Musings of a minor megalomaniac
Francie has a couple of her newest friends from Plymouth State here visiting on summer break. No Colorado tourist activities are complete without a tour of the park, so we got that done last Tuesday. Allie and Annie seemed to enjoy it like everyone always does.
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So here we have Jessie James making the catch, and a football move to score. At WORST he recovers his own fumble in the end zone. What a bunch of cocksuckers those refs were.
Don’t take my word for it:
Many impressive statistics piled up during last Sunday’s big win over Baltimore to clinch the AFC North division once again. Regardless of your NFL team opinions, one number, statistic, and cold, hard fact stands out to me: 23. The Steelers have taken the division title 23 times since the 1970 merger – more than any other team in the league. They are unquestionably the class of the division, if not the conference and the whole league right now. Showdown time with the Patriots for #1 seed this season comes up this week. Here’s a few reasons for why New England is VERY worried after last Sunday’s Baltimore beat-down :
Many outstanding plays in this brutal slugfest at Paul Brown stadium last night. Unfortunately Ryan Shazier went to the hospital with a back injury in the 1st quarter. Pundits today are saying this game was the ugliest ever, with record a number of penalties and players on both sides receiving suspensions following illegal hits. Seems like the AFC North is the last real NFL holdout for old school smash-mouth football.
And Antonio Brown made his bid for what will most likely turn out to be the catch of the year, in a 40-17 drubbing of the Titans last night:
Finished sorting and posting photos from the trip this morning. See this page for all the details. Pictures from the Woodstock Museum in Bethel NY are at the bottom. I captured literally the entire place, inside and out, so this is probably the best you’ll ever see of it, unless you go there yourself. You can see Francie (#25 in white) making a nice strike during one of their games on homecoming day early in this little clip:
Hiking Buddy Jax and me recently spent a week up in Rocky Mountain National Park. We got all the way up Lily Mountain and within about 3 miles of Buchanan Pass this year. But I paid the price for over-doing it and took a week to recover this time around. So it looks like the Buchanan Pass goal is going to have to wait until after a left hip replacement. Despite making it about a mile further than last year, drug-assist is just not cutting it anymore. But I think starting a little earlier with a new left hip will be the future formula for success on the Buchanan Pass quest. Lion Gulch along the Little Thompson river is the last dog-friendly trail in the vicinity we have yet to explore. I think maybe we’ll be doing that on a day trip with Michelle sometime soon. The hiking boots will just have to collect dust until we get the necessary hip repairs completed. Here’s a page of Photos for the week.
I got antsy yesterday and decided to take a little drive up to Mt. Evans. It was 49F and blowing a steady 20-30mph wind at the summit. The last 1,000 ft. of the tourist trail was still snow covered. There seemed to be alot of cold people milling about under-dressed, having obviously overlooked the elevation temperature change. It was 95F down at our place. I saved a dozen shots of the spectacular views for this page.
We managed to accomplish my annual camping trip in the Rockies this week after missing it last year due to excessive mundane life obligations. Home renovations, kids, projects and other miscellaneous activities just ate up all my time. I had a reservation in Moraine Park campground like always, but ended up cancelling it due to irreconcilable scheduling issues. It seemed odd, since I was technically supposed to be retired as of around February, 2015.
But anyway, we got it done this year – “we” meaning me and Jax, We headed for higher ground only the day after Carolyn and Ron departed following a 10-day stay for their 2016 summer vacation. They were only really “here” less than half that time, out driving all over Colorado trying to see as much as they could in a short period of time. Taking them on a little tour of the park last Thursday was really cool because I got two opportunities to breathe the clean air this year AND Carolyn and me got to re-create a 50-year-old photo of us sitting along Raindow Curve, taken by our parents on a trip to California in the early 60’s. It more than made up for missing it last year.
This pic was along the Buchanan Pass trail out of Camp Dick, south of the park. It’s a 9-mile hike to the pass through some amazing and even dangerous terrain (link to trail details). I had to leash Jax more than once when he was excitedly running around too close to the edge of a 100-foot cliff. He was having a GREAT time:
We did two other “dog friendly” trails the day prior to that and maybe a bit less than half the Buchanan Pass hike before I ran out of steam due to aging joints despite taking Tylenol at the trailhead. It looks like this one may join the north side of Bear Lake on the list of trail goals I am no longer able to complete. The National Park anti-dog trail policy doesn’t really bother me any more, because I’ve already hiked most of them and the National Forest and Larimer county regions nearby have all the same stuff with far fewer tourists clogging up the scenery. Here’s a link to the web page with all the photos from our 4-day hiking trip. Pup (and me!) was worn out by the time we headed back down via road 7 and some fun cutting curves with the Bimmer on new Ohlins coilovers:
