Watch out referee!!!

A Difficult Choice

I love having a family that can act as a sounding board. I usually chat with my brother about personal issues, my dad about politics and sports, and my mom about everything else. Today I had to call my dad about Steamboat 700.

I wasn't calling to ask how to vote. And he never offered up a suggestion specifically as to how to vote. That is exactly the way it should be.

My dad and I are pretty similar in political sway and political thinking. Sure there are nuanced differences between us that may change over time, but the discussion method and approach is very similar. We listen, are able to see the issue and understand arguments. I like being that way. I thank my dad, even if it may tend toward paralysis and what may sometimes seem like a lack of direction or drive. But these are the reasons why I picked up the phone today. I needed to sound off and hear back. It was a way for me to become acute prior to voting.

Usually my mind is long made up come election day. But not this day, not this issue. It is too complex given the immediate impact to daily life, to property demand, supply, and values, to work related challenges and opportunity. This issue, unlike those at a national or even state level, will impact every member of the community - a tremendous number of the people that I consider friends. Throw on top the changing economic reality (only temporary?) of today and the fact that a community that (at least now?) you can wrap your arms around.

This issue isn't about my job. It isn't about my home value in downtown. Or is it?

It's not about whether the current plan on the table is a good deal. It's not about this vote being an up-or-down confirmation of the West Steamboat Area Plan - a document with deep roots in this town's master planning and long term visioning for the last two decades. This is only a blip in time. This is only one proposal out of many possibilities. West Steamboat might still be the long term place of growth. Or is it? South valley is an option right? Drinking water. In fill? I like that, but would it work? Strawberry Park? Really! Over my dead body will you cut down these willows to widen the road 4 feet much less put in some subdivision, rec center, blahdiddy blooo.

What are we doing in the world today? Are people still moving here? Are the empty commercial spaces, declining retail sales volumes, lack of real estate closings, tons of rental listings just a sign of the times or is it a new paradigm. Should we add a bunch of homes and commercial to a place that seems to be struggling? I just got back from Detroit and do you want to see what happens in a negative growth economy? GO TO DETROIT! Sure there are still oppurtunities in Detroit, and I met a ton of amazing people doing great things. But most people in Steamboat would be spinning in circles in a negative growth economic model. It isn't in our blood; we haven't endured 30 years of negative growth. Retail sales in Steamboat contracted 19% last year, on pace to contract 10% this year - Some real estate comparisons are down 50% in value from 2007 levels. Are we Detroit? I doubt it. Are we Steamboat in 2007? I doubt it.

I drove out to west steamboat, down RCR 42 and looked out over the proposed annexation area. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a land of houses and roads and parks and people. I tried to think about a community being there. Is it something that I want there?

I've voted in every election for which I have been eligible. My background has cemented a civic minded responsibility that I should vote. I asked Dad, "What do you think? I can't make up my mind. Every time I think that I've convinced myself one way, five minutes later I argue myself back to neutral. I've gone both ways over and over. Should I just let this one go?" Dad's answer was "No way, you have to vote.", and he's right. At some point you have to make a decision. He said, "The likelihood that your one vote will determine the outcome is so small, that you don't need to stress out about it." I agree. The political scientist in me also knows that for every me, there are a bunch more out there. So if at the end of the day, I sway one way, it's likely that somebody swayed the other way. I can rest easy.

I left my dad with the closing statement - "....You just might never know how I voted!"

And neither will you!

Polls just closed. Tomorrow's future will be one path or the other - at least on paper. See you there, wherever that is.

Why Such High (or Low) Expectations?

I usually like to share only calculated outbursts. Not this one. I'm disgusted!

Watching Skip Bayless tear apart the Canadian Women's Hockey Team this morning made me want to chop off his head more than I usually do. Now I bet Skip Bayless is a pretty good guy. I honestly believe that his shtick is to have an in-your-face on-screen personality, foment argument, and be abrasive. It gets your blood boiling and makes for more intriguing argument between his counterpart, because let's face it, when have you ever seen a Skip Bayless show where it isn't a point/counter-point format. The guy is like the Paul Begala/Tucker Carlson (take your pick) of sports anti-journalism.

This "controversey" about the Canadian celebration makes me want to tear my hair out. I'm not sure if this "controversey" is limited to the American media, but it must stop. Why have we become so damn righteous that we expect people to be nonhuman. These girls are probably dentists, and paralegals, and bank tellers, and college students, and who knows, oil well roughnecks during any other week. This week they are playing a hockey game for a gold medal in a 'border war' with the US. They win the gold. And heaven forbid, they have a few cigars, a few beers, and some champagne. Good on yah!



