A journey to the Four Corners

Tim: Yeah, I know...it is about time we got off our lazy backsides and posted on the blog. In reality, our life the last two weeks has been, well, boring. We have done the typical daily trip to the bookstore and have learned a ton of things during those visits. We have also started going to the pool here at the apartment complex on most days. We have taken a couple of days off from this as we got fried one day and needed to recover.

We decided to take a trip the last two days to the four corners area (Candy's so cute in the picture above!). The four corners area is the only area in the U.S. where four states come together at one spot (Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona). The area was very interesting and the mountains were incredibly colorful. Along the way, we drove past the Ute Mountain Tribal Park, which has Chimney Rock, an interesting rock formation that is legendary in the Southwest and similar to Devil's Tower National Park (image I found from web below):

The exact spot of the four corners is on the Navajo Nation area of New Mexico and the park, which is owned by the Navajo, closes at 5 p.m. Well, in typical Tim and Candy fashion, we arrived at 5:45 p.m. The fence said "No trespassing" (see picture below...I acted like I had the key for the lock),

but we decided that we had traveled for seven hours and we were not going away empty handed (so to speak). We joined a lot of other people and walked to the exact four corners spot, which was about half a mile from the fence area. Here is a picture of me playing Twister on the four spots:
After seeing the four corners, we headed to Gallup, New Mexico for the night. On the way, we saw the legendary Shiprock, or Shiprock Peak. It is a rock formation rising nearly 1,800 feet above the high-desert plain on the Navajo reservation, near the town of Shiprock. The name derives from its resemblance to an enormous 19th-century Clipper ship. This is a picture of it I found from the web:
We stayed over night at a Holiday Inn on historic Route 66 in Gallup. This morning, we headed out of Gallup and drove on part of the old Route 66 to Albuquerque, where we briefly visited the Old Town. We have been on this route before back in 2002 on another of our journeys, so it was really just a rehash of that trip.

After Albuquerque, we headed back to Pueblo, which is about five and a half hours from Albuquerque. We drove through Santa Fe on the way home, as well as Trinidad, Colorado. This area of the country is really an incredible area that is almost untouched. On the way, we actually got hail and had a great deal of accumulation., which was very interesting. I guess when you are at 8,500 feet above sea level anything can happen.

The entire trip was around 1,100 miles and was well worth it. Chase was along for the ride again and had a great time, as well. We decided to rent a car for the trip. Our Element has nearly 115,000 miles on it and we figured we give it a well-deserved break.

We promise to start posting more often. We still need to go to Pike's Peak and to the Sand Dunes National Park, so more posts will be coming soon. We only have a month left here in Colorado, so we want to get the most out of it.

Have a great day and we will post again in the coming days!

Rushing to Cripple Creek

Candy: Today we took an impulse trip up to Colorado Springs, ate some great Mexican food at the On the Border restaurant (yummy), and then pulled out the atlas to see what would be a great back-roads route to take home to Pueblo.

We ended up driving west on highway 24 to 67 south, traveling around three sides of Pike's Peak (beautiful), and ending up in Cripple Creek, Colorado, which is about 60 miles northwest of Pueblo (as the crow flies) in the hill country behind Pike's Peak.

The lead image in this post is a roadside vista we pulled over for. Tim played fetch with Chase down the sloping hillside where we stopped, which was great b/c it tired Chase out really quickly, both from the high altitude and the uphill running.

The town of Cripple Creek, at 9,494 feet above sea level, marks the area where a cowboy named Bob Womack discovered gold in 1890. Today it's a National Historic District commemorating the fourth largest producing gold camp in the world. There are still two large gold mines in operation today, and tourists can take mine tours and pan for gold.

There are tons of historic mine shafts and lots of old, abandoned buildings that dot the mountainsides. We could easily imagine what it must have been like in the gold rush days. The town is filled with quaint red-brick buildings and there are quite a few cool shops for the thousands of people living in the town and surrounding hills.

By the way, as we entered Cripple Creek from the north, this is the vista we saw. There was quite a bit of haze and I don't yet own a polarizing filter, so you can't really see the snow-capped mountain ranges in the distance in a way that would be much more true to what we saw this afternoon.

