H-2-O

We drive to Walsenburg to hit the waterpark. On hand are two three story water slides, one of which requires an inner-tube and is enclosed for darkness. Cool! Eitan and Madeleine are rightly scared but Madeleine bunches up her courage and goes for it: "whoopie dad! This is totally rad!" (OK, I gave her the expression). Eitan gets into the action and soon we are racing up the stairs umpteen times to ride the curves. The lifeguards are bemused by the accents and ask what football clubs we support (Eitan: Manchester United of course. Madeleine Chelsea and me Arsenal). Afterwards Sonnet and I sunbathe while the kids splash about. Tonight: BBQ at Martine's ranch. Rad!

"I don't know if I like being the sentimental favorite."
John Elway, Denver Broncos

Dawn Patrol

Eitan and I go for a walk as the sun rises over the mountains. We are the first up accept for the church-goers who prepare a $5 pancake breakfast on the High Street. Bacon and coffee included. According to Robin, the evangelicals have arrived in La Veta and are preaching their tupper-ware to the influencables. A main recruiting ground is the public Middle School where community pressure has allowed the congregation to prosper. This being the United States where Church and State or supposedly separated, a 16 year has taken it upon herself to write the only (so far) dissenting op-ed in The Pueblo newspaper.

Madeleine I find by our door step this morning shooing her ant "Polly" from her cage. Madeleine captured Polly last night, entrapping her in a clear-plastic crayons case complete with grass, dirt and food-stuff. Fast friends from the start, Madeleine showed Polly to the locals (who would listen). As for Polly's release this morning: "I want her to be free" says Madeleine.

Beecher

Beecher with her grand gal Thea. After spending a morning in Cuchara, we return to La Veta so Eitan and Madeleine can get a cone at local grocers Charlie's. At $1 a scoop, a bargain. Afterwards we visit Aunt Robin and Ray, who have recently completed their home and work studio nearby. Robin is an artist who focuses on large and small stones, beads, feathers and crafts. It is never boring. Her work is sold locally and in places like Taos, Telluride and Santa Fe. I try on several pendants but she is now focused on women, so I will have to wait.

I ask Madeleine if life is good or bad. "Well, it is both" she says.
Me: "Why is it bad?"
Madeleine: "Because people die."
Me: "And why is it good?"Madeleine: "Because the sun is shining."

Red Neck

I practice my look for the summer in this self-portrait. We spend the morning in Cuchara with Beecher, Whitney and her kids Tess and Thea who is now about one year old and just begging to walk. Cuchara is 8,600 feet altitude and we are happy and dehydrated by morning's end, which includes hide-and-seek, tag, swings and other outdoor mountain activities. Beecher's cabin was a gift from a wealthy Texas family. It is nestled in the firs next to a brook, open fields and of course mountains.

Sharon

Sharon is one of Katie's best friends from Harvard. She famously travelled with us along the Karakoram Highway (KKH) in 1997 which took us from Islamabad, Pakistan to Kashgar, China and beyond. Here Sharon is with her daughter in a more natural habitat - New York City where she was born and raised. At school, Sharon was a scholar-athlete and played some mean stick - she represented the USA on several international field hockey teams.
Katie's picture taken in Central Park.

La Veta

Here is where we be. The Inn was built in 1876 (photo from the Inn)

History of the town

Colonel John M. Francisco (1820 – 1902) and Judge Henry Daigre (1832 – 1902) formed a partnership and purchased land under the Vigil-St. Vrain Land Grant in 1868. The land was located on a Native American trail used by the Ute tribe (and earlier the Comanches). They built a plaza known as Francisco Fort to supply the Denver mining camps with products from ranching and farming. Ranches and farms like that of the Bela and Fain families were located nearby.

In Spanish, La Veta, translates as “the mineral vein”, which is apropos, given the town's association with mining claims; like the abandoned mining camp of Ojo which is located a few miles from the town. The concrete foundations of the camp can still be seen upon close inspection. Hiram Vasquez said that the town was named by Mexican settlers from a vein of white mineral which they called “La Veta Tierra Blanca”.

By 1876 the Denver and Rio Grande Railway Company -- later theDenver & Rio Grande Western Railroad - built a narrow gauge railroad through a right-of-way to the plaza and 200 acres for a town site donated by Francisco and Daigre. The tracks continued over what is known today as “Old La Veta Pass”, completing a trek up to an elevation of 9582 feet to a depot built by1877 in a place known as “Uptop”.

Wayward Bound

Here we are in Chicago, on our way to Colorado for July and August. The day starts with an 0530 pickup and ending at 1400 in Le Veta. Please note that the time difference is +7 hours, making this a looong trip. We and the kids hold it together and when compared to earlier travels at sub 3 years, this seems like a snap. Both Eitan and Madeleine proudly keep their back-packs and "buddies" closely held in the Tesco bag. We stay at the Le Veta Inn. The town has a population of 900 or so including local cowboys and urbanite yuppies. While I'm not able to buy the New York Times, there is excellent coffee at the local bakery (open four days a week) and the Denver Post gives me the baseball scores. Today the kids go to Martine and Bill's horse ranch to see their pals Praline, Buckwheat, Charlie and others.

