Trout: Are They Ticklish?

As a trout fisherman in Colorado, I've caught everything from itty-bitty brookies barely big enough to swallow the hook to mean-looking brown trout that have scarcely seen a lure in a decade to lake trout too long for most of our cooking gear. I have fished from Steamboat Springs to the Rio Grande headwaters. I have heard fish stories and I've heard true fish stories. Until recently, I considered myself a decent docent of the salmoninae family. Then I hit Wikipedia and I heard of this activity which, to my amazement, has been done since antiquity. You might say it had me reeling.

Who Am I, Again?

It's beginning to look like Christmas around here. Advent has started. We're still waiting for our Advent Book on order. Tabitha's Travels is en route, I'm told.

I just had a delightful conversation with a 3 year-old. She proclaimed that Santa Claus was coming to give gifts to all the children. Of course, I pretended not to know anything about it. I asked if you had to be a certain age, which she didn't know. I asked her if she thought I could get a present too, even if I'm all grown up. Karen, my wonderful wife, chimed in, "Because he's still a kid at heart."

To which she replied, "He's not a kid! He's a boy!"

Rats.

Can We Park Here Or Not?

If you Google images like Funny Street Signs, you'll find all sorts of genuine bureaucratic boo-boos, mistakes, and botched jobs. I ran across my own where I live. When we were looking for a handicapped parking space, my wife and I noticed something was a little ...off.

It wouldn't be so bad if this wasn't a city crew's paint job. I guess with the recession, they're having to freehand it.

Street View For Winter Olympic Trails

It's no secret that I'm a Google Earth nut, but I'm amazed I didn't find this earlier. Street View is available for Winter Olympic trails at the different venues. Here's how they made it.

Questions Asked By Tourists Visiting Colorado

I love living in Colorado. It is a wonderful state to live in. Vacationing is easy. Just pull into your own driveway, take the phone off the hook, put up a tent in the yard and technically, you're camping. Seriously, though, we have trouble taking a vacation to a place that's too close by. Driving thirty minutes to camp or stay in a hotel feels a little weird. So, folks in Denver like to think they'll retire to Colorado Springs. Colorado Springs folks think about retiring to Buena Vista or Leadville. I'm not sure where the folks from Leadville will retire to, but with the winters up there, I bet it will be someplace warmer or even tropical.

In honor of the start of summer break and the commencing of vacations, I thought I'd put up a list of things tourists have said while visiting Colorado or that people have asked Coloradoans when they defy reason and leave the state.

1. What time of year/At what altiitude do the deer turn into elk?
2. Where do you put the moguls in the summer?
3. You don't ski? I thought everyone in Colorado skied! (also applies to wearing cowboy hats)
4. Y'all got paved roads in Colorado? (not yet, but Woodrow Wilson mentioned we'd get some soon)
5. Do you own a horse?
6. Do you ski to school? (also applies to sled dogs)
7. Where do Rocky Mountain Oysters come from? Is there a lot of water in Colorado?
   
8. Do you need oxygen tanks to live there?
   
9. You live in an igloo right? (Bonus: How do you walk around your house without slipping?)
   
10. So what's South Park like? (Tell them Casa Bonita is real and they won't believe you.)
11. Why don't trees grow on top of your mountains?

The photo at right is from the top of Mt. Evans west of Denver. It's a bit of a read, but the details are riveting, especially when you count the screws used to mount the sign. There's a reason they did that.

For those who want to look more like a local or who really want to know what the answers are, I've put them down below.

1. Deer and elk look similar, with antlers, snouts and four hooves, but trust me, they are two very different species. Elk tastes better, in my opinion.
2. Moguls are turned inside out, shaken hard, and put on a plane from Aspen back to L.A. ...Wait, that's movie moguls. Ski moguls are mounds of snow that are created by skiers as they carve down the slopes.
3. Although I haven't seen a survey of state residents and skiing, I'll speculate that a surprising percentage of residents do not ski, and fewer still are those who have skied in the last three years. There are a lot of reasons for this, but lift tickets are horribly expensive, I-70 is terribly crowded, and we keep thinking we'll go next year.
4. Duh. These are likely the same people that ask if we ride horses everywhere or if we still fight Indians, both of which questions showed up on a "dumb questions" page online as legitimate, documentable inquiries.
5. See explanation 4 above. No, we do not, although it's practically required for someone to live in Golden. Do I have a cowboy hat and boots? Ain't tellin'.
   
