SHARING THE LOVE

So last night had us conventioneers dining and drinking at the fabulous, historic Sheridan Inn, a full service restaurant/events complex complete with a ferocious parking problem. Enter the Saratoga contingent, trundling around downtown Sheridan, Wyo in an enormous Chevy Tahoe. We park where we can, we park where we can.

And that is how we earned a little love letter from Sheridan's finest! Yes! Not a parking ticket, but a sternly worded warning, addressed to our one and only hypersonic town clerk, Squeaky (not her real name), whose name of course appears on the Tahoe's registration...at least I have to assume this is how it came to be; the notion that anyone could mistake my fellow harrumphing councilman Uncle Mac (not his real name), a seven foot tall ex sergeant-major with a booming, gravelly voice that sounds like god's own master-at-arms, for Squeaky (also tall but of a more delicate frame, titian hair and a taste in clothing and couture that makes her look like she's perpetually preparing for an Easter parade) is just too absurd to contemplate.

What could we do in such a situation? We saved our parking ticket and delivered it to its intended recipient. There's a 3x6" time bomb planted on the windshield of Squeaky's car. She is, of course, parked perfectly legally in the middle of the Sheridan High School lot, so I'm sure that her outrage will overcome her basic sense of shame and I'll hear about it over lunch.

Either that or I'll hear the refrain with which she frequently greets both my father and myself: "Damn you, Sherrod!"

Stay tuned...

DIARY OF A MAFIOSA

Woo hoo! Now I know how the Crips and the Bloods feel! There's nothing like walking into a room at the head of a posse to make a girl feel tough and scary. I may start wearing a doo-rag!

Yup, I'm back with the Carbon County Mafia, the combined tequila-drinking, jail-building, antelope-shooting, river-floating might of the local elected officials of Carbon County's ten municipalities. No other Wyoming county has near so many towns, so no other Wyoming county has near so many delegates here at the annual convention of the Wyoming Association of Municipalities. We're a faction, a bloc, a gang! It's plumb intoxicating!

Speaking of intoxication, well, that's what the mafia does best. We take over bars, mostly - last night's victim was the Mint Bar, here in Sheridan, a wonder of warm cedar driftwood, panels of real brands from real Wyoming ranches (I found two from Saratoga just in the nook where we sat - one for the Mowrys and another I couldn't read) and an ample supply of Jackson-brewed Zonker Stout (for some reason, the Mint has concluded that Guiness is a "winter" brew and has a policy of replacing it in the summertime with an Alaska Amber, drinkable but certainly no substitute), followed by some cheesy kid bar that, in its defense, did have dance music (nobody dances like party-starved municipal clerks: it's quite a sight), but in its debit column was infested with...

KARAOKE

Prompting Radical Ron (not his real name), Rawlins' economic development officer, and I to engage in a favorite pastime: haiku wars. Below is the finest flowering of this unusual art form, a joint effort of ours that evolved over the course of about 500 agonizing hours sucking down Amber Bock (best they had, alas) and trying not to listen. But enough on that subject.

Karaoke hell.
Tone-deaf singers keep it up.
Take away the book.

Ah, conventioneering.

And what was the big topic of contention at this morning's public safety policy committee meeting? Why, liquor licenses, of course!

Justice, like government officials in Carbon County, can be quite poetic.

More later (aren't you glad there's full-bore internet access available at convention headquarters?)...

GRATUITOUS SPEED POST AHEAD!

Purely to soothe the terror and stave off the ire of those of you who have been checking this site and wondering when the hell I'm going to write something new, I'm writing something new, though I am soon to board the Town Tahoe for a six-hour drive with a fellow harrumphing council member to go attend the annual convention of the Wyoming Association of Municipalities. Never say I don't do what I can to keep you happy. It's all for you. Feel the love.

I have missed a Spanish goal in the last round of their pool play. They are ahead of South Africa 3-1. Kind of meaningless, though, since Spain has already advanced to the elimination round (so for once I slept - are you proud?). But still, I sacrificed seeing this goal, which excited Ty Keogh very much, because I care about YOU. Yes, you, dear reader. I'm thinking of you right now. I'm putting you ahead of my quadriannual (no, I don't know if that's the actual word and I'm on the tightest deadline of my life here, so no time to look it up, so pretend it is one, okay?) soccer orgy. I hope you appreciate how special that is.

While I'm babbling, lately I've been wondering what kind of readership I still have. I know the persistent readers, commenters, hecklers (most common heckling text: "I'm serious! You need to get a life!" -- advice I take with a grain of salt since it comes from a man who earned the designation of Sewer King. But I digress. It's what I do when I'm not busy having a life). But what about the rest of you. Who are you? Where do you live? Grey Poupon or French's? Less Filling or Tastes Great? Legs or breasts?

Seriously. I'm curious. I know there's people reading me in Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, Illinois and Tokyo... anywhere else? People I'm not personally acquainted with?

Wow, now that I've posed the questions, I'm bound to lose sleep over it until I have some idea of the answers. And there's still two weeks of World Cup Wackiness to go. That's a lot of sleep I'm not going to have. Which will affect the quality of the blog. So do your part for making LIANT the wonder of the Wyoming Wide Web and drop me a line. There's a little thingie on the left hand side of this page where you can e-mail me (I'd put in a mailto link, but I'm just discombubulated enough not to be sure of the syntax, and I don't have my HTML guide handy).

So do it already.

OK, off to Sheridan. I'll bring you back something nice. Kisses and hugs!

Don't drink all the beer while I'm gone.

- The author

BECOMING NOCTURNAL

I have a whole different set of priorities this month.

