She had chili with cheese and onions

Occasionally you see a movie, read a book, or hear a story about someone inspiring and hope to meet the person. Then there are the once in a lifetime opportunities you have to not only meet that person, but to get to work with her (or him). Late last year I found out there was a project on which I might be working with my friend Dan (of Vendor Hippo). The project was amazing in and of itself. But then came the part about the “talent” for the video project.

I had never heard of Temple Grandin till that day. About a month ago, as part of preparing the shoot I viewed the Made for HBO movie about her life and was moved to tears by — well, many things in the movie. Today I got the rare privilege to direct a shoot with Temple explaining the ins and outs of handling sheep. What an amazing morning.

It was awesome to hear her explain the things the movie depicts but related to sheep. Her passion for helping people understand livestock so the handling of the sheep is less stressful on the animals and the humans was evident.

Claire Danes… I’m impressed. What a great job of portraying this special person. You definitely deserved the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Mini-series or Movie Oscar you won for the portrayal of this bigger than life lady.

Those of you who even think you have a tough life and need a leg up to move forward in this life… see the movie!

From sheep, sheep, and more sheep to teaching, teaching, and more teaching. I was all poised to teach four courses at Front Range Community College here in Longmont (their Boulder County Campus) when Colorado Mountain College asked me to teach one of the same courses I’ve taught at FRCC for them online. They had several students who needed the course for their certificate or degree and couldn’t find anyone to teach it. That was one week before the course was supposed to start. So I’ve been pretty busy converting the classroom experience into screen casts, discussion topics, exercises, and assignments that can be completed through a Blackboard interface.

Then, I was excited to meet yesterday with the folks over at Boulder Digital Arts (http://www.boulderdigitalarts.com) about teaching some PHP and MySQL over there. It looks like that will begin just as the FRCC and CMC gigs are winding down for the semester/summer.

Whew! I love it but it’s definitely a schedule killer!

Great times! Thanks Amy Trinidad from the American Sheep Industry and Dan Borgmann of Vendor Hippo for all the help!

The tomato plants we got from a friend that were in a little Target starter pack (seeds, soil, envelope — just add water) started out great in the starter pack, but once transplanted went to pieces. So we replaced them with a starter plant from a local nursery and added two other types of tomatoes as well as red, green, yellow and orange bell pepper starter plants, a jalapeño starter, an Anaheim green chile starter plant (thank you Rod Grice for introducing us to these as hors d’oeuvres to be placed on the grill as it’s heating up and eaten while the real meal is cooking on the warmed grill), and last but certainly not least a cucumber starter plant.

It’s only been 2 months and we’ve already learned so much and can’t wait to set out next year’s “crop” based on what we’ve learned so far. Nonetheless I’m really enjoying tending the small plants and watching the beginnings of the fruit (or veggies) of our efforts. Today we added tomato cages around the tomatoes and bell peppers so I thought I’d snap some photos to share.

"Caged" Tomatoes

"Caged" Yellow, Orange, and Red Bell Peppers

"Caged" Green Bell Peppers, Jalapeño, and Green Chiles

So we are 14 days into our seedling nurturing. As you can see several FINALLY have sprouted and are beginning to look hopeful. Lavendar, Spearmint, and Parsley pots still show now sign of life but the others just popped out one day over the last week (Basil was first) and seem to be progressing quite well. Today we may spend some time prepping their outdoor home for transplanting in the next couple of weeks.

Yesterday we bicycled around town to a couple of nurseries to look at starter plants for some flowers, fruit, and vegetables we hope to add to our horticultury mix for the season. Other than a few pretty flowers for Julie, we’re planning to put out some tomatoes, peppers (jalepeno, anaheim, bell), squash, cucumbers, cantalope, watermelon, and I want to try some beans of some sort… green, peas… not sure yet.

The last time we attempted a garden was in TN and we planted a number of seeds for tomatoes and peppers. What we got was WAY too many. Yesterday we were thinking one or two tomato plants initially. Then we remembered we could make fresh salsa and decided to up it to four or five. YUM!

So I don’t really know when it happend but I noticed a few months ago when I entered just a set of words in the address bar in Firefox rather than giving me a list of Google results I was presented some kind of Comcast sponsored Ask.com search (thanks Comcast… I’m guessing some “gift” from you since I’m a Comcast subscriber). I wanted my Google results back. A quick search on Google gave me the answer to fixing it. Here’s the page I found to help me get it back the way I wanted it:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/06/12/hack-to-modify-firefox-3-address-bar-to-return-search-results-when-query-or-invalid-url-is-entered/

(Ma, don’t panic over the title… it was the only appropriate comment I could find for the title)

So, I’ve put off writing about this for a while. But felt like writing about it today. In September 2007 we “purchased” a home in Henderson CO via an owner finance deal (that’s the simplified version of the whole deal) where the owner held a mortgage from CitiMortgage (a subsidiary of Citi which has seen at least $25billion of our tax dollars) and was supposed to pass our payments through to the Citi loan for two years until our self employed status allowed us to refinance with a conventional mortgage. In September of 2008 we became aware the owner had not been passing our monthly payments back through to the CitiMortgage loan and Citi was proceeding with foreclosure on that loan. Essentially that meant we were screwed and would lose all we had invested in the owner finance deal. At the time the house we had “purchased” for $275k was valued at around $242k and the outstanding on the original owner’s Citi loan was right at $242k (our outstanding was $235k).

All that to get to this beef. On June 15, 2009 the property was sold by the the clerk’s office at Adam’s County for $263k to a single bidder. Who was that bidder that paid $21k over what the home was valued and the same amount over what the original owner owed to CitiMortgage? Yep, you guessed it… a Citi subsidiary. So the huge and failing mortgage company you and I are paying taxes to cover a $25billion plus bailout to, paid $21k more for a house than the value of the home, not to mention $21k more than the orginal loan that they were foreclosing on.

So there’s another reason for the bailout to have a bad taste in your mouth.