Monthly Archives: September 2014

Introspection

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The Rut has started. It’s time to get back out there and start collecting cows. His antlers are in their prime and polished until the tines look like old Ivory. He’s in the best shape he’s been in for years. His coat is glossy, his voice is in good form and the cows are down at the other end of the meadow just waiting. He’s looked the new crop of young bulls over and he’s not worried. Yet he’s just not feeling it. It’s cool here in the afternoon shade of the aspen and although the nights have been cold it’s still hot during the day. It’s too soon to get all worked up.

Maybe he’ll let things get started before he joins the fray. Let some of the younger bulls do the work and gather up his cows before he goes out and runs them off. Or maybe he’ll just wait until he feels the need to go out and do battle again. Right now it feels pretty good to just stand here and watch the sunlight play over the long grass. He might even lie down here and just think about things for a while. That sounds like a plan, there’s plenty of time yet.

Sunrise At The Institute

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This is the time of year when many people are filled with angst and fearful thoughts about what is going on in the world around them. The seasons are changing. It’s getting dark earlier again. Mother Nature seems to be in a rather petulant mood, sending storm clouds and unexpected winds, perhaps a smattering of cold heavy raindrops that at first you thought were going to be snowflakes but then turned into an ugly drizzle instead, just when you thought it was going to be a bright sun-shiny day.

The Institute has weathered many of these changes over the years and seeing the worry and discomforting feelings that arise during this changeover we have set our crack team of meteorologists to finding solutions to make this period a more stable and non-threatening time for you our loyal readers.

Our first task was to identify what it is exactly about this time of year that sends you into such a tizzy. We immediately set our survey department to work to determine the most worrisome problems in numerical order and came up with the top five reasons. As we felt this was a high-priority problem we suspended our usual mail, radio and TV ads to get information and took to the phones instead to get our information as directly and quickly as we could. We called everyone in our data banks and asked “What’s the big problem? What bugs you every fall? Have you sent us your free-will love donation yet and why not?” The answers we got were surprising. Here they are in order of importance.

Biggest Problems This Time of Year

1: Survey takers

2: Survey takers who ask us for money

3: Sunrises

4: Robo calls, especially those political ones

5: When Aunt Pheeb sends me out to pick blueberries when she knows the bear is out there and locks the door so I can’t get back in until the pail is full. She also puts peanut butter and honey sandwiches in my lunch bag when she knows I hate honey.*

* We almost didn’t include this one in our results because we know it came from Uncle Skid and you can’t trust a word he says, but since we could only contact about 7 or 8 people for our survey we had to include it to make the full five reasons.

The real surprise for us was “Sunrises”. That was an unexpected reason for worry. Since we only had a few moments to ask our questions before they slammed the phone down, we weren’t able to quantify why sunrises were a point of concern for you. Vexed, we racked our collective brain for possible reasons. Unfortunately we came up with nothing, Zippo, nada, nilch, not a thing. But !, and I cannot stress the importance of this, since this was a large concern for our responders, or in this case responder, we felt obligated to do whatever we could to alleviate this problem.

Tossing this hot potato back to our meteorologists and weather modifiers we gave them several hours to come up with a solution. And they did. Due to a legitimate fear of finding themselves back on the unemployment line they came up with a pretty darn good fix. Since the primary cause of fear was the fact that many people couldn’t see the sunrise due to things like blinding snowstorms, or intense darkness or having their eyes closed and thus became convinced that there wasn’t a sunrise thereby producing the angst and unrestrained panic that made them all crazy-like, we decided to tie the sunrise to not only early morning, but to the actual dawn part of the day. That’s the beauty part. That’s what makes this work.

That way people could depend on the fact that the sun would come up everyday, even if they couldn’t see it due to inclement conditions. They would know it was happening and be reassured. We also decided to add a spectrum enhancement that would occur every three or four sunrises that would be so spectacular that people would be talking about them for the next several days to get them over the next few days in case they didn’t get to see the sunrise, again due to crappy weather conditions.