I offer this little tidbit not as an excuse for not having posted to this page in five months (dog time), as I have no exuse for THAT other than laziness, ennui and a bird festival to run (about which more anon, of course), but as an excuse for not going to coffee much this month - and as long time readers know, coffee is where I get most of my best column material.

So what is my priority that is keeping me out of the public eye, local gossip and the continuing saga of popcorn wars?

The FIFA WORLD CUP, baby!

It goes like this: think of how much you love the NzBA, hockey, professional (American) football, the Eukanuba dog show circuit, NASCAR, the PGA, whatever silly sporting event pins you in your recliner with a cold one by your side shouting things like “pass, you dumbass” and “my grandmother drives faster than that!” at the top of your lungs at a very expensive piece of furniture. Now think of what a drag it would be if you only got to see it once every four years.

Hence, my devotion to catching as much of the World Cup as I can, a devotion so intense that I actively encouraged my parents to go on a long road trip so I can borrow their cable-TV equipped house (well, it WOULD be silly for me and annoying for the cable guy for me to hook up to cable for just this one month, wouldn’t it?), and I have sat up VERY late almost every night watching a bunch of foreigners in shorts (I missed the USA vs. Portugal game because I couldn’t drag my sorry butt out of bed at 3 a.m. - thus learning my lesson that it’s easier for me to STAY up than GET up. I won’t commit that error again) kick a ball around an enormous field while commentators with nearly impenetrable accents slowly catch me up to speed on what these players, most of whom I haven’t seen in action since 1998, have been up to lately.

I’ve only seen a few teams in action so far, but I’m already wishing I could reassess my picks for the Secular Johnson Pick’em league (I obviously way underrated Senegal, who last night executed as beautiful a play as I’ve ever seen, a precisely timed series of exquisitely perfect passes all the way from their goal to Denmark’s and ending in a very neat equalizer goal that left even Seamus Mallin kind of tongue-tied).

And so far I’m still functional in the daytime. I’ve been missing coffee but not missing work, and there’s all this Diet Coke leftover from several chamber events at which people cleaned out the pop coolers, denuding them of everything but Diet Coke, so there’s plenty, it’s all here in my office and it’s all now crammed into the fridge that shares space with Molly the Collie under my desk...

I shall probably drive my Wyoming Association of Municipalities colleagues batty next week, scheduling our social time around games, though I suspect that at least one of my treasured drinking buddies, the municipal judge at Opal, might be just as crazy as I am (we both own Newcastle United replica jerseys, to give you an idea). I’ll either drag them from bar to bar in Sheridan, Wyo (of course we’re starting at the Mint, where they know how to pour a proper pint of Guiness, according to my advance scouts) in search of one that will let me tune in, or I’ll be cutting us off at midnight so I can settle into my motel room for ESPN’s World Cup 2Night and the first game of the evening.

Yup, a whole different set of priorities in June...

ANY EXCUSE...

Lo venire, lo brindare, lo riuscare
- My Saratoga Wine School 2002 diploma

(Rough translation: I came, I drank, I graduated - and never you mind the infinitives)

Just because living in Saratoga isn't enough fun yet, the wife of our esteemed mayor, who along with said mayor is something of a wine connoisseur (French for snob) (not really in strictly lexigraphical linguistic terms, but true in spirit, no?), came up with a capital new idea.

Although we live in what is arguably the dining capital of Wyoming, although we already have something of a world class liquor store (really! If they don't have it, they'll order it for you, just like our book store! Which is also a quilt store! But I digress! As usual!), although we are already people who are devoted to squeezing the last possible fragment of fun that life has to offer, Mrs. Mayor decided what we really needed was a Wine School.

Wine School in Saratoga terms meaning three successive wine "tastings" on concurrent Monday nights at the already ridiculously sybaritic Hotel Wolf, those tastings accompanied by huge hunks of "Italian Candy" (gorgonzola cheese as it's known by the family who owns and operates the wolf) aka "gagonzola" (as it is known to the oldest daughter thereof, who notwithstanding can make a mean flank steak gyro without even thinking about it) and other treats.

For a small fee, residents of our fair and silly burg got to hear lectures from area representatives of national wineries like Gallo (who through their Redwood Creek label have actually made a merlot that didn't make me gag - of course it's cut very liberally with that true prince of grapes, the SHIRAZ!!!!) as well as local ones like the Terry Ranch (who starting late this summer will feature a red and a white created with Canadian hybrid grape strains grown on the south sides of hills all over Wyoming - yes, Wyoming - that show great promise judging from the wines the crew there has made from grapes already tainted by that Colorado soil...). It was meant to introduce "course" takers to things like the aroma wheel, the difference between varieties of grape, the importance of terroir, etc.

But, this being Saratoga, anyone who cares about that sort of thing already knows, and everybody else just likes whatever fermented grape juice does the job of loosening the tongue, releasing the inhibitions, etc. So what it really was, was an elegant and VERY enjoyable excuse for getting together with people who were already our friends and guzzling a lot of wine and eating a lot of Italian Candy and other appetizers. A typical exchange therein went something like this:

PAID WINE EXPERT: You might note hints of cherry and vanilla in this remarkable blend of Shiraz and other grapes from Australia.

ME: I don't taste any of that stuff, but I'll sure as hell drink it!

LOCAL CONTRACTOR FRIEND OF MINE: Me neither, Kate! Cheers!

Brief silence as my contractor friend and I drain our glasses, ignoring completely the wine-tasting protocol of "chewing" the wine and then delicately spitting it out into the buckets provided. Hey, at least we stuck our considerable schnozzes into the glasses before guzzling; we have learned a thing or two about "nose" over the years.

RECENT RELOCATOR TO THE VALLEY: I don't know about cherry or vanilla, but this smells a lot like banana!

