The Red State Blues

A free concert tonight at Avagadro's Number!

It's the Kathleen Strong band at Avo's Patio.

 Avo's seems to be the place to be for great live entertainment. I expect that we will stop by often.

Signs of Humanity, Part 1

Part one of our study is along College Avenue, South of CSU.

M&E Painting assures you will receive the best paint job available by today’s professional standards. It keeps the CSU grad students off the streets during the Summer too!

This walking sign was captured near a car dealership.

Directional ability is important for this torso'ed sign.

So, you think you can dance?

It's Friday in Old Town... Ya gotta dance!

People love to dance around here. I never saw so many public dance displays back in the Mid-West.  On the 4th-Of-July we saw some guy dancing to the 1812 Overture! It seems that at any live music event there is going to be someone who will get up and start moving to the music.  I expected to see people dancing to the 1000 drum symphony, but never to the Fort Collins Symphony Orchestra.

Fashion and Traditions of Mourning in Victorian Society

Time for some Fort Collins History!
The Avery House is an historic home in Fort Collins, built in 1879, by Franklin Avery - founder of the FoCo First National Bank. This week the historical society exhibit was "Fashion and Traditions of Mourning in Victorian Society". I think the exhibit will continue through October, as it is listed in Hauntedcolorado.net's "Fun & Spooky things to do October 2008 during this Halloween season!'

Marcia, our Avery House docent for this day, is shown here next to the piano in the Avery living room. She is wearing traditional mourning clothes of the early 1900's.

Fort Collins has Franklin Avery to thank for the wide streets in Fort Collins; he took advantage of the open spaces when he surveyed the town in 1873.

Horsetooth Reservoir revisited

It's a warm day, and we need a break! We had these old truck tire tubes that needed to be broken in for Colorado fun! They are good for floating on the water, but they may also be good for sliding in the snow! ...down a mountain! It could happen!
Anyhow, Horsetooth Reservoir is just down the road from us, and they have a little swim beach. Here we are, floating on the reservoir:

It was very relaxing...

and sometimes entertaining!

The reservoir is large enough that we could take months exploring by kayak before we decide on taking on the Poudre River. Perhaps by next Spring we will have the proper equipment. The rubber tire tube just isn't enough!

Team Whatever!: Archive # 1032

The Olympics are over! & we didn't get invited to attend the DNC!

There's work to do around the house, so here's some pictures of some RAGBRAI Team buses!

Drum Archives #709

There's work to be done! No time to screw around town with the camera! Here, listen to this guy:

UU Sunday Brunch

This morning we went to the UU Brunch. A fiddle player and two guitarists were there!

It sounded like we know all the old favorites!

We will do this again soon!

Today I'm hooking up the electrical circuits in the basement to get our hot tub working and to get better lighting in the work room. Jeanne is helping out at the UU yard sale. (As I am typing this, I can hear an old DC3 airplane overhead! I wonder if there's another air show at the Ft.Collins/Loveland airport?)

City Park

We went to City Park today and did NOTHING!
There was a Greek Fest in town but we decided to pass on that...

Here's a little bit from yesterday's drum thing:

If I get a new gadget, it's going to be a good digital audio recorder. I could get better sound quality and add it to the video. 

1K Drum Symphony!!!

The Symphony is now over! And we had a grand time!

Thanks to our composer:

Halim El-Dabh

And our Director:

Grant Marquit

Analysis of the Symphony for 1000 Drums

Jeanne and I participated in the symphony. We brought with us a gig bag full of various percussion instruments including: claves, tambourine, tar, vibratone, rain stick, and cow bell. I also brought along my Canon GL1 digital video camcorder so I could take some candid frame shots of the action.

The composition was called 'Symphony for 1000 Drums'. Some anal types might ask 'Were there really 1000 drums at this symphony?' Well, were there?
It probably does not matter. Why couldn't you play the symphony with 900 drums, or even 500 drums? Hell, I play musical pieces clearly labeled 'FOR PIANO' on my banjo! Does it matter?

Oh, well, let us look at some pictures and review the evidence:

Clearly not every person there came to drum.

Sometimes as many as six people beat on ONLY ONE DRUM!!! How inefficient !

...and what the hell is this? That ain't no drum!


Hmm, lots o stuff here... probably 150 percussion pieces right there!
Native American drums, frame drums, ashikos. 20 more drums!
Perif- drums, about 100 or so.
At least 4 kit drums. With cymbals, that's gotta be 500 percussion instruments right there!
Djembes! Don't forget Djembes! Maybe 100 more!
I'm gonna count any noise making thing as a DRUM!
Four kettle drums!
The dancers clapped their hands! Add 12 more!
Rattles, sticks, etc. How about 200 of them!
They all had a great time making music!
All kinds of hand drums!
Frame drums!
Congas, Djembes, whatever!
Traps, dumbecs, tamas, dondos, tambours!
Talking drums, ashikos, bodrans, steels drums,
Dong sons, dhaks, cajons, log drums,
congas, bells, snare drums,
Casabas, tom-toms, maracas,
Even more Djembes!
another doumbek
wood blocks and washboards!
and more djembes!
Shakers!
At least 1000 drums, to be sure!

..and after the performance, a little ovation for the composer!

Symphony for 1000 Drums: The Rehearsal

Here is our first gig in Fort Collins!!! This evening was the rehearsal for an event sponsored by the Peace Corps Reunion Committee.

See if you can spot Jeanne drumming!

Crack houses

In the middle of nowhere there are these eight little houses all in a row...

They look pretty much the same. They each have fenced-in yards and giant window air conditioners.

The one on the left has a tree growing through the porch roof.

Bohemian Nights 2008

A free concert by Little Feat !