However, the Sangre de Cristo (blood of Christ) mountain range is to the far left in the distance, and several other mountains were within view. Mt. Pisgah is the dark, pointy peak to the right.

The other photos in tonight's post are from the same vantage point as the panorama above, except that they show the areas behind or to the side of where I was standing for the panorama.

This is Mt. Pisgah again. I like the lens flare effects of shooting into the sun on this shot.

We arrived back at our apartment in time to watch the rest of the season finale for Grey's Anatomy, one of our favorite shows. Shortly after 11, Tim started having some pain in his stomach, and we hoped it was just gas, but it now appears that he has food poisoning.

What are the odds that we'd both get food poisoning in the same week?

Today I finally felt back to normal, and we ate essentially the same foods and drank the same drinks, with one exception...a Big Gulp brand cola Tim drank this afternoon.

He loves those non-namebrand drinks. I'm guessing that's what caused it, though there's really no way to know, of course.

He's been vomiting and getting chills and all the other usual symptoms, and has been doubled up on the couch as I write this. I'm hoping that it'll move through his (much faster metabolism) system quickly and that he won't be miserable for as long as I was. He's finally gotten warm enough and comfortable enough to fall asleep.

Well, I'll leave you with my favorite photo from today. I love the clouds and how brilliant the sky was against the contrasting yellow vegetation.

Have a wonderful Tuesday.

Update from Pueblo

Tim: It has been a couple of days since we last posted, so here is the latest with us. On Thursday evening, after our daily trip to the Barnes and Noble, we watched the final round of “American Inventor” on ABC. We are not huge reality TV fans, but we have really enjoyed watching this series. The final four contestants have shown us the true meaning of commitment to your dream. One contestant in the final round works in a factory in Detroit, owns a small gym in his community and had to declare bankruptcy on his small gym during the show. Another contestant in the semi-final round was fired from her job in pursuit of her dream. Still another contestant spent $80,000 over a five year span to build his new computerized word game. All of these people risked so much with the possibility that only one person would win the $1 million prize. That really spoke volumes to us, especially looking at what we have done in the last two and a half months.

We have been weighing where we should go next, but the one thing we do know is that we will have a level of commitment that will be unwavering. Ben Stein, an author that Candy has spoken about in the last post, used an analogy in his book, “How Successful People Win: Using "Bunkhouse Logic" to Get What You Want in Life”, regarding “being at the table.” He said that in order to be successful at a casino, for instance, you have to be competing at the table, not by watching, but by taking a risk. You have to be at the table. We have decided that whatever happens, we will be “at the table.” So many people do not take chances in their lives and never reach their true potential. Failure is not final or fatal…this is something I have learned about my recent experience in coaching.

We had planned to go to Pike’s Peak on Friday, but decided to wait until next week to make the trip. Instead of going to Pike’s Peak, we made a trip to the bookstore, and then went to the local drive inn movie theatre in Pueblo. We saw “Poseidon”, which in our opinion was not as good we thought it would be.

We had not been to a drive inn movie in over a year. One of the things we loved to do when we lived in Grove City was to go to the Butler Drive-Inn in Butler, PA for a Friday night double feature. We would always stop by Sheetz and pick up a sandwich, chips, and a drink, then head to the movie. Going to the movie this past Friday night brought back some good memories of that time in our life.

After the movie, Candy started to feel sick. She apparently ate something wrong at lunch on Friday. After a very long night of chills, a sour stomach, and a lot of vomiting, we deduced that it was food poisoning. She has had a tough Saturday and is very dehydrated. I have gone through being food poisoned twice in my life, so I can understand how painful it is for her. She has gotten a lot of fluids and rest today and we hope she feels back to normal by tomorrow.

Chase update: that rambunctious puppy is healing very well after having his bandages taken off this week. He finally got to exercise yesterday.

Sorry we do not have any pictures today. With the resident picture person doubled over with food poisoning, we do not have any cool images for the blog today. Thanks for reading again and to all the moms out there, have a great Mother’s Day!