6. See explanation 3 above. Skiing to school is not practical unless you live at the top of a mountain, and then you've got other problems, like lightning, wind, and a dog that refuses to go outside in either, remembering that the last time it did, it nearly died. If you tried to ski to school (without the aid of a snowmobile or truck known as skijoring), you'd have to cross-country ski, and then we'd accuse you of losing your mind.
7. No, there is not a lot of water in Colorado, which is why we have lawyers who litigate exclusively over water rights. The lack of an ocean and the lack of a local delicacy prompted a joke that's groin--er, grown into a novelty dish. I will not mention the ingredients, but you can read more about Rocky Mountain oysters here.
8. Contrary to all the press our altitude receives, people from below 2,000 feet ASL who take it easy the first 24 hours or so can acclimate fairly well if they drink plenty of water. People who don't are soon usually flat on their backs complaining about the lack of oxygen. That's when we bring them a tank and tell them not to drink alcohol while they're here. We breathe just like they do, only better.
9. Another Duh. Although, we have winter festivals with snow carving and such. How do we keep from slipping? Seal skin.
10. South Park is a big, empty broad expanse of Kansas that we imported to break up the monotony of all those mountains. There is no town called South Park, unless you count Fairplay's effort to capitalize on the show's popularity. It is brown (or white) and mostly treeless. Antelope do play, but mostly they just stand around, gawking at the tourists.
11. Above 11,200 feet or so, trees do not grow in Colorado. This is called timberline. It is too cold, snowy, dry and dark for trees to grow above that threshold. Alpine tundra is beautiful and has small wildflowers that manage to thrive in that climate, including my favorite, the Columbine.

Like I said, I love Colorado. I plan to live here the rest of my life. I've seen nearly everything in the state, so if you're coming to Colorado, give me a shout and I'll pass along what I know.

News of the Weird

Whether it's cheese rolling (I assume the cheese is in their pockets or in their noggins),


Or shin-kicking,


there's something to be said about the folks in Gloucestershire, UK: They're nuts.

Google Street View

When Google Maps came out, I was impressed.
When Google Maps satellite view came out, I was floored!
When Google Earth came out, I was knocked out!
Now that Google Maps street view has arrived, I'm all woozy!

Watch this...


Now, doesn't this look like fun? It looks like so much fun, I'm going to be a virtual tourist for a few weeks. See ya!

Peering Into the Futility Closet

One of my favorite bloggers is Greg Ross from Futility Closet. He posts the odd and little known factoids in life, like this one. You'll see my answer to the post if you highlight the following text:

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You can type the entire line using your right hand exclusively, for qwerty keyboards anyway.

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Pretty nifty site all around, although sometimes I don't get the "bizarre" fact stuff. Seems pretty normal to me. Does that... nevermind.

Halo 3 and Youth Group - A Toxic Mix?

When I was growing up, video games were more or less a novelty. Pac-Man, at right, made a lot of money in the arcades, mostly in quarters (remember cash?), but no one really considered a home gaming market, mostly because the technology didn't exist. Today, a wildly popular game such as Halo 3 grosses $170,000,000 in the first week of sales, out-pacing the figures for Harry Potter books and film releases. It is cultural currency of the highest order. It's also rated M for mature by ESRB, and with good reason. According to the experts, it's a violent, gory first-person shooter.

This game is a boon to anyone looking to train skilled commandos willing to dispatch their targets with extreme prejudice. It's not so helpful for parents who are trying to raise normal, healthy human beings. What's even more troubling is the fact that some churches are incorporating this game into their youth activities. I realize that some times that youth leaders are using some unusual tactics to build community with the kids, but some ideas are not worth pursuing, like bobbing for goldfish (wasn't that an old frat trick?). I have to wonder at the wisdom of incorporating WWJBA? into any program (What Would Jesus Blow Away?). Whose decision is it to expose any child to the violent imagry in this game?