Jump!

Madeleine checks out the turbo-trampoline and we can see she is in capable hands - not. The kids beg for a go and the thing catapults them 30 feet in the air. The more advanced do loops and summersaults while show-boating for their (girl)friends. Eitan tries first and while not so daring, has a blast. Madeleine is surprisingly timid and requests to come off after several moments. Usually it is she that thrives on this kind of thing - no fear, grrr.

Summer UK

My faithful five: apologies for being offline for the past week. I write from Le Veta, Colorado, in the Colorado Rockies. But more on this later.
This photo taken in Brighton-By-Sea, where I return with the kids last week. We lucked out with good weather as the summer has otherwise been the wettest in 75 years. Flash-flooding across England has left 1,000s without water, electricity and home. The worst towns are where the Thames and Severn Rivers meet, unable to absorb the hillside run-off. Earlier this month we saw Sheffield, home of the Arctic Monkeys, washed out. But back to us: Brighton was once the seaside town for which these Brits pined before modern travel whisked the wealthy (and now the pint drinking, cigarette smoking) set to Southern European locals setting in motion the the second British colonisation: low-cost, beach-front condominiums. God bless the herd mentality of this people. Our day otherwise is unspoiled following a train-ride from Clapham Junction to Brighton station. We enjoy the rocks, eat greasy chips and vinegar and check out the boardwalk. A fun day spent while Sonnet prepares for the summer Bon Voyage.

This one makes me (and Wayne) proud - from IHT

Devanand's eyesight and livelihood were saved through the efforts of an innovative microfranchise program developed by the Scojo Foundation, a nonprofit social enterprise based in New York that uses market solutions to distribute inexpensive corrective glasses in the developing world (picture and story from the IHT).

Worldwide, according to Scojo, more than 700 million people who make less than $4 a day suffer from presbyopia, limiting their ability to make handicrafts, read a newspaper or find insects on crops and separate seeds. Sufferers face the dark prospect of diminished productivity and greater poverty.

Scojo does more than just sell glasses. Operating in six countries, the foundation has trained more than 1,000 people to become microfranchise owners, or "vision entrepreneurs," who conduct basic eye exams, sell affordable prescription glasses and refer those who need advanced eye care to clinics and hospitals. According to Scojo, many of the microfranchise owners have doubled their income, and thousands of farmers, craftspeople and merchants have been able to return to work.

Using 5 percent of profit from the for-profit luxury eyewear company Scojo Vision, and grants from organizations like Open Society Institute of George Soros and the Acumen Fund, the Scojo Foundation addresses the most basic eye-care needs of local communities. It also trains its entrepreneurs to refer those in need of serious medical treatment to organizations like Orbis, the global anti-blindness charity.

In Ghana, Fan Milk has sold 8,000 people the bicycles and dairy products to become distributors, and in India, Hindustan Lever has trained nearly 31,000 women in its "Project Shakti" network to sell consumer products like coffee, laundry detergent and toothpaste.

Since its inception in 2002, Scojo has joined forces with more than 20 private companies and nongovernmental organizations in Bangladesh, India, Ghana, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico to train microfranchise owners, often linking up with existing networks of health workers, peddlers and shopkeepers.

In April, Scojo began collaboration with the nonprofit health organization Population Services International to distribute glasses throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In five years, Scojo has sold more than 70,000 pairs of eyeglasses to the poor across the globe.

That Hat

A photo from the archives - this one taken November 2003 at three years old. The flapper was a Christmas present from me to Sonnet when we lived on the Upper West Side. "Flapper" referred to a "new breed" of young women from the '20s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to unconventional music and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered "decent" behavior. The flappers were seen as brash in their time for wearing excessive makeup, drinking hard liquor , treating sex in a more casual manner, smoking cigarettes, driving automobiles, and otherwise flouting conventional social and sexual norms. God how we miss 'em.

Surreal

These lovelies are from the cover of Surreal Things which is on display at Sonnet's museum. We attended the opening in April and the curator, Ghislaine Wood, wore an Alexander McQueen butterfly print dress mirroring the 1937 version by "Schiap." While the most known works are by Dali (of course), Andre Breton, Joan Miro and Man Ray, my favorite is Alberto Giacometti's unexpected pottery including "Tutankhamun' lamp in 1933. I have only admired his bronzes and so a real treat to see his weirdness in clay.

2007 is really 1984

In a document mistakenly released by the Home Office Tuesday and reported by Fleet Street, U.K. police may be given access to the details of journeys taken by millions of British motorists collected by road pricing technology for congestion charging in London and elsewhere. The data would include license plates and individual targeting of suspected terrorists and potential criminals and criminal-like behaviors, whatever this means. There is yet considerable opposition to the plan and I listened to our new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith dodge the question on Radio 4 this morning claiming she would like more information before rendering her opinion. Britain has the infrastructure for the Orwellian plan: 2,640 "smart" cameras in operation and pilot-less camera "drones" now being tested in areas like Manchester. The 21st Century started yesterday.

