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Just got off the phone with Xcel Energy, the local power utility here in Boulder. I signed us up for wind power, baby! That’s right, every watt we consume is now being generated by a wind turbine farm in Colorado or Wyoming. Oh sure, it all goes into the same grid, right alongside the coal-produced electricity, but by participating in Xcel’s Windsource program, we’re supporting the renewable energy infrastructure – and it only costs about a buck per hundred kilowatt hours to do so.

Time for another long-overdue update. Let’s go in reverse order, with regard to the title of this post.

Well folks, there it is. Our new place. Ours is the one to the left, and yes, those are the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in the background. We closed today, we move in next week.

See the thing is, you can question government. That’s a good thing. And blindly trusting government is generally a bad idea, yes. But in this day and age, especially in this day and age, cooking up idiotic theories about 9/11, and even worse, allowing some fucking nutjob moron – who already was stupid enough to work for the bush administration (in a capacity that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with national security, aviation, architecture, structural engineering, physics…) in the first place – to get some airtime in a local Boulder paper, to basically assert that what I fucking saw with my own eyes did not happen, is bad for the liberal cause.

September Eleventh - An Account

Right on, Sky News, Right on.

This country is lost. The way I see it, when thousands of people die and the reaction is for thousands more to begin looting and shooting at the helicopters trying to rescue them with their ten pairs of Nikes – while rich people argue the details of supply and demand and its effect fuel prices on an aviation mailing list I subscribe to, and the so-called leader of this country goes on television and says he “understands” what’s going on – I believe we are truly in the midst of the most serious reality-disconnect mode I’ve ever seen in my life.

Hi. It’s been a while. Rest assured, I am alive and well. But my lack of presence online and an untimely email outage actually led my friend John to think I actually was dead.

Well, I’m back. Been back, in fact. But I spent three great days at the greatest airshow & aviation event in the world (and then a day wondering just how in the hell we managed to screw up commercial air travel so wholly and completely).

Enough of this Boulder business, I’m goin’ to Oshkosh!

Last week, I saw some of those tree huggers. Literally.

You have to love this.

I left my apartment at 8AM this morning, and arrived at work ten minutes later, self-reliant the whole way. A friend of a friend out here loaned me his mountain bike indefinitely, which has been great for getting around Boulder. There are bike paths and bike lanes everywhere, and many crosswalks have bike sensors in the road so when you roll up the lights often immediately begin to turn in your favor. A garbage truck stopped and let me cross a side street, and the driver even waved and smiled.

One week in. Settling in at work, and just yesterday I moved from a hotel to an actual apartment, so now it really feels like I live in Boulder. I guess I do. Holy Shit! Today was my first day off since arrival in Colorado, and I spent it walking around and exploring (and locating this free wireless internet access point). I was here in Boulder a month ago for the interview, and our friends Bill & Lauren showed us around, but the weather was uncharacteristically poor and we were pressed for time to boot, so everything kind of flew by. Today, I have been experiencing Boulder the way one is supposed to: slowly, thoughtfully and roasting under a mountain sun.

Outta my way, Mork. Boulder’s about to get a new resident.

When the time came to fly 93F one last time, I asked my friend John to come along. I wanted to tell him how much I appreciated our friendship, and his help with acquiring this plane of mine, this plane that was about to become someone else’s. John’s the guy who made aircraft ownership possible for me, and in a way, I felt as if I was letting him down by leaving New Jersey and leaving niner three fox behind as well. But life happens.

The good news is I spent this past entire weekend with friends and family. The bad news is the goodbyes at the end of the days had a little more significance.

“OK, so I want to have a brokers-only open house on Tuesday…”

Well, that’s that. In a few more days, I won’t be able to call myself an aircraft owner anymore. Niner three foxtrot, my little Cessna 150, won’t be joining us in Boulder.

Sitting at my desk, eating lunch, looking for something to read online, I put this search term into Google: “cycling in boulder”. The wealth of decent links was impressive, but this one gave me goosebumps. I knew that Boulder was a cycling hotbed, but the sheer mass of cycling talent that resides in the Boulder area is like a who’s who of American cycling. The story specifically talks about a lot of the riders who were great when I was really into road racing, back in the mid-80’s. Guys like Andy Hampsten, Davis Phinney and Ron Kiefel – the old seven-eleven team, remember? Somewhere I still have some old copies of “Winning” and “Bicycling” with their pictures in them, and now these guys are going to be my neighbors.