Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where everything changes on a daily basis. It has been a wild ride the last two and a half weeks. There was loneliness, and it was crazy busy and stressful and there were tears and rage and pity parties and a whole bunch of politically charged conversations between us, the in-county staff and the far-removed out of county staff who have been doing reservations and collecting money and writing our checks, but really have no clue what has actually gone on in the county, and who are now wanting to be involved and we are not sure where we fit anymore. Since we promised to stay until new help was trained (which could take until next spring, according to the out-of-county managers, who are panicking at the thought of losing us). And then thee was just the crazy. I have concluded that people who live under the constant high stress of property management are a special breed- they are, by necessity, a little unbalanced. That is certainly us, but we are beginning to conclude it may apply to others in this company as well. B has been trying to drive truck and spread manure, a process that takes both hands, while being available to give us advice on an as-needed basis, which has him frusterated and us panicking, because we don't call him unless we really do need him, and then he is often out in some field without good cell reception or does not hear his phone ring, or is simply to preoccupied to take the call. So if you ask how we are doing, we probably won't lie and say we are doing fabulously. We will say we knew this is how it would be, and it was still more important to us that B stop the creeping of gray into his hair that wasn't there five years ago, that he remove himself from an industry that does nothing but create angry, resentful people with no trust in the goodness of humanity. After a day up here, as wonderful as it is to see each other, he is ready to leave again and go back to where the only stress is trying to get a field done before the evening thunderstorm. A day here witnessing Marci and me falling apart because in trying to do the right thing, the things we thought our absentee bosses wanted us to do, we do the exact wrong thing and have been chewed out for it and now are wondering how we are even going to manage to make it another day, let alone another eight months up here, all he wants to do is escape to where there are no crying women. By the time the phone finally stops ringing in the evenings, Marci and I find it difficult to even finish sentences, our brains are so fried.

I have not been on my bike but twice in the last two weeks. There was a ride one evening up Ptarmigan, then the race last night. I knew I was ill-prepared to race, feeling so drained from all the other distractions, but I went because I was on the roster for my race team, so if I didn't show up, there would be a zero on their points total. Even finishing DFL (Dead Freaking Last) is more points than a zero, so I went, and finding my stores of energy drained and my legs heavy after two weeks of no training, I just settled in and focused on merely trying to catch those immediately in front of me instead of the leaders. About 30 minutes into it, I suddenly realized it had been 30 minutes since I had thought about work, and it had been thirty minutes since that tight knot of worry in my stomach had somehow untied itself. I have never been so happy to have been racing. There was nothing but my ragged breath and the pounding of my heart and the squeak of my bike and the mantra that I whispered to myself with every breath. This mantra changes with every stage of every race and it helps me focus on my breathing and cadence, keeping my vo2 max in an optimum range while focusing my mind. It ranges from "What am..." (on the inhale) "I doing"(on the exhale), to "Catching her...catching her" to "Ride this...damn bike" to "I can...do this" to "stu-pid, stu-pid, stu-pid, stu-pid" (on steep climbs when my nose is over the handlebars, someone's riding my wheel and I am panting in short gasps) to nonsense syllables like "Haloodalee...haloodaloo". Yes, when I am biking, I tend to swear at myself a lot. I do not say things like that until I am yelling at myself to go faster and harder, and even then, they stay safely under my breath, my tongue just barely forming them. Last night though, the words I repeated with each breath were "This is...what I need. This is...what I need." And it was. I came in fifth, the losing a photo finish by a hair's width to the girl who is this year's enemy on the course, friend off the course. I slept soundly last night, in spite of having consumed a caffeine-laced Clif shot, and awoke in a better frame of mind than I have been in a while.

So there is your update. It's not exactly fun up here right now, but we are surviving. We think. Little things like a glass of wine and a bike race (though not in that order), a few minutes to read a book while drifting off to sleep, lunch on a sunny patio make us realize we are okay.

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where the only things I want to tell have happened while in the bike saddle. Oh, there are other things to tell but it's exhausting to even replay it in my mind, let alone let my fingers tap it all out. But tap it out I shall, all in good time, possibly at the cost of my usual blow-by-blow recounting of the latest race, or bike ride, or other high country adventure (I know, try not to act so disappointed).