MAYOR AND ME: Oh so Thomas Pynchon o yes!

Etc.

Yes, this wine school can be called a success, even though more than half of us plotted to fail the course deliberately so we could be sentenced to summer school and considerably more of us than that gleefully accepted after-school "detention" and still more of us talked about general remedial courses...

Then tonight, the coup de grace. Just to make you all jealous, dear readers, here is the menu, prepared, I might add, as expertly as it might have been done in Tuscany or anywhere:

ANTIPASTO - Asiago cheese stuffed olive, garlic infused olive oil and french bread (all you need for buna cauda except for no anchovies!), with Sonoma Cut'rer Chardonnay (very nice, not as dry as most chardonnays but not so sweet you go into a diabetic coma either).

ENSALADA: (Did I mention the management of the Hotel Wolf has a bit of an Italian bias? Funny for people who specialize in prime rib, no?): Romaine with pears and gorgonzola salad dressing (heavy on the wondrous raw garlic), with Silverado Sauvingnon Blanc.

MAIN COURSE: Baked tenderloin (that's beef for you city folk) with Madeira wine sauce, garlic mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli, with Wild Horse Pinot Noir (!) and Clos Du Val Cabernet Saugvignon (good, but I'm still a working girl, so I'll stick to Liberty School when I want a cab, and Black Opal Shiraz, which I learned I can save a lot of money by buying by the case, when I just want a good, affordable red).

DESSERT: Grapes and assorted cheese (those cheeses being a nice aged gruyere, my favorite since I was a tot and bogarted the gruyere from our Swiss Colony order each Christmas) and Blockheadia Ringnosii Zinfandel and Tosti Asti.

Yes, it's a difficult, deprived and horrid existence here in Saratoga, Wyo, but we do endure, we do endure.

And none of us can wait for our Wine School 2002 class reunion!

(Meanwhile, Obie and me and a few others are planning on our own learning disabled make-up sessions of Wine School to make sure we deserve our diplomas!)

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS...

So, there I was sitting peacefully at coffee yesterday morning, discussing the affairs of the day with my friends, when suddenly we all heard the noon whistle a little early (for my out-of-town readers: this is an old mill town, and the big loud fire alarm still goes off every day at noon to tell us all we may go to lunch. Usually it goes off when we're already at lunch, but that's another story).

Amidst speculations about what would happen if there was a fire at noon, would anyone show up, etc., one of my snarkier friends leaned over and said "Ah, don't worry; it's just Kate's house burning down!"

Ha. Ha. Ha-ha, I believe I said to him.

Cut to about an hour later, I return to my office, and there sitting patiently on the sofa, are my own dear personal mom and dad, mom looking chagrined, my dad bearing a shit-eating grin.

"So, Kate, are you ready to move again?" my father asks.

"This isn't very funny, honey," my mom whispers, slightly swatting him.

"...?" says I.

"Did you hear the fire sirens this morning?"

Swat.

"Well, yes! What was it?"

"That was for your house."

Cut to me sitting heavily on the floor, all color drained from my cheeks, all breath escaped from my body. Everything begins happening in slow motion, blurred, soundless. I'm thinking of my 100+ year old poetry books, all of my journals, drafts for novels...library books already overdue...

Dimly, from 1000 feet underwater, I hear my mother saying something to the effect of "Ha, ha ha, how does it feel?"

My father lets me off the hook: "I ran over your gas meter is all. It's all fixed and your pilot lights are lit and everything."

Apparently they had been to my little house on the river to set up the fenceposts for a dog pen, as this time tomorrow I shall have a four-legged duck herder for a roommate. Since said duck herder is a grown border collie, my father decided I need an extra tall fence, and so the posts are correspondingly lofty - he had to stand up in the back of his pickup to pound them in.

And in moving the truck to put up the last fencepost, he nudged the gas meter a bit.

Apparently every single member of the Saratoga Volunteer Fire Department, of which my dad is a former president among other things, showed up for the call. I imagine it's going to be a while before he lives this down, poor man.

But of course, my family is going to be ragging on me for years for falling for the old "for whom the bell tolls" gag, too.

As I say so often in these and other pages, no day is a dull day.

SOMETIMES, THIS STUFF BUGS ME...

"And now, a question of etiquitte: As I pass, do I give you the ass or the crotch?"
- Tyler Durden

I just jumped onto AOL's Instant Messenger a moment ago to see if my sister might be on because, well, she and I are both "a bubble off" and are more likely to be home and quiet on a Friday night than pretty much anyone (my nights to howl being Tuesdays and Thursdays and hers being... much more random, actually).

And she wasn't there but a bunch of my brothers in secularity were. I wasn't in the mood to further discuss the recent rash of pipe bombs in the midwest or the Will Code For Food guy or PUTTING IN BEN WALLACE, so I jumped off very quickly.

But I saw that they were online, so conversely, through the magic of buddy lists, they would have seen that I was on, too.

Should I have hailed them, acknowledged seeing them even though I didn't want to get into a conversation? Was it rude of me to zip in and zip out?

Were this "real" life and I saw them on the street, surely I would at least wave (indeed, in my real life, everyone waves, even to strangers, and woe betide she who does not wave back, because sure 'nuff, the next time she is sitting vulnerable on a bar stool of a tired Tuesday night because the mayor is on a bathroom break and the minister of fun is hitting on a tourist, that's when the person to whom she didn't wave will corner her, accusing her of self-involvement, snobbery, or worse!).

But what's the AIM equivalent of waving?

Does anyone else think about these sorts of things?

OH WAS IT WORTH IT!

