Birthday Report

My birthday was last weekend and we celebrated with three days of socially distanced "yardies," including a lobster dinner with my BIL and SIL, John and Dawn, and a delicious steak dinner with our friends Ray and Paula.  In addition to good food and friends, the weekend was a fun sequence of opening presents.  Paul gave me the lovely flowers shown above along with some good chocolates.  The package that Ben had tucked by his chair the past few weeks, tempting me to open it early, turned out to be a really beautiful hand-blown glass wine decanter made in Italy.  

Ben also gave me a new terry cloth bathrobe and this wonderful lamp made from a big hunk of Himalayan salt.  I think Ben really enjoyed finding these treats on the Internet, and I certainly enjoyed receiving them!  

Boulder County's virus numbers are good, but we're expecting another surge as CU students return to town this month.  In addition, we're in a drought and have had a spell of hot, dry weather.  At the moment there are four major fires burning in the state, including the Grizzley Creek Fire that has closed fifty-seven miles of I-70 through the Glenwood Springs area.   

Drew Litton, Colorado Sun 

Our views of the mountains are obscured by the smoke that is hanging over the Denver/Boulder area,  and while the smell is irritating, the smoke itself does make for amazing red sunsets.    

photo by Ben Mealey

The heat and smoke hasn't stopped us from hiking and we even tried a new-to-us trail, the Anne U. White out-and-back which is up one of the nearby canyons.  This "beloved" trail was destroyed in the September 2013 floods and it took seven years to rebuild it.  So it's not just fires that we contend with here, but also flash floods when heavy rains hit.  

And speaking of hot weather, about three weeks ago it suddenly occurred to us that we since we have central heating, the ducts needed to pump cool air through the house already were in place and we could very easily install air conditioning.  Our nights and early mornings are cool enough, but it does get hot mid-day.  On Friday a crew of competent and nice people came and installed an AC unit.  Now I can more comfortably work in my studio in the summer afternoons.  And on warm nights when the noise of partying students floats up to our open windows, we can close them and we all, and especially that loyal guard dog Turbo, can sleep comfortably.  

As you can tell, we aren't running around doing a lot, but I did get down to the Denver Art Museum to see the two excellent exhibitions it has up now.  One was a comparison of the work of Winslow Homer and Frederick Remington, and it lifted my spirits to see such interesting and beautiful art in person.  The other was "Norman Rockwell: Imaging Freedom," which focused on his popular Four Freedoms paintings, created in 1943 to support the war effort and published by the Saturday Evening Post.  The four separate paintings are shown in the collage below.  The upper left one is Freedom From Want; the upper right is Freedom of Speech; the lower left is Freedom from Fear; and the lower right is Freedom of Worship.      

Viewing them reminded me of how mainstream American culture of the time depicted primarily white people, and the exhibit curators addressed this by showing modern art that provides current takes on the "Four Freedoms" theme.  Here is a recent and powerful one by Pops Peterson, reworking "Freedom From Fear" to show a black family tucking in the children in at night.  In this case the headline of the newspaper the man holds reads "I Can't Breathe," rather than the "Bombings Kill..Horror Hits" headline on the newspaper the man holds in 1943 image.  

The exhibit included some later works by Rockwell, such as "The Golden Rule" .....

...and this one, "The Problem We All Live With," which shows six-year old Ruby Bridges walking to school accompanied by U.S. marshals when black students were first admitted to all white schools in New Orleans school in 1960.     

Getting downtown and into an art museum was a treat.  Nowadays simple pleasures are the mainstays of our lives, such as the arrival of fresh Colorado grown corn and peaches into the local markets.  Sometimes simple is pretty darn good!