Closing the hotel, escaping Grand County under the darkness of night, arranging for assumed identities in Mississippi....Damn it, I've been busy!!
The blog is not dead, as our Grand County exit, replete with a final good-bye from the Riverside ghost, is forthcoming.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Au revoir....for now
This is a tough one. It’s not a blog about Grand County drunks, dogs, ghosts or ketchup. It’s not about the magnificent Colorado, the spring lupine or the majesty of Byers Canyon. It’s about our life.
I’ll try not to be bitter, and try to keep it beyond the sort of thing that would tip the scale on your not visiting here.
Let's see...Rome, Grand County; Rome, Grand County; Rome, Grand County…oh, that nasty, bitter blog – Rome it is!!!
Effective March 13th, 2010, we have closed The Riverside; forever, under our ownership.
We gave it our all – mentally, physically and financially. We poured our heart, soul and savings into the old girl; they’re all still there, but we are off. As you might already know, I left the hotel in October to take a job in Mississippi, and Julie will join me this next week in Mississippi, as it should be. We’re walking away from a lot, both personally and financially, but nothing in this world is worth being without the person you love; nothing.
Please don’t feel sorry for us, as we are at peace with what we did, and for how we are ending things. There is no question that our timing in undertaking this endeavor couldn’t have been worse. ‘The perfect storm’ is an over-used descriptive term for Murphy’s Law being fueled by Armageddon; over-used, but still very applicable in our situation. Oh well….
What happens next? Lot’s to be sorted out, hopefully with a buyer, but most likely with the banks, the feds and the lawyers. At the end of the day, we’ll be in a new place, with our health, good jobs, and memories and experiences that you simply can’t put a price upon. We can walk away with our heads held high, in that we succeeded in our goal of taking this beautiful old building and turning it into an extension of ourselves; a warm, welcoming place of good taste and good cheer. And we have you, our friends, family and patrons, to thank for helping us realize our dream.
I won’t hang my head over our situation, as I am daily reminded, by the travails and real sufferings of others, that we are still blessed. Our situation is a little business deal gone badly; it’s not health, life or death.
I’m not bitter. I'm sad, I’m proud, and I'm ready to move on.
I’ll try not to be bitter, and try to keep it beyond the sort of thing that would tip the scale on your not visiting here.
Let's see...Rome, Grand County; Rome, Grand County; Rome, Grand County…oh, that nasty, bitter blog – Rome it is!!!
Effective March 13th, 2010, we have closed The Riverside; forever, under our ownership.
We gave it our all – mentally, physically and financially. We poured our heart, soul and savings into the old girl; they’re all still there, but we are off. As you might already know, I left the hotel in October to take a job in Mississippi, and Julie will join me this next week in Mississippi, as it should be. We’re walking away from a lot, both personally and financially, but nothing in this world is worth being without the person you love; nothing.
Please don’t feel sorry for us, as we are at peace with what we did, and for how we are ending things. There is no question that our timing in undertaking this endeavor couldn’t have been worse. ‘The perfect storm’ is an over-used descriptive term for Murphy’s Law being fueled by Armageddon; over-used, but still very applicable in our situation. Oh well….
What happens next? Lot’s to be sorted out, hopefully with a buyer, but most likely with the banks, the feds and the lawyers. At the end of the day, we’ll be in a new place, with our health, good jobs, and memories and experiences that you simply can’t put a price upon. We can walk away with our heads held high, in that we succeeded in our goal of taking this beautiful old building and turning it into an extension of ourselves; a warm, welcoming place of good taste and good cheer. And we have you, our friends, family and patrons, to thank for helping us realize our dream.
I won’t hang my head over our situation, as I am daily reminded, by the travails and real sufferings of others, that we are still blessed. Our situation is a little business deal gone badly; it’s not health, life or death.
I’m not bitter. I'm sad, I’m proud, and I'm ready to move on.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Bad Blood
Editors Note: This blog has nothing to do with living life in Colorado or Mississippi. If either of those topics are essential to your reading this blog, then save your time on this one. On a positive note, this posting isn’t a bitter rant, nor should it dissuade anyone from vacationing in any particular locale.........
BAD BLOOD
An internet-alert friend of mine made me aware of the following, long-overdue technological advancement in the field of consumer product packaging. Surely you’ve all learned of this by now, but in case you haven’t:
http://fastfood.freedomblogging.com/2010/02/06/heinz-testing-new-dip-squeeze-ketchup-at-fast-food-chains/50795/
My friends interest in this story centered on the fact that previous ketchup packaging – those little foil thingies – have been used by Heinz for the past 50-years without any change or advancement. In that 50-year span, technology in all areas has grown at warp-speed, and you’d have thought someone in the packaging department at Heinz might’ve stumbled across some sort of package improvement in the past 50 years. Damn, you might think they’d have stumbled on some new ideas from screwing around and perusing the internet during their work day, in lieu of actually spending time developing new packaging products! Anyway, 50 years later, Heinz has delivered us an improved ketchup package.
