Insects

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Japanese Beetle

Insects are part of life.  I mostly ignore them unless they are deer flies or horseflies.  I get swollen welts the size of a cupcake when they sneak up and get me.  Denver is pretty dry, so mosquitos aren’t much of a problem.  Bees and wasps won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.  Flies in the house are a nuisance but they are easy to control.   

Insects in the garden can be a problem, but they can be controlled as well.  There is one huge exception, however.  Japanese beetles are evil, vile, nasty creatures masterminded by Darth Vader, the Empire, and the Borg.  They eat, kill, and destroy.   

Four years ago Denver had no Japanese beetles.  Then, someone in one of the upscale neighborhoods brought in some plantings with beetle larvae in the soil.  They are rapidly spreading northward.  Two years we had a few, last year they were a plague.   

Damage

What do they do?  The beetles themselves eat leaves.  They love rose blossoms, but leave those leaves alone.  They like linden tree leaves, grape leaves, raspberry leaves, and peach tree leaves.  A rosebud opens in the morning and by noon the flower is gone.  They work on grape leaves to the extent that any new growth stops.  That is no good when you are trying to grow a grape arbor.  Lots of linden leaves get honeycombed, but the tree seems to be able to cope.  Our peach tree and the raspberries get attacked, but so far, not a lot of damage.   

In Palisade, over on the Western Slope, peaches and vineyards are the mainstay of the economy.  Unchecked, the beetles would have wiped them out, so they took the nuclear option.  They sprayed.  Spraying stopped the beetles, but it killed the beneficial insects as well.   

Japanese Beetle Grubs in a Lawn

The other part of the Japanese beetle life cycle is when the beetles fly down and lay their eggs in the lawn.  The eggs hatch, and the grubs start eating the grass roots.   Lots of eggs, lots of grubs.  They can be so dense as to form a living mat of grubs.  The lawn develops spreading dead spots.  Uncontrolled, no lawn. 

What to do?  In the morning go out and flick the beetles into soapy water.  Nematodes and milky  spore help with the grubs.  There is a grub poison called GrubEx, but it isn’t selective in what it poisons.   

Trap

A popular control is traps.  The kind where the beetles fly into the jug, attracted by some bait.  They drown, and give off a scent that attracts more beetles.  Soon, it is a beetle feeding frenzy with beetles coming from the entire neighborhood.  They look around for another snack and eat all your plants.  You can’t have the trap near your vulnerable plants, not easy on a small urban lot.  I think I will do it anyway, just to watch the evil creatures die. 

I don’t think we will have a grape arbor.  The linden, peach tree, and the raspberries will cope.  We will cut off all the rose buds in June and July.  We may have to eliminate what lawn we have left after years of reducing its size.  

My task is to give up on my beetle obsession.

 Japanese Beetle

Posted in Beetles, My Story, Obsession, Pain, Pestilence, Stories

Cycles

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The Universe

The universe cycles.  Things arise, then pass away.  It may take a while, a few billion years or so, but the only constant is change.  So it is with my life, change is the constant, it is just that the cycles are shorter.  The big cycle is of course, life itself.  Born, live, decline, and die.  After that, who knows for sure?

Today, it is about my spiritual cycles.  Those cycles can run from weeks to years.  Lately it is weeks.  I am a seeker, and was drawn to Buddhism in college.  I read, thought, but couldn’t meditate.  Now I meditate and after a number of false starts, I can call myself a beginner Buddhist.   Well, a Bhuddapalian, because Jesus is still in my life, but that’s another story and other cycles.

I have made quite a bit of progress, and have experienced varying times when I am actually living in the moment, not thinking about the past or future.  After all, the past or the future don’t exist except in our heads.  A few weeks I went on a retreat of enormous benefit.  18 people at the Y of the Rockies in Estes Park where we formed a bond during a silent retreat.

Cycles.  After the high comes the low.  From being in the moment, I found myself trapped in my past.  Now, for the purpose of survival I  need the past.  I learned things and apply the knowledge for the sake of survival in a fairly hostile world.  I don’t need all the old traumas and mistakes filling my head, however.  I use that stuff to fuel addictions in order to block what is gone anyway.  That’s how the brain works sometimes.  I block with food, various drugs, sex, and depression.

