Hi to all my peoples again...
Wow, hawaii seems like a long time ago. I may have sat down long enough to check my email about four times since then, and my computer has laid on the coffee table and gathered dust in the meantime. When we got home, we had three days until we closed on our "new" house, and in those three days we told ourselves we should just relax, get a few things done, and prepare for being really busy. I didn't do laundry (should have) I didnt cook ahead (should have) but I did go to the basin and get one last day in on my snowboard. Well, not an entire day because the weather did not cooperate and threw little stinging balls of sleet at me until I gave in and went home. Seems like every time I take the time in May to go up to the basin and make a few turns, that is what happens. It can be toasty warm every other day, people skiing shirtless, barbeque grills and sunburns, but the day I go up, the clouds build, the coats and neck gaters come out, and I finally have to concede defeat because if I'm going to be riding on corn and ice, it had better be on a nice day, or it just isnt worth it. I returned home and watched tv, catching up on all the shows I had recorded to watch before we lost our DVR box when we moved out.

And then, on the 27th of May, we met the seller, gave her a check that pretty much cleaned us out, and I spent the rest of the day removing popcorn from the kitchen ceiling. It had been painted over, and painted over, and painted over until it was cemented to the ceiling, I discovered. The only way to get under it to scrape it off was to knock off the tops of the "popcorns", soak it with water from a spray bottle, wait a minute while it softened, then chip at it with only slightly more success than before. I spent about ten hours on the kitchen ceiling, skylight, and utility ceiling before calling it quits on the rest of the house. That night, my shoulder cramped up so bad I was nearly in tears, and BBD wanted to be mad at me that I had undertaken such a job in the first place, since popcorn on the ceiling was not something that one simply couldn't live around, unlike unfinished walls and lack of flooring and filthy, decrepit appliances. he couldn't be too upset though, because I was already furious at the ceiling that was almost to get the better of me.

I finished the ceiling the next day and cleaned up the mess, and we began painting. The people who lived here before us had begun texturing over the dark brown panel walls, but had given up before they were finished and just painted the rest of them, so I got out the sheetrock mud and began filling the grooves. We got a little help painting from Amber and Scarlett and Marci, and the walls that did not require mud were soon a warm, yellowey color. We tore out the remaining carpet, holding our breath as the pad beneath disolved into yellow dust and all the stink hiding under it was exposed to fresh air. Tore up linoleum. That night, after our help had gone home, Bobby got out the fireplace poker (because his crowbar was at home) and began prying up the countertops. After that, I don't really remember all the details, i only know we ripped, we mudded, we textured, we painted. then we made our first trip to denver for materials. We tried three U-haul places for a trailer, to no avail, before BBD got really frusterated, mashed on the gas pedal, and drove decisively to the trailer-sellin place, where he wrote an ill-afforded check for a 6x12 utility trailer. Our days of dealing with u-haul are over, thank goodness. We took the trailer to Lowe's and Home depot, and loaded it up with carpet, vinyl flooring, more paint, more mud, wood trim, wood for the countertops, and formica to laminate the countertops with. More foggy details followed. Cutting, sawing, pounding, hammering, measuring. We decided to save a little money and not replace the painted-over oak cabinets, instead I sanded the edges to give them an antique, distressed look. A floating plank-vinyl floor went in, then carpet. I was going to wait with the lighting until my dad came up, since he's the electrician, not me, but I got so excited seeing it all come together that I could not wait. I unwrapped just one fixture... just to see it... but seeing it on the countertop was not enough, so I climbed up on a chair and installed it... then another one... and another one.... then the chandeleir... until they were all up. And after BBD ironed and stretched the last of the carpet, and the vinyl floor was close enough to finished to be livable, we hooked up the trailer again, went to denver, and loaded it with two couches, a table, chairs, barstools, a used fridge, a used dishwasher, a new stove, switch and outlet covers, vent covers, more lights, a ceiling fan. Bathroom fans. A tv stand. The next morning, we unloaded it all into the house with only one major glitch. We had measured the couch and knew it would fit through the door only it we turned it on end and swiveled it through. we did not however realize that a trailer house door may be a bit shorter than a regular house door. We pushed and grunted and angled it and staightened it until our fingers were raw from handling it before conceding defeat and getting out the wrecking tools. When we had the screen door, door, and door frame torn out down to the two by sixes in the wall around it, the couch finally fit. We decided a new door would be nice, anyway, after all that, so we did not bother replacing everything we took out and now, after dark, a generous shaft of moonlight shines in around it.