Why, you might now be asking yourself, would I take yours and my time to carry this discussion any further? Well I’ll tell you why – the old Heinz ketchup single use package has a very special place in my heart; it ties in to one of my early life memories so solidly that every time I see one of these packets of sugary, red goo, I’m drawn back to a hot summer day in July of 1967. In retrospect, I thought it was much earlier – and when you discover what a senseless thing I did on that fateful day, you’ll be astonished that I was 11 years old, and not 4 years old – but I dated it with the release of the album ‘The Doors’, which I remembered listening to ad nauseam that summer. And in subsequent summers.
When we were kids, and we weren’t privy to the economic struggles that adults encounter trying to house, educate, feed and clothe kids – 5 kids, no less – we thought my Dad was a bit of a tightwad. (I now wonder and marvel at, how on one salary, he did what he did, and made us feel like we were rich – I’m certain if you’re in my age group you wonder the same thing about your parents.) Tightwad or not, my Dad did Christmas and vacations right. Regardless of how often he reminded us throughout the year that “we can’t afford that!” or “you eat that cereal like you’re getting paid for it!”, he never disappointed us come Christmas and vacation time. Again, I don’t know how my parents did it.
However, our summer vacation of 1967 was substandard compared to all of the others; I know now because my parents were in the process of building our final family house – the five bedroom one with central air and all of the 1967 bells and whistles. Instead of a week at the beach or a northern lakeshore, we went to visit family in St. Louis for a few days, then on to Chicago to visit the Museum of Science & Industry – an absolute requisite for a WWII-era engineer with three sons.
Chicago was awesome, but it’s St. Louis where my ketchup connection occurred. I was born in St. Louis, but moved to Kansas City at the age of three – I’ve got peripheral memories of St. Louis at best - but my older brother and sister had some solid memories of St. Louis, and some of their fondest memories involved the St. Louis Zoo. All kids love the zoo, and my 11-year old standard for a zoo was the Kansas City Zoo – damned fine by my estimation, but then it was all that I knew, and I was informed by my older siblings that the KC Zoo was bupkis compared to the St. Louis Zoo. So needless to say, being a normal, zoo-loving kid, I was unconcerned about our truncated vacation and jacked about a visit to what had been described to me, by reliable sources, as the Mecca of all zoos.
The St. Louis Zoo was all that was promised, and far superior to KC – an entire building dedicated to reptiles, a massive big cat house, Phil, the poop-slinging gorilla, a walrus pool – that’s right, a freakin’ walrus pool.
I was in heaven, but I was hungry; time for lunch at one of the crowded concession stands. Hot summer day at the zoo, lots of people at the concession stand, waiting in line, hungry for lunch; lots of kids, lots of dads – lots of hot hungry kids, lots of hot, hungry, cranky dads. No matter to me, as I told my Dad what I wanted to eat, he got in line, and I moseyed around taking in the sights. There were perhaps twenty or thirty people huddled around the concession stand counter – it wasn’t organized in an airport security checkpoint back-and-forth fashion; it was kind of a mob at a counter – one of those situations where the loudest guy got waited on. People were hot, people were hungry, and people were cranky. No worry for me, as I was waltzing around in zoo la-la land, waiting patiently for my father to fight that crowd and bring me a burger with fries.
“Oh, what’s this?”, I asked myself, “an empty counter to lean against, with lots of napkins, plastic eating utensils and mustard and ketchup packages.” So lean I did, and I can’t say that what transpired next involved an orderly, rational discussion with myself. Perhaps it was the mid-day summer heat, or the hunger, or the lingering euphoria of experiencing the walrus pool – I honestly can’t say what drove me, in an unconscionable instant, to grab about a dozen of those ketchup packages, put them on the ground, and stomp upon them with all of my might.
You golfers know what it feels like to connect with the ‘sweet spot’ on a drive. It’s a feeling so clean and so pure that the second it happens you know you’ve hit pay dirt. My Size 6 sneaker absolutely experienced that sweet spot feeling as it laid into those 12 grounded ketchup packets; really bad timing for that ‘sweet spot’ thing. That hot, hungry, cranky crowd that was huddled, begging, growling and fighting for food at the concession counter was, in an instant, taken away from their heat and hunger pangs, and left to concentrate on a blistering Heinz ketchup assault from their unprotected rear flank.