Summer has arrived for real. All but the highest trails are clear by now. We enjoyed two weeks of absolutely idyllic blue summer days before monsoon weather patterns moved in. Most of this week, by 9 am the clouds are starting to build, and it is raining by noon. Then there is a brief hole in the clouds in the afternoon, followed by rain in the evening and through the night.

We have spent our days lately in a haze of stress so high we wonder if the tightness in our throats is ever going to go away. We have actually hit that point where we food tastes like cardboard and eating it is just more work than going hungry. I can think of exactly twice in the last ten years that has happened. It's just as well, since going to the grocery store is such a monumental undertaking. Aisles and aisles full of so many options, and buying food means having to plan ahead for menus, and we end up buying cereal but forgetting coconut milk, or buying onions but forgetting green peppers, or coming home (if you are me) with bags and bags of fruit because you were thirsty when you were shopping and nothing else sounded good. And then you spent $100 and all you have to show for it is a pitiful pile of food that now needs preparation. Then you decide that you are so hungry you are shaking, and just five miles away is a Qdoba or a Noodles and Company, and you could just pay $6 and voila! Instant food!

The cause of said stress comes from several different sources. First, the job has been unusually demanding lately. B has been working late into the evenings trying to satisfy guests, some of their complaints legitimate, and some just plain silly. He spent an entire eight hours the other day working with a group who had the misfortune of checking into a condo after a month-long construction crew booking checked out. Reservations gave us a day to clean it and fix it between bookings, and we spent it changing every light bulb in the place, revacuuming and recleaning after housekeeping had left (in their defense, I know how it works when you are a housekeeper and walk into a unit that is as absolutely filthy as that one was- after you have spent all day in it, you think it is sparkling. Then someone else walks in and sees all the things you have been looking at and not seeing all day because you are so overwhelmed with the sheer amount of yuck that you have already scrubbed through.) Once the guests noticed some of their dishes were less than sparkling, they were on a tear to find everything wrong that they possibly could. B ended up making many trips to the hardware store and walmart to buy odds and ends that they suddenly decided they simply could not have a successful vacation without- another spaghetti pot, non-slip mats for the tubs, new plates, new teflon pans, more fans, the list goes on and on. At eight o'clock that night, he was still working in their condo around them, while they sat in the living room and the most demanding woman in the group reiterated again and again how ashamed of himself he should feel, how ridiculous it was that they should be paying good money for such a dump, and when he walked into the other room, the rest of the group, by now somewhat placated, tried to shush her and tell her it wasn't his fault, so she should stop taking it out on him. When he came home, he was absolutely drained. The next few days weren't much better, with several of our duplexes rented out to groups who can not solve their differences, calling Bobby to complain incessantly about each other, a tenant who threatens to call the cops every time the child in the unit above him runs across the floor, rent payments to chase down and collect in wrinkled twenty dollar bills from tenants we urged our boss to not rent to. Every time I called him from a unit to report more maintenance, he could not get his maintenance guy out there to fix it because the maintenance guy is a family man who's wife also works, so if the wife is at work or little league needs a coach or the inlaws are out, he is unavailable. It was one of these evenings, when at 5:00 we were supposed to be at the Frisco Bay Marina wishing a friend good luck on upcoming nuptials and a move to Golden and a graduate's degree at the School of Mines, but were instead in a condo stuffing feather duvets into egyptian cotton covers and pillows into microsuede shams and remaking beds with freshly washed mattress pads, in the rare event that the owner might show up unannounced and think the world was coming to an end if her condo was in less than perfect shape, that we got good and angry and began to talk.