While most of you, my gentle readers, were watching TV or pounding away at theses or sitting through meetings or working late or doing whatever it is you poor creatures do when you're not treating yourselves to my golden prose last night, guess what I was doing (after my requisite three or so hours finishing things up at the old apartment, I mean)?

*I* went fishing in my own backyard!

No, I didn't catch anything (as my own dear personal dad likes to say, more often than not, "The fishing was good but the catching was lousy"); the river where it runs past my house does not present an ideal fishing hole as such, but that's not the point.

The point was that it was possible. I had access. I was a mere 15-20 feet from my very own front door, barefoot, in my kick-around-the-house clothes, a mandarin and soda at my side (and I didn't have to hump out a cooler to have ice and refill material) and I had a line in the water! And got to watch a pair of ospreys farting around overhead (many thanks to Obie the Artist [not his real name], without whose company and guidance I would still not know an osprey by sight. To say nothing of his assistance in humping my furniture over to the new place, for which his reward is K8E's own Sicilian pizza this weekend!). And saw a great sunset. And when the sun went down, stars (my old neighborhood had too many trees to permit a view of more than a slice of sky).

Now, I'm not gloating (much), but damn, I'm pretty satisfied.

Except for one little thing.

By rights, I should also have been able to write this little blog entry from said riverfront lawn, and post it. But I could not.

My Local Podunk Phone Company (tm) has not yet hooked up my land line, you see. So I had to compose this article from memory more or less (and actually, you should probably be glad, gentle readers, because I'm pretty sure the original was a lot more smug) from the confines of my office and upload it from my work desk tonight after two very exhausting meetings. Boo!

On the other hand, however, my phone didn't ring once while I was fishing. From my back yard. Ha.

WHERE ELSE BUT HERE...?

So, I stopped by the offices of my Local Podunk Phone Company (tm) recently to ask them to change over my land line service to my new place, which they will cheerfully do for a totally unjustifiable fee that's not cripplingly high but is still ridiculous and annoying enough to make me want to spend that amount on some really good vodka until I'm nice and liquored up and then call the president of my Local Podunk Phone Company (tm) at his home and tell him to shove that land line up his...

But that's not what I meant to write about in this little note, because this actually relates to something kind of cute, kind of nice, kind of charming – a real "only in Saratoga" thing.

Because the gal who broke the news of the fee to me has known me my entire life, and as she broke the news to me, she stopped me from storming out of her office with a gentle "Oh by the way, Kate, I've been meaning to give you something I found a while ago. It's out in my glove box."

Lo and behold, the phone lady had a photo she'd taken of me when I was a baby. It's sitting now on my desk in my office until such time as I can bring it to my new home without worrying about its loss. In it, I sit with just the first traces of hair on my head, plopped down on a baby blanket with my teething ring and a shot glass (there are apparently no extant photos of me before age three in which I do not have some accoutrement of alcohol close at hand, as my parents' famous pic of me with a bottle of Cracklin' Rosie attests). What a happy looking little baby that is! No clue about the whirlwind of meetings, popcorn pop-offs, rude telemarketers, deadlines, car troubles, mysterious boxes of kitchen items, or really obnoxious service charges to change over her phone service in her future.

Bliss indeed, courtesy of my favorite employee at my LPPC(tm).

A MOVING EXPERIENCE

“I hear you’re not going to be a troll any longer!”

Oh, it’s a true friend indeed who can get away with opening a conversation this way, but in this case this smart aleck remark is remarkably accurate: I am emerging like we wish Osama would from the cave I have made my home lo these many years, and I can already feel the attendant improvements in my disposition.

It’s something of a drawn-out process, moving from a tiny basement apartment to (amusingly enough) a somewhat tinier house across the river, and it’s not one I’m enjoying one bit as I sort through years and years of stuff and debris trying to pare down the volume to one that will comfortably fit into my new home and still leave room for me and my habit of pacing furiously when writer’s block threatens to overcome me.

Alas, it’s not just my stuff, either, that I’m sorting through. I long ago became some kind of weird focal point for the foisting off of other people’s possessions. It started off with my grandmother’s kitchenwares when she closed up her house and moved to a retirement home and went on from there. Someone would offer me a box full of goodies and at first glance it would all look so devastatingly useful that I would say “Of course I’ll take that!” Only later would I find there were only three or four actually useful items cunningly distributed on the box’s top layer.

Of course, a normal person would have kept the useful items and discreetly pitched the rest, but though I am now unmistakenly oozing into my fourth decade I still haven’t really gotten the hang of this “throwing stuff away” business. I can throw away papers, pens that run out of ink, magazines I’m done reading (unless they contain an article or two I’ve found really good – I’m still too disorganized to maintain a clipping file), stuff like that, but what about a pretty good saucepan that’s just not in as good a condition as the three others I have? There is (thank god) a used clothing store here in town whereat I can get rid of the fourteen pairs of sweatpants that have somehow materialized in my utility room over the three years I’ve lived in my cave (and I don’t even wear sweatpants! Ever! Give me shorts or give me death! Remember, I even wear shorts in December!), but what about a store for used computer components (I have a Dell chassis, a 486 microproccessor, a great PC motherboard and a perfectly good monitor... gathering dust in my linen closet ever since I bought my tangerine iBook. Any takers? Anyone?).

But alongside the anguish there is also awe and awareness. Like so many others of my generation, I have moved more times than I can count on two hands (so you think I’d have gotten rid of some stuff along the way, but no, no. Always before there has been haste and hurry, and usually a moving van with more space than was strictly necessary; much easier to toss it all in and sort it all out when I’m at the new place. The sorting just never came!) and so I am quite familiar with the phenomenon of objects lost many moves past turning up again during the packing or unpacking process.