Last time that I checked, that is pretty normal behavior. In city softball leagues across the nation, there is beer in the dug out, during the game even. Unless its an 8am game, most times that I finish a soccer game with the boys, we drink some brews afterward. And yes, those softball leaguers and soccer players are dentists, and lawyers, and bank tellers, and ski bums. There are kids around. While there are no television broadcasters or AP photographers, I think we still act as role models in these situations. And most of the time, I think we do a pretty good job of that.

I would go so far as to say that a beer after a soccer game, or a gold medal hockey game for Christ's sake, is proper behavior. If you just went from office cubicle monkey to gold medal winner and didn't want to have beer with the rest of the we-just-went-from-average-to-something-and-tomorrow-we'll-be-average-again teammates, I would think you were f'ing insane.

Please to the "Tabloid, blue-light law, moralists", stop expecting so much of our 'role-models'. LET THEM BE HUMAN BEINGS!! That is more healthy than the alternative that you seem to advocate in stirring up controversy to sell papers and get website clicks. If you keep this up, the only achievement that we will reach is to become robots.

Never Seen That Side of You

It's good to see people in different lights, in varied settings, inside and outside 'their' element.

I got off the indoor soccer court tonight and what I would call an acquaintance said to me, "I've never seen that side of you." I'm not quite sure what that means. Did you think that I was a nice guy? a bad guy? a clumsy guy? a reserved guy? you didn't know I was competitive? that I desire precision? I don't want to read too much into it; it was probably nothing, just a small comment. We make them all the time, to our friends, parents, coworkers. I also know that when a comment is made, whether light-hearted or meant to cut deep, when it is a characterization of personality, I know that I take a minute or two or maybe more to think about what the comment means. I've thought before about the fact that those around me may know me better than I know myself. They see who I am. They see what pitfalls trap me, what things I say that are ridiculous, nerdy, wierd, silly, smart, insightful, blah, blah, blah. I just rattle around in my own head, making excuses for what I'm not doing, or why I'm not doing what. I post as my Facebook profile picture some strange photo of some celebrity that maybe has some resemblance to me because I barely even know what I really look like. I'm fat. I'm ugly. I'm handsome. I'm better looking with shorter hair. Really? I don't even have to look at myself most of the time.

Back to the comment after the soccer match:
I think it is great to see others in different settings. If you really care about getting to know or knowing the friend, or lover, or family member - go see them do something that you don't usually see. If you usually drink with that person, go build a trail with them. If you usually see that person in a business setting, go coach soccer together. If you ski together, talk politics every once in a while. Don't be surprised if you learn something about the person.

Maybe it's cool to make a comment like "I've never seen that side of you." Sure you are acknowledging the person, but you might also put them off. Better than stating your surprise, just take note. Put it in the back of your mind and realize you just got to know someone more fully - for better or for worse!

A Novel Idea

About 6 months ago, four lost kids made a mistake to try to take on Las Vegas.

That silly venture hatched an ambitious life plan to try to take on the American behemoth: for the remainder of life - visit a place where people want to go in the summer, and go see a place where no one wants to go in winter. There were no ground rules for the summer destination. There were rules for the winter location:
- No one could have been there before
- It had to be a second or third tier city
- It had to have a basketball team
- Preferably the weather had to be terrible

The Vegas Four grew back to the more righteous Group of Eight on an epic email chain that stretches into the hundreds of mailings and is still appropriately titled "Re: Vegas". It survives to this day as a virile and pungent reminder of youthful exuberance and wasteful indiscretion. What it also represents is a true spirit of wonder and adventure. Amid the frequent references to boobs and booze, our group of domestic explorers makes me proud. While we seek to indulge and enjoy, we also seek to understand this life.

In about three weeks, we will land in Detroit, Michigan. We will take in a Piston's game, see some music, indulge in libation, escape to Canada, and most importantly try to find out what the hell is going on in Detroit. I mean who wants to go to Detroit?!!? RIGHT?? Aren't we creative? Aren't we trail blazers?

Well.....

Maybe it's not such a refreshing idea...

From some research, it seems that Detroit has begun to attract those with our similar intentions. Urban spelunkers have been visiting abandoned warehouses for years, chronicling the death(or at least serious illness) that Detroit is experiencing and also being silly.



Journalists and photographers have been taking advantage of the scenes created by the degradation of a city. And Time Inc has gone a step further. About the same time we were hatching our plans, Time bought a house and "embedded" journalists in southeast Detroit. They have an extensive blog touching on all things Detroit, recognizing the historic and "American" value of the once great manufacturing center.

So while we may not be the tip of the arrow, at most, we can be part of Detroit's reemergence. And at least, we will leave some of our money and a good bit of our integrity.

