I just checked out my buddy M's wife's blog. They got back from China a few weeks ago with their new little girl. She's cute. I'm massively impressed by people like them. It costs a lot of money to do something like that and it comes out of their own pocket. While many people around them are tripping over themselves to over-extend on sunrooms and Touregs, J&M are using their own money to give life and love to an abandoned little girl....accepting all the what if's, attachment issues, and cultural land-mines. We need more people like them in this world.

A lot has happened since the last blog. I had an intense trip to the front range last weekend. I felt like I got very real with myself and real with my parents. I don't think I've been a mess in front of my parents in about 10 years. It actually felt good. Sometimes you just have to let yourself be an irrational, emotional train wreck.

The 100 shoe sized jelly beans are down to about 85 right now. Hopefully when I walk into work tomorrow it will be down to 50. This is the stage where we have to think about taking away as much as adding things in. Less is more. Of course, I'm excited to see less colors, less styles...Sometimes it's a selfish desire to lessen the project load, but really it's about being focused, about letting the funnel work. It will be a few more months before I can put pics up. I feel like I spend the majority of my time managing the flow of information and obsession over details that I forget (or don't have bandwidth) to be creative or to innovate. I'm not sure how to deal with that. I think I have to start blowing things off. I have to be willing to risk dissapointing some people at work so that I can have the time and energy to do what I came here to do...change the game.

I said that I was going to write about my conversation with the Copes, but a month later it's all fuzzy. It was about not gaining your sense of self or relevance from your work; how people create their own drama in order to feel important; how work can be self medicating; how we're replacing relationship with God and others with work and busyness. I've had some significant conversations about this in the past month. My friend and former housemate D cared enough to sit me down to read the riot act on my work habits. He said that if I want to spend my life being stressed out, giving the best of myself, and working a bizzilion hours, then not to wast it on mid-priced consumer goods for rich westerners...to take that energy and make the life and death decisions and work to change lives on a direct, practical level....or alternatively, if I am to stay in the business world, then take it easy...it's not life or death decisions I'm making. You have to realize that this is coming from a person who actually does put life, limb, health, and everything else at risk to bring aid to refugees, to feed the poor. He's been working as a logistics/ops manager for an NGO in Darfur and Iraq. He has the credibility to tell someone something like that. The conversation radically altered how I look at work.

"Training" for the Enduro is going well. I put training in quotation marks because I don't really train for anything. If it's not fun then it's not going to work for me. So, I've been having fun suffering on the bike. This was the first week of intervals and attempts at being fast. I have so far to go; but a big, ridiculous goal is really the only way that I can get up off my ass...I actually have thoughts like "it's 9pm, I don't need any more food", "I don't feel like riding, but on July 29 I'll be glad that I did", or "chocolate isn't as important as it used to be". These may sound like repressive terrible thoughts, but they are actually coming out of some weird place inside me and they are good and sound.

This hasn't been so much about the western slope and transition into small town life...at least not in a direct way. But it all ties in. To me anyway. There are lots of things going on in P-town. I found a lady that sells plants out of her sunroom. It's totally back alley but the plants are healthy, cheap, and potted. I love the low maintainence for me, but really the love she puts in to them. I volunteered at a fund raiser for a local non-profit last night. It was fun and I met a lot of people. This valley is full of some very weird folks, but some cool people too. I met Ed and it felt like meeting a celeb. He was the editor of a very pominent publication based in town and is running for county commisioner. He's not your typical guy; he's...dignified or something. Can't explain. He's different and even though we were just talking about people we know or how the town has changed he gave me hope. I saw D and he's off to Patagonia in a few weeks to work with a school down there. Days have been spent freezing on the bike but I get some good glimpses of pheasants, hawks, a ferret, and the first Robin of Spring perched on the chain link fence. Winged hope.

Happy Holy Week.