Blowing in the New Year

Hold onto your hats, ladies and gentlemen....nothing special, I'm just saying hold onto your hat because if you don't it is going to blow away.

Quite windy up here the last week. Since about Monday we've had some pretty serious winds, which the news is saying should be dying down sometime this evening. I am ready for it! The sustained winds have just been really annoying all week. Our garbage can blew away on Tuesday since nobody was home to put it away after the garbage truck came. I found it yesterday about 70 yards away caught in the root system of an overturned tree. The majority of my exterior Christmas decorations have come down or have been blown away; the tree which I took such care to weigh and strap down came down the other day, and most of our lights have been blown off their gutter hooks. I found some of my garlands rolling across the yard, tumbleweed-style, and one of the big red bows is still stuck in a bush around the side of the house.

But so far there's been no damage, so, keep your fingers crossed that we'll ring in the New Year calmly and not with a tree down in the yard.

All that aside, the holidays are quickly winding down up here, and it's bittersweet for me. We had a great time hosting Cameron's family for Christmas. Some of my family came to visit Colorado, and it was very nice to have them come up and spend a day in Estes, even if it was a bit windy while they were here. The holidays are a good way for me to stay very busy--all that cleaning and cooking and entertaining--and now I am left with a little bit of uncertainty about what to do now. This week I made three trips to Denver in three days, visiting old friends and family and last night, seeing the Broadway tour of West Side Story with Cameron and my parents. While on the one hand it's going to be nice to have a couple days to decompress (and clean!) after the hubbub of the last week or so, I'd still rather have things lined up to do. This will be the first time since we moved in that we have not really had anything directly around the corner to be planning or preparing for, and since I am only working one day a week, it could be a very long end to the winter. I am hoping that some jobs might start to open up soon and I can have something else to do until spring.

That being said, 2012 is guaranteed to be a very busy and exciting year for us, with the wedding happening in October. I am also hoping that this year will be the year that I find an agent who will publish my book. My resolutions for 2011 were to finish my book and start sending queries to agents before the end of the year, and I did both of those things! This year, I resolve to find an agent and make this year the year that I publish. I also resolve to read more--something you'd think I'd be better at, but I'm not. (Sometimes it's hard for writers to read as much as we're supposed to, since often if you're writing at the same time as you're reading, your own voice has the chance to shift if you're not paying close attention.) But I digress.

May 2012 bring you joy and happiness, and most of all, I hope that you have a very fun and safe New Year's Eve from wherever you might be and whoever you might be with. Until next time!

Awakened by Mountain Lions on Christmas Night

It was two in the morning 

when I woke from a dreaming sleep

to the sound of mountain lions

screaming in the night.

They were close, so much that I worried

they had caught the scent

of the turkey carcass in the garbage

even though we'd taken such care

to double wrap the bag.

They went on crying

from somewhere behind the house

and we lay there together listening

to the eerie sounds on Christmas night.

A coyote joined in then, barking,

and we figured there was a deer, or

some dead animal to be fought over

in the field next to the house,

the one owned by the horse ranch next door.

I rose out of bed to see if I could spot them,

but the night was too dark to see.

In the kitchen I found the cat had

gotten into the streudel and knocked it

to the floor, perhaps feeling

inadequate to his pre-historic ancestors

fighting outside the windows in the cold inky night.

After a minute the cries and barking faded

and I thought about who had made off victorious

with whatever had encouraged the fight

and who had been left cold and hungry

as the winds started to descend

into the valley.

I returned to bed in silence

but was bothered by the sound of the dog

who had snuck a piece of streudel off the floor

and was crunching away on his snack

from down at the foot of the bed.

Here Comes Santa Claus....hope he packed his long underwear....

Because it's bloody cold up here!

This is after we received just about a foot of snow yesterday. My car is stuck at the bottom of the hill below our house because neither Cameron nor I could get our vehicles up the incline that is our driveway. This is what my car looked like yesterday...before I had to leave the driveway.

I happen to love the snow and I'm glad we're in for a White Christmas, but I'm not thrilled about the prospect of being unable to get up the driveway--especially since I haven't yet done my grocery shopping and the notion of lugging a turkey and other Christmas dinner trimmings (plus food for us and the in-laws for the next few days) up my drive is a bit daunting. I guess I could leave them in the car for a while, not like anything's going to thaw out there anyway...

As chilly as those pictures look, we are actually pleasantly warm in here. That picture of the temperature read says that it's about 62 in here which might seem chilly to some, but it's not terrible. (Could be worse.) Although we only have one large Coleman heater (from probably the 60s) that does not blow air, we stay fairly cozy. My parents bought us a very handy space heater that warms up a room almost to the point of being too warm. I just hope that our visitors staying with us over the next few days will be sufficiently warm. (Although to be fair, 3/4 of them are from Kansas and Chicago, so I have no doubt they'll do fine.) It's all about the long underwear!

