Tag Archives: New Years

New Years in Central Colorado

There are many ways to approach travel. Some people travel for experiences, like festivals. Others visit places to see a specific landmark, experience a natural phenomenon or take part in a specific activity. Many seasoned travelers indicate that some of the most rewarding travel experiences are when they get to experience life in a different place. It is why Samantha Brown advocates going for a walk and Anthony Bourdain would always meet up with locals. For them, traveling is (or, sadly, was) not just about checking items off of a bucket list and visiting landmarks. It’s about experiencing a bit of life in another place.

During a global pandemic, that can be difficult. It is hard to sit in the restaurants where locals eat when the restaurants are restricted to takeout and it is hard to talk to locals when there are not too many people out and about.

Last summer, when I visited Leadville, another high elevation town right in the center of Colorado, there were plenty of people out and about. This was likely due to it being warm out, as it was summer. However, even then, it would have been strange to talk to people I did not know while everyone is on edge about what germs people could be bringing. Still, through both experiences, I was able to get a little taste of life in these small high elevation towns by spending a couple of days in town, slowing down, observing and noticing.

The region of South Park, in which Fairplay sits at the heart of, is breathtaking right from the start.

Regardless of season, there is nothing like driving over Kenosha Pass on highway 285 and suddenly gazing upon the wide open valley surrounded in all directions by some of the Nation’s highest peaks!

After spending a few winter days here, I wonder if the locals start to take these breathtaking sunrises and sunsets for granted.

Most people who come to the region in the winter come for the skiing, some of the best in the world!

However, there are a few things I did not learn about winter at 10,000 feet in Central Colorado on ski trips.

While this many not be too big of a deal for those that live in more rural areas, it is always interesting to spend time in places where people regularly encounter wildlife.

Both alive and dead.

Having spent most of my winter days here riding ski lifts and whizzing back down the mountain, I did not realize that a brisk walk, around town or in the nearby mountains, can actually be quite comfortable in the middle of the day.

The sun shines quite bright at these high elevations.

Note: The reduced distance to the sun is not why the sun’s rays feel stronger at higher elevations. The distance between the earth and sun is slightly over 90 million miles. 10,000 feet, by comparison, is negligible. The actual reason the sun’s rays feel stronger up here is that they are traveling through significantly less of the earth’s atmosphere.

Despite the temperature being right around the freezing point (32°F, 0°C), I was walking around in just a hoodie.

The flip side is, though, it starts to feel quite a bit colder as soon as the sun goes down.

The other fact of life specific to this region is the wind. In winter, it can get quite nasty quite often. Surprisingly, these windy days, where travel and spending time outdoors is quite unpleasant often occur in total sunshine.

Every time I’ve spend time up here in the winter, I’ve observed this interesting mix of calmer, more pleasant days and days with strong winds.

It was at this point I really wished I could wander into the bars and restaurants in order to talk with those who live here, in one of these towns.

I would love to ask….

Are the weather forecasts up here reliable enough, so that people know when the wind is going to pick up?

Are residents able to take advantage of the nicer days?

What does everyone do on these unpleasant windy days?

Is it bothersome that, even in the summer, it gets pretty chilly after the sun sets?

Is this sign, where people take their pictures as the characters from South Park by sticking their faces into these four openings, spreading the coronavirus?

Maybe I’ll find these things out and more, in 2021.

Five Percent Better After An Extremely Annoying Year: My 2020 Story

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2020 was a tough year to have a lot of travel experiences to write about. Like many, I spent a good part of the year trying to find the right balance between my social responsibility to avoid any potential spreading of the virus and my mental health needs. Spending too much time at home can be distressing for almost anyone. For me, an extrovert who loves to travel, it was especially rough.

For a variety of reasons, 2020 turned out to be an extremely annoying year. In 2019, as a decade came to an end, I took stock of our culture and current challenges. Three of our key societal issues would become an even bigger issue as a result of all the events of 2020.

For the sake of our physical and mental health, it felt obvious that we needed to spend less time alone, indoors and seated. If anyone managed to spend less time alone, indoors and seated in 2020, well, I would seriously like to meet you!
With the nastiness and divisiveness of our political culture, I seriously felt like we needed less politics in our lives, particularly identity politics (usually about race, age, gender and economic status). In 2019, I was proud to say to anyone that brought up the 2020 election that I had personally decided I would only think about the 2020 election in the year 2020.
It seemed obvious that our culture was too risk averse. In 2019 I told people that if there is a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 being taking no risks on anything and 100 being constantly taking over the top risks like the main character in Uncut Gems, the ideal state is 50. Our culture seems to default us to somewhere like 25 or 30.

2020 would force us not to gather in large groups.