Finally, it is livable. The bathrooms still need the same treatment the rest of the house got, but they are usable as they are. We removed the woodstove from the corner of the living room and before winter, will install one that meets EPA standards and is capable of heating the whole house. We still need to decide what we will do for a vent over the kitchen range, and in a year or two, might buy a fridge and dishwasher that matches the rest of the kitchen. All the trim needs installed, and the windows are a little drafty, although with free heat from the woodstove that will not be a huge issue between now and when we have the fundilation to replace them. BBD agreed to install crown molding around the tops of the kitchen cabinets, since that was the one completely useless fancy detail I fixated on. It is far from finished, but it is already home in a way that the house on Bighorn Circle never was. We live here. Alone. And it's a house that we own. We got the title in the mail a week ago. Our touches are everywhere, everything is personalized to us. Every surface in this house has changed in some way, and it was our hands that did the changing. And even better, we are living inside these four walls that bear our mark for the same amount of money that some people here pay to be a roommate in someone else's house. We bounce around three bedrooms and two bathrooms for a less than half of what we were paying to share four bedrooms and three bathrooms with as many as seven people.

I almost have to gulp sometimes when i reflect on how things have worked out for us. Was it only a few months ago I was praying, penciling, calculating, even having conversations with BBD about our options for when we were forced to move out of Summit County? When we realized that we would need to be moving, and that rent had increased at the same rate as real estate in the two years we had been living at Bighorn Circle, we had almost convinced ourselves to sell our souls to a half-million dollar mortgage. The house that we rented for $2,200 a month would be re-renting for closer to $3,000. A three bedroom, two bath is now renting for almost what we were paying for our four-bedroom, three and a half bath. The mortgage payments seemed almost doable in the light of that sort of rent increase, as long as an economic collapse didnt happen. we even looked at some houses for sale. We had been told by an evicted former resident of this park that no new homes were being allowed in here, and the old ones were being phased out in favor of developing the land it sits on into two-hundred-thousand dollar homesites, so we did not even consider it an option until, in the process of beating the bushes for housing, we realized that there were actually quite a few new homes going in here. So we stopped and asked, and were told that no development was in the plan, in fact the owners of the park are bringing in about ten new trailers a year just to sell once they get them set. We began to think that the payments on a new double-wide would be more affordable than the payments on a house and land. The fact that we live in a trailer park really is not an issue at all for us, since this is, after all, summit county. Even the trailer parks here are beautified and covenant protected. And then one day, long after we had given up on being called back on an older trailer we had called about, the lady called us back, and all the pieces tumbled into place. We almost have to wonder if this is exactly where we are meant to be. It feels like an answer to prayer. We have no right to be able to live in such a place for so little, and we feel a little guilty, because many of our friends up here were not as lucky as us and still have mortgages. I remember being nearly in tears as the one-bedroom cabin in Montezuma rented, the two-bedroom in Silverthorne, the condo in Keystone, the townhouse in Frisco, all rented before we could get our names on the lease. I remember wanting to scream, I was so sure we would end up in half the place we wanted, for more money than we could afford. I wanted to run ahead and get something NOW, so that wouldn't happen. But once again, I have been humbled and reminded that when the timing is right, everything will be better than it could have possibly been had I run ahead of myself.