He Must Be A Republican

Senator David Vitter for 16 hears staked out the moral high ground where he has challenged the ethics of other Louisiana politicians on same-sex marriage while depicting himself as a "clean-as-a-whistle" champion of family values. Says he: “I’m a conservative who opposes radically redefining marriage, the most important social institution in human history,” Mr. Vitter, a 46-year-old family man and yes, Republican, wrote in a letter last year to The New Orleans Times-Picayune. Well, His Holy now admits that his phone number is in a list of clients’ numbers kept by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who is accused of running a prostitution ring in Washington (Vitter missed major votes on Iraq in the Senate and made no public appearances as accounts of other prostitutes multiplied in the New Orleans news media). Vitter now says he committed "a very serious sin in my past.” No shit mister. What are the odds he voted for Clinton's impeachment? Would YOU take that bet?

Adding to the road kill, in 2000 Vitter's wife Wendy was asked: If her husband were as unfaithful as Bill Clinton, would she be as forgiving as Hillary Rodham Clinton? “I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary,” Wendy Vitter told Newhouse News. “If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me." Recall that Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband's dick with a kitchen knife when she found out he was having an affair.

Madeleine 24

Here is Madeleine at Day One of life. As any parent says: time goes by fast so enjoy the moment. I can say: when this photo taken time did not go by fast but there was enjoyment. Madeleine had lungs like a bull-horn and a stubborn personality from the git-go. She had no problem wailing for hours until given the midnight nip or a little comfort from mum. This holds remarkably true today where our little girl sets her mind to something and works hard for it - or screams murder otherwise. This morning, for instance, Eitan and I work out various clock times. Madeleine, who has not done this in school, sits on the side-line chirping her guesses: "1:05? 15:36? 100:45?!" She's not ready to call it quits when we move on to something else and I promise her that we will get the hours and minutes sorted out together.

Mel Ramos

The notorious and "utterly questionable" pop artist Mel Ramos has surfaced in the West End - pictured. The W1 showing is a first for the artist most famous for his 1960s sexy nudes and naked B-movie stars draped around over-sized cigars, cigarette packs, tooth-paste tubes and other familiar 1950s house-hold products. At the same time Andy Warhol was trolling pop culture with his Elvises and Marilyns, which netted greater introspection and long-lasting attention. Unlike Warhol, Ramos did not fuse depth and pop trash - he was only trashy and so objectionable to the critical masses. I, lighter than air, intend to ogle the great ogler.

Swann-Upping

The Queen's annual swan count began yesterday at Sunbury and the whole country is a-twitter. Passing through Berkshire to Abingdon in Oxfordshire, a boat of loyals (dressed in their scarlet uniforms) and children count, weigh and ring each bird while checking for signs of injury and disease. The ceremony dates from the 12th Century when the Crown claimed all unowned mute swans in Britain to ensure a ready supply for banquets and feasts. Nowadays, the Queen retains the right to ownership on some stretches of the River Thames and tributaries. For the record and the most recent data I could find, in 1991 there were 116 cygnets and in 1992 the total number of new cygnets marked was 136. There is as yet, no answer to the problem of those that are strangled by fishing lines. Photo from Londondiary.com.

Smokes

Eitan and I go to Eddie Katz's this afternoon. EK offers kids a giant play area complete with slides, bouncy castles, hockey, video games and other must haves for a six year old (Madeleine is at a birthday party). On the way home, we discuss cigarettes and I ask Eitan if he understands a craving. "Is it like sucking my thumb?" he asks adroitly. We then touch on addiction: "only when I suck my thumb I can stop" he adds. We compare TV and chocolates to smoking and I use our car ride to touch upon drugs. "Some kids, even your friends, will want you to take pills and you will have to decide" I say. Eitan comments on a school story about a boy and an apple. If eaten, the apple will bring a long life of unhappiness.. I ask if he would eat the apple. Eitan: "No, I'd rather die now but happy."
Photo from the WWW.

Champions

Yesterday is the final day of football as the summer break is upon us (Kids last day of school: Wednesday). Eitan and Madeleine play in tournaments and each's team takes second place in their division. Eitan scores a terrific side-post goal that makes him visibly happy as the other kids high-five him. For the record, Madeleine enjoys footie, effectus, but is now aware that she is one of two girls on the pitch. Some discussions have taken place about swim-club and tennis, which I would enjoy with her later on. Stay tuned, dear reader.

The artist formally know as "the squiggly thing" angers the high street by giving away his latest album In today's Sunday Mail - Prince will play 30 gigs in London this August. The Mail paid Prince £500,000, a small figure for His Purple Squire, but the stapled controversy has produced enormous free publicity feeding concert attendance as each show has sold out. Sonnet and I will probably see him in September, though I generally shy away from big venues like the 02 center, formally known as the Millennium Dome.

Gold

Here is yesterday's sporting result where Madeleine takes first and second place in her races. This photo is from my mobile camera as I forgot the DSLR - but I think it gets the point accross. Picture taken on the school grounds, post pick-up.