And when in doubt....there's always Longs Peak.

"Business? Mankind was my business!"

Well, we are within spitting distance of Christmas now. Conveniently, I've come down with something. Cameron came home last week from a trip to Chicago with a sinus infection, so I'm really hoping that it's not that and I can just knock it out with Vitamin C and rest and not have to make a trip to the doctor. Too much to do! Cameron's family arrives on Friday to stay for the holiday, which means I have to spend some time deep-cleaning this little house. (I am still perpetually amazed at how messy it gets with only the 2 of us.) I also have to shop for food and get everything prepared for the cooking of my very first turkey for Christmas dinner!

In the meantime, though, I'll share with you my wonderful experience acting in a recent production of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It was produced by the Estes Park Repertoire Theater Company, a little community theater here in Estes that has done 14 productions in the last 3 years. I spotted their casting call ad in the paper before we had even moved to Estes and I came up to audition. I did a lot of theatre in high school and in college (I have a minor in Theatre Arts) and I really enjoy it, so I was eager to have some opportunities in Estes and to meet some people. In addition, A Christmas Carol is one of my favorite Christmas stories and is very close to my heart both from a literature standpoint and from my own personal memories. Every Christmas Eve, my family and I sit down to watch the George C. Scott version of the story, so the story is very close to me and I was very excited to get to be a part of a staged version.

The version we performed was a much abridged version from the normal story. It only ran about an hour long and was narrated, and as a result much of the excellent points the story makes were "lost in translation" as it were, but I still think it was a good version that covered most of the best points. I was originally cast as Mrs. Cratchit--with a whole two lines!--and so I also invested serious time in the tech aspect, which is something else I also enjoy. I helped built the set and designed several of the set and prop pieces, including Scrooge's grave and the Cratchit's Christmas turkey. About two weeks out from the production's opening, one of the young ladies had to drop out of the play and I assumed the role of Belle, Scrooge's past flame, in one of the flashback scenes he witnesses with the Ghost of Christmas Past.

That's me in the middle there as Mrs. Cratchit--and actually I'm here half in and half out of both of my costumes; the photographers for the newspaper didn't have enough time to allow us to fully change in and out of our costumes, for those of us who had more than one role, so I really just had to throw some extras on top of my Belle costume.

We played the last 2 weekends to very receptive crowds. It was a wonderful experience and I'm very glad that I was able to participate; and even more, I'm very glad to have been so accepted by the theater company. I've never felt so welcomed by a group of people, and I think that speaks largely of the kind of community that we have up here in Estes. (If you know theatre people at all, you know that sometimes they can be somewhat standoffish, from a competitive standpoint, until you're allowed in the club, but I felt like a member of the family right away.) They've already asked me to join the board of directors as the Assistant Director of Productions. Next year we have on tap a production of the musical Nunsense II in the spring and in the fall, Ira Levin's Deathtrap, and any other productions have yet to be decided on. I would love to be involved and potentially direct Deathtrap, but depending on the timing I might not be able to because of the wedding.

Here are some photos to share with you from the production. All photos are courtesy of the Estes Park Trail Gazette and the Estes Park News.

Backstage with Scrooge, Michael Dzik, with his tombstone, designed by yours truly.

Little Tiny Tim, 8-year-old Woody Moreau.

Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come--the latter was played by 82-year-old Margie Corcoran, a former restaurant owner here in Estes. We had a very wide range of actors and experiences in this production.

Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past, Mark Edwards. He is also new to town and the only other "newcomer" to the company.

The cast at large. Some of the roles had to be changed to fit the actors we had available--so for example, Scrooge's nephew, Fred, was changed to his niece, Elizabeth (Gracie Moreau, seated at left) and the Collector and the Ghost of Christmas Present was also changed from a male to a female part (Christann Higley, seated at right). That's me again in the back with the red and blue cape, to the left of Scrooge.

So, at this time of the Christmas season, whatever you may believe, I'll leave you with the words of Tiny Tim:
"A Merry Christmas to all, and God bless us, everyone!"

Preparing for Christmas

The last few days have been quite pleasant up here in Estes. Daily temperatures have been in the mid-high 30s and with the exception of today there's been nearly no wind. Delightful! Most of the snow from the last fall has melted, except on the north-facing areas of town where the sun doesn't hit.