The problem, those strategies wear off and I am back simmering in the cauldron of despair.  Old pains lead to compulsive behavior leading to despair and addiction.  The Buddhist strategy is to devote oneself to serving all beings, clean living, loving kindness, and letting go-detachment.  Lately, not working.  I watch violence on You Tube, eat, fantasize, and avoid drugs.  Letting go?  Hmph.

I had this dream.  I was back at work after a vacation and there was new stuff I didn’t know how to work with.  There weren’t any instructions, of course.  When are there ever instructions about what to do?  So, I just had to cope, even though the boss and an engineer were running around talking about the future.  They weren’t going to be any help.

That’s where we are, isn’t it?  New tasks and no owners manual.  I just have to sit with the situation until a strategy presents itself.  Oh, wait, I just laid out the strategy, didn’t

Posted in Addiction, Buddhism, Depression, Insight Meditation, Jesus, Meditation, Stories

Weather? What Weather?

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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The arguments about climate change continue.  Those who point to the changes on our planet use science to support their arguments.  Retreating glaciers and ice sheets. Thawing tundra.  The worldwide atmospheric temperature is rising.local climates are changing, and severe weather events are increasing.  It makes sense, doesn’t it that if the temperature rises there is more energy for hurricanes and tornadoes.  The wind will blow as well, although you might not notice much difference in Wyoming.

The deniers usually have one of two reasons.  First, it is money.  If a business or individual has to spend money to reduce their carbon footprint, they tend to object.  The other reason, which I am going to explore, is religious.  These days in our country, the religious arguments come out of biblical prophesy.

Biblical prophesy:  abandon all hope if you venture to study prophesy.  Prophets abound in all human cultures.  As humans, we don’t know what the future will bring and we would really like to know.  The stars, tea leaves, the oracles at Delphi, Jeremiah, Nostradamus, and a host of others.  The unknown is a source of fear, and people want their fears assuaged.  Myself, I prefer fortune cookies.  At least I get something sweet for my effort.

Most religions rely on fear to some to gain adherents.  The right corn dance will bring rain and a good harvest.  No dance, no rain.  Money sent to an evangelist will get the right kind of prayers said for you.  No confession, it’s hell for you.

Let’s go into Christian prophesy.  Much of the Old Testament is about God railing against his people do do right by him.  In some places God’s own words are recorded.  In most instances it is a prophet.  The prophets were doing God’s work : “Straighten up or else.”.  Most people don’t straighten up.  They don’t get the word, they don’t give a damn, or they aren’t going to listen to some raving madman.  And then, bad things happen.  The prophets say “See? This is all your fault.  Straighten up or it will get worse.”

Well, it gets bad all the time.  It also gets good some of the time.  All that bad weather and fire we get in the prophesies?  Plagues, pestilence?  Happens all the time.  Last summer at our house it was Japanese Beetles eating our roses and grapevine leaves. That was a pestilence.   No grapes, no wine, if it happened in ancient times.  Ever since the New Testament canon was settled on with its prophesies, especially the book of Revelation, the prophets have been crying doom regarding the Second Coming.

About that book of

Revelation, take some time and read the thing.  Powerful imagery, wild predictions, fiery rhetoric.  What is it about?  Rome.  The Beast is Rome and its Legions conquering and ruling by the sword and crucifixion.  Prophesy is aimed at a specific target, in this case the Roman Empire.

It seems to me to be quite a stretch to fast forward a couple of centuries to today.  Prophets of doom said before the first millennium those were the last days, and the year 1000 would bring Armageddon and the second coming.  Lots of nineteenth century and twentieth century prophets sat down with their pencils and predicted the end of the world was at hand.  Didn’t happen, folks.

The Second Coming of Jesus

Now many of the believers in the last days and impending doom are in positions of influence.  Our Vice President is an example.  Much of the so-called conservative rhetoric and congressional action is designed by prophesy believers to hasten Armageddon.  I encourage you to look around the internet for the multitude of websites saying the same thing.  We’re in the last days, Jesus is coming, the righteous will be raptured to heaven and the rest of us are in big trouble.  Don’t you believe it.  There is another scripture in Thessalonians saying nobody knows the date, He will come as a thief in the night.  That one seems to be ignored these days.