A Strange Recording

"...calculating eyes wrapped in sunglasses.

Ten trucks must have pulled into the labor exchange that morning and another half dozen into the lot at the post office and forty men got work. Condi[Candido] though was the first in line each time, and each time he scrambled up out of the dirt, for nothing. She watched him with a sinking feeling, his look of [eager]ness and hope [as] he disguised the hitch in his walk and tried to hold the bad arm rigid at his side, and [then] the face of rage and despair and the ravaging limp [as he] came back to her.

At 9:30 or so, the fat man wheeled into the lot in his rich long car. Ame[r]ica had been chattering away [about Tepoztlan to take Candido's] mind off the situation -- She was remembering an incident from her childhood, [a] day when a September storm swept over the village and the hail fell like stones [amid] the standing corn and all the men rushed out into the streets, firing their pistols and shotguns at the sky -- But she stopped in midsentence when she heard the crunch of gravel and looked up into the lean shoulders and predatory snout of the patrons car. She felt the living weight of the big man's hand in her lap all over again and something seized up inside her: nothing like that had ever happened to her before, not in her own country, [not in Tepoztlan,] not even in the dump in Tijuana. She was seventeen years old, the youngest of eight, and her parents had [loved] her and she'd gone to school all the way through, and done everything that was expected of her. There were no strange men, no hands in her lap, there was no living in the woods like a wild animal. But here it was. She rose to her feet.

Ame[r]ica crossed the lot in a kind of daze, picturing the bright expanse of that big room with the Buddhas and the windows that laid all the world at her feet, and the money too, twenty five dollars, twenty five more than nothing. The window of the car, threw her reflextion back at her for a moment, then it ceremonially descended to reveal the face of the patron. He didn't get out of the car, but there he was, expressionless, and the beard clipped close round his mouth to frame his colorless lips...."

This recording was left on my voicemail on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 11:19am. I thought it was funny that such a thing was recorded for two plus minutes on my phone. After listening to the voice and the voice inflection, I realized someone was reading to me. But it was too inhuman. Someone had accidentally called me while listening to a book on tape. I couldn't delete it, because it was so strange. It might mean something? A message? I thought about listening to it, transcribing it, and figuring out what it was. Like so many intentions, it was put off. But now I listened to it, transcribed it. After a bit of searching, I found that the excerpt comes from The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle. I found the actual quote and edited what my transcription showed to reflect the actual text. It's hard to transcribe the spoken word, people!

Well, I've done it. Not sure what it all means - if anything? But a fun exercise nonetheless. Maybe I should read the book, I've heard good things.

El Niño

I wish I had good news. But I don't. Any moment the head honchos at Steamboat Ski Area are going to have to do something terrible. They will have to begin closing runs in January due to lack of snow.

Now I say this coyly as weather is never predictable, but if trends are trends - things ain't getting better. I geekily put together some data and plotted it for comparison purposes. I plotted known El Niño years(1) as defined by some class notes from Dr. Nolan Atkins, some Professor from Lyndon State College, that my dad sent me. I then grabbed some data from the Western Regional Climate Center which compiled snow fall totals by month since the beginning of the 20th Century(2).

I had to repair some of the data as the monitoring equipment missed a few days. If the month was between December and March, I added the daily average for that year's month to the number of data points missed. I also had to get rid of the 86-87, 29-30, and 07-08 years due to serious errors in recording - fucking drunk ass Forest Ranger, hope that guy was fired. I have no idea where this snow depth is measured. But again, my dad sent me the link, so it must be right. Right?

As you can see, the plot on the left shows El Niño years and the plot on the right shows non El Niño years. Plotted on the same y axis scale the bell curve for El Niño years shows much lighter snow than non El Niño years.


(click to enlarge)

Plotted over time for average annual snowfall, El Niño years produce less snow on average. As you can see, the left plot shows El Niño average snowfall at approximately 140 inches a year and non El Niño years trending down from 175 inches near the turn of the century to 160 inches today. So while, that difference isn't huge, it's still less.


(click to enlarge)

Searching for good news, I looked to see if maybe El Niño years produced more snow in the spring months. While it seems that a typical March during an El Niño year may hold up to Marches in years without El Niño conditions, it still doesn't look pretty. NO LUCK! Ouch! I'll be on rock skis all year!


(click to enlarge)

Per Snotel data(3), we are at 69% of average snow water equivalent and 78% of average precipitation accumulation on 1/19.

Start praying people!!! Now that I wrote this, it won't stop dumping 'til March 25th! Bam!

References:
(1) http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter10/elnino.html
(2) http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMONtsnf.pl?costea
(3) http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/snotelanom/snotelbasin