Interestingly enough, the find thus far consists chiefly of photos and related relics from my very first non-dormitory abode, a seriously funky farmhouse in Orono, Maine I shared with several other entomology students – and in many ways just a bigger, stranger version of the house into which I am moving now. Most arresting and, in a way, poignant are some of the photos of my friends and roommates at the time, international students I will probably never see again (or at least not all in one room, crammed into one car, gazing sentimentally at each other over plates of cheap lobster in restaurants, dancing and drinking powerful Brazilian cocktails at three-day parties) but were the first ones who got me watching soccer seriously, friends whose wives I took on whirlwind shopping tours as we made the local IGA our English language lab... I have to strain now to remember everyone’s name in the photos but I still can. I have no idea where in the world they all are now, not even the crazy German-Spaniard I was in love with at the time, and it’s sad to realize that, but it’s fun to remember them.

Mentally I make plans to make some kind of big photo collage now that soon I will dwell in a place where it’s okay to put things on the walls and there is enough light to see them. Not only enough light to see photographs, but enough light to keep plants alive. I’ll save on electricity because I’ll be able to read by daylight again. I’ll have a view out my windows.

And speaking of views: This little cottage, this crazy cabin (no Unabomber jokes, thank you), this funky little love shack, has a mighty fine one because IT’S RIGHT ON THE RIVER! Yes! I have lovely vistas out two windows where I can watch the ducks, both in the river and IN MY BACKYARD. I might even be able to fish from my backyard, though I don’t know how the catching will be. I’ll have my own lawn (of sorts) on which to sit as I enjoy it all.

Yes, there’s lots to look forward to once I get the old place cleaned out.

Until that happens, though, if you see me walking frazzled down the street, don’t panic. There is neither a town nor a chamber crisis a-brewing. I’m just wondering what to do with that extra coffeemaker.

SOMEBODY PINCH ME!

All signs point to my actually getting a chance to use my degree this week! Saratoga High School's junior class voted in overwhelming numbers earlier this school year to use a Chinese theme for its prom decorations, and one of their sponsors remembered that I spent four sweaty years of my life learning the Beijing dialect and traditional character system of that very language!

So in between making final plans for Goofy Golf (about which more in another blog entry; it's late tonight and I've been through a meeting marathon today) and finishing the Chamber's tax return and helping the Minister of Fun prepare his requests for allocations from Saratoga's municipal budget (first budget workshop is 4 p.m. Tuesday, April 30 at Town Hall! I know you'll all want to be there!), I get to go paint Chinese graffitti on a whole bunch of stuff at the high school gym!

And here I thought I'd chosen a pointless course of study at Beaudacious Bard College. I'm sure Lao Guan would be proud.

SPIN CONTROL IN SMALLVILLE

To my out of town readers who might not find all of this Green Mountain stuff all that fascinating, my apologies.

HOWEVER...

A rumor began circulating around Saratoga and Encampment that is so far from being true as to be hilarious, except for in what it represents.

The rumor is that Sand Creek, the Ranch Preservation Company and the Grand Encampment Mountain Resort withdrew their loan application from consideration by the Wyoming Business Council.

I’ll quote Sand Creek’s marketing manager, with whom I spoke this morning (Friday), directly:

“The rumor is categorically FALSE,” he told me.

“We are continuing to work with the WBC staff and Board to supply them with whatever additional information they request as they continue to evaluate the project and the $15 million loan that’s been proposed and previously recommended by the WBC staff.

“I can honestly tell you I have ZERO idea where such a rumor would come from.”

Burger also said that he had checked with Sand Creek CEO John Jenkins, and that he “100% confirmed the above and is equally in the dark as to the rumor’s origin.”

In addition, the Wyoming Business Council has confirmed Burger and Jenkins’ statements.

The application is still active, and will be discussed at the Council’s August Board meeting, WBC Executive Assistant Linda Hollings said.

Both the Tuesday (4/16) meeting in Saratoga and the Thursday (4/18) meeting in Encampment will proceed as scheduled. Both meetings begin at 7 p.m. and will take place in each town’s respective town hall.

HE PICKED HIS OWN NICKNAME, HONEST!

I have a number of friends to whom I regularly refer on this website by amusing nicknames – Obie the Artist, the Fat Cat Republican Bastard, Tad the Grocer, the Maitre d'Marquee, the Chicken Lady, etc.

There is also the man I refer to as The Sewer King. He gave himself this nickname several months ago at coffee.

Well, I had a bit of downtime this afternoon while waiting for the operating system to re-load on one of my office's computers (trashed to an astonishing degree by a self-proclaimed masters degree in computer science who still didn't know how to find a command line interface on a Mac), and for some reason I did a Google search on some of my friends' nicknames.

The best result by far can be found by clicking HERE.

I just want to remind everybody once again that he did pick his own nickname.

Explains a bit about his minions at the store, too, doesn't it?

JUST A BRIEF INFORMATIONAL NOTE

I'll return to ordinary blog posts soon, but since my favorite local newspaper did not deign to announce this anywhere but in a teeny blurb in the bloated community calendar (though they did make this meeting look more important than the town council meeting which precedes it by placing it above the council meeting notice), I want to make sure that my readers in Saratoga, Encampment and the surrounding areas are aware of an important opportunity.

At 7 p.m. this coming Tuesday, April 16, representatives from Sand Creek, the Ranch Preservation company and the Grand Encampment Mountain Resort project (also known as the Green Mountain ski area, and other names) will be on hand at the Saratoga town hall to do a short progress report and answer your questions and address your concerns about the project and its loan application to the Wyoming Business Council. The project leaders will then be present at the Encampment Town Council's regular meeting at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 18 at the Encampment Town Hall.

