Fiber Fool

As scary as I felt the High Park Fire was in its first days and its vicinity to town, I cannot even fathom what residents of Colorado Springs and perhaps even Boulder feel like. And while my removal of smoke was in post-processing and unfortunately for our 86+ degree house not in real life I’m proud of my abilities to do so. And, well, sometimes you just have to grab hold of the little things to keep yourself afloat.

I have to say I am thoroughly pleased with my current temp assignment that I’ve been on since March. I love my co-workers. It is awesome to work “in the country” in the city where even meeting people on the road to work results in the country steering wheel wave! While I have occassionally crabby people taking out their frustrations on me for no purpose, I help people. It was no hardship to hear that my stay here was being extended.

After two particularly rough weeks it was a thrill to push the limits of my job description and do a photoshoot for them. They were in need of a high resolution image that could be blown up onto a banner to go in our new museum opening this fall. They borrowed a slighly higher resolution, but more or less the same camera as mine, from the museum and a coworker lined up her grandson and a friend of his to be the models and the five of us headed out to one of the natural areas in the foothills.

You have to love a job that has you hiking for an hour on Monday morning!

Of course when you are on a deadline and have extra people lined up you cannot plan for perfect shooting conditions. Sure enough, Monday morning dawned and things looked pretty promising, then the winds shited and smoke literally rolled into the foothills and into town by 6:30am. We were to shoot at 9am. Driving to the natural area you could hardly see town it was so covered in smoke! It wasn’t nearly as dramatic looking on our way back into town so I didn’t end up taking a picture.

While we tried our best to stick to relatively close backgrounds to keep smoke impact to a minimum, the shot really kind of needed the vista and variety of terrain to have a visual impact. So we shot a ton of both options. Then during down time at work I did some research on reducing haze in post-processing and gave it a shot. I think I suceeded.

What was even better in my mind is that I did all post-processing in Lightroom! I always do rudimentary, all over adjustments in Lightroom before I send the images to Photoshop as Lightroom edits are non-destructive. But I’ve never really gotten much into spot editing. Now, if any of these are chosen for the banner I’ll certainly go do some more detailed work in Photoshop. But I’m quite pleased with my results.

The basic idea was to reduce saturation and luminosity of blues in the image, up localized contrast (via clarity) and in general improve the dynamic range of the image by manipulating the histogram. Because messing with the blues reduced the haze so well I then went back in with localized edits and added blue back into the sky as well as darkened and boosted contrast further in the distant objects. There are a lot of tutorials out there for making these sorts of edits in whatever software you prefer, just Google it or check YouTube.

I can’t wait to hear which image they choose and I’m even more excited to see my photo in large scale out in public! Wowser!

In May we had the Hewlett Gulch fire. June 9th, the High Park fire started. Over the weekend there was a fire in Estes Park. Now there is one descending upon Colorado Springs that has caused a massive number of people to be evacuated and yet another started yesterday in Boulder.

The last I heard there were 11 wildfires burning in the state of Colorado. We’re experiencing days upon days of highs over 95 and setting records like crazy all over the front range. Relative humidities are in the single digits and winds are frequent and erratic. All things that spell disaster for getting these fires contained. Meanwhile we get glimpses of hope in the form of rain, only to have very little coverage of light rain for small periods of time and with it comes massive amounts of lightning.

Estimated containment date (note, containment does not mean it is done burning) for High Park is now July 30th. Well over 200 homes in that fire along are confirmed lost. Many of those homes housed livestock on their property who are also without homes.

My heart aches for those who’ve been evacuated for weeks and still have no word on the state of their homes. It aches for those who have lost everything. It aches for all the animals being uprooted from their homes - domestic and wildlife. I feel helpless.

As one of my friends who lost her home said on Facebook recently, “This is the big one..this is out and out WAR..this is our Katrina/Tsunami/get the picture?” It is so true. Every time it looks like we are getting a hold on containment, the wind stirs up or the heat kicks in and we loose ground like this last weekend. Now add in all these new fires in the last week. The damage is mind boggling.

If you have a means to help, please visit HelpColoradoNow.org and do what you can!

Another friend of mine is housing some extra animals for a friend of hers whom I’ve met who lost her home. She has been following statuses and learning a lot about wildfire fighting. If you want to know more, I’d recommend reading her series of posts on the High Park Fire which start here. There are currently 5 parts to the series and I’m guessing plenty more to come in her Current Affairs category.

I suppose there is no other season as well suited to feeling like a kid again than summer. The heat and smoke are getting to me so it’ll be good to dream a bit and think about the more positive aspects of summer!

1. The first thing that comes to mind is getting around on two wheels! I didn’t have an easy time biking as a kid, growing up on a gravel road. But it was my means of transport to/from VBS, babysitting jobs and to visit with my nearest cousin and best friend growing up. It also gave me the freedom to do a little bit of grocery shopping for the family before I got my driver’s license when the little co-op store nearby was still open. Man, did that make me feel like an adult!

2. Multi-day marathons of board games - especially Monopoly!

3. Picking fruit straight off the tree/vine/bush and straight into my belly!

4. Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea marathons - at least once a summer for many years my cousin and I had one of these and I haven’t watched them in several years. I really should rectify that!

5. Playing in the straw! It always takes me back to helping (or trying to anyway) with getting the hay and straw up before it rained and running frozen treats and cold drinks to the men helping.

6. Hanging out wherever I could find a cool spot and reading as much as I possibly could. Including the not so cool hiding under the covers with a flashlight reading way past my bedtime, LOL!

7. Enjoying frozen treats, especially ice cream! Growing up we only had homemade ice cream a few times, but darn was the good! Especially when we had it at my aunt and uncle’s lake cabin!