On Saturday, we experienced a full lunar eclipse. We are lucky to have seen the majority of it, as it appears that most of the other residents of town were too low in the valley to see much of it. We weren't able to see totality before it slipped behind the mountains, but we saw almost all of the first phase. It started at roughly 6:05 in the morning, and by the time it disappeared it was just before 7. I am lucky that my parents happened to be visiting for the weekend and it helped get me out of bed in time to see it!

Although the weather here has been peaceful lately, it's been a little tumultuous over the edge of Long's Peak. If I could figure out how to do a time-lapse video of it, I would. The changes in atmosphere around it at any given time are stunning. Here's two photos taken just about 15 hours apart of the old boy:

On the wildlife front, we have deer and elk prints literally beneath our bedroom window. Perhaps I need to set up a security camera of some sort, if only to see what time of day they are coming by, because we have yet to see any of them. Although to be honest, I think the idea of waking in the early hours of the morning to an elk outside the window might be a bit frightening. Just about an hour ago, I was sitting in my office on the computer and something dog-sized and white ran right by the window. I have a feeling it was the neighborhood coyote, but it could have been a bobcat. On a not-so-nice point, I found what I believe was a Black Widow spider in a pile of boxes I had set aside for recycling this morning. This was not so exciting for me, because I am terrified of spiders. I dumped the lethargic bugger out onto the snow and promptly squished it. I had assumed that because of the cold, the spiders had gone dormant for the season, but I guess not. Yuck!

Tomorrow is my Christmas cookie-making day. One of our neighbors recently brought us a hefty stockpile of elk meat (shot in our yard, coincidentally) so I have a pile of cookies planned to thank him for the gift. Christmas is quickly on its way and Estes looks lovely with all its Christmas livery on. With any luck, I'll be able to get some photos of the downtown area with its nighttime lights on. In the meantime, here's a photo of Conklin House all ready for Christmas...well, not including my exterior Christmas tree, which is currently making its stage debut in my production of A Christmas Carol with the Estes Park Repertoire Theatre Company...which I'll update about this weekend before we close.

Meeting All the Neighbors

The wildlife up here is fascinating. Just the other day that coyote I saw a few weeks back walked through the front yard. I discovered elk poo in the yard yesterday, which means that it was exceptionally close to the house. (Usually they come through the back.) There's a bobcat in the neighborhood, though we're not sure where, and a couple mornings ago we woke to hear mountain lions in the distance talking to each other. (If you've never heard a mountain lion, it's kind of freaky, like someone is screaming in the distance.)

And then of course there are the birds. Yesterday I came home to a bunch of ravens hanging out in the front yard, which I think is great. I love ravens and crows; they're wickedly smart and I think beautiful birds. (In fact, the ring tone on my new phone is the call of an American crow.) Cameron's uncle gave us a window feeder so that we could see the birds come right to the window and not have to worry about the bears. (I hope.) It took a while for them to find it, but now they're in it all the time: mostly pygmy nuthatches, mountain chickadees, and sparrows. They all hang out in the tree off the porch and chatter away at lunchtime. It's great. This morning, I had a Steller's Jay at the window. That's one of these:

They're relatives of blue jays and are common in the area although this is the first one I've seen. He tried to get to the feeder and then realized he was too big. When that happened he sat on a branch of the tree over the porch, looking in the window at me, and started screaming at me. Evidently he was none too happy. All in all I'm not crazy about having a Jay at my feeder because they are kind of mean and I know he will chase away all the nuthatches and chickadees. Did you know that jays will mimic the call of a bird of prey so that the other birds in the area will take off and leave their nests unattended? Then the jay will invade the nest and kill their babies. Yeesh.

December sure came in with a bang

And a severe fall of the temperature!

Since the first of the month we've had 3 major snow events, each bringing about 3 inches or more. Nothing too serious; in fact, most of the Denver metro area got significantly more snow than we did. It's typical Colorado snow, though, which means that it'll snow overnight and we'll wake up to a crystalline snowfield, but the sun comes out immediately and will shine all day even if it remains cold. It's one of the reasons I can handle Colorado winters.

Still, that being said....it's about 9 in the morning now, bright blue skies and full sunshine and not a cloud in the sky...and it's still ten below zero. Yeesh! When I took the dog out for his morning business I was afraid he would freeze and get stuck....

This is what I found this morning when I woke up. Our front windows are great, but unfortunately they're only single pane, a design flaw if ever there was one. I know this house was built a long time ago, but surely someone must have realized recently that single pane windows are not feasible in Estes Park in the winter. (Our landlord said he would have a second pane put on when we signed the lease, but he hasn't come through yet. Hm.)

The good thing is that when the sun comes around the front of the house, it melts right off. It's just a little disconcerting the first time you see ice on the inside of your house.