It's time everybody in the valley made the effort to get the facts about this project, which really shouldn't be as divisive an issue as it has become. For instance, no Wyoming taxpayer money is at risk: the loan the group is applying for would come out of the state's Permanent Mineral Tax trust fund, which represents revenues generated by mineral companies digging stuff out of the ground in Carbon and other counties, not by property or sales or lodging taxpayers. Some of this fund has been set aside for economic development projects, of which this is the first in Carbon County to seek this funding (and the first project in I don't know how many years to get beyond the bullshitting stage and into action). All of it is invested in overnight deposits back east in big financial companies that fund projects all over the world. In other words, our mineral tax monies are being used to prop up poorly privatized companies in Russia, new construction in Malaysia, wiring the Phillipines for better internet service... but all we, the citizens of Wyoming and Carbon County are getting out of it is some interest, the proceeds of which we then squabble over through our elected legislators.

Why not take some of it and use it to back people who are trying to get at least something started here where we live?

That's my take on the matter at hand – and make no mistake; the loan application is the matter at hand. The land swap is accomplished; the section of land the Grand Encampment Mountain Resort company plans to turn into a ski area and real estate development is private property and as long as they obey the law, satisfy the Carbon County Planning and Development Office's and the County Commission's zoning requirements, and find capital, the project is a go. The land is theirs to do with as they see fit as long as they operate within the law, which they are doing.

The only question on the table now is if they will be able to proceed with help from the Wyoming Business Council and the economic development funds it administers. A no from the WBC will not necessarily put an end to the project; it will just force the company and its supporters to try some other way to get it off the ground financially, which, by the way, could result in changes to the project that there is no guarantee any of us will like.

I know there are lingering concerns about the project, especially regarding housing for staff and the development's impact on local water resources, to name two.

People, THE TIME TO AIR THESE CONCERNS AND DISCUSS THEM WITH THE PROJECT LEADERS IS NEXT WEEK. The people putting this deal together are reasonable folks just like you and me, who love this land and the people who live here just as we do, and want to see us all be able to maintain, and maybe even improve, the quality of life we have enjoyed and which our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents came here to enjoy. And they want, as much as they can, to incorporate our input into their ultimate plans for that beautiful spot so that it's attractive to US as well as to the people whom they ultimately convince to buy property up there.

I do urge everyone who wants to see this happen to make the effort to share your support for the GEMR's loan application with the WBC by notifying WBC CEO Tucker Fagan by e-mail (click on the highlighted text to send a message) or, better still, by postal "snail" mail at: 214 West 15th Street, Cheyenne, WY 82002.

And even though nobody likes a lot of meetings, if there's something about this project that you really want to know about or a concern that you really think needs addressed or a rumor that you really want confirmed or denied (and there are some doozies, like the truly hilarious one that this loan money is going to be used to pave the road to Steamboat!), make the effort to be at one of these meetings. It's a much better use of your time than is gossiping about the project on a barstool or fretting about it with people who "live" here for only two weeks out of the year and don't care about those of us who have made the commitment to really be here (until they need ambulance service or get asked to pay their fair share for maintaining the water lines).

PEDALING MY ASS

No, no comma is missing from the title of tonight's essay; I mean nothing derisive about pedaling or peddling or even piddling.

I took my bicycle out for my first serious ride of the year this evening, to enjoy the weather (sunny, strongly breezy, clear blue sky, the very air aglow with anticipation for the upcoming advent of daylight savings time, which means that Hotel Wolf porch sitting season is almost upon us), get some exercise and, in my family's favorite phrase, "blow the stink off," which stink feels considerable after a winter even more than usually cooped up in doors, lain flat out by a really stupid illness.

I kept within the city limits to avoid "overdoing it" and so did not escape commentary from the likes, for example, of my neighbor cum fellow town council member, who hollered out "Careful that people catch you at that, Kate; there's an ordinance against peddlers, you know."

Ever since I got this bike, a police department special (meaning it was largely cribbed together from two or three bikes that had been repining behind the police station for lo these many years since they were turned in as lost and found back when I was in high school [from the look of them]), I've used my car less and less until it's reached the point whereat one of my closest friends revealed today that he had no idea I even had a car, dredging up in my begrudging brain the endlessly recurring question of why I actually do have a car.

What do I do with a car in Saratoga, WY, population 1726, roughly 200 miles away from the nearest shopping mall, 150 miles away from Wal Mart or the hippie food store, 40 miles away from the nearest movie theater?

My enumeration of my distance from institutions that most Americans take for granted and make part of their daily lives is of course misleading, since I frequent none of these. I don't have the time, wouldn't even if they were just a five instead of a 125 minute drive from me.

No, my car is pretty much for getting me to the odd out of town meeting (usually in Rawlins, where the movie theater is but otherwise a place I have never found particularly appealing and to which I avoid traveling when I can) and for hauling groceries from the store, which is less than a two minute drive from my house but is situated most inconveniently atop a long, steep hill that even serious cyclists like our police chief and his wife (who are the type of people who read bike gear catalogs the way I read the New York Review of Books, i.e. recreationally in their own right as well as a source for serious information on the next big purchase. As I pore over a review of John Polkinghome's latest screed so do they minutely examine new handlebar configurations or bike chains, a fact that I find subtly terrifying even when they are not eagerly passing on the latest catalong to yours truly, who recently made the mistake of mentioning that I might need a new front tire soon) do not often dare, and never more than once a season.

Just before I got sick, though, I found on a fine day that I'd somehow managed to get my cycling ass and haunches in sufficient shape and to build my endurance and tolerance for lactic acid build-up to such a degree that a back way to the grocery store was now within my pedaling reach. I could ride over to the hot pool, cross the footbridge over the Hugus-Mullison Ditch there, and make my way up the hill on that street. It's still uphill, and it's a long hill, but though long and of a decidely upward slope it's still nowhere near as punishing a ride as that via the highway.

