Memories

Pic the clicks..... Sorry, momentary dyslexia

Since I often whine about how putting a picture on the Internet destroys most of the detail of the original photograph this is an example of what I'm talking about. This photograph started out as a 22 MB Raw image, and Raw means that it contained all of the digital information that the camera sensor captured. I turned that Raw picture into a 5 MB JPEG, because that's what the Internet uses, and resized the JPEG to about 230 KB to fit on my website. And then the Internet did whatever it wanted to do to the picture, which is usually nothing good.

The red box in the picture represents where I cropped the 5 MB JPEG to show a close up of what I could see before I made the picture much smaller for the Internet.

The folks you can clearly see on top of the highest dune, in this crop of the 5 MB JPEG aren't visible after resizing down for the Internet. But to me knowing there are people up there watching that sunrise makes the picture more interesting.

By the way, they either  hiked up there before the sun came up, or more likely backpacked up there and spent the night. Your not allowed to camp in the part of the dunes that their standing in, you have to camp in the interior of the dune field. But It's only a few minutes walk from where you're allowed to camp to get to where they're at.

It was about 40° in the Arctic Fox when I got up this morning, so I had to fire up the radiant heater to take the chill off the living room. And it was partly cloudy today but not enough to affect the solar panels, and I don't think it ever got up to above 60 today. I don't mind chilly weather too much when the temperatures slowly drop over a week or so, giving me a chance to get used to it, so its not as challenging to deal with as when it drops quickly.

 I'm thinking of taking an overnight camping trip to my property near the 11-mile reservoir sometime next week and see if the leaves are changing up there yet. If they are, I might mosey on over to the Cripple Creek and Victor area and see if the leaves are changing there also. Cripple Creek is an important area for Colorado Springs folks to see the leaves changing in the Fall, and on weekends during peak leaf season, it would be the busiest time of the year for us Cripple Creek business folk.

Those weekends would be extremely hectic with the town packed with people; you could hardly walk down the sidewalk. No place to park without a long walk, so I would usually get to the restaurants by 7 a.m., so I would be ready to open by nine, which was about the time the crowds would hit. Normally I would prep the restaurants by myself, but during leaf season weekends, I would have a couple of employees helping me and usually have someone on the register to take care of the early birds that wanted a doughnut and a cup of coffee.

We never knew how many weekends like that we would get during the Fall. Maybe only one or two, or if we were lucky, four or five, it just depended on when the first winter storm would blow through and knock all the leaves off the trees. Then the next weekend, there would be almost nobody in town except us business folk. We called ourselves Creekers, which probably had more to do with our age than our location. Standing around talking to each other about how the Summer went. Who was closing for the winter, and when? And how we were going to survive until the tourists came back to town.

A lot of folks like me closed up, drained the water pipes, and left. Some had businesses in warm places they would go during the winter. I knew one guy that had a shop in Key West selling sunglasses all winter. I was always jealous of him. And a handful stayed open during the winter eking out a living on what few locals lived there.

Yeah, maybe I'll go to Cripple Creek next week. Even though I don't know a soul there anymore, I used to know almost everyone, so I have many memories rattling around in my head about that old gold mining town, some good, some not so much. But whether good or bad, memories are just about all we have left in the end.

                            theboondork

My Grandson

The Spiders lair. Who would be so brave as to poke a pinky into that dark, creepy, cavern? Knowing what horrifying, hairy, creature lurks within.

A pair of Hibiscusis. Or is it Hibisci? Or maybe Hibiscuits?