In any event, we are staying warm and enjoying it all the same. The dog loves the snow.

Now, with any luck, I'll be able to get my car to start so I can make it to rehearsal tonight!

Storm incoming?

If you've lived in Colorado or even just visited for any amount of time, you know that the weather forecasts are usually mixed up with the humor section in the newspaper - because it's usually wrong, at least in the foothills and Denver metro area. But up here in the "high country" it's usually a tiny bit more accurate.

That being said, I'm excited to see if we'll actually be getting this tomorrow:

If we do, it will be nice because I actually have a full day off--no work or rehearsal--and it will be nice to just get the house cleaned for my parents' visit this weekend. On the other hand, I didn't make it to the store to stock up on any foodstuffs...so I might have to enlist the help of the fiance when he gets off of work and make him go to the store while he's in town!

Welcome December!

"Tuesday Morning on Highway 34"

jackrabbit flapjack
crows pick at fur flesh and bone
cars - crows fly away

Happy Thanksgiving

From all of us here in Estes Park, a happy and safe Thanksgiving to you and  yours.

Here's Whiskey trying to "help" with the pie making effort.

Here I was complaining about the lack of wildlife...

...because it had been nearly a week and we hadn't seen any elk or deer up close. Got my wish today! It was so pleasant today and the elk were out and about in town. About 6:15 this evening I went to my rehearsal (for A Christmas Carol) and spotted two magnificent bull elk grazing in the grass near the bottom of my driveway.

I wasn't able to get a great picture, but you can see one of them here:

When I came home, I turned onto our road and almost drove right into the two of them! They were standing in the middle of the road just hanging out. I was too scared to try to drive through them so I sat there with my brights on for a minute and they stared back at me, a little perturbed that I was disrupting their munching time, and finally I honked my horn and it spooked them just enough that they cleared off the road and I was able to drive through. I'd heard horror stories from my dad's time living in Alaska about moose ramming cars so I was worried that I might provoke these two bull elk into the same kind of anger if I drove past them, but they were content enough to let me through.

How To Get Internet in the Boonies

I didn't think we were that remote when we moved here. We are within sight of state highway 34, surely we can't be that far from civilization. The KOA next door offers free wi-fi to its guests, so it can't be that inaccessible.

We found out otherwise when we tried to get internet installed at our house.

Qwest, the bigger of the 2 major service providers in Colorado, said that they couldn't service us because they haven't laid ground lines on this side of town yet. Comcast doesn't even service the city at all. So our other option was to go with a company called Airbits, which is a local company that provides point-to-point wifi. Basically, they have a giant mother router, and they send out little baby routers to your house. If your router (or radio box) can see the mother radio box, you can receive wifi internet.

So this is what we have now:

It's not terribly fast internet, at least as opposed to what we were used to having when we lived in normal civilization, but it's still internet. The verdict is still out on whether or not it's fast enough to stream our shows on Netflix, but I'm still grateful to have it.

And that's how you get internet in the boonies.

They Don't Tell the Tourists about the Wind

....which will be the title of my memoir, if I ever write one.

In any event, onward!

We arrived in Estes Park with our moving truck last Friday. In the last week we've been living here, it's been a period of adjustment. Adjusting to a house that was built in the 20s and therefore was electrified before the advent of 3-prong electrical plugs. Adjusting to the fact that it's just going to be cold in the house most nights. And yeah, adjusting to the fact that this is our front yard:

The other thing we've had to adjust to is the wind. My goodness does it get windy up here. Of course, we were lucky enough to get here just in time for some pretty severe winds (we had gusts of 100mph on Saturday) that are not always the norm. That storm did some pretty good damage to other parts of Estes, including knocking down some pretty big trees, but it seems that we are far enough down the valley that we didn't get the worst of it. It does seem to be pretty breezy almost all the time though, which is something that I'm still getting used to. The house we live in is a wood frame, and old, and it creaks a lot. It's an adjustment.

All in all we are almost all settled in. We discovered a crawl space under the house and were able to throw a couple of plastic bins with duct tape under there to save some room. We finally got cable installed yesterday, and although finding an internet provider was a bit of a challenge at first, we have our service arriving on Friday. It was a little challenging to be so cut off from the world for a couple of days. This is the first time I've gotten my computer online in almost a week. Almost everything is put away now, excepting the second bedroom which is being used as my office when we don't have visitors. The problem we're running across with that room is that the electric rung heater doesn't seem to work, so it's very cold in there unless the sun is shining right into the windows. The other problem is that we threw out two bookshelves that were in bad condition, and because I have a lot of books, most of them are still boxed and on the floor. So there's not a lot of navigation room in there as of yet. In fact, by and large, it still looks just like this:

But we were surprised to find upon moving all of our furniture into the place last week that we have more room than we were anticipating. We were also pleased to find that the closets have a ton of storage space above them (because we have a vaulted ceiling) so that helped a lot. 