Close many of the establishment where we would gather.

The main Inn in Redcliff, CO in May 2020

Force us to often stay home alone looking at social media, and place a greater emphasis on both identity politics and avoiding risk.

I struggled not to fall into dispair.

I went through four of these between March and June

I got myself through by imagining how we will come out of this better.

I took a lot of screen shots of my songs on Spotify this year

I started to imagine a future world where work is less oppressive. One morning in September I woke up with all kinds of ideas in my head.

I imagined a world where we rediscovered the importance of friendships and community. I imagined that, with concerns about health, and our loved ones, we would prioritize the things that really matter. No longer would anyone be asked to come into work when feeling sick.

With a lot of stuff cancelled or shut down, and large groups discouraged, I embraced more 1-on-1 meetups with people, cultivating better relationships. Slowing down also allowed me to connect to a more spiritual side, through things like meditation. This all culminated with the spiritual experience I had on an August backpacking trip.

Since then, I have never felt more clear about who I am and my purpose in life.

I am also ending the year with a better job, better financial position and I actually managed to lose weight during the pandemic. Perhaps there really is something to cooking rather than eating out.

Still, I certainly could have done better with all the spare time I had this year. Looking back on 2020, there were three things that occupied too much of my time, preventing me from making even more progress.

Drinking while watching television: Drinking can be a great social activity, but drinking in front of the television is not the greatest use of time. While stuck at home, it is far more productive to read. I could have finished all these books!

2. Scrolling on my phone: My screen time was up again, some weeks I averaged close to three hours per day

3. Overthinking: Sometimes you have to just make decisions and stop worrying about all the factors and what could potentially be better.

In 2021, we will be ready to move on, hopefully not back to the world as it was prior to the pandemic, but to something new, something that produces a happier overall human experience. When the vaccines get distributed and we re-engage in many of the activities we previously took part in, like travel, concerts and nights out at the bar, hopefully we take the lessons learned from all this, particularly about health, community and priorities into our new lives. I am under no impression that 2021 is going to be easy. On the contrary, through this and my many other endeavors, I plan to work hard in 2021 to ensure I at least have an input into what our world will look like moving forward.

What I learned in 2018

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As I outlined in my previous post, 2018 ended up being a pretty significant year for me, I started a new job in August which ended a nearly seven year long series of career disappointments. Through this experience, as well as observing people in organizations like TED and Start-Up week, and reading books, I have learned quite a bit.

1. The first wave is Internal

This is something I first read about in 2016, when I read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. We often get this wrong. People who are stuck are often waiting on someone else, or some kind of external event to bring their lives in a new direction. I feel like I was there for quite some time. Change must come first from within.

After changing my attitude, actions and expectations, I then needed to reflect those changes out to the world. This concept is best described in Belong, by Rhada Agrawal. When we show our true selves to the world, we eventually find ourselves in the right places and surrounded by the right people.

2. Maturity = Confidence + Resilience + Delayed Gratification

People are often told they need to “grow up”. For a long time, it was a pet peeve of mine. It felt as if anyone who had told me this was expecting me to give up on dreams, give up on what makes me unique, and accept limitations and the ability for others to determine my path.

As a result, for many years, I resisted the very concept of adulthood. I would rather stay in my fresh out of college partying days longer than become a generic middle-aged guy. However, I would later get exposure to mature adults who were living lives that I admire quite a bit.

In addition to the authors mentioned above, I got exposed to authors and TED speakers such as Simon Sinek, Chris Gillebeau, and Jen Sincero, as well as many others in the local community who are doing great, interesting, and unique things with their lives.

I also saw the result of continued immaturity, primarily the political hysteria of our time.

This was not what I wanted. I realized that I do want maturity, just defined differently, by what I would say is its true definition. The factors that distinguish the two groups of people I observed are not the mundane everyday things that most associate with “growing up”. They are confidence, resilience, and some form of long-term thinking.

3. There’s a time to be chill and a time to be ill

Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is perhaps one of the most challenging books I have ever read. It forced me to confront the fact that status and power struggles do exist in humanity. This is something that, for a long time, I had hoped to just ignore. Unfortunately, a lot of people do care about status, and there are people who want nothing more than to have power over others.

This is where we all need to assert ourselves when necessary. In my previous entry, I outline a bit about who I am and what I care about. There are a lot of people that want to define, or redefine that for me. We all face that same struggle. Nobody else should get to chose things like that for us, and when they try to, we need to calmly assert ourselves.