The only thing thwarting me from using this route and method for my grocery shopping, then, was my lack of a basket or any kind of saddlebags on my bike! With alacrity, I resolved to begin shopping for one, even to cracking open those creepy catalogs (really, though, I shouldn't mock them; I'm sure if the chief and his wife saw my new favorite website, that belonging to Games Plus, they would be equally disturbed. Perhaps even more so).

But that was then and this is now. I'm just recovered (more or less) from mono, at least to a sufficent degree as to allow me to tramp all over downtown Chicago with two of my friends last week without fainting or anything, though the considerable aid of 1) alcohol and 2) cafe de olla cannot be discounted there.

In other words, it's going to be a long uphill climb before I'm able to do my grocery shopping on my bike, and not just because there's a big nasty literal hill involved. Sigh.

But in a few months, I will. And then I'll really wonder why I'm making car payments. And insurance payments. And paying attention to recall notices. And wondering when the hell my new driver's license that I was supposed to get before my vacation but still don't have and my temp license is about to expire... is going to show up in my mailbox so I'm all legal again in case I get carded at the bar like I did in Chicago.

Until then, I'll be pedaling my ass all over town and beyond, striving, ever striving, to make my car even less useful than it is, except in that my car, quite unlike my bicycle, makes a pretty good storage shed...

HE WHO LAUGHS LAST...

...Sells paintings!

Yes, I just learned this morning at coffee that the grafitti lovingly placed on Obie's windows by the grateful souls whose tires he decorated yesterday (who at first thought their own tires had been stolen and replaced by old, shot tires from off of fence posts about the county) has actually worked to bring him business!

A visitor strolling idly about town yesterday afternoon couldn't help but take note of the big, bold yellow letters on Obie's shop windows that read "WILL PAINT FOR FOOD" and came in and bought a painting!

I guess that's one joker who will fear no retribution in the future.

Please don't paint the windows on my briar patch...

FOOLIN’ IN TOGIE

I’m not done writing about my weird, wonderful vacation in the Anti-Saratoga, but for today I’m going to share with those who missed the fun yesterday a sample of how even the most minor of holidays is commemorated with great enthusiasm and imagination here.

Yesterday was, of course April Fool’s Day, a holiday with origins in the Gregorian reform of the calendar (instituted to bring the calendar year back in line with the solar year). Prior to Pope Gregory’s adjustment in 1562, April 1 was celebrated as New Year’s Day; after the reform, January 1 became the big day. HOWEVER, the internet and other reliable and instantaneous forms of communication not having been invented back then, not everyone knew about the change in anything like a timely fashion, and some when informed of the change did not believe it. People who persisted in celebrating New Year’s Day on April 1 came to be known as April Fools and it became the height of sixteenth century hilarity to send these on “fool’s errands” or to try to get them to believe an amusing fib.

No one tried to convince anyone that, e.g., the Orange Bowl was going to be on TV last night, but there was plenty of foolishness in the Saratoga business community.

As longtime readers of this blog might expect, most of it got started at morning coffee.

My good friend Obie the Artist (not his real name) had the idea and came to coffee looking for takers: wouldn’t it be funny to paint “No Hunting” and “Keep Out” and similar variations on the good old “No Trespassing” theme onto people’s car tires for April Fool’s Day (point of clarification: big old tires are for reasons I’ve never really been able to fathom the item of choice for hanging from ranch fences to communicate these messages, as can be seen on any drive along any county or forest road in the Rocky Mountain states).

Everyone quickly agreed that the best target for this prank would be the Fat Cat Republican Banker (not his real name) who won the Great Corn Pop-Off through his devastating combination of bribery (everyone who voted with a $5 bill or greater got entered in a drawing to win a $50 bill or bottles of, in his words, “panty dropping” wine), half-truths (he plastered posters advising Pop-Off “judges” that his booth featured girls in swimsuits, but pulled a bait-and-switch and just had the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, though none of the guys at the event – not even the FCRB’s closest competitor – seemed too upset with this substitution) and the collection of “absentee” ballots.

Obie and his accomplice/enabler, Tad the Grocer (not his real name) set out immediately after coffee, found the FCRB’s pickup and annointed it appropriately. Then, for good measure, cars belonging to Tad’s Woman Friday (wife of the mayor!) and to the Napa Man (not his real name) got the same treatment.

Tad and Obie retreated, giggling, to their respective places of business and awaited the results.

Obie quickly lost his nerve and, knowing their targets’ taste for retribution, decided it was time he took his pickup for a nice long drive. And it was a good thing, too, as Tad quickly learned when he discovered his own truck had been tightly shrinkwrapped.

Since the wounded parties did not have access to Obie’s vehicle during the afternoon, they revenged themselves on his studio windows, leaving a lasting monument to Obie’s own proclivities. Painted now in huge yellow letters on both windows at WYOLD Aspen Studios is the legend WILL PAINT FOR FOOD.

I watched all of this from a distance, of course. I hate being the butt of practical jokes, the inconvenience of washing my car or replacing its battery, the constant reminders of the whopping load of bull for which I fell, etc. So I do not, therefore, play pranks or encourage them – beyond, at any rate, occasionally favoring particularly favored friends with a seriously outrageous whopper that I’m sure no one would ever actually believe but is just fun to say. I’m always way more baffled than they are when I realize I’ve been believed...

Anyway, so passes another April Fool’s Day in Saratoga. No lasting property damage as such, but there are still lingering signs commemorating the day.