If the questions thrown at youth ministry seem unfair, you should probably know that I was a youth leader for a few long years, meeting success and failure week in, week out. What I didn't realize until long after my work with youth was over was that Sunday School and youth programs started off not to minister to the youth of the church, but as an outreach effort to bring in new believers at young ages. It was an overt, deliberate attempt to bring about child evangelism. No wonder it's doing a poor job raising our children! When I was serving as a youth leader, I had a dramatic insight as to why youth ministry is so tough today. Parents, nominal pillars of the church community, would foist their kids on me and directly or indirectly say, "Here you go. Teach them about God." How is any youth group leader going to undo in 2 hours what the teen has been up to the other 164 hours that week? Parents are the rank and file defenders of their children, something most parents seem to have forgotten or summarily abandoned. Any youth or children's pastor needs to focus on child evangelism and parents need to lead their children into the deeeper waters of biblical Christianity, not abandoning them to a youth leader.

In the case of Halo 3, I find myself agreeing strongly with Paul Asay of Plugged In Online. I have a hard time convincing myself that it's a valid tool. There's a reason M ratings are handed out and parents of teens, Christian or secular, would find their parental rights undermined by the church leaders in such a tactical blunder. Sorry, but Halo 3 should be dropped like a sack of potatos for use in Christian youth evangelism or any youth program.

Soaring In The Mountains

It’s hard to believe that Christmas is only two months away. With today’s high in the mid 70s, the snow we had a few days ago now seems like a distant memory. Ten years ago from today, we were engulfed in one of the biggest blizzards of my life, one seldom seen even in Colorado. I remember surprising my 8 year-old niece by grabbing her and throwing her through the air into the freshly fallen 4 feet of snow. She loved it! It hurt my back to do it, but she convinced me to do it twice more. Today, doing that would put me out of commission for a few weeks. I can’t wait to get to heaven and have a new body with which to do things like that. I believe there will be snow in heaven. It wouldn’t be perfect without it.

Before my disability, I used to love to ski. My favorite runs were the long, groomed cruisers where any speed was possible, but carving long turns gave you the thrill of controlling your speed just enough to know you were skiing within your limits. I’ve never skied on parabolics (mostly because they’re so new), but I get the feeling I would love them. Skiing gave me the feeling of riding the wind, of flying. It was gravity with all the perks. Schussing down a mountain with all the speed of a bird and the grace of an ice skater was something that made life worth it all.

It’s why people spend so much on lift tickets, skis, poles and other gear. It’s being able to slip out of your world and into one filled with soaring and sweeping turns, amazing speed and the occasional jump when you’re feeling fearless. I may not be able to do it now, but I did it then…and I’ll do it again in heaven!

Drivers Education In Colorado: Watch for falling trucks

When I was 15 and 3/4 years old, I got a learner's permit. One of the first highways my dad taught me to drive was I-70 west of Denver. This is a stretch of highway so nerve-rattling, it has it's own web page! Believe me, it deserves it. Imagine a dad telling his nervous driver-in-training, "By the way, keep watching your rear view mirror. If a semi is gaining on you very fast, do what you can to get out of the way."

My response, at least in my mind, was probably, "Yeah, Dad, sure thing. Am I too young to have a will?" Amazingly, I've never seen a truck actually plow into a runaway truck ramp, but I've seen enough trucks in them to know that my dad's words were not pure fiction. My father and my grandfather have been driving these Colorado roads all their lives. Now, I am less than five short years away from conducting my own driver's training for my daughter and eight years for my own son. Yikes! I can't imagine what that will be like. I'd better start praying for patience and peace now.

See Spot. See Spot...Slither?

Yesterday, my dad, my son, Bubba and I all took a drive. We set out to let Bubba do some target practice, but it didn't turn out that way. We came across a road closure and while we stopped to watch the work crew, one of the guys on the crew points to the base of a telephone pole. We get out and look at what he's pointing at and we discover over a dozen garter snakes slithering around and getting warm in the afternoon sun. At this point, my wife would probably be back in the car, but since she wasn't with us, we all studied them closely.