My take on it, live the life that is best for you.  Find the answers for yourself.  If someone says he knows the answers, the odds are he does not.  If you don’t find the answers yourself, you are in good company.  No one knows for sure.

Posted in Bible Prophesy, Jesus, Last Days, Stories

I am an Evangelical

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Augustine

Well, not really.  But I was one.  I was raised a Methodist, and had a profound conversion experience into a Pentecostal denomination.

Yes, they were evangelical.  Evangelicals tend to take the Bible literally and have traditional beliefs about sexuality, marriage, abortion, and politics.  I hold none of those views.  I’m a liberal of the kind vilified on Fox News.  I retain some Christian beliefs, but am a practicing Buddhist.

I have an extensive library on Christianity.  Most of the books are about the relatively new thinking about Jesus and the Bible, most of them anathema to an evangelical.  I do accept the historical reality of Jesus, but that is about as far as it goes.  I tend to view it all from an historical perspective.

Regarding God, nobody knows for sure.  Most every culture deals with God in some fashion, but my view is he was extrapolated from the spirit world, entities who exist, but in my view are no more deities than we are.  Like us they would like to be gods, but only Donald Trump has made it.

I am from a milieu steeped in the old time religion.  It is ironic that the concept of original sin came from Augustine, a Catholic Scholastic.  His idea about the event in the garden leading to human depravity rather than free will leads directly to the idea Jesus assumed our sinful nature to release us from God’s curse.  John said God loved us and freed us from sin on the cross, but Augustine said God let Jesus atone for our depravity.

John Calvin

American evangelical Protestantism adopted Augustine.  Conservatives: we’re bad.   Liberals: we’re good, but need help because the event in the Garden gave us free will.  We can choose, a coyote can’t.  But, we sometimes make bad choices.

For several reasons, deep down I believe I’m bad.  I am engaged in overcoming that belief, with limited and intermittent success.  Sometimes I feel good about myself, sometimes I don’t.

I really don’t like Augustine, Calvin, and their wrathful God.  My father and grandfather had that Scots Presbyterian Calvinist outlook even though they were not religious.  I caught it from them.  The underlying attitude was nobody could ever measure up, including me and them.  There, ladies, and gentlemen, is a prescription for an unhappy life.  My mother was raised Congregationalist, another Calvinist denomination (no longer, however).

Grandfather, Father, and Mother were pretty nice people, which revealed their true natures, but under it all they thought they were lost souls.  As our current self-appointed deity would say, “Sad.”.   I’m afraid some part of me will always believe I am really a bad dude, which I caught from them.

Our culture remains contaminated with the evangelical attitude.  I sit here in the coffee shop next to Denver University, started in 1864 as a Methodist school.  The Methodists have never been quite as infected by Calvinism, coming from Anglican roots, but that need for redemption is still there.  The idea behind DU was to bring the gospel to the wilderness.  That was fine, but there was an underlying belief those naked heathen Indians were beyond redemption.  John Evans, the Methodist territorial governor in 1864 and a co-founder of DU, and John Chivington, a Methodist minister and Colonel of the Third Volunteer Cavalry Regiment decided those murdering heathens had to go.  Thus, the Sand Creek Massacre.

The streets at DU are Methodist, starting with Wesley, the Anglican who founded Methodism.  Looking west from Evans Avenue one sees Mt. Evans, both named after an Indian killer.  I live between Evans and Asbury Avenues.  Asbury is named for the first Methodist Episcopal Church Bishop in the United States.  I don’t seem to be able to get away from it.  The current DU students, however, don’t seem to be as infected with that stuff as I am.  The architects designing buildings at DU don’t seem to have gotten the message.  Even the big athletic field House has a bell tower. The old part of the campus has several spires and bell towers.

The University of Denver has, to its credit, recognized the tragedy of Sand Creek and the role of the Methodist founder of DU in the act of genocide.  DU is no longer evangelical, but has the history.  I am no longer evangelical, but I carry the history.