I knew immediately that I had made a mistake. It was much like jabbing a rutting lion in the ass with a hot poker, having it turn to see what poked it, and standing there to face that angry beast – naked and unarmed. My action didn’t kill anyone, or cause any actual physical harm, but the crowd looked as if lots of them were dying. The masterful distribution of the 12 ketchup packs – it wasn’t a linear distribution, it was exponential – made it seem as if I’d spurted 50 gallons of ketchup at that crowd with a sophisticated piece of spray equipment; the kind of spray equipment that firemen would lust after. There were big gobs on this guy, fine spray on that guy, ribbons on the next one. And in 1967 fashion, all of the dads had on white shirts, and all of the kids had crew cuts. I still have this vivid image of a dad on his knees, his white shirt splattered with ketchup, him furiously wiping ketchup from the side of his 5-year old crew-cutted son’s head. He was cussing; he was not remotely jolly about his clean-up effort.
As I was surveying the carnage that I had wrought, my Dad was on me in an instant. He grabbed me by the shoulders and started shaking me, saying “What in the hell were you thinking??? What made you do a stupid thing like that??” I think I still remember a lot of the other dads saying “You’d better kill that little SOB, or we sure as hell will!” I clearly remember that no one laughed it off. These guys were going to have to walk around for the rest of a 100 degree day at the St. Louis Zoo with ketchup sprayed and splattered all over their clothes, crusted in their hair and the sweet, sickly smell of Heinz’s finest permeating their nostrils into the late afternoon hours.
The great thing about this, and the great thing about my Dad, was that there was no serious aftermath to this incident. He probably thought it was funnier than anything he’d seen in a while, and he knew his little display in front of the angry mob was all he needed to teach and all I needed to learn regarding the negative consequences of a once in a lifetime opportunity to plaster a crowd of people with ketchup packages.
I have one little experiment yet to conduct. What would happen if I were to take these new-aged, high tech ketchup packs and stomp on them? If you nailed them as I did the old-fangled packets, just right, would they wreak the havoc that was wreaked on that sunny St. Louis day in 1967? What if I could hit that sweet spot again?
It’s a comfort to know that if the new ones don’t work so well, I’ve got a trusty, proven, low-tech 50-year old back up.
Just when is the next Hot Sulphur Springs town meeting?
BAD BLOOD
An internet-alert friend of mine made me aware of the following, long-overdue technological advancement in the field of consumer product packaging. Surely you’ve all learned of this by now, but in case you haven’t:
http://fastfood.freedomblogging.com/2010/02/06/heinz-testing-new-dip-squeeze-ketchup-at-fast-food-chains/50795/
My friends interest in this story centered on the fact that previous ketchup packaging – those little foil thingies – have been used by Heinz for the past 50-years without any change or advancement. In that 50-year span, technology in all areas has grown at warp-speed, and you’d have thought someone in the packaging department at Heinz might’ve stumbled across some sort of package improvement in the past 50 years. Damn, you might think they’d have stumbled on some new ideas from screwing around and perusing the internet during their work day, in lieu of actually spending time developing new packaging products! Anyway, 50 years later, Heinz has delivered us an improved ketchup package.
Why, you might now be asking yourself, would I take yours and my time to carry this discussion any further? Well I’ll tell you why – the old Heinz ketchup single use package has a very special place in my heart; it ties in to one of my early life memories so solidly that every time I see one of these packets of sugary, red goo, I’m drawn back to a hot summer day in July of 1967. In retrospect, I thought it was much earlier – and when you discover what a senseless thing I did on that fateful day, you’ll be astonished that I was 11 years old, and not 4 years old – but I dated it with the release of the album ‘The Doors’, which I remembered listening to ad nauseam that summer. And in subsequent summers.
When we were kids, and we weren’t privy to the economic struggles that adults encounter trying to house, educate, feed and clothe kids – 5 kids, no less – we thought my Dad was a bit of a tightwad. (I now wonder and marvel at, how on one salary, he did what he did, and made us feel like we were rich – I’m certain if you’re in my age group you wonder the same thing about your parents.) Tightwad or not, my Dad did Christmas and vacations right. Regardless of how often he reminded us throughout the year that “we can’t afford that!” or “you eat that cereal like you’re getting paid for it!”, he never disappointed us come Christmas and vacation time. Again, I don’t know how my parents did it.
However, our summer vacation of 1967 was substandard compared to all of the others; I know now because my parents were in the process of building our final family house – the five bedroom one with central air and all of the 1967 bells and whistles. Instead of a week at the beach or a northern lakeshore, we went to visit family in St. Louis for a few days, then on to Chicago to visit the Museum of Science & Industry – an absolute requisite for a WWII-era engineer with three sons.