8. Along the frozen treat line, I must indulge in a root beer float at some point this summer. Nothing is as quintesentially summer as that!

9. Playing with cats and kittens! While I’m not a huge cat fan these days due to allergies, I still adore them - especially the kittens. Or course any favorite furry animal of any age will do :-) Especially if they get you to laugh out loud!

10. I think the key of childhood was being in the moment and enjoying it for all it had to offer, no matter what you were doing. I think that is something we loose as we age. We are always anticipating the next thing on the to-do list or worrying about this and that. That is one thing I want to work at doing more.

What things make you fee like a kid again? Are they specifically summer related?

Wow, what a week it has been. I’m not sure if it is the heat or the smoke or the solstice or what, but people have been extremely rude! One day this week I had been called almost every bad name you can think of, all before 10:30am! Yesterday afternoon I had a woman use the F-bomb no less than 12 times in a 5 minute span, along with many other instances of equally offensive language. Unlike most callers, she did realize she was rude and aplogized before she slammed down the phone. But dang, I am ready for this week to be over. In none of those cases was I in a position to do anything about what they were cussing at me for. *sigh*

So, onto happier things - I did go on the hiking program last Saturday and it was fantastic! Soapstone Prairie is an Natural Area owned by the City of Fort Collins which shares borders with Larimer County’s Red Mountain Open Space and Cheyenne’s Big Hole Open Space. It is located roughly 30 miles north of Fort Collins. Soapstone contains the Lindenmeier archeological site famous for its Folsom culture campsite. What was unique about this particular program at Soapstone was that we were allowed to wander off the trail at points to get a closer look at some of the homesteads on the property.

The Master Naturalist volunteer who lead our group, Brian Carroll, was a great storyteller and very knowledgeable about homesteading practices of the time (late 1800’s and early 1900’s) in this area. He and one of the NA employees are digging deeper into the history of the homesteads that were on the property and are unearthing many different tidbits. Of course, as is the case with puzzling out the history there are some more questions being raised and some conflicting information. It was all quite fascinating though - marriages, divorces, moves into Fort Collins, affairs and all manner of events not that different from today.

We hiked about 3 miles, much of which was on-trail to what is currently being called the “Lindenmeier Homestead” but some new information is making it sound like maybe the Lindenmeiers never lived in that particular building. We had some visitors keeping us company for our lunch too! Portions of Soapstone are still leased out to area ranchers for grazing.

One view of the homestead.

Parts are still standing.

Near by is a naturally fed spring. It has been so hot and dry that you can easily see where it flows! Looking for such things are always a clue to finding evidence of prior habitation! This particular spring also had the remains of an aquaduct very nearby, though that was no longer being used to bring water to the stock tank near by.

While I had my doubts about the weather when we were setting out on the hike, it ended up being just about perfect. The air was free of smoke. The temperatures were moderate and the sun very quickly came out. It wasn’t a bad way to spend a weekend day burning some calories and learning some local history. They’ll be repeating the program again in the fall and I’d definitely recommend it to any locals.

If you want to see more photos from the day, I’ve put up a set on Flickr. Though I haven’t yet gone through and appropriately captioned everything yet. If you have questions about any of them, feel free to comment!

With the forecasted temperatures this weekend and the rudeness of people I’ve dealt with this week I think I’ll be hibernating at home aside from the required weekly grocery jaunt. Hopefully I’ll be in the basement, perhaps in front of the sewing machine! What are your plans for the weekend?

Sure, I write things. I write knitting patterns and pattern descriptions and what not. I write here on the blog irregularly. But when I’m writing for this blog I rarely take the time to really hone my words or think about the impact of choosing one word over another. Let us not even mention when I’m speaking off the cuff!

That said, in the last couple months I’ve had reason to think about some key phrases that have been directed towards me and how profoundly different they are. Even though the words sound the same and I suspect the different people speaking them meant to convey more or less the same sentiment.

Being the last one to jump on the weight loss bandwagon and still be on it in my family I knew this was coming. I knew both my mom and my sister were tired of hearing it — the person you haven’t seen for a few months who comes up to you, smiles and says “Wow, you’re just withering away!” The first couple times it happened to me I enjoyed it. It is of course nice to know that people recognize the hard work you are putting in to live a healthier and more well rounded lifestyle. But it does get old. Then, one evening this spring I went to my usual weekly Yin yoga class, not in an oversized sweatshirt or sweater, but in my more normal workout wear (which is more fitted) because it was finally a warm enough temperature to have short sleeves on and my instructor, Jill proclaims “Wow, you are really whittling away!”

To the ear, there is not much difference between withering and whittling and in this context they both casually mean the same thing – I’m shrinking and it is noticeable. That is good thing. But once you dig a little deeper there is a profound difference.

Withering, to me comes across as negative; something that happens as part of illness or perhaps even the dying process. It is something that is out of your control. Not to mention, that while I’ve lost about 30% of my starting weight at this point, I still have a BMI in the upper portion of the “Overweight” section. I’m still not even a “healthy” weight! I have another ~30 pounds before I cross the line from “Overweight” into “Normal.”

Now, whittling – I like that word selection. It implies certain deliberateness. It even includes the hard work and attention to detail that this process has required. It is a much better choice for this instance and in fact, I cannot really think of a better option. Although I suppose keeping it simple and just saying “you’re looking good” or something to that effect is a safe choice too.

Are there things you say that upon further thought are not saying what you are really wishing to convey? I have a feeling I probably do similar things quite regularly. I’m going to try to be more deliberate in my word choices, especially when paying people compliments!