It's a cozy little place, and I like it quite a lot. Best of all, my green children love it.

We haven't seen too much wildlife lately, although I suspect that because it's been so exceptionally windy, the animals are all bedding down to keep warm. I saw a positively enormous coyote at the end of my driveway this morning, although I wasn't able to get a picture. (I'm discovering that it's probably best if I carry my camera with me everywhere!) He was a good-looking guy, although he was favoring his left paw. According to one of the baristas at Starbucks, he's a local and has been injured for quite a while. We did get an up-close encounter with this handsome fellow on our way up the valley a couple of days ago:

We know that there are deer nearby, because we've found scat within 25 yards of the back door. Just haven't seen any of the culprits yet! As for our animals, they're settling in nicely. Brody, the dog, was a little skittish for the first couple of days, I think because the sound of the wind was making him nervous. We've been trying to get him used to being out on his chain so that he can spend some time outside (we don't have a fence and I worry about him running for it if he spots an animal), but so far all he's done if we walk away and leave him is cry. Another adjustment. The last couple of days he's been fine though. 

Whiskey, the cat, has been nonplussed from day one. He was in control since the moment he walked into the house, as you can see.

Estes Park has been very welcoming to us so far. The community here is beautiful and the people are wonderful. I've never felt so immediately welcomed. I think we are going to fit in very, very well here.

Until next time.

Welcome

Hi! Thanks for visiting. Whether you're here because I shamelessly plugged or because you're interested in learning more about Estes Park, I'm glad you're here. I'll get into more of what this blog is for in a moment--but for now I'd like to introduce myself.

I'm Stephanie, and this is my fiancé, Cameron.....(we're getting married next October)

this is our dog, Brody, and our cat, Whiskey.....

and this is the Conklin House.

Right now we live in Fort Collins, Colorado, but in less than a week, we are going to be residents of the Conklin House. And the Conklin House is in Estes Park, Colorado. In case you're unfamiliar with Colorado, Estes Park is northwest of Denver and sits right at the base of Longs Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park, and the Continental Divide. It's well-known for the elk that come right into town in the autumn and for the Stanley Hotel, famous for being fantastically haunted and for being the inspiration for Stephen King's The Shining. 

Estes is situated at about 7,500 feet in elevation. Its first white visitors settled in the valley in 1859. Most cities in Colorado, especially mountain cities, were founded because they had some useful resource like gold or silver. Estes Park was founded mostly because people thought that it was paradise. And let's face it--it is! How'd you like to have this be your front yard?

That's Longs Peak in the middle. The peak just to the left of it is the Twin Sisters. Longs Peak is a whopping 14,259 feet tall. Cameron and I are making plans to ascend it sometime next summer.

In any case--we're moving to Estes Park for work. Cameron is a store manager and just got the opportunity to come to Estes to manage a store here and of course we snapped it up right away, even though we just moved to Fort Collins about 5 months ago. I'm a writer, or at least I'm trying to be. And that means that I can do what I love from wherever I want. That being said, I thought it would be a great opportunity to write about the place that we live in now, since it just begs to be documented daily. "A Year at Conklin House" refers to the fact that we believe we'll only be living in this particular house for about a year, hopefully with the intent of saving some money and finding a different and bigger place to move to after that. We got the notice that we were moving to Estes Park so fast that we didn't have a whole lot of time to look for places, and on top of that, most rentals in Estes are considered "out of season" after Labor Day and as the demand decreases, so does the selection. We figure we'll have all year to nail down a beautiful place to spend some more long-term time in after this year.

But for the time being, the Conklin House it is. We know that it was built in 1925 in a "neighborhood" that was populated mostly by rich folk from out east who used Estes as their summer getaway. And that's where we figure it got its name from. We also know that most of the interior of it is way more recent than 1925, so we are thinking that it was completely renovated when the demand for long-term housing hit the market with people who wanted to move to Estes year round. I'm going to spend some time in the local library to find out who or what Conklin refers to, and potentially try to find out what the house looked like back when it was built.

So I'll be keeping this blog updated with general goings-on around and in Estes, our adventures in Rocky Mountain National Park (one of our favorite places and where we got engaged), all the beautiful pictures we can capture, and perhaps the history I come across--I love history and Estes is chock full of it. So thanks for visiting, please add me to your follower list, and enjoy the view!