New Year's Eve

As the annual influx of Christmas circular letters arrive in my letterbox (those things I neatly – or otherwise – avoid by pointing people to this page), I think back to the highlights of my own year and realise that there are a few things I haven’t written about but pop up in my mind instantly as significant bits of the year.

Small things - For example, in March, Sally and I both had our hair cut. I found a salon in Ft Collins that would cut hair for free if you acted as a model. Sally was a model for an apprentice to practice on. I was a model for the stylist to demonstrate to the apprentices how to deal with a client. We both loved the results and for me anyway, it saw a fairly fundamental change in my look. This photo was taken two months later in Glenwood Springs.

In April, Sally asked me to take her to a Jonsi concert in Denver. A little reluctant to go (such a palaver, driving to Denver – and what a wonderful time for our GPS to pack up!) I was, never the less, pleased that – apart from needing a ride to the concert – she would actually tolerate going with me. In the event, it was fantastic, and we are both big fans now of this music, and more often than not, it is our music of choice on car journeys.

Spencer signed up for a basketball team in November and we managed to find a free-standing basketball hoop on freecycle. He has been out most days shooting a few. The first game was a heartsinking 42 – 2 score, but his team won every other game they played.

That's him with the arrow pointing at his back.

Andrew had two trips to the UK, the second of which saw a meeting that, in his words “could not have gone better if I had scripted it myself.” So perhaps that will prove the beginnings of a highlight or indeed, life-changing deal for next year. (what?, income?) You’ve all been told so many times to watch this space. I continue watching as I have no choice.

Can it really be ten years since we celebrated the change from the 20^th to the 21^st century? This new year’s eve will see us driving down to Longmont to join in a traditional family dinner followed by card games and a white elephant gift exchange. My mother normally hosts this jamboree, and it is strictly over by 10pm – which I love. This year, my youngest brother will be hosting, so we may stay until 10:30

Happy New Year to you all.

We Gather Together to Ask the Lord's Blessing...

Thanksgiving spent in sunny Laramie, Wyoming with my sister & her family again this year. Laramie is about 70 miles north, but some 2000 feet higher in altitude, and significantly colder whatever the time of year. My sister told us to bring warm clothes so that we could take the children sledding.

Warm clothes were required, as the temperature was in the teens (well below freezing) and the windchill took it to below zero F. This is my brother, Jim, Sally, and Spencer getting ready to break necks. When you inevitably careen off the sled, the resulting face-full of snow melts on contact, but then freezes almost immediately again, so you are left with mini-icicles on your eyebrows and eyelashes. I see from the news, that Britain is in the grip of cold temperatures and snow again, but we really don't know we're born when it comes to cold.

This sledding area was just 15 minutes or so from the town. Sally, a senior in high-school now, is in the process of making applications to universities. She applied to the Univ of Wyoming, which is in Laramie (my brother-in law is a professor at the Uni, which is why they live there). Tuition and fees are quite a bit less expensive there than in Colorado. However, before we had even arrived at my sister's house, Sally said there was NO WAY she wanted to spend winter in Laramie.

I dunno - you can go cross county skiing in the same park, and it costs nothing other than equipment and time.

She'll kill me for posting this, but it is a tradition in the USA for seniors in high school to have a portrait taken. Nowadays it is almost compulsory to have them taken outside, draped around a tree or fence or something, which neither Sally or I particularly wanted. I wasn't expecting Mona Lisa either.....

Apologies to those of you who received our Christmas card at the end of LAST month. Andrew took another trip to the UK then, and I thought we might save a bit by having him take Christmas cards over and buy postage there. He was to have asked a friend to post them at the beginning of December, but he forgot that bit, and thought he'd be helpful by posting them himself in October. Sigh.

Autumn arrives

September is nearly over and our second summer saw me participating in the County Fair. Frankly, it’s nothing like as nice as the Leigh Summer Show. I may be accused of nursing sour grapes because I only won second place for my entry (but get a load of my official ribbon!).