I can probably count on one hand the times in the last near-decade that I have been married to him that I have seen B angry enough to be nearly violent. Those have been times when he felt directly insulted in such a way that it was absolutely impossible to take it any other way. A certain night nearly a decade ago comes to mind involving some not-yet-mature bros of his,(And at my mom's suggestion, after reading this blog, I should explain, as I had to to her, that "bro" is not short for those who came from the same parent, but simply means male friends, as in, those whith whom one can hunt and fish and golf and have a bromance that wives are half pleased by, and half envy. Bros follow the Bro Code-click the link for a sample, but please know that I do not endorse such bro-tish vulgarity, and be warned that it is there.) These particular bros, having planned an evening in Garden City with us, then met two girls there, and after having offered to go reserve us all a table together in a restaurant, asked for a table for four, not seven, and were already seated at it with said girls when we arrived, and after a meal at a different restaurant, B licking his wounds over his buddies choosing 'ho's over bros (again, see the above Bro Code link), a certain pickup truck bearing said bros came flying around us on the way home with the hairy backside of one bro hung out the back window exposed to our headlights. After which a confrontation involving a high speed chase ensued, followed by a phone call in which the bros were made to understand a fair amount of things, including the ramifications of breaking the bro code. This one incident has stayed with me because it was completely uncharacteristic, and in a really weird way, reassuring, because I had wondered until then if anything would cause him to stand up for himself or me. It showed me that this man whom I married because, first and foremost, he would never hurt me or threaten me, was also capable of protecting me if the need should arise.

But I digress. I only related that story to say that B has varying kinds of angry, and this was not that one. It was the kind for more common to him- the wallowing in self-pity kind that smolders rather than burns hot and bright, the kind that comes from being beat down time and again until he is too tired to fight back. The really dangerous kind. The kind of anger that leads to bitingly condescending remarks in a normal, conversational voice that eventually leads to my own bright-and-hot flare, because I run much hotter than he does and my redline is a little lower, and I panic when I recognize that I am unhappy because my deepest terror is living my life in the absence of love and cheer. Which does nothing except end with me crying myself to sleep because after all that effort and rage, I have accomplished nothing except being less attractive to him now that my face is red and all the scary that I keep inside has just spilled all over him and he can't possibly love me anymore. And he responds by digging just a bit lower into his hole of self-pity and self-flagellation, and so it continues.

So we talked like angry but mature adults, with me trying hard not to interpret his comments that nobody else works around here to mean that I am a lazy, selfish person without a single redeeming feature, as I usually take such statements, and we eventually came to an agreement we have come to before, but always with an abstract plan- we have to make a change. This plan has been a thing of constantly evolving shape- it involves running a hotel, it involves a beach and a flunky job with no stress, it involves a small western-slope town on a river somewhere, it involves doing exactly what we are doing now, but in a place of equatorial perpetual summer. It has never even held the hint of going back to that place we ran from, the place that was always our back-up plan, our bomb shelter, as our first option. We stood there, me leaning against the loft railing looking down at him as he stood leaning against the couch downstairs looking up at me, and we finally both sighed and stated the obvious- if we gamble and go somewhere and blow our savings on a move without a job secured, and if it's a flunky job and we never save any money again, and then we end up living in Kansas driving tractor for low wages in a farm economy that my be weaker than it is right now, will we hate ourselves for not paying our dues now and going back there while the economy is strong out there, jumping into a business opportunity that most likely will not be there in a few years after we are too broke to finance it? And in that moment, going out to Kansas where there are no screaming New York vacationers, no high-maintenance Chinese women calling every few minutes because they have another inane question (not to sound racist. I am sure there are some very self-sufficient, laid-back Chinese women. They just don't vacation in Keystone.), no Texas housewives asking for one more wineglass at midnight, no "You should be ashamed of yourself, I can't believe you are still in business if you run it like this" comments from guests he has just spend eight hours and driven a hundred miles trying to please... a field stretching to the bare, flat horizon and the whine of a diesel engine sounded like just the medicine he needed. And I could see it so plainly in his face that it overwhelmed all of the selfish reasons I had for wanting to stay here- the summer days that drip past like warm pine sap, hot sun and cool breeze, nodding wildflowers and trickling streams and damp earth. The winter days that are so brisk they crackle, deep, pillowy blankets of fresh snow in the morning. Friends who routinely do the impossible, win world championships, throw insane tricks off of fifty-foot cliffs and star in action films, race bikes in Europe, then come home and lay flooring and cut down trees and sell ski gear like any average joe, never thinking to mention in normal conversation that they are celebrities in certain circles. All the reasons I have for never wanting to leave Summit County died as I saw this glimmer of a smile on his face at the thought of walking away from this job.