For our part on Sec-J, we prayed that a posting we found on wilwheaton.net, the internet home of the second-rate actor who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which suggested that Mr. Wheaton was in negotiations to take on a recurring role of some sort on the latest Star Trek series, was itself an April Fool’s prank. We’re still praying.

And one of us also noted a funky anomaly in the way the most important holiday in the Christian calendar (well, in the non-Orthodox calendar, anyway) fell this year: Sunday, March 31, Jesus is risen from the dead. Monday, April 1, APRIL FOOLS!

Oh, and to all of you stubbornly clinging to the Julian calendar, Happy New Year!

OVERSTIMULATED IN NAPERTHRILL

I have not yet dropped off the face of the earth, though activity on this blog of late might indicate same. Instead, I am on vacation.

I still have internet access where I am, but my days are full and my nights are merry and every night so far I've been too tired to post here. I'm too tired tonight as well, but my conscience simply would not let me allow another day to pass without adding a little something new to this page as a gesture of my love and appreciation to you, my readers.

I could do the standard "Nyeah, it's ____ degrees here and I'm wearing my _____ and sipping a _____ and watching ____ go by" kind of vacation gloating postcard like many of my fellow Saratogans have done or have admitted being tempted to do whilst frolicing in time zones, at latitudes, over bodies of water far from here, but I won't. For one thing, my personal entries for those blanks would not be very interesting at all: 35, boots, Guiness, cars. Pretty much the same entries I'd have were I still in Saratoga.

But, I defy any of my golf-playing, cruise-ship riding, RV-driving, slot machine-stuffing pals to come up with such a worthy collection of quotable quotes to remember their vacations by as these:

"I detect wood."

"Gizmo has dominated the dwarf."

"Quincy tries to steal the mistletoe!" (This announcement made with appropriate TV theme music)

"Best. Commentary. Ever."

"I can't believe I only spent $40 bucks in there. I must be getting old."

And so much more.

I'll have much more to say about all of this and what it has made me realize later on. But for now, having a great time, don't wish you were all here, see you soon, watch out for wandering damage.

I MAKE WEIRD THINGS HAPPEN

The countdown is on to maybe the weirdest single excuse for a party I have ever concocted, the Great Corn Pop-Off, set for 6 p.m. tomorrow night (Friday) at the Fireman's Hall (I was going to have it at St. Ann's, but I realized I might be giving an unnecessary sectarian advantage to two of the competitors, who are Cabbage Cookin', Pancake Flippin' Big Catholic Laymen). We're going to settle once and for all (unless this becomes a yearly thing) whether the hardware store, the bank, the historic downtown hotel or the upstart watering hole offers the best free popcorn in Saratoga.

This all started back in February when two of my coffee buddies got to arguing about whose popcorn is better (longtime readers of LIANT may remember my posting on this when I was ill), and a third buddy and I scooted over into a corner and started giggling over how funny it would be to pit them against each other head-on and let them duke it out "Chicago style," i.e. with no rules of conduct, standards of fair play or limits on how shady or weird they could get in vying for the title. The event's name, of course, came from the wildly weird brain of my own dear personal mom (the corn doesn't pop far from the plant, does it?).

It has mushroomed from there, with two more entrants, a donated keg of beer (plus a lot of leftover Chamber beer from February's chariot races) (my newly-able assistant and I need to get that stuff chilled pronto, even though it's really just emergency back-up supplies in case the keg runs dry) (which is likely as our unofficial motto in Saratoga is "Who has more fun than we do? Nobody) (OK, no, actually, it's "Our town can out-drink your town") and a lot of backroom planning, and very little of that has had anything to do with popcorn recipes.

For our part, my artist friend, my newly-able assistant and I are working on a humdinger of a trophy. We've got a mint condition 1960s era Jolly Time corn popper that we are shortly going to decorate as a possible traveling trophy (if people enjoy it this year, you bet we're going to make this an annual event!). And earlier this week I planted a funky little story in the local newspaper touting this as a grudge match between two titans with two dark horses along for the ride.

This is going to be fun.

Oh, and by the way – all of my votes are still for sale, boys!

MAYBE IT REALLY IS INFINITE...

My vanity, that is. Why else would I so feel like crowing because National Review Online liked my snarky definition for a neologism and posted it on its groupblog The Corner today.

Earlier in the day, Rod Dreher said "I've heard and used the term "Oprah-fied" myself, the capital "O" and the hyphen indicative of a certain unease with the neologism. Imagine my surprise and delight to see it deployed as "oprahfied" by Jim Nuechterlein in his First Things column this month. Truly it has entered the popular lexicon. Would any of you Corner lexicographers care to hazard a definition of "oprahfication"? What does it mean to oprahfy something?"

And asked readers to submit short and sweet definitions for this important new word.

What the hell; I had a few minutes between finishing up a day's work distributing little "2002" year tags to my chamber membership and hopping in the town Tahoe for a quick trip to a Carbon County Council of Governments meeting in Sinclair, so I devoted a stray brain cell to the task for a minute or two, and lo and behold, came up with something Mr. Dreher ranked it as one of his top five, or something. Anyway, he mentioned me by name and quoted my definition as follows:

"And Kate Sherrod observes that "to oprahfy is to render the tragic ludicrous or the ludicrous tragic through various devices of sensationalizing; in either direction, it is to render sensible, tasteful, educated people completely incapable of caring about the matter (or material) to which one has tried to draw attention."

Oh, and I got a nice, encouraging, extraordinarily pleasant e-mail from science fiction writer David Gerrold today, too!

So in terms of getting my name out there and feeding my monstrous ego, today has been a banner day! And to think when I woke up this morning I thought it was going to be dull!