Art and Words

Candy: Last night and today I worked on some older photos in my collection. I'm working hard to redo my photography website and while collecting and processing the photos, I played with a few. I'm including them for you tonight.

The lead-off image is a panorama I took while standing inside the Pantheon in Rome last May. It's what you see when you look out between the columns. I can instantly put myself back in that plaza when I look at this photo.

This one is an artistic rendering of what was a really blurry photo of a gondolier I took from a bridge over one of the canals in Venice. I wasn't sure what would happen from that not-very-good photo, but I really like how it turned out. This one was produced from a photo taken after dark near Elbow Lake, Minnesota, in July of 2004. You'd never know it was pitch black, would you? It's really colorful, and these type of renderings have been really appealing to me lately.

Here's a piece based on a photo of the pier and cable cars at Daytona Beach, Florida. Tim and I were there between Christmas and New Year's with his basketball team, and the photo was taken from the balcony of our hotel room.

This one is one of my favorite images so far. It's a little blue elephant bank that I photographed in our attic in Hiram this spring. I love the colors that came out as I played with it in Photoshop.

I read half of Alice in Wonderland today at B&N. I haven't read that story since I was a little girl. It was really great to go back through it and rediscover some really clever truths hidden in the story.

Part of a conversation between Alice and the Cheshire Cat struck a chord with me today. I've been struggling for most of my life with what I should do as a vocation, but especially lately as I contemplate what direction to take next. Here's the conversation.

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" asked Alice.

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where--," said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"--so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if only you walk long enough."

Funny, right? Except that it's indicative of my professional path. I haven't known where I wanted to go so it didn't really matter which way I took. This fictional conversation symbolizes the frustration I have with not knowing the destination before I head out.

The flip side, though, is that it really opens the door to some adventures that I might not ever have experienced had I known the destination and taken the shortest path to it.

Because I'm working on my site, I also read a couple books on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Flash, but nothing was really interesting enough to include in this post. Go figure!

I'll tell you what, though. Last week I read a book by Ben Stein that was really incredible. You know Ben Stein, the guy from the TV show Who Wants to Win Ben Stein's Money?

Anyway, he's written several books, and this one is How Sucessful People Win: Using "Bunkhouse Logic" to Get What You Want in Life. It addresses the issues of making a contribution to your world and how to live a big life modeled after the way people we consider successful live.

The two basic tenets are this: you have to use your "inner mobility" and "activity" to keep yourself going. He uses the analogy of a cowboy driving a herd of cattle to market throughout the book, and talks about how to prepare for the game of life, then identifies ten rules of the game that he has learned from his observation of successful people.

Here's an excerpt that I found especially interesting.

The cowboy doesn't simply abandon his cattle 20 miles from the market and wait to see if they arrive by themselves. He herds them every inch of the way.

Similarly, your ideas, your creativity, and your energy are your charges. You cannot just abandon them to the free play of the cruel world. You must guide them and take care of them by doing for yourself. That is how you win the game.

Think enough of yourself to do for yourself. That is how you'll thrive in the world, and that's the only way.

Here are Stein's tenets:

Prepare for the game
1. Decide what you want
2. Ask for what you want
3. You can't win if you're not at the table

Rules of the game
1. Concentrate on "How To"; Forget "Why Not"
2. Notice what is, not what should be
3. Luck is catching
4. Life is a process, and the process never ends
5. Nothing happens by itself
6. The best is the enemy of the good
7. Personal relationships are golden
8. Persistence: the one indispensable ingredient
9. Make time your ally
10. "Nice guys" finish first

#6 especially hit me because it's about perfection and how that often keeps people from doing what they are good at. Stein wrote that "the compulsion to do something perfect is the exact equivalent of the compulsion never to get anything done at all" and that "perfectionism is the great crippler of young adults." Interesting.

Well, I guess that's enough for today. I hope that you have a great Wednesday and that when you encounter frustration that you can remember this: the cowboy doesn't give up or cry when he reaches the watering hole and finds that it has dried up. He simply moves on in search of another watering hole.

Here's to moving on from dried up watering holes!

Royal Gorge Takes Our Breath Away

Candy: Wow. The Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River took our breath away today. Literally.