Holy crap! Some guy playing banjo, but it's not me!

It's none other than Dr. Banjo, Pete Wernick!

...at Bohemian Nights 2008 in Fort Collins. I have one of his banjo books somewhere packed away in the basement.

Oh! Deer!

Bohemian Nights 2008

This weekend there are free concerts in downtown Fort Collins! Tonight we saw Bongo Love and the Taj Mahal Trio. I had my camera, but I forgot to put the memory card back in, so Duh! No film!! Tomorrow should be better!

In other news:
The other night I went to the Horsetooth Mountain Drum Circle via the VW Cabrio. It was up in the foothills (where we looked at houses in March), so it was good to see how well I could drive on those narrow gravel roads at night. Actually, it has not been too much of a problem so far, but I can imagine what it's like when there is ice and snow.
This was the second time I drove to the drum circle, but on the main highway past the horsetooth park, I came into contact with a deer crossing the road! I grazed it on the passenger side of the VW. The deer kept on running into the brush, so I am sure I didn't kill it, but I heard some car parts drop off of my vehicle.

Here is a picture of the front of the VW when I stopped for gas in Naperville, ILL last month.

This is the VW today. It looks like the parking light panel is now history!

We got some rain !

We usually have seen maybe 5 minutes of rain per week around here. Well, today it rained ALL DAY LONG!!! It was good to see rain!

I was traveling toward Ft. Collins about 40 miles east of town and going straight for this weather event. It was sunny and clear on three sides of this thing and for some reason I decided to drive right on into it.

More beer?

Here's equal time for the other small breweries in town:

I liked FCB. It was small, but friendly!

I'm not sure about Odell. It must have been a bad day for the employees. They didn't even say hello!

What the heck, here's more video of Mike:

Alice! Who the hell is Alice?

Hey, It looks like I had some video of Mike McAbee!

Observation

Of coarse we are watching the Olympics on NBC. It's all good stuff. However, there is one thing that I wonder about. When I see an NBC Olympic newscaster on the tube, they are wearing their Beijing logo on their clothes someplace:

Whenever I see the logo, I can't help but think of product placement. Is this a coincidence?

Nah! I'm just being weird, as usual!

Ice Cream!

RAGBRAI is over, but I still have over 5GB of photos and movies to look though. Also, right now we have been busy doing a few things around the house. So, the heck with bandwith, I'm going to post a few things this week in video format. 

I think I stopped at Beekman's home made ice cream maybe four or five times to have a root beer float.   The ice cream makers are powered by antique gas engines. There's even a 95 year-old man that hangs around the ice cream truck to fix the engines when they break down!

P-51

Mystery Lizard

A couple of years ago I purchased this plush doggy chew toy from the Dollar Store. The toy is some kind of lizard or salamander or something. It has a blue-green body color with yellow eyes and orange, red, yellow and blue legs. The toy made a squeak sound when the tail was pinched unlike the sound made by many of the salamanders found in North America. Why did I buy this toy? I do not own a dog! OK, I wanted something that was soft so I could rest my elbow on while I was driving the car!
It is just the right size and it works perfectly. And for one dollar, the price was right!
When not in use, the lizard gets stuffed into the car door pocket. This leads to some problems at times when the toy pops out of the door pocket and falls to the ground when the door is opened. This has happened a number of times but I was always quick to retrieve it and get it back into the pocket. But one time, the poor lizard was run over by the car, permanently damaging the squeak mechanism.

NOW COMES THE MYSTERY:

Last week we were in Winter Park and we had accommodations at the Pinnacle Lodge. We stopped in at the office to check in and I immediately noticed on the counter a plush doggy toy lizard that looked like the one that I owned. It seemed strange at the time, but I did not think much of it.
For the rest of the week I did not drive my car until check-out time. After the car was packed, I got into the driver's side and looked down at the car pocket for the lizard. IT WAS NOT THERE!!!
I went back to the Pinnacle Lodge office and asked if they had seen any sort of toy lizard lying around. They went to the back and brought out the lizard doggy toy. I inspected it carefully. It was the right size, shape, and color of my toy lizard AND THE SQUEAK MECHANISM WAS DAMAGED!!!!

WAS IT THE SAME LIZARD AND IF SO, HOW DID THE LIZARD GET THERE?

AM I NOW DRIVING AROUND WITH THE WRONG LIZARD IN MY CAR?

I have no clue!

Happy Birthday Natalie!

This week’s activities were planned over six months ago. We wanted to celebrate my MIL’s 80th birthday, and decided to have a little family reunion in Winter Park, Colorado. What we didn’t know then was that we would be living in Colorado by the time of the reunion!
We live about 3 hours from Winter Park, so will be taking some family members over the mountain pass to Fort Collins tomorrow. They will get a chance to see our house and we get to figure out how to drop people off at the Denver airport!

Hey, I just got these links from Roadside Boys member Tom Harrington:

Tom and I playing the Pork Chop Song

David the flying dentist

Raft trip?

On the Colorado River

The gang of ten shown here drying out

It was a great day for rafting!

Winter Park

So, as if riding a bike across Iowa was not enough a pain in the ass, I had to ride a horse too!

Here is Ben, a nice horse that only wanted to eat grass

Next, we will go on a rafting trip!

Fraiser, Co

It's a family party in the mountains this week!

The Fraiser Rodeo!

The sheep trampling event was funny!

On the road tomorrow!

Not much rest. On Saturday we are going up to RMNP to do some fun things!

Here is another picture from Boone, Iowa. I'm playing congas with these two street musicians. I can't remember their names. This was a pass-through town on RAGBRAI. If you know these guys, let me know who they are!