What I didn’t like is that you hand over your entry for judging, and then the show officials take on the task of staging your exhibit. I have to say the staging was such rubbish that I couldn’t find the exhibit that won first prize in the class I’d entered. In addition, the county is so large that it’s all anonymous. You’d have to enter for years before you began to have an inkling of who your competitors were.

Spencer might have given some people a run for their money this year with a cabbage he grew. In order to encourage children, some organization or other provided these vegetable starts to school children and devised a competition to see who could grow the biggest cabbage. Having never grown cabbage before (I’ve always rather felt with cabbage, there was not much point for some reason), I am amazed at the size of this thing. You can see that the slugs were also very appreciative.

I've started a bit of volunteering. A couple of hours a week at the library, and during August, at ‘The High Plains Environmental Center’, which undertakes work comparable to that at the wonderful Bore Place, which I still miss daily. Hoping in either case that the volunteering may lead to paid work at some stage, but I’m not exactly holding my breath. We were told this month that the recession officially ended LAST July. As the news itself took a year to trickle down, I’m rather thinking that it will take another year for the reality to do so, and perhaps by this time next year, a job will come begging. Ho!

Two Years On

And so it has been two years now since we arrived on these shores. Things have a way of repeating themselves, however, making it seem as if little has changed – or maybe as if we are in a version of the film ‘Groundhog Day’.

This time last year, Andrew had gone off to the UK for two weeks, and I was doing some census work. This year, Andrew has gone off to the UK for two weeks, and I am, again, doing some census work. Go figure. If I am doing census work this time next year, somebody shoot me.

Sally and Spencer started school last week; both looking forward to it after 12 weeks of lolling around here. Spencer is in the 4^th grade, but would have been in year 5 at Leigh school. Sally, a senior in high school, and due to 'graduate' is busy looking at ‘colleges’ to attend – although has no specific 'major' or field of study in mind to my knowledge. She is leaning towards art courses – I would hope she might do more with it than I.

We are still having temperatures that skirt the 90s, more often, now on the cooler side of that figure, but today it is a cloudy and chilly 66 out there. Who’d’ve ever thought one might consider 66 degrees chilly? And I discover, when I wake sometime between 5am & 6am that it is darker and darker. Sigh, with kiddos in school, cooler temperatures, and shorter days, I’m already going into an autumnal funk.

I can be brought out of it fairly quickly though when out in the garden harvesting. Yellow summer squash (sometimes known as crookneck or straightneck) is a personal favourite – for some reason not grown or marketed in the UK - and my one plant has produced so much that the children are pleading for us to have something else for once. Loads of cucumbers – grown outside no less – are also proving troublesome. I juice one most days, but what to do with the rest?

We are amply able to appreciate seasonal produce from the grocery store as well, and it is with great delight that we find that Colorado Peaches are ripe and can be had for 99c(64p)/lb. Imagine. Cantaloupe melon is also another Colorado stalwart and is in the market now for, perhaps $1 a melon or 30c/lb. And while these items can be had at any time of the year, it seems that prices reflect the seasonality of foods here to a much greater extent than they did at home.

Those of you who pay attention will notice that even after two years, I still think of Leigh as home. Now there was a garden.....

Summer holidays

Here is one time of year that I find I’m very 'glad to be here', as we realise that for many of our English friends, the summer holidays have just begun this week, whereas we have already enjoyed two glorious months of summer holidays.

June 26^th, saw us making a three-hour drive to Avon, Colorado. This is just three miles or so from Vail, which most of you will have heard of, and less than a mile away from Beaver Creek. Colorado Ski country. I didn’t know much about this area, despite growing up in Colorado, but made the unremarkable discovery that it’s lovely (if you can ignore the rape of the mountainsides that the ski-runs necessarily entail).

My mother has a time- share condominium in Avon, hence our stay, but as cheap holidays go, the expense of doing anything in this part of the world geared to tourism made it unsuccessful on that score. Other than hiking, which is largely free, any other activity usually involved an expenditure in the range of $200 for the four of us.

