An Apt Team Name

[fish_tie]

It occurs to me that I forgot to post last week's bowling night. It is quite possibly due to the fact that I did so abysmally that my denial apparatus went into overdrive to block it all out. I truly tanked my average by bowling a 97, 110 and 101. A series where I barely broke a hundred average really jarred my senses a bit. There was a moment

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Re: Hey! Flashback city!

[lafemmemakita]

Two years ago, when it looked like the Broncos had a slim chance of surviving the playoffs, I brewed up some homemade hooch out of persimmons. If drunk within the first 2 weeks, which would have been about Superbowl time, persimmon beer is cloudy orange, fizzy, and low in alcohol. If, however, the Broncos choke as usual and the stuff sits firmly corked in your crawlspace for, oh, about six months, all the particulates settle out and the transparent, apricot-pink fruit wine has a delightfully delicate bouquet and initial palate. . . .And then it goes down like raw tequila. Supposedly, it's impossible to get much above 14% alcohol through fermentation alone, but this stuff must have wound up at about 15% or higher! It became a great punchline when friends would drop in, and then start hinting around about a drink. My friend Glenda (the Good Witch), grew up in San Diego and 'must' have a little wine with her meals, actually enjoyed it. The rest would approach it very gingerly, grudgingly finish it, then ask when I would be making anymore. Well, due to the bumper crop of prickly pears growing through my 'rustic' retaining wall, this year's experiment will be a lot of prickly pear wine, and a tiny amount of wild plum wine. I haven't checked the chokecherry crop yet. When I told my mom about how the first night, the persimmon beer kept popping the corks out and I had to wire them down like champagne corks she started laughing and told me that HER parents had once had a Concord grapevine that grew on about a half-mile of fence and they had bottled their own wine and stashed it under the front porch. All night long, they kept hearing the corks pop out and bang against the porch floorboards. So, I guess it runs in the family.

Re: Hey! Flashback city!

[lafemmemakita]

Now that I'm out from under the thumb, I've gone back to a lot of my old sports and taken up new ones. I suck at snowboarding, but there's a very steep and deep grassy swale right in front of our building, so I'm thinking about zipping up an insulated bunny suit over my 'Corporate Casual' clothes and taking a few tumbles during lunch this winter. Also, I've been slowly but surely ticking off the 14,000 foot peaks around the Denver area. Hikers in Colorado are such snobs, they don't count 13,000 footers!Well, except James Peak, which begins with an almost-vertical climb up St. Mary's glacier (near my family's private campground) and ends with a very, very stormy and steep peak. That one is tough enough that it 'counts'. DONE IT! I've been ice-skating sporadically, also. There are lots of community rinks around here, and it's pretty cheap. There's one 2 blocks from work, and it's where the Avalanche practices. Mostly, I've been running a little, and biking a lot. There's a GORGEOUS bike path that runs along a small, lazy river running all the way through Denver, and my Frankenhaus (the house made from the parts of other dead houses)is only 6 blocks from it. It's so easy!Hop on my bike, go a few blocks, hit the trail, ride 15 miles down to the reservoir, turn back and almost coast the whole way home! Anyway, the Frankenhaus neighborhood was very scary-looking at first, but now that I know my neighbors pretty well, they're actually the best neighbors I've ever had. They're all friendly, I know all of their well-behaved kids and dogs, they keep an eye on me and my house, they're generous with homegrown tomatoes and corn, they gossip over the fence ... they're just plain what neighbors used to be and should still be. I mean, when I moved here, I was so broke I had to house-sit one of my brother's half-finished flips (no appliances, no phone, no grass) for almost a year because I couldn't afford to rent anywhere and I had no down payment to buy. I was finally able to get a mortgage, but it was a for a house so run-down, the utilities had been shut off for years. The poor little dainty realtor had to borrow one of my flashlights for the tour. I had to re-wire it, re-plumb it, install a new furnace (I lived in it from February until April with no heat because the existing furnace leaked CO. Thank God it was a mild winter that year), and help the ceiling in the kitchen finish falling down. It's the size of a small single-wide trailer (835 square feet) and looks like it's haunted, but it's solidly built and slowly turning the corner. Thankfully, with my brother flipping houses, I've been getting a lot of free leftovers, but I still have a lot of construction expenses. Funny, I didn't want to install used plimbing or electrical, but half-sheets of drywall and almost-empty paint cans has been fine with me! It's been a very tough and frantic 3 years, but man! I'm so glad I'm here!