Then Grandpa gets an idea...or maybe it was mine...I'm not saying. The idea was presented that one of them would be a cool pet for Bubba. I snickered at the thought and said, "Yeah, right. I'd be in the doghouse just for thinking that." Well, Grandpa and Bubba had no regard for my sleeping arrangements and Grandpa dug out a bag from the back of his Jeep. The next thing I know, they're both up at the telephone pole and my baby boy, nearly 8 years old, is leaning over a viper pit...garter snake pit...whatever. Anyway, I scarcely had time to fear for his life when Bubba seizes the snake by the tail and holds it out to Grandpa, who is struggling to get the bag open in time. Grandpa closes the bag and walks back to the Jeep while my son, looking like the Croc Hunter, is all smiles.

We drive back home, create a makeshift place for him to stay and we head off to the pet store. Around $30.00 later, We walk out with the new home for our “free” garter snake. How was I able to leave the snake at home without alerting my wife? Very simple, she was out shopping with Grandma. We get the snake all settled in complete with sun lamp, water dish, rocks, hiding place and a fresh supply of crickets. When mother came home, we had been watching him for close to an hour.

Now, normally I wouldn’t stoop to such trickery, but in this case I had little choice other than subterfuge. Mom is still not thrilled, but she is slowly warming up to the concept. At least I think she is… she’s still not talking to me, at least not normally. She keeps mentioning something about Eve, heads and heels.

She had a slightly better reaction than Grandma, who took some convincing to get out of the car when she got home and heard about our new pet. Bubba has decided to name it Spot. A close runner-up was Doghouse.

What is it with women and snakes? Oh, did I mention the store sells frozen mice?

A Not-So-Super Bowl Party

Rules irritate me.

Let me clarify. It irritates me when someone uses the rules that exist for the good of X to prevent the good of X from happening. In Jesus' time, the Saducees and Pharisees burdened their people with all sorts of rules which they believed were necessary to please God. "No walking more than so many feet on the sabbath," and so forth. It was ridiculous to be that specific. Part of Jesus' revolutionary teachings was that the two greatest commandments were all that was necessary to please God and live a fruitful, satisfying life. Keeping the letter of the law kills your soul, but keeping the spirit of the law brings life.

This weekend will see Super Bowl XLI® in Miami. The two teams, the Chicago Bears® and the Indianapolis Colts® will represent the NFC® and the AFC® respectively. Please note that the words Super Bowl XLI®, Chicago Bears® and Indianapolis Colts® along with the acronyms NFC® and AFC® are licensed and protected by the NFL®. It is unlawful for organizations, entities, persons, or corporate bodies and/or enterprises to use these terms in promotion of their own events. A church in Indianapolis (thank goodness they didn't ® the city name itself) has found out through lawyers for the NFL that they could be sued if they have a Super Bowl party or show the Super Bowl® on anything larger than a 55 inch screen. Some homes, I reckon, are also breaking the law by using their projection TVs and having a few friends over. I wonder why the lawyers don't go after them?

All the NFL® has done by enforcing this law aimed at protecting the NFL® from being abused is alienate fans in Indianapolis. A few years ago, my own church hosted a similar party on it's projection TVs for families that didn't feel comfortable taking their kids to sports bars. This is a new and untapped potential audience and such events promote the NFL and football in general as an all-American, family-friendly activity. How on earth is that wrong? This is holding to the letter of the law (no events and no screens larger than 55 inches) and ignoring the spirit of the law (protecting and promoting the NFL®). Commissioner Roger Goodell had better learn such differences quickly if he expects his league to prosper and expand enough to support teams in cities outside the United States.

By the way, I didn't have to ® every term (or the NFL logo) because they constitute illustration and fair use. I was just showing how cumbersome and ridiculous it is to hold to the letter of the law.