Like so many things that are life-changing, this one started with that glimmer. No need to mention it to anyone. Maybe make a phone call or two and see if it's even a possibility. A phone call became a trip out there to discuss options with a seller of a business, a trip turned into a meeting with a banker, a meeting with a banker resulted in financing being available and came right back to the question that suddenly needs answered immediately- do we want to do it or not? And here we are on the brink of a huge fork in our life's path, bewildered and silent and brooding and terrified and excited and reluctant. Bewildered because this thing has taken on a life of it's own and thrown us into the back seat, but the promise of money is far better than what we are making here, so it makes sense, and all we have to do is say yes. Silent because we never really wanted to go back there, aside from a sense of responsibility to family, and how glad hey would be to see us move back. Even though our roots are there and our family is there, we have seen such beauty and we have become such different and better people living in Colorado that we are reluctant to go back, terrified that we will become who we were when we lived there, falling back into the mess that is peer pressure and conspicuous consumption and the need to prove one's self worth by sheer tonnage of one's vehicle and the newness of one's house, and the need to prove that we are still good people, gentle and loving, possibly more than ever before, in spite of the fact that there will be those who watch our every move for a less-than-Godly agenda. (And even if those dear black-capped and bearded ones don't do that, we still imagine they do. After all, it was they who passed judgement on us and declared us spiritually dead and shunned us, at a point in our lives when we were coming into our own mentally and spiritually and had never felt so close to God and all that is holy and loving.) Excited because the business holds the promise of a better payday, because B has lived the last eight years trying to quell his entrepreneurial spirit, because old friends still live there and we look forward to reconnecting with them, and because Kansas businesses simply do not know the level of stress that a lodging company in a world class ski resort town knows. Reluctant because none of our dreams involved a life with no adventure beyond what we create for ourselves, limited by those flat horizons and neighbors who see no fun in adventure, surrounded by judgement and hemmed in by the lack of options in everything from food to recreation to jobs. And our silence becomes more of an obstacle every day, because it is so hard to explain all of these feelings to our friends up here, justify why we are leaving them, that it is easier to just pretend that everything will just go on as it always has, and sooner or later, we will have to tell them, and we dread it.

And besides, I can't leave here. Not yet. I still have a company to manage along with Marci. Our days off for the next nine months just got cancelled by the fact that there will be no Bobby to take the abuse that this company can give out. Marci and I have to stay here and keep things from falling apart and train in new managers. It's bittersweet for me- I can stay, but I won't have time for any of the things that make this place so amazing. I will only have time to make sure it is amazing for everyone else. I will become Bobby, with no me to help share the load. In the meantime, I will miss him like crazy.

I am confused about the thought that we are willing to live in separate states for nine months. Do we think it will be easy? Are we in denial? I admit, a part of me wants to know if I am strong and independent, if I can do this. A part of me can't wait for him to leave so I can be my own person and make my own decisions. I went from being a minor living with my parents to being a wife, and I have never really flexed my muscles on my own. We have settled into our routines together, and we understand, on some basic level, when the other needs space and needs to make a decision for themselves. Hence the reason he wanted to see the banker and seller without me, for various reasons that may or may not have made sense, and I didn't argue, because I happily spent that time on a two day road trip, just me and my bike and miles of pedalling on the road shoulder, camping in a grassy mountainside clearing under a brilliant milky way while dew collected on my bike and my sleeping bag, deliciously alone in the silence and the dark that was far from black. I think normal people find this alone place in their lives working separate jobs, sharing childcare responsibilities that take their minds off of each other and focus it on a common goal. I think it's a normal part of co-existing, but one that few can ever articulate for fear of being seen as unhappy together. And it's true, my mind doesn't really understand all the long evenings and lonely nights that are nine months apart. My army wife friends know only too well, having spent entire years apart without the option of a five-hour car trip if the loneliness gets overwhelming. I just don't know. What I do know is that Bobby quitting this job may be the best thing he ever did for his own health and sanity, and that a change was going to happen, so maybe it's a good thing that it is solidifying sooner rather than later.

So, faithful few, that is how it has come to be that next Tuesday, we plan on signing all our savings over to the bank in exchange for a loader and a raw manure spreader, and possibly by the end of next week, B will be out there running it, and I will be here running the lodging company, and my two week notice has been turned in at the bike shop. And that is the reason for the stress-induced malnourishment. And the silence and refusal to commit to anything. And now you know as much as we do.