However, I can highly recommend the 18 mile bike ride down Vail canyon and would do it any day of the week. Here is Sally, at 17 and one day, who probably enjoyed herself as well.

I also had a fabulous time spotting and trying to identify wildflowers, which were out in profusion. These are columbines (no one here calls them aquilegias), the state flower, which were accompanied

by wild delphiniums, geraniums, violets, orchids, huckleberries, penstemons, and dozens of others I don't yet know. To my great delight, one day we took a trail which led us alternately through two aspen groves and pine forests, only to have the third aspen grove carpeted with bracken. It was my first sighting of bracken here, and, even though one is aware of it's reputation as a thug, I was thrilled to see it as it reminded me of home.

Summer is Here

It’s disorienting somehow to think back to just over two short weeks ago and recall that snow was falling from the sky. We had two snowstorms in early May, and yet, on Saturday last week, I was helping out at the neighbourhood swimming pool, getting it ready for the kiddos to splash around. And, as it was a hot 80 something degrees, splash around they did.

They finished school last Friday, 21 May, and I’m so happy to have them home. Sally is trying to find a summer job in the hope that we can get an additional car for her when she obtains her drivers’ license sometime in July. I have signed Spencer up for a short ‘summer camp’ (for this is what the Americans like to call any arrangement for children during the summer months – even something like this five mornings in early June) called something like ‘Grow a Rainbow’ where he will learn a little about vegetable gardening.

Yesterday saw me making final preparations to my newly dug vegetable bed, where I planted a row of beets, carrots, spinach, and some spring onions. My pre-sprouted squash, cucumbers, and possibly some cantaloupe, are now fending for themselves in the garden along with tomatoes and my goodness it’s lovely to be out in the dirt.

I hedge with ‘possibly some cantaloupe’ because while I had the seeds nestled safely in their cells on top of the washing machine earlier, one of the cats decided to jump up and toppled the entire tray off onto the floor. Some of them had already sprouted, and I did my best to save what was there, but the labels, by then, were useless. I expect I will recognise them when they start fruiting

Not me today, but a Mercola.com article I read and copy in full below. I thought I was reasonably clued up on Agra business, but the size of these subsidies made my eyes pop. I think it may be time to write a letter. One is sick of hearing politicians wring their hands about obesity, and more of us need to be aware. I'm sure the situation is mimicked to an extent in the UK, and in any event, that good old American influence pertains. It's long, but worth reading.

OBESITY CONSPIRACY: The U.S. Government Scandal that's Really Making You Fat

A decade ago, an American woman's waist, on average, was close to two inches smaller than. Eighteen year olds are 15 pounds heavier than they were in the 1970s.
One reason is federal subsidies for food production. Take a look at these numbers:

Meat/Dairy -- 73.8 percent
Grains -- 13.2 percent
Sugar/Oil/Starch/Alcohol -- 10.7 percent
Nuts/Legumes -- 1.9 percent
Vegetables/Fruits -- 0.4 percent

That’s right – just 1.9 percent for nuts and legumes and 0.4 percent for fruits and vegetables. As a result, a salad often costs you more than a Big Mac.
Sources:
Treehugger March 15, 2010
The New York Times April 26, 2010

This Treehugger article contains several interesting charts and graphs that are well worth taking a closer look at. But it should come as no surprise that federal subsidies for certain kinds of food will directly influence the production and subsequent consumption of that food.
As you can see in the list above, the US food subsidies are grossly skewed, creating a diet excessively high in factory-farmed meats, grains and sugars, with very little fresh fruits and vegetables or healthy fats from nuts and seeds.