These may seem like simple solutions after the fact, but if they were so simple why didn’t somebody come up with it before. Like maybe those guys sitting around in those big high paying think tank jobs, where they get to just sit around all day and think of stuff. There’s a waste of the taxpayers dollars if I ever saw one. This problem has been around for a while and we’ve fixed it in a few hours and do we get the big bucks? No sir-ree bob, we don’t. But your thanks are payment enough, so don’t worry, we’ll still be here to solve the worlds problems and do the hard thing when it needs to be done, because we’re The Institute and we’re here to help.

P.S. the image above is a sample of our new and improved uber-enhanced sunrises that we expect to be turning out by the boatload for your viewing pleasure.

Blue Thursday

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I always call today Blue Thursday because it is the first Thursday of September and it won’t be long until every Thursday and Tuesday and Friday and Wednesday will look like this all winter long. That is, it will if you live right on the very edge of the Grand canyon. If you don’t then your view will be somewhat different. It will still be Blue Thursday though no matter where you live, the view will just be different.

This is the time of the year where Mother Nature messes with your head. It’s sort of a little joke with her to screw you up, it helps her pass the time during an otherwise boring seasonal change over. Things like where one day you’re sweating like a donut in a police station and the next you’re as cold as an ex-wife’s heart. I wouldn’t complain about it too much though if I were you, she can do a lot worse, Mother Nature that is, and I for one do not want to cheese her off. Think of the Dark Ages where she killed off half the world’s population just because somebody said something they shouldn’t have. In her view we don’t have to be here you know, this is just a courtesy on her part because we amuse her occasionally.

If you look at the image closely, go ahead click on it, I’ll wait, you’ll see white stuff laying all over the place. We all know what that means don’t we. Snow shovels, snow days, dashing through the…, S’now business like Show business, Teenage Mutant Ninja Snow Turtles, S’now way Dude, I’m not eating that, and lots of other stuff that is nasty, cold, wet and uncomfortable. But I’m not complaining! I put that in, the I’m not complaining part, just in case Mother Nature reads my blog, I don’t know if she does but why take chances. I know this other blogger that made fun of this witch and now he has a head shaped like a Raccoon’s butt and all he can eat are buttermilk smoothies. I’m just saying. Watch what you say.

Yes I know that some of you might find that scene above beautiful, maybe even serene, certainly restful. There’s no drama involved, everybody kinda likes blue, and the open spaces make you feel like you’re a small little, slightly overweight bird with short stubby wings, flapping like crazy trying to make it to the other side, but remember, this is early in the morning, you haven’t had your caffeine of choice yet, it is really, really cold out there, the wind is clocking right at a blustery 35mph, and there is every chance your car won’t start and you’re going to have to take the bus to work today. That’s why I call this Blue Thursday, and I suspect you might too.

Let me know if you have any real trouble adjusting to the change and we’ll think nice thoughts about you. Otherwise start digging out all the down stuff you own, I think we’re in for a big one this year.

A Tree Grows In Wyoming

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It was early in the morning Saturday when I got the call. I had just sat down to do some serious blog writing when the sound of my ringtone “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” blared through the office thoroughly erasing the story from my mind I had intended to write . As you know this is a song by Iron Butterfly from their 1968 album “Songs My Mother Sang To Me” and I chose it because it is seventeen minutes long which gives me plenty of time to decide if I want to answer it or not.

“This had better be good, dogbreath.” I said into the phone. My caller, a spotter I used periodically to notify me if she found anything interesting was too excited to catch my tone and went on breathlessly. “Boss, I found it! I found the tree that grows in Wyoming.”

“Bull Dimples!” I yelled back at her. “You called me at 4:15 in the morning to feed me crap like this?” She never missed a beat and went on to tell me that as she drove along one of the back roads near the Colorado border there it was. The tree.