Posted in ADD, Addiction, Agression, Family History, Free Will, Jesus, John Calvin, Moral Decline, My Story, Original Sin, Stories

Change

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Where We Started

As Neil DeGrasse Tyson points out, we are made from stardust.  It takes a supernova to generate the energy to create the heavier elements.  That stuff diffuses, then gravity slowly congeals into new bodies.  Now this takes time, many millions up to billions of years.  Even geologic time is somewhat inconsequential compared to galactic time.

That’s a reason why we are so deluded with respect to time.  For children, the weeks leading up to Christmas can seem like forever.  It’s no time at all.  However, sometimes when I sit in meditation, time seems to stand still and I get jumpy.  In truth, our lifetimes are meaningless when viewed from even the nearest galaxy to our Milky Way.

The message in this?  Chill, already.  The therapist I saw for my ADD had me put a sticker saying NBD on the dash of my pickup.  No Big Deal.  Universes come and go in the blink of Kali’s eye, and we are obsessed with He Who Must Not Be Named’s tweets.

What is important is what we do with this tiny minute we are here.  I am attempting to connect with that eternal universe I tend to ignore most of the time.  Going back to the roots.  Well, the roots are made from stardust.

My brain gets oxygen and food these days, so it goes into action, what it evolved to do.  The action is thinking.  Thoughts arise, mull around, and pass to something else.  We are physically safe most of the time, so it isn’t really necessary to be on alert all the time.  The saber-toothed tigers are gone.

So, my task is to stop thinking so much, and just be space and stardust.  It’s where we came from and where we are going, so why not just be with that?  When I am able to let the clutter go,  I am more in harmony with the changing universe, not my nearly ceaseless churning of the noise I absorbed yesterday.  What arises, fleetingly, is equanimity and serenity.

In the long run we are all dead, so what’s the big deal?  Maybe we need catacombs, ossuaries we visit regularly to remind ourselves of the impermanence of it all.  I would like ho hold Nietzsche’s skull in my hands.  So much for the Ubermensch.

Can’t we all just get along?  If I remember something, I wand to remember yesterday’s sunset and look forward to the breeze in my face as I walk out of the coffee shop.  Oops, there I am thinking about the future, not enjoying the nice people in the coffee shop.

 

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Posted in ADD, Aging, Buddha, Depression, Fear, Meditation, My Story, Stories, Trump

Getting Older

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Really Old

I am 74.  I retired in 2011 at age 68 when I started noticing I wasn’t as sharp in responding to problems.  I also noticed my co-workers giving me the easier jobs when on a project,I was used to wading right in, sometimes literally.  It was a water plant, after all.

Now, other things have manifested. If it doesn’t hurt, it itches. I have arthritis and allergies.  My balance problems keep me off the third step of the ladder.  I was falling off.  I fell on the stairs, broke two ribs.  I gave up motorcycling, given my desire to stay alive (Just go to motorcycle crashes on YouTube.).

People are dying.  Yes, they have  doing it all my life, but now it’s old friends, classmates, a guy I was Best Man for.  Not people I viewed as Old People, but my contemporaries.  Does that mean I am an Old Person?  Yep.  Old people see their friends dying.  You can also tell if you are old by falling down in a public place.  People laugh if you are young.  You are old if they rush over to help.

Then there is CRS.  I have always had a poor memory, but this is getting ridiculous.  When I hear someone’s name on meeting them I tell them I will forget it.  I head downstairs to get something, do two or three things I see need doing, and go up without I went after.  Also, people my age tend to be terrified when they start forgetting.  Is it Alzheimer’s?  Am I going to be a drooling vegetable?  I try to stick to my rule about not worrying about things I have no control over, but it doesn’t always work.

A good thing: after my ADD diagnosis at age 59 with the therapy and medication I have more focus.  I can even manage to focus on stuff I don’t like to do.  I used to put off paying bills until my anxiety level forces me to sit down.  Now, I can plan the time and actually follow the plan some of the time.  I can write.  I don’t have to go to work.  I just spend my four pensions and watch our investments slowly diminish.