The Root of the Problem

I believe many of our society’s chronic health problems could be resolved if attention was paid, at the highest levels of government, to the root problem – our agricultural subsidies.
If growers of subsidized fresh vegetables were in a clear majority, you might start to see some fine advertising campaigns promoting the consumption of those veggies…
Unfortunately, the Department of Agriculture is deeply entrenched with the agri-business, and current legislations protect the profits of these large industries at the expense of public health.
In fact, the agriculture lobby is more powerful than even the pharmaceutical industry! You don’t hear about it as often, but the ramifications of their political influence are just as hazardous to your health as that of Big Pharma.
Sadly, you also see this influence in nutrition science. It is actually not designed to help you make sound dietary choices but rather to allow food companies to make health claims to increase profits, and this is a primary reason why you cannot get sound dietary advice from your government.
Take the Food Pyramid, for example. Back in 2005, when the updated food pyramid was unveiled, nutritionist Luise Light, a former USDA insider and contributing architect of the original version of the Food Guide Pyramid, exposed how the US government bows to industry interests and plays a key role in the obesity epidemic.
As this recent New York Times article states, “Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that we’re supposed to eat less of.”

US Government Subsidizes Fast Food

The food crops currently subsidized are corn, soy, wheat and rice. What do you end up with?
A fast food diet!
And what many fail to remember (or don’t realize) is that the farm bill has a direct impact on what your child gets fed in school, for example, and what food assistance programs will distribute to poorer households.
It’s quite clear that the farm bill creates a negative feedback loop that maintains the status quo of the standard American diet. Because by subsidizing the farming of corn and soy, the US government is also actively supporting a diet that consists of these grains in their processed form, namely high fructose corn syrup, soybean oil, and grain-fed cattle – all of which are known contributors to obesity and chronic diseases.
(In addition, let’s not forget that the vast majority of these two crops are also genetically modified, which in and of itself is a major health hazard!)
High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is perhaps the most obvious example of how the farm bill destroys health, as opposed to promoting the production of food that is actually worthy of being called “food.”
HFCS is in TENS of THOUSANDS of food products. If it’s processed, it probably contains HFCS; oftentimes it’s one of the top three ingredients. With everything we now know about how HFCS and other sugars create obesity and chronic disease, it’s no wonder we have a health care crisis on our hands!
Our federal food policy reaches to the very core of our everyday lives; the core of our health. Unless the food policy is addressed and corrected, little progress will be made to improve the current health care crisis.
The links are clear: These food policies directly impact what and how we produce our food, which impacts disease rates, which in turn drive health care costs into the stratosphere.
The average American is now 10 pounds overweight, which translates into $250 billion in added yearly health care costs, not to mention a shorter lifespan.

Farm Bill Also Promotes Excessive Fossil Fuel Consumption

In addition to producing little else but fast food, this type of monoculture is also very dependent on fossil fuels. Because when you grow one type of crop almost exclusively, you deplete the soil, which means you have to use more fertilizer, which is made from fossil fuel.
Monocultures also invite more pests, which need to be treated with ever increasing amounts of pesticides – also made from fossil fuel.
Cheap food is actually incredibly expensive once everything is added up, including stratospheric health care costs, continued dependence on fossil fuels, and the destruction of the earth as a whole.

Opt Not to Play Along – Choose Health!

If you want to optimize your health, you simply must return to the basics of healthy food choices. And try as they may, industry lobbyists still cannot force you to buy these types of junk foods. The choice is entirely yours, and consumer demand will always win eventually, so the more people demand healthy, unadulterated foods, the more they must produce, one way or another.
I encourage you to support the small family farms in your area. You’ll receive nutritious food from a source that you can trust, and you’ll not only be supporting the health of your own family but the health of your entire community.
However, there is still much confusion about what is healthy – and in some cases, whether or not something is actually food. The easiest way to get confused and be led astray by misleading advertising is by focusing on individual ingredients or nutrients rather than the food as a whole.
In a nutshell, the easiest way back toward health is to focus on WHOLE, unadulterated foods; foods that have not been processed or altered from their original state. Food that has been grown or raised as nature intended, without the use of chemical additives, pesticides and fertilizers.
Whole, especially organic, foods contain so many nutrients that work together synergistically, making them superior to anything that contains only the active ingredient (and frequently as a synthetic version at that).
Now, if you don’t’ know what’s implied by “as nature intended,” then that should be a sign that you have gotten too disconnected from the natural world, and a refresher course in natural farming practices may be called for. (For example, corn is not, and has never been, a natural part of any cow’s diet. You will never see a cow nibbling on a corn stalk when out to pasture, no matter how much corn is growing nearby.)
Eating a diet of processed foods while popping vitamins and supplements, thinking you’re getting everything you need for health, is a reckless miscalculation that will extract its true cost in the form of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
Remember, any amount of time and money you save today by stopping at a fast food restaurant, you’re bound to repay later when you’re too ill to lead an active life.