First we took the Royal Gorge Route Railroad. It was kind of boring, but it was a nice two-hour train ride through the gorge. This photo shows what the Royal Gorge Bridge looked like from sea level. The little blob near the top of the picture is the Royal Gorge Aerial Tram, alleged to be the longest aerial tram in the world.

Here's the train and the river as it appeared from our seats in the first class car.

After our return to the depot in Canon City (should be a tilde over the "n" in Canon--pronounced Canyon) we drove up to the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park, about 10 miles west of Canon City.

Here's what the highest suspension bridge in the world looks like from the verandah outside the gift shop at the park. It's 1,053 feet above the river and 1/4 of a mile long. When I took this picture Tim and I were about to board the aerial tram.

I'm not normally afraid of heights, but I have to admit that the thought of riding the tram across the (really deep) gorge took even my breath away. As you can see from the picture above, Tim isn't completely comfortable standing that close to the edge yet either.

Here's a photo of the tram up close.

Here's what the bridge looks like from the tram while hanging over the center of the gorge.

We then walked around the other side of the park and saw some buffalo, including a rare, white American bison. There were three baby buffaloes, one of which had just been born minutes before we saw it. Its little wobbly legs barely held it up.

We also saw elk and some bighorn sheep. I took a photo of this guy because his horns were so curved and because he looked like he was chewing on a piece of straw like a country bumpkin.

After we passed the western wildlife, we saw the Skycoaster and heard lots of screaming coming from that general direction. When we arrived at the base of the ride, we saw three people strapped into harnesses and being pulled up by a cable to the top of a pole.

A ride worker on the ground yelled "Three. Two. One. Fly!" and one of the people strapped in pulled a ripcord which released them from the cable. They free-fell for about 2 seconds before swinging forward out over the gorge, then back and forth until they lost momentum and returned to the ride platform. No way I would do that. No way.

Here's what the ride looks like as seen from the bridge. The little dot in front of the tower is the person on the ride. Scary.

We then proceeded to the bridge itself, and began to walk across it. Tim was a little freaked out, but he went right up to the side several times and even enjoyed it. The bridge platform itself is comprised of eight-inch-wide planks and many of them look to be really old. They're uneven, also, and there are gaps between them, which makes it a little more scary to walk across because you can see the river waaaaaaaaay down below.

Here's the bridge from one end.

It was a lot of fun and we stopped several times in the middle of the bridge to feel it sway in the wind.

Finally, we rode the steepest incline train in the world down to the river (I know, a lot of world's biggest, longest, steepest for one day). It runs at a 45-degree angle for 1550 feet down to the banks of the Arkansas River. Each way takes about five and a half minutes. Here's a photo of one of the trains (there were two--one red and one blue) before we boarded to ride it back to the top.

On the way out of the park, I saw some redwood pieces lying near where one side of the bridge's cables attach to the mountain. Here's a composition that caught my eye.

It was a great day. It was warm (in the low 80s) with blue skies and occasional puffy white clouds and intermittent gray rain clouds.

Tim will be flying back to Ohio tomorrow to pick up a few urgent things from our storage unit, and returning to Denver on Wednesday. If you want to connect with him on Tuesday, call his cell phone. I'm sure he'd love to see you.

Chase is healing well and will return to the vet for his final visit on Wednesday as well.

I hope you have a good Monday and that all the moms out there enjoy a great week leading up to Mother's Day.

Friday in Colorado

Tim: Today, we took Chase back to the vet to get his “boo boo” looked at again. The vet cut off the bandage and the cut was healed well, but moist from Chase’s incessant need to lick. She decided to take out the stitches and put another bandage on. Wouldn’t you know it, Chase was at it again with the licking and we had to redo the dressing tonight. The vet gave us plenty of dressing supplies for Chase until his next and final vet visit on Wednesday.

Chase was crazy at the vet today when another Lab came in. He has not gotten his necessary exercise since the accident, so he has some pent up energy, I guess. We did get to see some Lab pups today that a vet client brought in. They were adorable and made our day.

We went to see "Mission Impossible 3" tonight and although I am not a big fan of Tom Cruise, it was pretty good. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is in it as well and is an awesome actor.