Writing is a good thing for an old dude to do.  I can do it most any time, usually mornings.  I go to a coffee shop where I am something of a regular and do some extroverting along with the writing.  I always wanted to write, but could not maintain the focus to write for myself.  With a deadline, the anxiety level activated my prefrontal cortex enough to allow me to get the words down.  In college I wrote papers for Forestry majors and the like for $10.00 per page (long time ago).

Now I write for myself.  I almost always write nonfiction, like most of my reading.  As you can see from this website, I have a wide range of interests.  That’s  probably a function of an ADD shifting his attention all the time.  I need to know.  They say ADD’s occupy an evolutionary niche because their shifting attention enabled them to spot those brutes from the neighboring tribe or the saber-toothed tiger.  Sentinels.  Of course, we are also smart and charming.  Someone has to keep the place stirred up.

I have written a little fiction, some very short stories and a longer short story when taking a class at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop here in Denver.   Good people there, students and faculty.  Naturally, some English majors, more interesting than engineers, although impoverished.

For me fiction is hard work. You have to create the world of the story and invent the characters.  Good fiction also uses lots of metaphor.  I am not very good in that area, mostly because it takes lots of practice.  I usually write about shifting tectonic plates; not so much need for metaphor there.

I have taken to reading novels aloud to Carol just before bedtime.  She likes mysteries written by women, she calls them novels of manners.  Much of their focus is on character development and scene setting, so they are a good light reading genre.  The reading is fostering an interest in fiction again.  Can I produce a story about geologists?  Maybe a story about 19th Century naturalists and biblical literalists.  Have I mentioned I like history?

I will have to work on producing pieces longer than 550 words, however. I can do the short essays in one coffee shop session.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Aging, Balance Problems, Falls, Health Issues, Humor, Itch, Pain, Stories

Mindfulness

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Meditation

The ostensible purpose of mindfulness meditation is to stay in the moment.  One does this by watching the breath.  Just watching the breath.  Not thinking about breathing, not planning the week, not obsessing about ice cream.  By watching the breath only, one is in the moment.  Not the past, not the future, just now.

What the Buddhists call the self is that portion of our brain which wants to stay busy.   So, we think.  Thinking about most anything.  Some people have feelings, but I mostly think about feelings.  We are to note the thought of feeling, and return to the breath.  The goal is like cleaning the garage, getting rid of junk and having the other stuff organized so we don’t have to think about it.

Carol and I start our mornings with fifteen minutes of meditation.   We both agree about considering the meditation a success if we are able to watch more than two breaths.  I beat myself up about this.  What the hell am I doing this for if I can’t stay with my breath more than two times.  I must be some sort of failure.  When I complain about this to accomplished meditators, I hear “That is just where you are.”  That is no help, thank you very much.

Can’t they wave their wands and create an enlightenment spell?  Where is Hermione when I need her?  In fact, I am making some progress.  Some mornings I can stay with two or three breaths several times.  During longer meditations I sometimes can sustain for several minutes.  If I can’t stay with the breath, I pray.  I pray for others, I pray for myself, or I just pray with gratitude.

I also use mantras.  I justify them by believing my ADD doesn’t allow me to meditate like normies.  After all, people have used mantras for thousands of years.  I also blame my addictions, as if people haven’t overcome addictions with meditation for thousands of years.

Well, despite my resistance and whining, I am actually getting somewhere with this mindfulness business.  I have tried lots of stuff, trying to get myself somewhat lined out in life, and mindfulness meditation is what works for me.

Now, this mindfulness is not a standalone thing.  It is Buddhist.  That means The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.  They explain why we are always thinking, mostly for no good reason, and provide guidelines for going through life without doing harm.  I dodge them by telling myself I can’t find a clear, brief explanation, as if Mr. Google doesn’t exist.  Well, I do a fairly good job of following them.  Most of the time.

At age 74 I feel I am finally on the way.  What more is there?

Posted in Buddhism, Insight Meditation, Jesus Prayer, Meditation, My Story, Stories

A Mountain Retreat

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Estes Park

People living on Front Range Colorado are so fortunate to live here.  The big attractions, of course, are the mountains, right up the road.  I am just back from a retreat held at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park.  No matter the weather or time of year, that hole in the mountains is a spectacular place, the T-shirt shops notwithstanding.

