Stuff That Happened

The Last Snow Storm in April




There's a neato Eastern European Market on Colorado if you turn East and the north side of the block the Big 5 Sporting goods is on, say, a mile or two North of I-25.



I caught and ate a trout from Clear Creek.



There was a nice sunset the day I caught the Trout, as witnessed here from the Grocery Store in Golden




My job has one of these Pink Floyd The Wall Machines that grind things up:




A lot of other machines are just outside, as they dug up and are now re-paving the street.



We played Soccer on Table Mountain





Our numbers were small but the playing was fun. There was one knee injury sustained that we were able to successfully evacuate. Soccer on a mountain is truly a great idea. We ate food and saw cactus. Then the sunset happened.





Then I canoed down the Green River. Look for more photos in the blog I posted before this one. But here are two that weren't posted yet. From a cameraphone in the middle of the river.





I cooked and swam and drank and ate and learned that pirates wear ARRRRRRRRgile socks.

The Savage Ideal concert will happen July 17th. So I am working on a new live set. It's summer and there are so many things to do at once again. That's a good thing.

David Macaray on the Labor Movement

You don’t stop a bully by giving him your lunch money; you stop him by punching him in the nose. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes you wind up getting the crap beat out of you. But continuing to give up your lunch money isn’t an option.

http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray05282009.html

Green River Photos

http://picasaweb.google.com/erinjoypics/GreenRiverGeology#

This is Utah

This is Utah...





You turn off I-70 and drive through Cisco. Perhaps you stop to hang out with the guy who melts car engines into scrap aluminum and buy a surplus ammo box from him to keep your tattooing equipment in. Then it's past the vultures and the dead cows and the flies through the yellow emptiness of sagebrush and sand to the red rock canyons of the scenic route, along the Colorado River, to Moab. 12,000 foot mountains tower over the desert just off to the distance while Hollywood actresses drive off the cliffs in Green convertibles. You can eat at a nice Italian restaurant in downtown Moab, or just cook over a fire, and then sleep out under the stars in one of the campgrounds along the river where some rafters give your their left over PBR to enjoy the evening with.

Abandoned mines litter the landscape and Old Timers may tell you about the heyday of uranium extraction. A giant, mutant spider pursues and menaces the mountain bikers, and after years of negotiations the Federal Government is finally ready to help transport "the pile" of radiation and heavy metals a bit father out from the river it could any day be washed away into.

Grab a six pack of "Polygamy Porter" from the nearest gas station and head over to "Butch Kassidy's King World Water Park" and reflect upon the irony of this world of dramatic contrast, colors, temperatures, and Death. This is Utah...

If you want surplus ammo boxes

IF YOU WANT surplus military ammo boxes from the front yard of a paranoid mechanic who lives in a ghost town in utah, let me know by tomorrow. They are in 5, 8, and $15 sizes (smallest to biggest)

Foothills

This happened like 2 weeks ago but due to life being busy and unreliable internet at home they haven't been posted regularly.

Anyways, there was the foothills:




That's North Table Mountain. Pretty huh?


There were deer





Jumping deer!



And a whole herd of Bighorn Sheep!




I like this kind of high plateau stuff on top of the foothills.




The desert turns green and blooms in the spring rains




This is highway 6 that goes from Golden to Central City and Black Hawk.




Still to come, making soup, the Yampa river, epic utah photos

How to Bake (breakfast) Rolls

There is a very good Swedish pastry known as the "Cardamon Roll". It is a nice, thick, bready roll with cardamon in it and chocolate in the middle. You can also use the same dough to make cinnamon rolls.

My mother taught me how to bake these and I have the recipie written down somewhere, but circumstances conspired to teach me how to "bake" a variation on it.

My issues were that 1) my oven wasn't working and 2) I wanted something I could bake lots of at once, and then heat up in the toaster, so they'd be easy to much on whenever I was hungry, and 3) I was pretty broke and wanted this to be inexpensive.

The result was a great breakfast "pastry". It wasn't too sweet, which is good for breakfast pastries / snack food, and it has yummy chocolate and nuts inside of it.

First, you neeed this stuff:





-flour (unenriched, unbleached, if possible)
-sugar (not too much)
-salt
-baking powder
-cardamon
-milk (or water if you don't have milk)
-butter (or oil if you don't have butter)
-nuts (I use pecans, they're awesome!)
-chocolate pieces

*** a hint on chocolate pieces. The "baking" chocolate pieces the grocery store sells next to the flour and sugar and other baking things are nice but usually more expensive than similarly sized chocolate bars that the same grocery store sells in the candy asile. Chocolates with flavors (orange with hazelnuts, wow!) are to be found there as well, and are quite good.

*** I don't have a measuring cup, so just do the porportions so they look right. Taste the dough while mixing to make sure its balanced. You may need to add more sugar or cardamon.

*** ground cardamon can be expensive ($9 for a thing of it). If you want to save money, buy whole cardamons and take them out of their shells and ground them yourself. You can also ditch the cardamon altogether and substitute cinnamon and nutmeg, though the result will taste a little different.

Heat up the milk a little bit in the microwave. This makes the dough easier to work with.

In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Very little is necessary, and don't put in too much baking powder, as we want a horizontal, dense, pastry that will still fit into the slots on a toaster.

