something old, something new

ME: So... y'know we close at 4:00, right?

HIM:  I thought you close at 5:00

ME: Nah, Fridays it's 4:00

HIM: FUUUUUUUCK

Just one of the conversations I had last Friday in the testing center. Aah, finals week. This particular student walked in at around 3pm for his 2-hour final, due that day. I know him from tutoring. He's a concurrent enrolled high schooler, racking up college credits. He'll be halfway to his engineering degree already by his high school graduation.

He's intelligent for his age, but not the most punctual... or time aware.

Once resigned to his fate, "Welp, I only need a 38% on this final to pass the class".

"I'd hope that's doable", I replied. And apparently it was.

And just like that, the semester's done. After the frenzy of activity in the days leading up to finals, things are now very quiet on campus until summer session begins in a couple of weeks.

I've got a few things on my to-do list between now and then. For one thing, I have a doctor again. Recall that I was doctorless for several months as my old practice underwent upheaval and is no longer in our network. The new place wouldn't take me until it'd been a year since my last checkup. I finally reached that milestone.

Saw the new doctor, who then got the ball rolling on all the things: blood screen, mammogram, colonoscopy...

In the chaos of the old office upheaval, some of my stuff was missing from the records. For one, I knew I'd had a mammogram since the last they'd reported.

This to say how handy this blog is, because I figured I probably mentioned the last mammogram here because how weird is that? Bingo. Found it. Who needs medical records?

And speaking of archives, I did manage to find our Sam signed napkin from the wedding as well as Sam and Katherine's page from the guest book:

         

My brother made the annotation of where they were from, lest anyone wonder.

In other activity, we're this close to completing the purchase of that big pile of dirt we looked at a few weekends ago. About 50 acres of dirt, actually.

There goes the neighborhood.

a cake, a kid, a mustache

I've just emerged from our crawl space, empty handed. It's dark in there, I went looking for the guest book from our wedding, of all things. It's in there somewhere.

Peggy over at https://straightupnochaser.blogspot.com/ posted about celebrity sightings, of which I've experienced little. When I worked at a hotel in downtown Denver in the mid 80s, we often had professional wrestlers stay for WrestleMania type events, but I've never followed professional wrestling. So, despite the throngs of fans in the lobby, the wrestlers weren't anything more than typical hotel guests to me.

However... How Ever... we did have a couple of well-known movie stars at our wedding:

Mr. Sam Elliott, along with his illustrious mustache, and wife, Katherine Ross.

No, it's not like they are long-time family friends who made our wedding guest list and RSVPd "Yes!". They actually, more or less, crashed the reception with the help of their young daughter, who is now 41 years old. I got this photo after googling from around the time of the wedding crashing.

SOURCE

So, the story of how our worlds collided

• I grew up in a small town in Colorado.
• We got married in my hometown.
• My hometown is surrounded by boonies. Lots of boonies.
• A movie adaptation of a Louis L'Amour novel was being filmed
• Louis L'Amour wrote westerns. Lots of westerns.
  
• Sam Elliott (and sometimes Katherine Ross) starred in lots of westerns
• Sam Elliott and Katherine Ross starred in this particular western
• The movie was filmed in the boonies surrounding my hometown
• The movie cast and crew stayed at the hotel of my wedding reception

BOOM, celebrities at our reception.

Our wedding cake was set upon a table, and this little blonde girl walked in and asked me, "Can I show my dad your cake?"

"Okay", I replied, nonchalantly.

She returned with freakin' Sam Elliott in tow.

And honestly, my mom was already practically best girlfriends with Katherine Ross by that time. My mom worked at the hotel in the restaurant. Mom was very easy to be friends with, and never went all stalker on Katherine Ross. 

She told me she treated them like any other restaurant guests, and one day slipped Katherine a note saying, "I loved you in 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' and 'Stepford Wives'", to which I can attest is true - those were probably Mom's two favorite movies. And the friendship grew from there, at least during their time in my boonie hometown.

Magnum and I got a picture with Katherine Ross and their daughter, a.k.a. chief wedding crasher, and I'm sad to say WE LOST IT - THE PHOTO.

There are lots of other photos of the wedding weekend, but that ONE is conspicuously MIA, lost during one of our earlier moves. I lost that photo along with my diploma for my bachelors degree. Of those two things, I am way more disappointed about losing the photo.

But we've got a signed wedding napkin, and the couple did sign our guest book - which is somewhere in the crawl space... maybe.

nieve seis de mayo

We're having us a snow day. First one for the whole school year, and it comes in May?

But we'll take what we can get after our long, dry winter.  Poor awakening trees, welcomed by drought only to get dumped on with heavy, wet snow. Their roots are loving it, but their branches, not so much.

So, I'll be zooming with the tutees today. No complaints from me or them. I have an easy commute to campus, but remote sessions mean I need only be presentable from the shoulders up. 

 I took a soggy walk-about the neighborhood this morning. Pretty quiet out with all the schools and colleges closed - a precursor to summer break when many of the university students go away. 

Monday is the last day of our semester. Then it's a couple of weeks until the summer session begins. I've made myself available for summer tutoring. There are less students in the summer, but also less tutors, so it seems to balance out. 

Welp, time to try to make myself a quarter presentable.

proms, snow, and dopamine

We made it to May. Snow in this coming week's forecast after a whole lotta nothing all winter. 

I'll take it, better late than never.

But this weekend's been lovely. I went out to take care of a couple of easy errands yesterday via bicycle. At one point, I rode through a picturesque part of the university campus. It was teeming will well-dressed folk.