Yesterday, we went up to Colorado Springs to a mall and found a store called Steve and Barry's University Sportswear. It was a cool department store like Old Navy, but it had tons of cool t-shirts from universities nationwide, as well as other cool stuff. The best part was the price of everything...under seven bucks for each item, which included shoes, blue jeans, jackets, etc. I felt like I was at an outlet store.

Candy and I found two great t-shirts. I found one like the one John Belushi wore in "Animal House"...navy blue with the word"College" in white lettering on the front, while Candy found one with the words "Rules are for suckers."

The plan for Sunday (weather permitting) is to go to the Royal Gorge Bridge near Canon City to ride the train along the Arkansas River and visit the highest suspension bridge in the world. We have also been to the second highest suspension bridge in the world, New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia, on one of our other trips in the past.

By the way, the picture at the top of the post is another of Candy's Photoshop works of art. It is a picture of the San Antonio Riverwalk from the 2004 NCAA Final Four trip we made. Pretty cool, huh? She keeps finding ways to make her pictures stand out.

Well, that's all from here. We will post again on Sunday night if we go to the Royal Gorge with some more cool pics. Have a great Saturday!

Impulse Trip Turns Fantastic

Candy: Today we spent a little time at B&N before deciding to go exploring. We hopped in the El and headed south on I-25.

The terrain become much more hilly but without much of real interest to see, except for Greenhorn Mountain (13,347 feet). We thought, "We'll turn around at Colorado City (20 miles south of Pueblo) and see if we can find the Riverwalk area in downtown Pueblo."

However, as we turned off I-25 at Colorado City, we saw an intriguing road that headed toward the mountains, so we decided to drive for a little bit and see whether we could find a great overlook.

Soon we entered the San Isabel National Forest, and almost immediately upon entering we came upon two deer grazing by the roadside. We stopped and took a few photos, and by then were jazzed up and decided to keep going. A quick survey of the map showed that we could take the road we were on back north and connect with CO 96 back to Pueblo, so we kept going.

At nearly every turn there was something spectacular to see, including the Bishop Castle, which I had discovered when Googling "things to do around Pueblo." I didn't know exactly where it was, but when we saw the sign we had to stop.

It's the craziest hodge-podge of a building, but it has some really cool elements. I've included a few photos of the place. It had a central loft-type space on the second floor, and the towers had circular stone steps all the way to the top. It was really cool, even if a bit quirky. Yep, that's a dragon head on the peak of the roof.

It seems that the guy is a little bit of a crackpot who has had some problems with the U.S. government while trying to build his castle. There are tons of hand-painted signs with misspelled words and statements such as "you don't need a driver's license," according to a certain Amendment to the Constitution. It was humorous and we spent nearly an hour wandering the place.

There was a ton of stained glass and lots of really cool industrial windows, doors, and wrought iron elements. The image at the left is one end of the loft-type space on the second floor. Pretty cool.

The steps below are some of the many intriguing staircases in this castle. Here are some of the stained glass windows I mentioned. Aren't they pretty?
Here's a picture Tim took of me sitting in a little niche in one of the tower staircases.

There were lots of interesting sculptures and oddball items in the castle. This was the top of what appeared to be a weathervane that had not yet been installed, and I really liked the way it stood out against the stone and windows in the background.

As we were leaving, I realized I hadn't taken a picture of this huge wooden chair in the front of the castle, so Tim hopped out of the El and climbed up in it to provide this fun shot. I love his expression.
We kept driving through the mountains and saw this great little barn and shed around another turn in the road.

Here's another view of it that I liked, too.

We saw some cattle and I stopped to take this cute calf's portrait. I couldn't resist his little white face. We also saw a herd of elk grazing by the road and I took some pictures of them, too, but didn't really like any of the shots.

As we kept driving back toward Pueblo, dusk brought with it some spectacular sights, including the magnificent rays of sunshine above the mountains (panorama at the top of the post) and these views below.

