Category Archives: meeting

meeting, weather

A little about even less

1 Comment

I sit here writing this post after warming up from the trip home from the energy conference. Attendance was good, even with the bitter cold and wind. It was kind of fun to watch the transmission line company guys bob and weave while explaining why they weren’t getting the lines to transport all the energy from the wind farms out of the area. Fortunately for the local wind farms, FPL and others got together to build their own lines to the main interconnects. Leaves some of the other areas a bit frustrated with the chicken and egg problem (which came first, the transmission line or the wind farms?).

I hate this kind of bitter biting cold. Usually we only get it for a couple of weeks in January, but this year it is here in December. Oh well, I can dream that it means that January will return to seasonably warm out here on the plains. You know it’s cold when I keep putting my feet out to the server farm blowing waste heat to warm up. The computer nerd’s equivalent of the old yule log I guess. Instead of throw another log on the fire, just fire up a few extra processes on the servers. What do *you* do to get that extra warm feeling?

Off to do some laundry – at least the son put all the bedding in the laundry hamper after his weekend visit-by.

economy, kids, meeting, reporter

Mid-week lull

Leave a comment

Today was the lull in what otherwise has been and will be a busy week. The walk down to the radio station was cool to cold, depending on how the breeze caught you. Since it was a glorious 15 degrees and the breeze was gusting to 20 mph, I wore my sweat pants. Just a bit too nip for shorts. Drat.

For approximately the 30th time out of the last 255 radio shows, the only live callers were jokers. Today it was the auto parts store I pass on the walk in to the station calling to ask if I had convinced the council to resign so I could sell their council seats. I told them that lord knows I’d tried, going so far as to forcing them all to resign. But then I had to reappoint all the original council members when I couldn’t convince anyone to buy their seats. (Somehow I don’t think there is a huge pent up demand for small town council seats. Oh well.)

I spent about an hour on the phone with a nice reporter from the Associated Press who is going to venture out here to interview me and some of the other community leaders tomorrow. We’re getting some attention because we are bucking the national trend of heading into an downward economic spiral. Because of the wind energy construction, relatively good commodity prices for the farm community, and lowered energy costs, we are actually experiencing some economic growth and a continuing labor shortage. It seems to conspire to make us noteworthy in the current economy. It will be interesting to meet the young lady. I am curious to see what her last name actually is because I haven’t heard it pronounced the same twice. Then after a couple of exchanges of email with outside counsel for the city about some contractual matters, I was free to pursue my own interests. Of course, by then I had a splitting sinus headache, but what more could one ask for.

Tomorrow is clear for most of the morning and then I have a luncheon date with the 5th grade class at the local parochial school. Every year they invite the mayor to come and have chili and cinnamon rolls with them. The shy young gentleman who called this year was a bit tongue tied on the phone. I think it caught him by surprise that I answered the phone. It gives the fifth graders a chance to meet the mayor and ask questions and it gives me a chance to explain how local government works. At that age, the mayor is still a semi-mythical creature that wields unknown powers. It helps to disabuse them of that and start them thinking about how government really works. When the kids reach the seventh grade, we have the “If I were Mayor …” essay contest for all the schools. The entries are judged and awarded scholarship prizes and then passed on to the Colorado Municipal League contest of the same name.

After the lunch, I have the meeting with the AP reporter and then a couple of other meetings. Oh, and during all this we are interviewing the finalists for the fire chief position. Fortunately I don’t have a lot to do with that process right now. In the evening I have the local community college Christmas gala and then finally I am done for the day. And speaking of being done for the day …

cold, meeting, prison, walk

The Cold Front (and Rear)

Leave a comment

Today as Molly and I headed out to walk, it was about 40 and calm. A nice day for a walk.

So I have on my walking shorts and a sweatshirt and a windbreaker. Just fine for the weather at the start. Molly and I begin our trek heading North, directly into the little breeze that is about. As we walk, the wind starts picking up and the temperature dropping. At the half way point about 3 miles out when we turn around, the wind is up to about 20 mph and the temperature is dropping fast. Pretty much a typical storm from coming in here on the plains.

