My brother ran into this fellow while hiking this weekend. He always sees rattlesnakes. I've never seen a single one, not even when I was volunteering for Boulder Mountain Parks and patrolling trails for 12 hours every weekend. Then again, I've seen a mountain lion up close — very close — and a mama bear with three cubs, and he hasn't. So...
We had another special edition at the paper, this one devoted to green living, and it took far more time than anyone had imagined. For the past two weeks, I've been working, eating and sleeping — and that's about it. Thank goodness this is sort of the last one for a while. Okay, okay, we have another for the Fourth of July, but that's nothing like these others.
These past two weeks have also been extremely unusual in that every single day we've had torrential downpours — sometimes two or three times a day. Even stranger, we've had tornadoes almost every day. I grew up here being told that "we don't have tornadoes here because we're too close to the mountains." Well, someone needs to tell that to the eight tornadoes that have touched down around here in the past two weeks. Obviously, they didn't get the memo.
We had our first tornado in 1996 — two on the same day, actually. I watched one of them touch down, utterly fascinated. They were pretty small. A friend of mine from Alabama just laughed at them and called them "cute." Then we didn't have another till last year when that enormous mile-wide twister touched down in Windsor. That's the tornado that wrecked my roof. It also killed someone. And now eight this year.
I hope to be back in the writing swing this weekend. Naked Edge is due in New York on July 15. I can't miss that deadline. So that means I might be taking an Internet break. The pub date has been bumped back to March '10, and I expect it might hit April '10 before long...
I have eight chapters plus and epilogue to write.
I hope everyone is well.