The retreat was an Insight Meditation retreat held from Thursday afternoon to Sunday morning.  Friday and Saturday were silent, something of a challenge for an extrovert.  It is normally hard to get me to shut up.  I had a good experience.

It snowed on the way up Thursday, and I helped several people get their cars up the hill to our cabins.  By Friday morning, there were six or eight inches of white stuff.  Estes Park is a Ponderosa Pine forest, and the trees had a thick frosting of show.  Beautiful.  Then the wind blew.  It really blew, as it often does on the east side of the Rockies.  The wind comes from the west, hits the mountains, shoots up, cools off, then descends, blasting across Estes Park.

The wind from the west blew the snow off the ground and trees and shot up the ridge on the east side of the park.  It snowed uphill.  Now that is something I had never seen before.  One of the themes of the retreat was impermanence.  The reality is change.  It snows, it blows, and it stops.  You are changing, different than you were ten minutes ago.  The mountains offer a powerful illustration of change.  They rise, wear away and are gone.  The snow and rain come, and then there is drought.  It floods, carving the canyons a bit deeper.  The glaciers arise, grind their way downhill, and change the landscape.From the window of the cabin I could see four climate zones.  Ponderosa in the park, then spruce on the slopes with lodgepole a bit higher, then timberline.  Timberline: tundra and pikas.

Those zones are not static, they’re on the move, responding to the changing climate.  The ponderosa are climbing the slopes, and timberline is heading downhill.

Lodgepole Beetle Kill

The lodgepole pine zone is changing the fastest.  Winter is less cold, not killing the Mountain Beetle larvae as usually happened fifty years ago.  The beetles kill the trees, millions of acres of trees.  All those dead trees are fuel.  The fires clear the land, opening it up for aspen to move in.  We think of change in the mountains being a slow process, but this has happened in the space of fifteen years or so.

The bare ground means much more runoff, making the floods Colorado sees roughly every twenty years or so larger and more violent.  Erosion is increasing, sending more mud to Mississippi.  The bare ground blows, and the dust and sand deepen the soils east of the mountains.  Next, the aspen move into the bare ground in the mountains, making fall even more spectacular.

Change is more rapid these days.  I am changing too.  This Insight Meditation is accelerating a process of inner change I began years ago.  I have dealt with lots of personal issues in the past, and am now cycling back through some of them.  Fear arises during the meditations, moving to anger.  My response is addiction.  Food.  Alcohol.  My personal climate zones change, the midsection growing as I eat to dull the feelings.

During my meditations, those old feelings arise, I note them, and watch as they fade away.  The past is gone, I have no need to hold on, and I see it passing away, replaced (slowly) by more time living in the moment.  After all the present is all we really have, the rest being a construct the ego brings up to have something to do.  I am working on training my ego to be OK with emptiness.  That also means giving up trying to live in the future.  The future isn’t there.  It never is.  We need to look ahead enough to make conditions favorable to staying alive a bit longer, but that’s all.  The rest is just ego busywork.  That busywork occupies most of my consciousness.

I want to stay in now, the present moment, but then I look up and see the pastries in the case here in the coffee shop.  I thrust myself into the future, eating them, even though I am not hungry.  There just might be more fat in the future.  I still have a lot of work to do.

Posted in Stories

Sherlock

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Sherlock and Watson

Two years ago I wrote about The Buckner Banner.  I rode the USNS Simone Bolivar Buckner to Germany and home two years later.  For some reason known only to the military gods, I was chosen to edit the ship’s newspaper, The Buckner Banner, although I was a lowly private.  It was great fun, and our nine issues were a big hit because we serialized a Sherlock Holmes novel.

There were civilians aboard, military dependents, and lots of troops in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for nine days with little to do.  The Banner was printed on a worn-out mimeograph machine, and the result was lots of gaps and unreadable copy in the paper.  Passengers got involved in the story and had great fun trading issues back and forth to be able to read each installment.

