First of all, thank you to everyone who checked in on me during the fire and after the shooting – it is so good to know people think of me! It has been a crazy summer, we have traveled and been busy with camping, hiking, family and now summer is half over.

I am not even sure where to start with updating everyone on what has been going on, but let me start with the big news – my oldest daughter, Cassidy, is pregnant. She is 22 and has been on her own for 2 years now. She and her boyfriend have been dating for a little over a year. And she is pregnant. I am still processing all of this and not quite sure how I feel about it, but I guess how I feel about it isn’t important. 

We have been spending time in Fort Collins and trying to sort things out, which may include renting out our condo and moving down there to support her for a couple of years. It has been a whirlwind of change. I had no idea how much being pregnant myself affected my own parents before now. 

So, congratulations to Cassidy and Kevin - 

 

 

But please, I am so not ready for the “G” word yet!

 

This has been a very busy summer, and I have been running back and forth all over here. I am sorry for all the posts I have missed, and also sorry for all of the posts I am going to miss in the next few weeks. I miss my Xanga friends.

Here is a quick update:

I visited the Royal Gorge with my father in law who was in town while my husband was not. Not knowing him well, I showed him all around CO because I didn’t want him to be bored. I may have went too far, because he was exhausted when he left. 

 

 

The following day, we hiked up to Boulder Falls. (If you can call it hiked, it was not very far from the road.) 

 

Then we went to Nederland and I had fun telling him about the famous frozen dead guy and the coffin races. He didn’t believe me, so we went to the coffee shop to verify my story.

 

Then I went back to WY. I spent time with my grandparents and visited the haunted old cemetery where my relatives are buried. I used to play there as a kid, it wasn’t as spooky as an adult. Someday I will dedicate an entire post to that.

 

A miniature sculpture of the Devil’s Tower made of stone by a grave, amazing work.

 

I next visited my childhood home, but didn’t take pictures because a new family lives there and that would be creepy. Here is the road outside of our house though.

I returned to Boulder, picked up Corey from the airport, and now we are going back to camp and hike in the Bear Lodge until a week from Tuesday. It was a good alternative to backpacking the CO trail, no fires up there.

The time I was traveling, one daughter took a road trip to Portland and the other moved to Montana. My husband traveled from PA to AL to TN.  It seems we were all scattered this summer.

I do miss Xanga, and it feels like I have been gone forever. What makes it worse is that I am not done running and know I will miss much more. At least I will have a lot to talk about when I get back! 

I hope you are all loving your summer and will remember me when I finally return!

I have been on a reading spree that happens to have a common theme – everyone is hungry. I started with All is Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque about German soldiers during World War I. I then read Wild by Cheryl Strayed which is about a backpacker on the Pacific Crest Trail. Finally, I reread Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, a memoir about a hungry family in Ireland. The common theme was hunger, and their description of food was so rich and detailed that reading it made me hungry, myself.

There were several lines that stood out to me, but the one that I remember the most about hunger was from Angela’s Ashes and his obsession with eggs. He heard a story about a boy in another country who had an entire egg he could eat himself, and yet he only had part of it and threw it away. Frank was outraged and in disbelief. “Oh, God above, if heaven has a taste it must be an egg with butter and salt, and after the egg is there anything in the world lovelier than fresh warm bread and a mug of sweet golden tea?” - Frank McCourt, ‘Angela’s Ashes’ (1996)

When you are hungry, not much else matters in the world outside of finding food. You don’t worry about politics, religion, art or culture. You don’t worry about recycling, global warming or the long term economic impact of the nation’s debt. You only worry about finding a meal. 

Even with the abundance of food we can develop today, 925 million people face starvation right now. 

 

I believed I had been hungry before. I have never felt more hungry than I did after working outside all day, or running a long, hard trail run. I believed I was famished and would die without putting something in my belly. But that is an exaggeration, I have honestly never known real hunger, and neither has anyone I know personally. 

Looking into this, I found that the world does produce enough food to feed everyone, 17 percent more than enough, actually. Obviously, the primary cause of hunger and starvation is poverty, but there are varied reasons why this is including conflict, war, government mismanagement, etc. In the US, 14.5 percent of households were considered food insecure - ‘A situation that exists when people lack secure access to sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development and an active and healthy life’. I can’t understand how that can happen in the US. 

I think my next series of books are going to be about happier topics. 

 

http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.htm