Bouncer - A Ski Story

I have been battling a bit of the blues lately. We have had snow on the ground since before Christmas here and it's getting into February. Snow where I live is like a good houseguest. It stays a few days, maybe two weeks and then it's gone.

I would be enjoying this more if I was able to ski. Sadly, my condition really doesn't like skiing, especially because it seems to be weather sensitive. Not to mention the fact that my toes still remember the indirect frostbite from high school days spent rocketing down the slopes. I couldn't feel my toes for a few years. But it was a small price to pay for all the fun I had.

Bouncer

One time when I was up skiing with my high school, a friend dared me to take a run called Bouncer. It was a relatively quiet day on the mountain and I had not done that run yet. My friend assured me that it was a groomed blue, meaning steep and smooth, good for large carving turns or tucking. My friend, of course, dared me to "tuck all the way down." Being young and foolish, and never for a moment considering why it might be named Bouncer, I did it. I got into the tuck and began to really pick up speed. It was like the movies. Trees were whizzing past my field of view. Instead of thinking 40 feet ahead, I was trying to look 150-200 feet ahead for people, which were thankfully almost non-existent. The adrenaline was in high gear. My heart was beating in my ears, battling to be heard above the wind as it roared. I could feel the dynamics of my skis changing with the speed and they felt terrific as they flew down the slope.

It was just about halfway down that I saw it. It was a 12 foot-wide access trail traversing the steepest section of the blue and forming an unmarked jump. Because it was white-on-white, my eyes didn't pick it up until it was too late to do anything. Anything, that is, but scream, "Oh NOOO!" My skis hit the jump and it forced me forward to where I was looking between the pair fairly closely. The snow peeled away as I rose up into my "modified spread eagle," also known as the "Look Ma, I'm About To Snort Snow!" position. I was flying! I saw the run fall away beneath me and I was flying!

Then...gravity reasserted itself and I fell like a rock. One thought ran through my mind. "Get forward over your skis now or you're a dead man." I leaned forward until I felt like any more would result in a somersault. Wham! My skis hit the snow and if I had been going fast before I hit the jump, falling the 25 to 30 vertical feet I covered in the jump made me feel like I was on rockets! I carved two giant rooster tail turns to bring myself to a stop and look back up at the "cliff" I had just soared over. It was the bounce in Bouncer. My other friends, who were not quite as crazy as I was had stopped short and were amazed to see that I was, in fact, standing and not lying in the middle of a yard-sale of slightly used, adrenaline-soaked ski gear. That night, we exchanged our stories over dinner and I thanked my friend for the dare. It made for one of my best experiences skiing. In the years following, I would do plenty more jumps, but none so high or thrilling as Bouncer.

Further Thoughts

Looking back on those days, now almost twice as old as I was then, I see the foolishness of my actions and wonder... I really do wonder... if I can get back up there and do it again! Am I crazy? Probably. On the other hand, it is one thing to tell stories and watch others do. It is quite another thing to actually live it yourself. I want to get healthy enough to challenge my son to go faster and fly farther than I did. Are there risks? Absolutely!

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

-- Theodore Roosevelt, 1899

Roosevelt is on Mt. Rushmore for good reason.

I want my son to take risks, to dare mighty things. As a father, my first instinct is to react and pull him back from the edge of risk. Yet, in his heart there is a man wanting to test himself, to see what he's capable of. He may be seven now, but tomorrow he's eight, then nine. When do I pass on that willingness to test himself, to gain the confidence he needs to dare to do great things? It starts right now. I will pass on what I have learned and encourage him to press into bigger and better things. I will counsel him to be wise but bold, for timidity is often excused as wisdom. I will not demand success, but I will give him a solid foundation from which to build and the courage to do so.

In such an endeavor, I will need help, perhaps moreso than the average guy because of my disability. Being disabled does not excuse me from raising a son to be godly, strong and full of courage. It is among my most sacred duties. The help I need will come from God, my family, and from a select cadre of men that can pass on to my son more skills, and more gifts. I want my son's life to be far richer, far more fruitful than my own. And it starts here.

God, help me complete this quest, in Jesus' name.