Pour the warm milk (or water) over it and stir it till you have a nice dough.



Put some flour onto the (clean) kitchen counter. Pour the dough onto this. Mix it up, adding more dough if necessary, until you get a nice dough consitency.

Repeat the above sets until you have as much dough as you think you need.

Chop up the chocolate into thin pieces.



Put it on a little plate with chocolate on one side and cut up nuts on the other



To cook these you can use a nice large pancake griddle, or just spread all your largest frying pans out over your stove. Get them hot and set the heat to med-low.

Grab a little bit of dough, and pick up some chocolate and nuts. Mix the chocolate and nuts into the dough. Then spread it flat on the counter. It should be about as big as the plam of your hand (give or take) and maybe 3/4" high.

Butter your pans and cook these things on them.




The baking powder will make them rise, but I mash them down with a spatula to keep them low and dense, so that they will still fit into my toaster.


YUM!

They can stay frozen for a long time. They can also be put in cookie tins and given away as presents. Just heat them up a little before you eat them. You can also take them with you on road trips or camping trips and they won't go bad too fast.

One of my favorite breakfasts is these things, some bacon, and nice warm pot of coffee.

Want to Drive to Moab?

I have to go there for something, and it will probably be either Tuesday or Thursday of this coming week. I have to talk to the State Parks and Rec office at some point, but before and after I'd like to explore the area a bit, take some pictures of the rocks and canyons, or maybe even go up to mt pearle. I don't have to be back until probably 11 am the next day so I was thinking about camping out by the Colorado River. It's in a beautiful canyon with river otters.

Anyone want to come along for the ride? It's one of the best ones there is. A lot of the end of Thelma and Louise was filmed around there. There's also a guy who sells surplus ammo boxes out of this yard, if you want any let me know.

Stuff I've been doing

This is a random "catching up with me blog".

I was unemployed... then... a scam known as 20/20 communications which hires "door to door" salesmen for Qwest got me to work for them. I thought it was a real job but it was some bullshit and I quit it after one day. There's basically a way to get people to walk around neighborhoods with "Qwest" clothes on to try and sign people up for faster internet. I think they really just exist to repair Qwest's image and give the world the impression that they care about customer service. This makes sense because their former CEO Joe Nacchio is now in prison for insider trading with Enron. Baddd....

None of these people have healthcare and the guy who was training me had only been there for two weeks! That is a bad sign. The smell of burnout and high turnover was prevelant all throughout the entire building.

On the first day of training they sent us to a neighborhood in Highlands ranch that had "no soliciting signs all over it". So we gave up and went back to the office in aurora and got told to drive up to Thornton. Then we have to go back to the Aurora to drop of paperwork. The workday started at 11am and you're to be back at the office at 9pm and then get on a conference call with everyone by 9:30 which can last a half hour to an hour. I was told this job would be fine with giving me a part time schedule. Then they had me scheduled for every day but sunday... the math I did of people on the higher end of this company's pay scale is that they were working 60-66 hours a week for 7-10 an hour. With no health care. And they were paying for their own gas and own car maintainence. But that's supposed to be "ok" because they can write that off their taxes at the end of the year. But almost no one stays there for a whole year, so basically people just get screwed.

One cool thing about this was that I got to meet a nice punk rock girl who also worked here (and also quit). She is pretty but is dating other people. I still get to be her friend though which is cool because I got invited to a fun punk rock party where a grind core band played in the basement and we danced to Michael Jackson.









I also got to ride in the back of a pickup truck!

Now I wait tables and bartend at a nice bistro-y mid eastern place on East Colfax. I'm not gonna lie- sometimes business is slow and that is not fun! But sometimes it is good, and at the end of the week it balances out. I like getting the bartending experiance and between shifts after I clean I can use the wireless internet! My coworkers are mostly friendly refugees from Lebanon and many "activist" type people come in here. I have learned some Arabic, and one guy speaks French, so it's good to practice that. I get to eat lots of GOOD food too, and I'm finally not working for politician / super rich / hustler customers, and I like that.

From this part of east colfax I get a nice view of the sunsets over the mountains at night.





Sometimes it storms



My friend Amanda works at the tatoo place two doors down and often comes in for food and drinks. That's pretty cool.

Other stuff,

There's a huge pile of art on my window sill I have to figure out what to do with. A promoter friend here wants me to play a show soon so I have a week to decide. I miss playing shows but the show is opening for an industrial / ebm / dance band at an industrial / ebm / dance night. So I'd have to write a lot more new stuff for it because the songs I have now are really good, but you can't dance to them, and they'd definately pull the plug on me and never talk to me again if I tried them there.

I'm dating an attractive teacher who reads me stories! That is great. But I think I offended her to do by asking if she'd like to help me with merch for the show. I told her straight up that merch sells better when it's attractive women wearing attractive / sexy clothes selling it. She said no and that she doesn't want to be "sexually objectified in public" by me... which is basically true- that's what would be going on. But I'm still glad I asked now about it up front and was also upfront about the sex selling thing. The worst guy in the world is the one who's in a band and just "assumes" his gf wants to help him with merch, and only asks her like the day before if she is ok with or not.

And

This is how I take pictures of the art.


whoops gotta roll new silverware. See ya!