By the time we are within a mile of the house, the wind is gusting to 40 mph and the temperature is down to 30. Molly’s fur is blowing forward on her face and has her tail whipping in the breeze like mad. I am walking a bit like a Keystone Kop from the old movies. You know, the hop-skip-jump-step that looks so funny in the movies. That is because the wind is blowing right up the back of my shorts and freezing what the TV commercials so politely call “that certain part of the male anatomy.” Needless to say, Molly and I were both happy to arrive at the house and get out of the wind and into the warm. Our walk tomorrow will probably require sweatpants – it is forecast to be cool and maybe even have some new snow.

Tomorrow looks to be busy as I have a haircut and then am off to the prison for a gang activity briefing from the Department of Corrections intelligence service. It will be interesting to see what is going on. Events and trends in the metro and front range areas tend to migrate out here to the rural areas with a certain lag factor. Thus we get a bit more time to prepare for upcoming trends. I don’t know whether to feel honored or insulted – I am the only non-law enforcement official invited. Is that good or bad? Assuming all goes well and I don’t get stuck in a lock down, I have the council meeting tomorrow night. The agenda doesn’t look too bad, but we are going to have to meet on the 23rd because we have a first reading of a contract ordinance tomorrow which means that we have to have the second reading and public hearing 2 weeks later for the contract to be in force by the end of the year (which it needs to be). The council members are generally pretty good about such needed formalities.

Well, time to see if this will post or not. Blogger has lost it’s editing headers and the font controls and … So I am not sure if enough of the function is present to successfully post or not.

football, meeting, weather

Sometimes you win …

Leave a comment

 … and sometimes you lose. Meeting tonight was canceled when one of the other committee members could not make it. So we put it off a week and adjourned to go watch football.

Speaking of football, does anyone else find this year uninspiring with the possible exception of three teams. Even the Broncos are so inconsistent that one is never sure which team will show up in any given game. Fortunately they play in a division where the other teams seem to have self-destructed early and often. So barring a really odd occurrence, they are in the playoffs. The three teams I find interesting this year? The Giants, the Jets, and the Titans. Oh well.

I love the odd weather this time of year around here. Today breezy and overcast, tomorrow up to the mid 60’s, followed by Wednesday when it is not supposed to exceed 30 degrees all day. It could be worse, we could already be buried in snow and the temperature could be in the teens.

Back to the salt mines. The Monday Night Football game is not interesting enough to waste the time watching.

dentist, meeting, tooth, veteran's day

YAVD

Leave a comment

Given that I am a science wonk and computer nerd, I couldn’t resist using an acronym for my title. Just in case you wonder, Yet Another Veteran’s Day (YAVD). It was a bit strange to see city employees out and about as I went to the store this morning. The city takes Veteran’s Day as a holiday, but there aren’t a lot of other businesses that do so.

I was out and about today for my delayed dental appointment . Looks like I will be getting a crown put on the broken tooth. Not too surprising given that the tooth had a filling so old that the tooth enamel was eroding around it. One of the hazards of getting older. Unfortunately, over the next few years there are several other teeth that will probably reach the same state.

In line with being a computer nerd, I find the technology of dentistry amusing. First there were the computers in every examining room and electronic practice management tools, then there were digital x-rays shown on the computer and filed electronically with the patients records, and finally the fiber optic “in the mouth” camera to show what is going on and the problem areas. It gives the dentist a chance to see things from a different angle and the patient a chance to understand what the dentist is talking about. How long before they have one attached to all the instruments? How long after that before robots akin to the surgical robots now coming into use start doing the actual dentistry? Enough about the foibles of dentistry and teeth.

There is a city council meeting tonight in spite of it being a city holiday. The scheduling question came before the council several weeks ago as we could move the meeting forward or back a day, but the decision was made to hold the meeting on Tuesday as normal. We made the decision in an interesting manner – we asked the veteran’s on the council their desire and they were unanimously in favor of holding the meeting as regularly scheduled. There was a general feeling that democratic government was one of the reasons veterans had served. So we will honor their wishes on the day that we honor them.

Off to the meeting I go …