I got lots of compliments, and had the run of the ship as newspaper editor.   Strangely I have never read Arthur Conan Doyle’s works until now.  Sherlock is one of the best-known fictional characters in English.  He is probably better known today than in the Victorian era because of movies and television.  Basil Rathbone starred in seventeen Sherlock movies.  Robert Downey Jr. starred in a movie, and there are two current TV shows, Elementary, set in New York and starring Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu (Dr. Watson a woman!); enjoying a five year run, and Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, also with a long run with just a few episodes each year.  At least 99 actors have played Sherlock.

We are steeped in Sherlock Holmes.  Barnes and Noble has a two volume edition of Doyle’s Sherlock stories, and I am well into Volume One.  The story I just finished is set in London and Brigham Young’s Utah.  The Mormons had a lot of bad press in Doyle’s era, what with polygamy and Brigham’s Theocracy.  The story reflects that bias, featuring three murders.

Doyle gives the Saints a bad rap, but a lot of their infamous deeds were a response to the persecution the saints endured in Missouri and Illinois, which led to their trek west.  2017 is not the only time people in America have faced religious discrimination; hate directed against Jews, Catholics, and Mormons for starters.

This was part of Doyle’s appeal.  He made the events of the Victorian era come alive for his readers then. They come alive for us now, here in a land of Anglophiles.  I am going to have a lot of fun with Sherlock, Watson, and company.

Posted in Current Activities, My Story, Sherlock Holmes, Stories, Troop Ships

Water

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Colorado River Basin

I spent thirty years in the water business.  I was one of the troops, not a manager or staff person.  I did, however, do what I could to keep up with developments in the water and wastewater business.  With the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, rivers no longer catch fire, and our fresh water. Supply is in much better shape than, say, the 1950’s. 

I worked at the Greeley, Colorado wastewater plant for three years.  The water we sent to the river met EPA standards until the Cache La Poudre flooded and washed out the pipe carrying water from one side of the river to the other for final treatment.  Lots of raw sewage went into the river for about a week until an emergency pipeline was laid on the highway bridge next to the plant.   

An old adage in the wastewater business goes, “The solution to pollution is dilution”.  That saying is mostly obsolete, but during that flood there was plenty of water for dilution.  We had to wear hip waders to get around the north side of the plant, flooded with almost three feet of water.   

The Denver Water System

Here is a big part of the water story in the American West.  There is either too much water or not enough.  Here on the Colorado Front Range a water crisis is slowly developing.  The available water is starting to run out.  Half of Denver Water’s water supply comes under the Continental Divide from the Colorado River.  There is little more water available from the river for the Denver Metro population except from spring runoff, when there is more water than can be stored.  Most years.   

Other years, the snowpack is down, spring runoff is low, reservoirs drop, and worry starts.  Water supply fluctuates, but demand only increases.  Oh, wait, during a big drought recently,  the Denver Water Board shifted its priority from dam building and water diversion to conservation.  It worked, and continues to work, not just with Denver.  Another water source is also coming into use.   

Water law says if you use water from your nearby stream, you must return what you didn’t use to the stream.  Water users downstream get lots of their water from return flows from irrigation or wastewater plant outflows.  Water law also states that water you divert from another basin does not have to be returned.  You can use it to extinction.  So what once went downstream is being captured in new reservoirs downstream made from old gravel pits and used for water exchanges, where downstream users trade their upstream water rights for return flow water from Denver.  The potato and corn fields don’t seem to mind.   

The other thing happening is taking that foreign water, treating it, and pumping it upstream for reuse.  At this point it is mostly for irrigation of parks, golf courses, and the like, but it is also being treated to drinking water standards.  Yes, you might be drinking water that once was sewage.  Not to worry, think about Omaha, St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans.  What are they drinking? 

Eventually this will all end.  The water will run out.  At some point, tap fees for new housing or industry will soar and development will go elsewhere.  The growth cannot continue indefinitely.  The same thing will occur in the entire Colorado River Basin.  Despite every effort to conserve or store more water, it is going to run out.  The new growth will then go to Cincinnati and Birmingham, all those wet places back East..  They have lots of water.

Posted in Stories, Water, Water Treatment, Water Treatment Plants
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