We're headed west again. This blog will share our excitement and tears as we transition from Boulder, Colorado to Orange County, California.
Three cheers
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I hope every single person reading this has a friend this great. She's using her blog to help me raise money for my Avon Walk. Rock on. And thanks -- to all who have supported me, and to the ever-wonderful Lynsey.
We had an exciting day here in Boulder yesterday. Just a two miles from our house a wildfire burned 1400 acres and seven "structures." It started when 80 mph winds blew down power lines. You could see the smoke for miles, smell it too. An entire side of a mountain appeared to glow orange -- we could see it from the end of our street. It's a mountain very close to our house, one we drive on regularly, and one we hiked on just the weekend before with a visiting grandma. More than 11,000 homes were evacuated along with a lot of livestock. Mostly horses, but I saw a photo of a llama. They brought all the four-legged evacuees to the Boulder County Fairgrounds, which struck me as brilliant, but of course must have been part of the county's standing emergency plan. The Red Cross set up a shelter at a local high school, but in a statistic that illustrates Boulder's wealth, most found friends or hotels: of those 11,000 households, only 75 people spent the night at the sh...
Boulder has a reputation. Think of Boulder and you most likely picture of a big ol' box of granola. If you know people who live here you might expand that notion to include words like hippy, green, liberal, easy-going, and sporty. We've been here for almost six months now (really! I can't believe it either) and I can tell you that Boulder's reputation is well-deserved. Aside from loose-fitting, natural-fabric fashion, dreds for white folks, prayer flags in every neighborhood, and other visual cues that this is a non-conformist place (in a the way that non-conformists tend to look alike), here are a smattering of observations: • The other day in a coffee shop I overheard some people talking about a "gypsy dance" party that was going to have live music, dancing, a feminine altar, and a masculine altar. • Some of the busstops here have solar panels to fuel the lights that illuminate the shelters at night. • When people bump into one another or have a problem, the...
So what do you do when your daughter tells you she wants to be an exploding volcano for Halloween? First you give her some time to change her mind. When she doesn't, you get creative. First, I made a newsprint pattern and then tried it on the kid, cutting and adjusting as necessary. (She's being scary in the photo, like a volcano.) Then I cut out a huge piece of brown fleece. It's worth noting here that I don't sew. I cut, I glue, and I make liberal use of that fusing material that allows you to iron fabric together. Then I made shiny lava floes. Then I made a crown of flames. When she put it on she looked a lot like the Pope -- pointy red hat and all. She loved it, so I loved it. I don't know that she looked like a volcano, but I also don't know how else I could have done this without resorting to paper mache. I made the space between her arm holes too wide, so the fabric bunched in front. She didn't notice, and I wasn't about to try to fix it. I kept t...
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