It's too early for graduation, I pondered. Plus, graduation would bring out caps and gowns, none of which were present. As I got closer, I noticed the well-dressed folks were a bunch of kids - broccoli-haired boys and gowned girls. 

Ah... prom.

Apparently, that location on campus is a popular place for prom pics.

I thought back to high school prom days and to how oh-so-important it seemed at the time, and how oh-so-unimportant it actually is/was in the grand scheme of things. But I hope they had fun - didn't get too drunk, and no one got pregnant.

Speaking of almost graduation, one week remains of the semester. Do-or-die for some students heading into finals. One of my tutees has very long, decorative acrylic fingernails. They can be cumbersome to deal with when she's doing her online homework - needing to use her chunky knuckles instead of fingertips when using her laptop touch screen.

"These nails make it difficult to do my math homework", she acknowledged, to which she added, 

"but I need the dopamine to do my math homework"

Hey, it's a balance.

watch out

"Wanna arm wrestle?"

Party Girl asked me this on Friday at work. Friday mornings in testing are nearly always very busy, but then things typically quiet down by noonish. We were at noonish. She suggested the arm wrestling to see which one of us could clock out early.

I asked what made her think of arm wrestling, "We could just rochambeau", I suggested.

But then I said she could go early since I had to tutor later so wouldn't be leaving campus anyway. She then admitted she just really felt like an arm wrestle match. So fine, I granted her wish, weird as it was. I don't think I'd arm wrestled since maybe middle school?

I won by the way.

• Speaking of granting wishes, two of my PEO friends and I interviewed a woman who applied for an educational grant. Bottom line, we learned she has too much financial aid already, so is not eligible for this particular grant. I need to draft an email to inform her, so am procrastinating by blogging instead. 
  
  
• We trudged around another property-for-sale in the boonies yesterday after deciding the access road to that other one was a deal breaker. Meego has come along both times, but Wolfgang had conflicts both times, so I meant to take photos of yesterday's site for Wolfgang, but plum forgot.

These are from the listing.

Again, there is some fire damage - from a fire in 2012 - but it's not nearly as stark as the last place we visited. And there are gorgeous views. I think we might put an offer on this one after a bit more research.

• After working up an appetite, traipsing around in those woods, we stopped at nearby Vern's just outside of town. 

Vern's is very popular, known for it's hearty meals and humongo sweet rolls. We'd never been there. It's an interesting contrast to restaurants in old town Fort Collins, which are more trendy, for lack of a better term. 

from Google reviews
What is that little thing below? A wolverine??

The Vern's decor is plentiful taxidermy, dead eyes watching from every vantage point. And there was a lot of camouflage clad clientele. 

Breakfast was delicious. Mine was meatless, which seems rather contradictory upon reflection.

cancel, campaign, commute

I'm in the computer commons at the college killing some time before my next tutoring appointment. I got to campus just in time to receive a text from my earlier tutee...

"I'm really sorry to do this so last minute..."

Okay, fine. She had to late cancel - health issues. So here I was in vagabond mode. I was in the student center for a while, having a snack. A guy walked up to me,

"Excuse me, are you a student?", he asked.

Heck no, what?? was what I was thinking, but to be fair, there are a few from my generation who decide to take college classes, for whatever reason.

So I said, "Uh, no. Sorry"

He approached the girl sitting not far from me. He's running for student government, getting signatures. I have no idea what the student government does here. As for me, I reached into my bag and put on my nametag so as to not look so student-y.

In other news, the Pelicans are here. They come every spring to, apparently, breed. Why Colorado, I have no idea.

I'm sure there are pelicans breeding in other places, too, but I always see a flotilla of them on my commutes home this time of year. 

And with that, so endeth todays loitering. 

moonscapes and lilacs

The weeks are a-flying by. Only three weeks left in the spring semester... but who's counting?  It's a busy time, and I'm SO glad I am not PEO president for another year. It almost happened, and *whew*. I've got enough other things to do.

I mentioned a while back that we've talked about purchasing some recreational land, and we've gotten more serious after perusing properties online. I should give credit where credit's due and mention that Magnum has been chief peruser, knowing our criteria. He's taken it on, sends me links to candidate properties, and found us a good realtor.

Yesterday was our first site looky-loo. We drove up to the boonies with Realtor to this mass of dirt that appeals to us for various reasons. It's kind of a sad story actually. The current owner purchased it a few years ago, worked at paying it off, built a small cabin - just a nice getaway. And then...

The Cameron Peak Fire happened and ravaged the place. It is now a landscape of blackened used-to-be trees and not much else. 

So, one's sad story is another's blank canvas.

Here's one of the pics I took of what was once a lovely evergreen forest

Very tall Realtor included for scale. (Seriously, the guy's like 7 ft. tall...)

But there are gorgeous views, primo location (when not on fire), and lots of potential. We really liked the property, but one downside is... The Road, yes it deserves to be capitalized. The road to get there is a bear for about the final half-mile. We brought our 4x4 truck just to make sure it could do it. It made it, and while not a deal breaker, The Road is a big red flag. Even Realtor and the local guy who maintains the roads in the area agree it's a beast.

So I want to look at at least one other property for juxtaposition. Not ready to start throwing money around just yet. 

Speaking of juxtaposition, lilac season is upon us despite our hot, dry winter and spring. I snapped this photo on a recent morning run around.

I'm sneezy, but they're pretty.