Chicago was awesome, but it’s St. Louis where my ketchup connection occurred. I was born in St. Louis, but moved to Kansas City at the age of three – I’ve got peripheral memories of St. Louis at best - but my older brother and sister had some solid memories of St. Louis, and some of their fondest memories involved the St. Louis Zoo. All kids love the zoo, and my 11-year old standard for a zoo was the Kansas City Zoo – damned fine by my estimation, but then it was all that I knew, and I was informed by my older siblings that the KC Zoo was bupkis compared to the St. Louis Zoo. So needless to say, being a normal, zoo-loving kid, I was unconcerned about our truncated vacation and jacked about a visit to what had been described to me, by reliable sources, as the Mecca of all zoos.
The St. Louis Zoo was all that was promised, and far superior to KC – an entire building dedicated to reptiles, a massive big cat house, Phil, the poop-slinging gorilla, a walrus pool – that’s right, a freakin’ walrus pool.
I was in heaven, but I was hungry; time for lunch at one of the crowded concession stands. Hot summer day at the zoo, lots of people at the concession stand, waiting in line, hungry for lunch; lots of kids, lots of dads – lots of hot hungry kids, lots of hot, hungry, cranky dads. No matter to me, as I told my Dad what I wanted to eat, he got in line, and I moseyed around taking in the sights. There were perhaps twenty or thirty people huddled around the concession stand counter – it wasn’t organized in an airport security checkpoint back-and-forth fashion; it was kind of a mob at a counter – one of those situations where the loudest guy got waited on. People were hot, people were hungry, and people were cranky. No worry for me, as I was waltzing around in zoo la-la land, waiting patiently for my father to fight that crowd and bring me a burger with fries.
“Oh, what’s this?”, I asked myself, “an empty counter to lean against, with lots of napkins, plastic eating utensils and mustard and ketchup packages.” So lean I did, and I can’t say that what transpired next involved an orderly, rational discussion with myself. Perhaps it was the mid-day summer heat, or the hunger, or the lingering euphoria of experiencing the walrus pool – I honestly can’t say what drove me, in an unconscionable instant, to grab about a dozen of those ketchup packages, put them on the ground, and stomp upon them with all of my might.
You golfers know what it feels like to connect with the ‘sweet spot’ on a drive. It’s a feeling so clean and so pure that the second it happens you know you’ve hit pay dirt. My Size 6 sneaker absolutely experienced that sweet spot feeling as it laid into those 12 grounded ketchup packets; really bad timing for that ‘sweet spot’ thing. That hot, hungry, cranky crowd that was huddled, begging, growling and fighting for food at the concession counter was, in an instant, taken away from their heat and hunger pangs, and left to concentrate on a blistering Heinz ketchup assault from their unprotected rear flank.
I knew immediately that I had made a mistake. It was much like jabbing a rutting lion in the ass with a hot poker, having it turn to see what poked it, and standing there to face that angry beast – naked and unarmed. My action didn’t kill anyone, or cause any actual physical harm, but the crowd looked as if lots of them were dying. The masterful distribution of the 12 ketchup packs – it wasn’t a linear distribution, it was exponential – made it seem as if I’d spurted 50 gallons of ketchup at that crowd with a sophisticated piece of spray equipment; the kind of spray equipment that firemen would lust after. There were big gobs on this guy, fine spray on that guy, ribbons on the next one. And in 1967 fashion, all of the dads had on white shirts, and all of the kids had crew cuts. I still have this vivid image of a dad on his knees, his white shirt splattered with ketchup, him furiously wiping ketchup from the side of his 5-year old crew-cutted son’s head. He was cussing; he was not remotely jolly about his clean-up effort.
As I was surveying the carnage that I had wrought, my Dad was on me in an instant. He grabbed me by the shoulders and started shaking me, saying “What in the hell were you thinking??? What made you do a stupid thing like that??” I think I still remember a lot of the other dads saying “You’d better kill that little SOB, or we sure as hell will!” I clearly remember that no one laughed it off. These guys were going to have to walk around for the rest of a 100 degree day at the St. Louis Zoo with ketchup sprayed and splattered all over their clothes, crusted in their hair and the sweet, sickly smell of Heinz’s finest permeating their nostrils into the late afternoon hours.
The great thing about this, and the great thing about my Dad, was that there was no serious aftermath to this incident. He probably thought it was funnier than anything he’d seen in a while, and he knew his little display in front of the angry mob was all he needed to teach and all I needed to learn regarding the negative consequences of a once in a lifetime opportunity to plaster a crowd of people with ketchup packages.
I have one little experiment yet to conduct. What would happen if I were to take these new-aged, high tech ketchup packs and stomp on them? If you nailed them as I did the old-fangled packets, just right, would they wreak the havoc that was wreaked on that sunny St. Louis day in 1967? What if I could hit that sweet spot again?
It’s a comfort to know that if the new ones don’t work so well, I’ve got a trusty, proven, low-tech 50-year old back up.
Just when is the next Hot Sulphur Springs town meeting?
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