4. Not all escapism is a waste of time

This is something I feel truly bad about. For a long time, I was quite judgmental towards activities I deemed to have no value. This was primarily certain television shows, but sometimes even certain kinds of conversations and activities. As Pitbull put it years back “Everybody’s Going Through Something”. While it is irresponsible to completely avoid our problems, people do need a break from them from time to time. It was unfair of me to judge people based on how this break manifests. There is a big difference between becoming a drug addict and watching something like Say Yes to the Dress for half an hour.

5. Don’t avoid uncomfortable conversations

When uncomfortable conversations are avoided, the problems that prompted them only become worse. Towards the end of 2018, I had to have a few conversations that I found uncomfortable. They certainly did not make anything worse!

6. Sometimes our adversaries are people we need

I am someone that likes to push boundaries, try new things, and pursue ideas. There are people that are more cautious, preferring to stick to routine and only embracing change when it is absolutely necessary or when the benefits are clear. It is easy for me to view these people as my adversaries and visa-versa.

However, without people to vet ideas before a lot of resources are poured into them, a lot of time and money could be wasted, with little to show for it. Without people on my end of the spectrum, to pursue new ideas and push people, stagnation is inevitable. We need each other.

Life is full of balances just like this one; idealism vs. realism, optimism vs. pessimism, big picture vs. details, etc. With respect to all of those balances, those that prefer one end of the spectrum need those on the other end to maintain that balance.

7. Laying around is not always the best way to rest

It is certainly the most obvious way to rest. However, it is often not what we need when we feel we need rest. When exhausted from stress, what we need is to get away from whatever is causing that stress. This is often not achieved by laying around at home, which can mean continued exposure to news and other sources of stress through television and social media. The best form of rest can often mean something like camping in the wilderness, going or a bike ride, or the right social event with the right group of people.

My 2018 End of the Year Note

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It feels strange to be writing another entry that is not about travel. I did travel this holiday season, back to Chicago, but the primary purpose of the trip was to visit family, not to explore new places.

I have also already written about both visiting places I have previously lived and about New Years as a time of reflection. Now that I feel more grown-up, I want to provide what other serious individuals provide, a year-end summary.

2018 in Review

I will always yearn for travel and adventure. However, 2018 took my attention in other directions. The year started with some major trips, including Vegas, Whistler, and Death Valley.

After those trips, I really needed to get my career back on track. The five years prior to this one had seen tons of great adventures, which I catalog on this blog. However, they had not been too great for my career. We all have to earn a living, and it can be hard having to do so in places that are not the right fit.

At first I was going about it in the manner that most do in 2018, looking for opportunities online. By springtime, I decided that getting out there, networking, and meeting people would be a better way to try to create something new in my life.

I ended up catching a break. In August, I started a new job which is both in the field I had originally studied, meteorology, and provides a working environment that is both flexible and collaborative. Not too many people can travel for a living, and not too many people actually want that lifestyle. Having a job where the work itself is fulfilling, and is also flexible enough that I can pursue significant travel and adventure, is probably the best scenario I could have hoped for. Therefore, I can say 2018 was a hard year but also a great one!

Before starting that job, I did go on one more major road trip, in Early August.

Since then, my life has actually been quite busy. In addition to starting a new job with a significant commute…

I continued some of the freelance work I had been doing prior to starting the job, as well as some of my involvements in professional organizations. There were some weeks, particularly in September and October, where there was very little spare time. I came into the holiday season quite exhausted!

2019 and a New Sense of Self

In addition to getting my career back on track, I feel that I am coming out of this exhausting but fruitful year with a better sense of who I am than I have had for years. A lot of people talk about “discovering themselves”. I feel this is an appropriate, yet sad, way of putting it. What I “discovered” about myself is stuff that I had known all along. I had just lost sight of them because of some of the disappointments and negative feedback I had received at various points in my life.

I determined I loved weather and science by the time I was five years old. It didn’t take much longer for me to figure out what else makes me who I am.

I often do not match what people expect from me. A lot of people think they understand the world, and the people in it, based on rudimentary aspects of who someone is; race, age, gender, economic status, and partisan politics. It saddens me to see people placing more, not less, emphasis on theses things in the past few years. This is one component of today’s world I refuse to be a part of or encourage, as who someone is is more about what they value and how they treat people.

For the first time in my life, I actually feel like I am in a position to help people, as opposed to being the one that needs help. With this spirit, as well as my new job and other engagements, I want to encourage the following in the world around me:

Bridging the worlds of science and enterprise. I believe this is the best manner in which we can bring the benefits of scientific research and scientific knowledge to the general public, in a manner that is fair and equitable.
Encouraging people to spend less time alone, indoors, and seated. There are a lot of mental and physical health problems in my country that are only getting worse thanks to things like people spending more time in front of screens and less time conversing with one another.
Creating a more flexible world, particularly in the workplace. This means removing outdated rules and assumptions which are costing many people the opportunity to be who they really are.