Living in Summit County is about living hand-to-mouth, in debt, as one's trade-off to being smack dab in the middle of world class skiing and some of the most beautiful mountains one can find without getting far off the beaten track. It is about somehow managing a half-million dollar mortgage on three poorly-paying jobs and never even having the time to enjoy one's surroundings. Carrying a bicycle and a kayak on top of one's car all winter because one has nowhere to store them. Having the bicycle on top of the car cost more than the car itself. Leaving the car parked in the free skiier parking and taking the bus home because even if you hadn't spent the money on beer that you should have spent on gas, and are now unfit to drive it home, you still feel that the money went to the better cause. Helping the rich get richer, helping them buy their third vacation home while you beg them to allow you to clean it in your free time and hope they remember to pay you and do not find some issue with the job you did and use that excuse not to pay you. For some, it is about helping a friend pay their rent in exchange for the priviledge of sleeping on their couch, or even in a utility trailer in their backyard, and turning complimentary ketchup packets into tomato soup on a bunson burner. There is a reason that the population in this county is a revolving one. And I am almost wondering if, in having everything fall into place as it has, we are being given the message that we are supposed to stay here, at least for the time being, because of some thing in our future that we do not know about yet.

My mom and dad came up here over father's day weekend to help us move. we actually had most of our stuff moved already, but the house on Bighorn still needed to have a thorough scrubbing. The walls had suffered in the two years we lived there, with such a revolving door of roommates and company, and many of them needed repainted. The day mom and dad were here, we spent in Bighorn, scrubbing and scouring and shining and spiffing and moving furniture and fluffing couch cushions and chasing cobwebs, in the hopes that we can collect most of our deposit. we took time off at noon to make a quick trip to Frisco, for the Frisco barbeque- the entire main street in Frisco becomes home for two days to a couple hundred vendors, all selling smoked meats and competing for the $15,000 grand prize for all-round best food. There was a boot-scootin band in the park, sunburns and greasy fingers abounded. Even Brother Nathaniel was there, waving his "Got Hope?" sign and gettin jiggy. There was so much meat, and so many people like me (i assume) who do not eat meat on a regular basis, that all the lines for smoked veggies were rediculously long. I waited and waited for smoked asparagus and when I finally got to the front of the line, it was gone. Oh, well. I sipped a high-fructose corn syrup and mango smoothie and gnawed on a drumstick like a good little omnivore.

Bobby spent the next two days painting, we hired a carpet cleaning company to restore the plush white carpets back to their original plushy whiteness. Finally, we are done with Bighorn. We had some good times there, but it was still nice to let it go. It was such a big house, it never entirely felt like home.

Before they left, dad wired in new ceiling fan (something I felt very underqualified to tackle) and mom and I took a walk. Did I mention that I live right on the edge of summit county mountain-bike central now? I am a quarter mile from the Colorado Trail, the volunteer maintained trail the stretches from Denver to Durango, and there is a regular spider-web of trails that are known as the "back ranch", accessible from the trailhead right outside my door. The new swan mountain recpath winds across the hillside just above me. We have a big, sunny, south-facing deck where we sit and eat our cereal in the morning because it is warmer than inside the house. We are suddenly geared to outdoor living, with everything we need just a few steps from the couch. Anyway, we took a walk, wound back through the trees that surround Swan Meadow, before they left. Then Bobby and I got out our bikes and went for our first bike ride of the season, on the same trail. It is finally dry. When we got home, I left BBD there and kept riding, up the recpath to another trail I discovered which took me to the top of a ridge above our place. There are a lot of wild rose bushes up there. Some day, I am going to sneak up there and dig just a few, from between the wheel tracks where they wil just get killed if I leave them there, and transplant them to my yard. And so began our biking season. The next day, i biked to work, then a friend gave me a ride home so my legs would be fresh enough to ride the trails with her that night. I rode with her and her husband, around the ranch, walking through the water still running down from the high country. And tonight, I am planing on meeting the Mountain Sports Outlet Divas for a ride on Oro Grande trail, their first ride of the season. In a few weeks, maybe Keystone Mountain will even be dry enough to ride up, even though it is a construction zone right now. A new Gondola is being installed by a massive helicopter, hovering and lowering towers into place to the tune of $12,000 an hour (i heard). Apparently, keystone plans on hauling up a few paying customers to pay for that.

And now, i must run. I am meeting Bobby and a couple we used to know in Kansas for lunch at the Red Mountain Grill, the restaurant beside our office. Another reason to love summer- kansas people occasionally pass through and want to see us.