Landlocked Pirate

#FTG On Oct 3, 2017,  I went to the Route 91 Harvest Festival with my friends Patty and Letty. This was our third year at the Festival and we looked forward to it for months. We found a great place to stay, a condo within walking distance of the venue and this was our second year staying there. We all arrived on Friday and that night we saw Brothers Osborne, Lee Brice and Eric Church. During Eric Church’s performance there was a guy in his early 20s next to me. He was singing and dancing and he tapped me with his elbow me a few times and said “This is awesome!! I love Eric Church.” Later during the performance, he asked if I thought it was his last song and I said “no he hasn’t sung Springsteen yet, he won’t end it without singing Springsteen” and he elbowed me again and said “that’s right! I love F’n Springsteen” and he started yelling “Springsteen” over and over at the stage. I wish I had taken a photo of the Springsteen guy, I hope he made it out ok. Sat...

http://www.greatoutdoors.com/published/across-montanas-beartooths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78HnNT689ac The Beartooth Mountains are one of those places for me, kind of mystical and magical and always breathtaking.  Charles Kuralt called the Beartooth Highway the most beautiful drive in America, and my experience so far is that he is right.  My favorite drive starts in Soda Springs Idaho and follows back country roads to Jackson Wyoming, north into Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone, exiting Yellowstone’s northeast entrance.  I was lucky enough to be able to make that trip twice every summer while I was going to school, once on the way to Nevada, and once on the way back.  The highway gets up above the treeline onto the Beartooth Plateau and flattens out and you are driving on the top of the world on rocks that came from the basement of the world.  It crosses Chief Joseph’s Trail and you can detour south and follow the Chief Joseph Highway...

To: Jim and Chuck From: Sandra Subject: Recycling Recycling and Acid Trips Occasionally I have these moments of incredible perspective that make me feel infinitesimally small and amazed at the same time. Last night it was one that made me feel smaller than usual. I was thinking about the beginning of everything, the big explosion that started it all and the idea that those things happen over and over. It started with me reading this quote from Carl Sagan that I posted on Facebook last year “Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air and drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.” I am an environmentalist at heart, but I recognize that it is really all about the impact it has on humans. People who say we are destroying the earth drive me crazy. We may be changing it, but we are not destroying it. Our environmen...

TO: James and Chuck From: Sandra Subject: Crazy Train (of thought) This morning I was lying in bed, thinking about how irritated I used to get at Jack when he would harass me because I didn’t take my turn on a game fast enough. There is this app called “Words with Friends” and it is basically an electronic version of Scrabble. Jack played with a lot of people and it would take me a day or two to remember to open the app to make a play. He would send an email reminding me that it was my turn and lay this big guilt trip on me because I didn’t play quickly enough and it would piss me off. This morning I felt guilty about being irritated with him and said out loud, “I’m sorry Jack, I should have been more patient with you.” Then I wondered if he was actually out there somewhere listening or if things are actually as he believed, when you die you are simply gone. It is a scary thing to contemplate because that means we only exist as long as people who remember us exist. It ma...

Hi Sweetie, I love looking at Google Earth with all the labels and borders turned off. You get a quick view of the geology of North America. It is cool. You can see all the older mountain ranges on the east coast that have been weathered, all the pot holes left behind by glaciers in the upper Midwest and up into Canada, and the spectacular mountain ranges of the west. I love the American West. I don’t associate a state as being where I am from so much as I do the Western U.S. The Rockies are amazing. You can follow them from where they begin, just south of Mexico City, northwest into Canada.  Nevada is a geologist’s dream. I remember, when I was still in school and working one summer with the geologists at Echo Bay in Battle Mountain, a few of them were roommates and they invited me over for dinner and we got a little drunk. There was a geologic map of Nevada on the fridge and I looked at it through my drunk eyes and said “look, Nevada is covered with stretch marks!”...