The cost of living

So when we started seriously thinking about moving here (can it really be three years ago now?) one attraction was that we should be able to enjoy a better standard of living. I mean, every time we came for a visit, we would pack an empty suitcase in our bags, because we knew that during our visit, we would pounce upon stuff that was so cheap we couldn’t not buy it. Oh, the money we saved – and by extension, the money we would save…..

Well it turns out that it was all a house of cards, as I’ve mentioned before, because, as a visitor, one never knew the cost of health insurance that burdens the American pocketbook. That alone is enough to bring the cost of living here in line with our UK expenses.

Of course, it made other things seem cheap in comparison. All those other things with which we used to fill our empty suitcase. (I can’t even think of one now….). And, of course, we all know the legendary low cost of petrol – Currently something in the region of $2.60 a gallon (43p a litre – actually more, as the American gallon is smaller, but I’m not clever enough – not bothered enough – to do the precise calculation).

I’ve always had a ready reckoner when thinking about US prices in comparison with UK ones and that was that the figure was the same, just the currency sign differed: if something was £2.00, it would be $2.00. The savings, immediate.

But one has discovered a surprising number of other things that are more expensive here than they would be in the UK. Books, for some reason, are more expensive. I think there are no books here under $19.99. Any paperback: £13 - £14. And you pay sales tax on top of that. Here in Colorado, that’s in the region of 8% (you never know quite how much extra it will be, as it varies, not only from town to town, but I discovered recently, from area of town to area of town. A particular shopping centre may well charge an extra % in order to help pay for itself.)

Paint is more expensive. I’ve finally got off my backside to tackle some interior decorating and find that a cheap gallon of paint is $20 – again, £13 - £14. If you want environmentally friendly paint be prepared to pay three times that amount.

Phone, TV and internet connections seem astronomical to me. We don’t pay anything for TV viewing, as we rely on the (frankly pretty horrible) broadcast (as opposed to satellite or cable) services. But if advertisements are anything to go by everyone else in America is paying $29.95 a month for their cheap introductory offer for TV for the first year, then it goes up – to I don’t know what – and you have to tie yourself in for two years or pay a $350 termination fee.

Mobile phone networks tempt you with their astounding services at only $69.95 a month. Internet service providers want the same. If you bundle all these services together you can get a deal for maybe $100 a month (£60), but again, you’ll be locked into the contract for a couple of years where it will increase horribly in the second year, or pay a huge termination fee.

Our electricity, and gas bills seem comparable to what we used to pay. Our ‘property tax’ (council tax)” at $1200/yr seems comparable. I think most food is less expensive, and in any given week, some variety of organic apple or pear is on sale for $1/lb (60p/lb). I can buy a pound of organic salad leaves for $2.50. Bread and cheese cost more, with a decent loaf of bread in the $3.50/$4.00 region. Good cheese starts at $17/lb. But we can find grass fed or free-range meat for $4/lb.

And let's not even mention the exchange rate.....

Apparently April is the month when Colorado can expect more snow than any other. We have had two spring snow storms in March so far, with 9 inches falling last week. Wet and heavy, it was gone within a couple of days. This is a picture of a flock of robins in our neighbour's tree. You will see American robins are bigger, and nowhere as cute as English ones, but they aren't quite such bullies either, and are happy to roost together.

A year later....