We found the Riverwalk area and walked around for a while before heading back to the apartment. It's a neat little area around 5 or 6 blocks along the Arkansas River. It looks like the city of Pueblo is trying to revitalize its downtown area and the Riverwalk is a good start. It's cute, with benches and waterfalls, and a little lake, too.

We worked out yesterday and are both a little sore. We'll be lifting tonight, so I'm betting that tomorrow we'll be even more sore. However, the results will be worth it.

I'll leave you with a funny photo of Chase taken last night. Have a great Thursday!

Chase Cannot Say No to Drugs

Tim: We took Chase into the vet today. For those of you who did not read the blog yesterday, Chase had an accident at the lake and cut his leg on some rocks. He was a good boy at the vet and was very cooperative with the staff there.

He was given some heavy drugs like morphine during the stitching procedure, so he was a funny dog all evening long. He has been wobbling around like a drunk. I suppose he must feel drunk. I wonder what that must be like for a dog? Needless to say, Chase has been amusing to watch tonight. The picture says it all. He has been doing this crazy leaning thing all night long.

He has a bandage over the wound that he cannot lick or get wet. Of course, he is doing his best to lick it off his leg. We are both watching him to make sure he does not do any licking. We have not decided whether or not to do shifts overnight to make sure he does not lick the bandage. If he messes the dressing up, we will have to take him back in. The visit to the vet was not exactly cheap.

We went grocery shopping last night at our local Wal Mart Super Center. We have not done this in so long that it was actually a treat for me (ask Candy and she will say that this is definitely an accomplishment). We started eating at home today and it was really a lot of fun to prepare food again.

Last night after shopping, we came out to the car and found some college kids messing with Chase through our car window. When we saw this, we decided to see if we could get the kids scared by saying, “Hey, Chase, do you want to come out and go for a run?” We let him out and the kids got a little scared, but they do not know Chase Dog Rice. His bark is far bigger than his bite. We got a little chuckle out of it.

Other than Chase’s visit to the vet, we made another trip to the bookstore today while Chase got his treatment. We get so much out of these trips, because we get to refuel our passion even more. I have really looked more at today, not tomorrow, during this time. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “One today is worth two tomorrows; what I am to be, I am now becoming.”

Have a great day and I leave you with something I found today at the bookstore. It is called “The Life Builder’s Creed” by Dale Witherington:

"Today is the most important day of my life. Yesterday with its successes and victories, struggles and failures is gone forever. The past is past. Done. Finished. I cannot relive it. I cannot go back and change it. But I will learn from it and improve my Today. Today. This moment. NOW. It is God's gift to me and it is all I have.

Tomorrow with all its joys and sorrows, triumphs and troubles isn't here yet. Indeed, tomorrow may never come. Therefore, I will not worry about tomorrow. Today is what God has entrusted to me. It is all that I have. I will do my best in it. I will demonstrate the best of me in it: character, giftedness, and abilities; to my family and friends, clients and associates.

I will identify those things that are most important to do TODAY, and those things I will do until they are done. And when this day is done I will look back with satisfaction at that which I have accomplished."

Mishap at the Reservoir

Candy: Well, today was supposed to be an uneventful afternoon spent hitting tennis balls to Chase into Lake Pueblo. However, our rambunctious puppy launched himself off the shore and managed to cut himself on a rock in the water.

It's a shallow cut but it opened up about an inch and a half flap, so we called a vet and she said to just pack it with Neosporin and bring him in tomorrow to look at it. It doesn't seem to be hurting him, fortunately.

We put some stretchy gauze tape on it and, surprisingly, he's not licking it. He's not real sure how to walk with it on his leg, so it's kind of funny watching him move around. Have you ever seen a dog try to walk while wearing socks? Chase is doing that even though his leg is wrapped, not his paws.

We didn't do much else today because we were a little concerned about Chase. He seems to be doing ok and is really cuddly right now. Probably hurts a little.

I took this funny picture of Chase tonight just before he fell asleep. I think he actually likes having the bandage on. Even a puppy must like having a little TLC.

Tim and I are launching our first month-long physical, spiritual, professional, and mental fitness program. We hope to establish some good habits in each of these areas by the end of May, and also hope to achieve some great results from our efforts.

Enjoy your May Day!