Learning in Leadville

Well whadda ya know?!

Free internet with my hotel room here in Leadville!

Yep, I was finally let off my short leash (attached to that dump truck!) and am down in Leadville for Forest Insect and Disease and Hazard Tree Training. I got here on Monday and will be going back to Grand Lake on Friday. It's like a vacation! I am off work by 5:30 instead of 7:30! And I like this kind of stuff. The mornings are in the classroom but all afternoon we are in the field, looking at "bugs and crud", driving around these sweet mountains down here. Found a few nice places to trail run yesterday by the Fish Hatchery (complete with big and little swimming fishies in the hatchery!) but wasn't so successful today... for future reference, the trails around Turquoise Lake are up, up, UP! And I didn't even bother today. :)

So along with this wireless internet I get CABLE. Ooooh. Ahhhh. Ehhh... there's a reason I haven't had it for years. I swear everything on TV is a reality show and very very much LAME. I did watch Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch though, so it's not all crap. Just most of it.

This weekend my friends Chris and Edie got married. Hooray! It was a nice modern small QUICK ceremony at the Wild Basin Lodge in Allenspark, it was absolutely beautiful and the food - salmon and buffalo - was fantastic! Tim left for the North Fork for 8 days on Monday morning, and I left for Leadville later that afternoon. Next time I see him, it will be our 2 year anniversary! Actually he gets out the 30th, and our anniversary is the 28th, but can't do much about it I guess!

From Chris and Edi...

The trails guys and their respective women; click the photo for more pictures from the wedding

Leadville is a great hub to hike 14ers and do offroading (where Tim and I went last fall) and other outdoors stuff, but the restaurants here pretty much stink. If you ever go out here, eat at the Tennessee Pass Cafe - especially if you dig Kona beer, goat cheese, spinach and avocado as much as I do - and maybe Doc Holliday's if you like meat and grilled cheese with hashbrowns.

Next week, we have a Stihl chainsaw rep coming up for an advanced chainsaw teardown class. It's my idea of a good time! I tried to set it up for just my crew... which has since gone from a small intense class to a big, possibly not as good class, but I tried. Then I get Thursday off (since Friday is my leu day and it's the 4th of July) so Tim and I are planning on relaxing or maybe a short trip somewhere. I'm soooo bummed I am missing my best friends Kevin and Beth's wedding in Michigan, but I just can't take the time or money or stress of leaving before I hit it hard at work again.

Oh speaking of dogs, did I mention I adopted Luna out to somebody who wants to put her to work as a real cattle dog on a ranch?? She has too much energy and brains to ever be happy with me, and I think she'd like the challenge! We'll see if it works out though, maybe she'll be back to haunt me. I miss my little girl! And I cried my eyes out. But you gotta do what you gotta do!

Besides that, hopefully I'll be done with the obscene amount of overtime in the next 2-3 weeks, but sounds like as of today that is a false hope. We are working with the power company on getting trees by the lines felled, and secondary lines dropped so that we (or somebody else AGAIN, grrr I just wanna cut trees and nobody will let me do my job!) can haul them away. I'm getting ready to throw a potato in the exhaust of that dump truck!! Will it ever end!

I'll find out in the next week or two if Tim gets to go to Alaska to blow up boulders for a trails project in the Kenai Fjords (I think that's where it is) for 2-4 weeks. If so, I can't wait to ask my boss for a month off of work. Will he let me? Doubt it. I'll have to figure something out so I can go...

There's a bunch of crazy fires going on, especially California and New Mexico. We'll see if they let me out this year; even though we're swamped and I'm the crew leader, we are on the fire crew so I think they'll send me out when the time comes.

I was looking up interesting news about Rocky Mountain National Park, and besides the two people that have died in the park so far this year (one heart attack, one fall... both at very popular areas) I found this article saying, VOLUNTEER FOR THE PARK! IT'S FUN! Or if you actually want to make money, here's how to get a job in the national parks. I also found this one talking about suicides in the parks - none lately in Rocky, but a couple in Colorado National Monument. Did you know there was such a word as "suicidology"??

Here's another one: I could get flooded out of Leadville right now as snowpack melts and all this water is backed up in the old mines around town. Sweet. Everywhere else is flooded, why not here?? :P

Here's my photos from visiting Michigan (mostly at the Wings game) and a few of a tele skiing day trip I took... and my last remaining photos of Luna before I adopted her out. Booo hooooooo!! :(

All work and no play makes Lisa cranky

Let me sum up why I haven't updated in forever, or called anybody, or seen anybody.

I moved to Grand Lake in a flurry. The cabin was not clean; I lived out of boxes up until last weekend, because I couldn't unpack them amidst the mess. I didn't have time to clean, because I have been working 60-80 hrs a week of hard manual labor. Luna needs more exercise and doesn't like being locked up for 12 hours so I've tried to deal with that but I am giving her to a friend who will try to train her to be a working cattle dog. (Good for my little girl! I'm so proud!) I'm sad to get rid of her, but between being allergic, and not having time, and she being such an energetic dog and my ridiculous and unreasonable schedule, it is the best thing for her. I'm still trying to unpack and finish cleaning, but it's nice coming home to a cabin where the frogs and crickets chirp, nobody has a porch light, and it is totally SILENT. Logan has been limping from a resurgence of his panostisis, so I've had to deal with him not eating from that, and being depressed because we just up and moved. I didn't even get to say bye to anybody, because I had so much crap to do and no time to do it! I finally fixed my motorcycle and got expensive fancy new tires. Did I mention I've been working 7 am to 7:30 pm every day? And on the weekends Tim and I take turns going back and forth but some days, the road has been closed which meant a 3 1/2 hr drive for me to Estes instead of just 1/2 hr. Did I mention I'm cranky and tired?

The work load on the west side has been insane, so as a response, fire decided to make it an "incident" and brought in a crew from Yellowstone, and a crew from Whiskeytown, California to help, as well as our local fire crews and the hot shot crew. Everybody finally went back home this weekend, so Ruth and I are in cahoots with the East side road crew, manually loading logs and slash into a loader, which is then loaded into a dump truck that is older than I am, and I drive that big yellow beast to the dump... 20, 30, who knows how many times a day. I am exhausted from the loading, and more exhausted from the monotonous drone of that damn truck! I haven't cut more than 1 tree down in a month, which hasn't help my mood any either. That's my stress relief! Instead, everybody else cut them down and we get to clean it up. Short end of that stick, eh!?

This weekend, Tim's parents, aunt and uncle are in town so I met them for the first time and we did the tourist thing. I found them moose, bighorn sheep, coyotes, etc... And I'm even more drained! I opted out of a tour of some of Tim's trail work, instead sleeping this afternoon and hopping on here to take care of business.

I have tons of photos to post but not the time to do it! If anybody wants to visit me... don't even plan on it until August. I don't think I can keep up this 12 hr days/5 days a week minimum for much longer. Thank goodness I'm going to training in Leadville for a week, will be a nice vacation!!

Miss everybody and sorry I have been so out of touch. I did finally switch from AT&T to Verizon, which is the only thing that works at my cabin in the park, but now I have to put all my phone numbers in the phone. Of course I don't know anybody's numbers by heart! Grand Lake is nice, if I only had the time to enjoy it!

PS: I'm so very very tired. I could just sit around and sleep and watch Scrubs for a week...