For years there have been rumors of a tree actually growing in Wyoming. Thousands have sought it out. Whole fortunes have been lost looking for it. Reputations have been ruined and lives wrecked searching for the tree that grows in Wyoming. And now my spotter says she found it. I was skeptical. It wasn’t until she sent me a grainy out of focus image from her BlackBerry that I began to think may be she had found it. If so I needed to be up there and get proper proof before we announced it to the world. The risk of ridicule was too great to mishandle this. I got what details she could give me, told her we’d talk about compensation if the story proved out and immediately began plans to leave.

For the record there are trees in Wyoming but they’re mainly restricted to the western part of the state and found up on the sides of mountains where they’re difficult to get at unless you’re like, a mountain goat or something. What we’re talking about here are trees on the plains of Wyoming. There aren’t any. And as Wyoming is 740% plains that’s a lot of no trees. The natives living here will tell you that isn’t so but tall bushes are not trees and don’t count. So finding that tree is a really big deal. Just think of the tourist dollars that would add to the state’s coffers. The person that brings this discovery to the world will be the next face on Mt. Rushmore even if that is in South Dakota.

I needed to plan my strategy carefully. I decided the best plan would be to ease up on it, kind of like you do at a single’s bar where there is real danger in spooking it off if your approach is too straight forward. I took the southern route leaving the Institute and heading west on Hwy 14 up the Poudre canyon, following the Cache La Poudre river, passing through the small towns of Spencer heights, Gould, and Walden, where I picked Hwy 40 towards Steamboat Springs and on to Craig, Colorado.

I wanted to immediately drive up Hwy 13 into Wyoming. I felt the excitement building, I was closing in on my quarry and hopefully I would soon approach it. However the Bokeh Maru was somewhat fatigued from the altitude change and needed to rest. Craig was a good place for that. In the morning we would take Hwy 70 in Wyoming and begin our stalk. I hoped beyond hope that no one had tipped the tree off and this would not become another hopeless quest. It was a difficult night for me with our quarry so close. The Bokeh Maru slept like a baby. It was like she wasn’t even aware of the importance of our mission.

The next day, after filling the Bokeh Maru’s tanks, we left and picked up Wyoming Hwy 70 which led us to Hwy 130 where we could almost smell that tree. All we had to do was climb Battle pass, snake down the switchbacks until we overlooked Centennial, Wyoming and then if our spotters directions were correct we’d be on that tree before it could shake its little branches and scamper back to its hiding place. That was not going to happen today. Not on my watch.

As you drop down the long sloping highway above Centennial you can see forever. They call it the Laramie plains and for every mile you can think of, there are long rolling hills covered with golden grass waving in the wind. I was thankful for the wind today, as it seldom blows in Wyoming, to cover the sound of the Bokeh Maru as we crept up over the last hill. Being Labor day and a holiday there were practically no cars on the road. Everyone must have been at labor because we alone on the highway as I cut the engine and coasted up to where the tree had last been reported and there it was. The tree at last. That lone green sentinel in a sea of golden grass. I was stunned to my core. I had found it at last.

I immediately took its picture, in fact I took two in case I lost one and then ran up to it and drove a stake through one of its roots pinning it to the ground. This was done in a humane way using recycled stakes and an OSHA approved hammer. This tree was not going to disappear before I could get my image published and the proper officials notified and begin the process of raking in the dough. The only worry that I had as I triumphantly returned to The Institute was that the wind didn’t blow the stake out of the ground and release the tree. There was little chance of that however, because as I mentioned before, the wind rarely blows in Wyoming and then it’s usually just a gentle little zephyr to cool off a hot day.

I couldn’t wait, I had to show you my loyal readers, the picture of the only tree in Wyoming before you saw it on CNN. My meeting with all the most important officials of the State of Wyoming is set for this Thursday and I’ve told them to bring their checkbooks. Now if I can just get an up to date weather report to make sure it’s going to be a calm sunny day I’ll be able  to sleep tonight. I can’t wait to be rich.