into the chasm beyond.

With a snap judgement I determined that there were other cars around who would stop to help and I would probably go to jail for causing an accident if I turned around, so I proceeded on my merry way. Again, not a decision I am proud of. I spent the next hour or so sitting in the back of the church, waiting for uniformed law enforcement officers to appear and cart me away. Fortunately for me this never happened. In fact I never even found out what happened. Nothing ever made the papers, so I assume that the people in the car were OK.

As I was thinking about sharing this story this afternoon a thought occured to me. While I didn't think about it at the time, in retrospect the driver's decision to, literally, ditch the car could be the only reason I'm here right now. Being rearended at 50 mph probably would not have been good for my health. I did learn a lesson from this incident and shortly thereafter found another means of transportation.

The moral of this story is, if you are driving around without brake lights, get them fixed. The life you save may be your own.

Do I have Bulimia????

Bobby

Appearantly many people have Bulimia and don't know it because they don't puke.

Bulimia is widely known as a “binge-purge” eating disorder, in which a person goes through cycles of excessive eating followed by purging — through either vomiting or abusing laxatives and diuretics.

But there are also non-purging forms of bulimia, where tactics like excessive exercise or strict dieting are used to counter binge-eating episodes.

Now the LAST thing I want to do is diminish the dangers of eating disorders, but where do you draw the line? Does this mean that when I have a big Sunday dinner and spend the rest of the week watching my diet and putting time in at the gym I have an eating disorder?

There are fitness experts that actually promote this type of lifestyle as a healthy means of weightloss. I have done this myself and had good success, but now this article says these are symptoms of an eating disorder. I am so confused.

God is moving… to Fort Collins

Bobby

Academy Patch
Back in 1992 I was accepted to the now defunct Irl C. Martin Academy of Industrial Science. The Academy was a training program offered by Woodward Governor Company. How I got there was a bit of a long story, but suffice it to say I wasn't so smart in my younger days and didn't go to college. I thought this program would be a good way to get some education, and I probably wasn't wrong. Due to the dissolution of the Academy program Woodward Governor paid for my associates degree… and then unceremoniously fired me the day I graduated.

My time with Woodward was a bit ironic. Woodward used to be a very old school company. They provided doctors, barbers and made everyone wear neckties. I still remember sitting in my 6th grade reading class during career day listening to the WGC representative describe his work environment and thinking to myself I couldn't possibly ever work for such a draconian company. Eight years later I was a student in it's prize training program.

One other good thing did come out of my tenure there. Due to my employment there my sister was encouraged to join their recruit program. This was a summer internship for students starting in high school. For their first couple years they were members of the grounds crew (WGC was VERY proud of their grounds) and as they got older they were taken into the production floor. It was on this electrical production floor that my sister met her husband.

WGC originated in Rockford Illinois and the corporate headquarters were there. A couple times a year the brass in Rockford would get on the intercom and we got to listen to the CEO give an address to all the plants simultaneously. The running joke for employees was that 'God lives in Rockford'.

Imagine my joy when I found out that, as of January 1 2007, God is moving to Fort Collins.

The Day After

Bobby

As part of the Sci Fi channel's Thanksgiving Weekend programming they aired the 1983 Made-for-TV movie The Day After.

For those of you not familiar with this movie, it was a Reagan era nuclear war protest movie showing the worst potential results of a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Russians. As horriffic as a mutual assured destruction scenario would be, this movie is exceedingly bleak due to the utter dispair of the characters in the story. As the movie winds down there is absolutely no hope for any kind of future. American citizens completely revert to a primtive state – a little over the top, but it was the 80's.

In 1983 I was 11 years old, in the sixth grade. I remember distinctly the original broadcast of The Day After – primarily because my parents wouldn't let us watch it. It was a big deal at the school. I don't remember now if the teachers were advocating watching the movie, or just responding to the questions of the students, but it was the talk of the school for several days. Of course, I was the only one of my friends who didn't get to see it, not that I fault my parents for that. It probably wasn't good viewing material for an 11 year old.

The biggest thing that struck me as I watched this classic piece of cold war media was how much our world has changed. From the 1950s to the 1980s the whole world lived under the spectre of a nuclear attack that could have destroyed civilization as we know it. Now, the worst that we could possibly picture is a single madman setting off a single device, probably closer to a dirty bomb than a 25 Megaton ICBM. While terrorist activities are still valid threats, they are literally many degrees of magnitude lower than what we faced a mere two decades ago. In spite of the diminished threat and relatively safe world we currently live in we still allow a constant fear cloud our political and social decisions. Of course, the 9/11 attacks did unequivocally demonstrate that terrorism can and will happen here in the US. Still, it's unfortunate that our society isn't able to mature and face threats rationally.

Vick makes obscene gesture

Bobby

Michael Vick

After this Sunday's 31-13 loss to the New Orleans Saints, Atlanta Falcons star quarterback, Michael Vick, felt the need to give the crowd an obscene gesture.

What is with this guy? This is his 5th year in the league, he is an amazingly talented player, why can't he act like a professional. Sure, he was labeled this week as a “coach killer”, but his behavior only helps confirm statements like that.

I sincerely hope Vick can get his act together. If he could act like a decent human being I could root for him and enjoy watching him play. Careers in the NFL are very short, Vick needs to figure this out and get serious about the game and show some leadership while he still has time.

Missed Opportunities

Bobby

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. As our tradition, the whole family got together at my Grandmother's house. She has cooked holiday meals for years (and hopefully will be able to continue for a while longer). Tuesday afternoon I was asked to provide a dessert.

Of course, my first reaction was to peruse the recipe sites on the Internet and find an appetizing concotion that didn't appear too hard to make. I Googled the term 'Thanksgiving Dessert Recipes' and found this likely candidate, which I will discuss further here, from the first Google result, a site named Razzle Dazzle Recipes.

I bookmarked the link, and that evening as I was preparing for my Thanksgiving Eve trip to the grocery store I attempted to pull the page up again. I was shocked to see Razzle Dazzle Recipes was not available. My guess is that EVERYONE was looking for Thanksgiving Dessert Recipes and Razzle Dazzle exceeded their bandwidth. What a missed opportunity this is? It's the biggest day to search for Thanksgiving related recipes, your site is at the top of the Google results and your site goes down. In fact, I'm not sure if the site was even running any advertisements prior to it's failure – I don't remember any (It definitely is now). I don't know if the poor Razzle Dazzle people even made any money off their site prior to the server melting down.

Fortunately, for me, Razzle Dazzle weren't the only ones with this particular recipe, so I was able to find it elsewhere and avert a Thanksgiving disaster.

The moral of the story is, if you operate a website, it's always good to be prepared. Be sure you are prepared to handle, and if it's your goal, to monetize the unexpected traffic. There is nothing worse than getting thousands or millions of hits and not being ready.