It scarcely seems possible that this time last year I was marveling at how mild the weather was, with both Sally and Spencer out on their bicycles in just a light fleece. One knew at the time that the mildness was unrepresentative, but this February is rubbing my nose in it. We had yet another four inches of snow yesterday and are due more today and tomorrow. Earlier last week someone came along with yellow machinery to dig up the accumulated ice on the north sidewalks and road. There are one or two missed bits where you can see the ice on the pavement is a very solid three to four inches. So now I am sighing: Will this never end?

I am aware that Britain is also in the throes of a particularly cold winter as well. Some say it is all the fault of Barak Obama.*

Despite the cold, I returned home yesterday with a terrific sense of warm smugness, for yesterday, nearly two whole months before the deadline of 15 April, (a date which means nothing to you in the UK, but has every American quiver with dread as it is the day on which one’s tax must be filed), Andrew and I filed our tax returns. Every American, and resident alien (which is Andrew’s official status) must pay tax on their worldwide income. I fell off the radar many years ago in the UK, when, after taking hours to fill out these horrid, horrid forms, I repeatedly came up with the grand number of “0”. I rather thought both the IRS and I had better things to do with our time, and stopped filing. Latterly, of course, one’s personal income was so low so as to legitimately neglect the task.

Last year we discovered a service –provided by the IRS – where volunteers help you fill out and file your return for free! There are some qualifications: the service is meant for senior citizens (of which Andrew can proudly claim to be), and those on lower incomes (of which we can also – perhaps not so proudly – claim to be). But my goodness is it wonderful. We went along with a dozen bits of paperwork, and a nice lady put all the figures into her computer in the right places, and, Bob’s your uncle, we were done. In just over an hour. I can’t begin to describe the relief.

My Mother turned 80 this month, and we held a surprise party for her here. Family members number 23, and we invited another 23 friends and neighbours. She was duly surprised, and everyone had a good time. Proof that my moaning about the weather is all rubbish is this photo, which shows us all outside on 13 Feb on a balmy afternoon. These are the people, and this is the reason I am here.

*….”Hell will freeze over before a black man is elected president of the United States.”

All the News That's Fit to Print

And so 2009 has ended (without comment from me – how did you all manage?) and I haven’t touched a dozen topics that exercise me on an almost daily basis.

Today it’s newspapers. I was sent an invoice for our newspaper subscription last week and I really really wonder whether I should bother to pay it. When we first moved here I was given a free four month subscription to our local paper: The Loveland Reporter Herald. We soon learned that our neighbours refer to it as the Repeater Herald, as any given edition is likely to be full of yesterday’s (last week’s more likely) news hashed over.

When it came time to renew (pay), I gently declined. A friend persuaded me to try the Fort Collins paper, and I did. While it’s marginally better, I decided after awhile that I wouldn’t bother renewing that either. When I phoned to cancel, they were magically able to reduce my subscription rate by 60%. It’s still rubbish.

We also have The Denver Post delivered. It pretends to be more of a national paper, but has more pages devoted to advertisements than news, and it is a daily occurrence to flip seven or eight pages of the latest furniture sales before coming to a narrow column of ‘world news’ consisting of a headlines and a couple of sentences tucked in beside more furniture sales ads. The editorial is yawnmaking, letters to the editor, facile.

I keep abreast by reading UK newspapers online, and listening to NPR – National Public Radio. Not as entertaining as Radio Four, it none-the-less fills a gap. In Colorado they broadcast the World Service between 9pm and 4am, although it’s not the same World Service that you hear in the UK. I’ve also become a devotee of a few US programs –for those of you who listen online, or download podcasts, I highly recommend This American Life. There is also Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, which is comparable to The News Quiz and usually has me laughing, much to Andrew’s consternation, as I listen to the podcast on my hand-me-down i-pod (Sally’s old model). It’s very odd to be in the same room with someone who suddenly starts giggling and, because you can’t hear what they’re listening to, you haven’t a clue why.

Ah, but I really miss sitting down in the morning with a cup of coffee and a good newspaper which I know will afford something interesting, informative and entertaining. At the moment I think that, by buying the newspaper, I’m contributing to the odd local career in journalism, and to paper recycling facilities. Is it worth it?