This may not be what some people desire of me, but it is my life. These pursuits were determined by matching my interests, values, and expertise with a desire to improve the condition of humanity.

I personally learned a lot more about life the year, which I will cover in my next entry. In addition to traveling and exploring less towards the end of 2018, a few other areas of my life also ended up getting neglected, particularly my physical health and social life. While going to an event with a professional organization can be enjoyable and productive, I have realized that it is no substitute for taking part in activities with friends. As I start 2019, I plan to place a higher priority on…

Physical health and particularly getting active and moving
Creating and nurturing some kind of a community
Expressing myself, and my unique-ness at all times
Finding new activities, new restaurants, new ideas, and exploring new places

Thank you for reading- hope you all have great plans for 2019!

Happy New Years

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This is going to be my year! This is going to be the year I land my dream job, meet all the right people, have that once-in-a-lifetime epic experience, save tons of money, buy a new house, become a better person, and lose all of the unnecessary fat in my body! All I have to do is change the following five or six behaviors…

Well, that is quite the tall order for a year that actually started out like this…

With the primary memory of the first hour being this…

Which really isn’t too terribly different from how any of the last seven years began for me! And, based on the number of bars that offer $75 packages that include all you can drink and get sold out weeks before Christmas, this is the way a good number of people will begin their year.

Yet, today many of us will put together a list of resolutions that we plan to begin acting upon tomorrow when all of our hangovers subside. Of course, there are those among us that will buck this trend- either choosing to skip the New Years resolution thing, or looking in depth into last year’s resolutions and trying to assess what is realistic in some kind of way. But many of us do follow the pattern that is way more common in the political world than everywhere else; over-promise like the statements that began this post, and then under-deliver. Only, in this case, we are not cheating anyone other than ourselves in this process.

That being said, and even knowing that I am not completely immune to this cycle of over-promising and under-developing, I still made a New Years plan. In fact, it is quite in-depth, and involves six over-arching goals, with sub-goals falling into each category. That is quite in-depth for someone who is now dreading how crowded the gym will be for the next three weeks with people who made New Years resolutions that will last approximately three weeks.

However, the process of reflecting on our lives, and pondering making changes is the entire point of New Years. Without this process, New Years Eve is functionally the equivalent of Blackout Wednesday (the day before Thanksgiving). Tomorrow is a day off, so let’s go out and get drunk. And, tomorrow we can be kind of lazy.

One of my favorite people, and one of the inspirations behind my writing style is David Byrne. While with his band The Talking Heads, he wrote a song titled Once in a Lifetime, one of the deepest songs of all time. And, while the lyrics can be confusing, David Byrne describes the song as being about living life on auto-pilot and never questioning or examining the direction it is taking.

Unfortunately, inertia is a pretty powerful (apparent) force in our society. And, nearly all of us slip into a routine where we just operate our day-to-day lives from time to time. In those periods of our lives, that inertia will simply carry our lives in a specific direction. Sometimes that direction is good, but sometimes that direction is less than ideal.

This is why we build into our schedules times like this, where we reflect on the direction our lives are taking, and, often times, come up with plans to make changes. The fact that many of these plans do not pan out over the course of the next few months should not discourage us from taking this time to reflect on our lives and determine what needs to be changed. And, while over-promising and under-delivering is cheating ourselves, never making those promises is even worse. If over-promising and under-delivering equates to our Republican form of government in it’s current state, never making promises, and never asking questions equates to a totalitarian dictatorship. I certainly hope that most would agree that no matter what we have to say about the current state of our country, it is way better than a dictatorship.

I won’t bore you with the specifics of my intricate set of New Years goals and sub-goals. But within this entire plan lies one over-arching resolution that relates to New Years itself, and that is to avoid the kind of “defaulting” that leads people into ruts, and routines, and allows them to simply be carried through life exactly the way David Byrne describes it in his song. By this I mean doing the same things over and over again, watching the same shows over and over again, going to the same websites over and over again, and never even considering trying something new.

In 2014, I published 26 posts on this site. That means that in that 12 month period, I considered 26 experiences worth writing about. One of the things I am trying to avoid doing is write about the same place multiple times. I know I have a couple of times, and I have reserved that for experiences that are different enough for me to feel that another post would not be redundant. So, in a way, the number of posts I make on this site is related to the amount of new and unique experiences I am having in life. So, if my overarching 2015 goal is achieved, I will have had at least 26 blog-worthy experiences in 2015.

The Action Story

Learning about the world and about ourselves through travel and experiences

Tag Archives: New Years

New Years in Central Colorado

Happy New Years