posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

house for sale

Open season! If you are looking for a retreat from the busy world, one with fertile soil, water rights, and high agricultural potential, next to some of the best Nordic skiing in the US, silent nights with dark starry skies, bright days with a sky to watch, read on. There’s plenty of wildlife: every sort of raptor, ravens, Colorado bluebirds, jays, magpies, flickers, marmots, foxes, deer, and ground squirrels, along with occasional coyotes, mountain lions, elk, and bears (haven’t personally seen these latter two on my property per se, but they are around!). The property is at 6500 ft (2000 m) on the southern flank of Grand Mesa with fine spacious views of the Uncompaghre Uplift, the Mesa, and the San Juan Mountains to the south. I’ve got decent neighbors as well.

the property, Cedaredge, Colorado, June ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.
the property, Cedaredge, Colorado, June ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.

I’ve put in a lot of sweat equity improving both the entire property and the house: removing tons (literally) of detritus from prior residents, caring for the trees and other vegetation, re-doing the bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen (with its ever-changing view from the sink!); upgrading parts of the roofing; re-doing the deck; and the whole house is scheduled to be painted next week. Also, because the property is largely open, it is insurable (unlike many rural properties in the state)! This is becoming a serious issue because of climate change and risk of natural disasters! The property is essentially not at risk of flooding, landslide, rockfall, earthquake, or fire.

Much of the process has followed the principle of sustainable DWAM (doing with available materials), and with the idea of sustainably re-wilding the property.

– 13.4 acres (5.4 hectares) 18145 Surface Creek Road, Cedaredge.

– 2 bedroom, 1 bath; 1362 sq ft; 300 sq ft finished root cellar w/ water and electricity; 600 sq ft workshop/outbuilding; 2 additional outbuilding/stable areas; metal roofing throughout; some fencing supplies available;

– several producing fruit trees: apricot, apple, cherry plum.

The best apricot tree on the property, July ©2022 hopkins/neoscenes.
The best apricot tree on the property, July ©2022 hopkins/neoscenes.

– Electricity (DMEA) to house and garage (220v) with a 30 amp RV hook-up.

– Upper Surface Creek Water Users Association (USCDWUA) provides domestic water from their treatment plant about five miles upstream

– Agricultural water shares in Leon Lake and Marcot Park Ditch and Reservoir Companies.

– Fiber-optic internet to the house (up to 8gb available) via Elevate.

– Eligible as an Agricultural Property.

– USDA loan eligibility.

– Cedaredge is a small town about two miles away. It’s got a decent grocery store, laundromat, library, dispensary, thrift stores, doctor/dentist offices, a handful of restaurants, excellent acupuncture/CTM center, the Grand Mesa Arts Center, elementary-through-high schools, and a friendly Ace hardware store. There are abundant fruit, vegetable, wine and other organic sources locally, and if you are a carnivore, there’s plenty of game.

– Delta (17 mi); Paonia (32 mi); Montrose (40 mi); Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park (40 mi); Grand Junction (50 mi); Telluride (100 mi); Moab UT (150 mi); Denver (250 mi).

Aspen (Populus tremuloides), Cole Reservoir #5, Grand Mesa, Colorado, September ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.
Aspen (Populus tremuloides), Cole Reservoir #5, Grand Mesa, Colorado, September ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.

– if escape from this pleasant reverie is necessary, both Montrose and Grand Junction have airports with daily direct flights to DFW, Salt Lake, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and other points.

— if you know anyone who would be interested, let me know, I’m prepared for sale-by-owner. Price $400,000. The house will be listed in a few weeks at $459,000, I will not be signing with a RE agent until then.

the property, Cedaredge, Colorado, March ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.
the property, Cedaredge, Colorado, March ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.
posted
  • place: Preston, VIC, Australia

finally

surpassed the 100 km mark on the lap club. have consistently been doing 3+ km/day for the last two weeks, with a few days off here and there. averaging 48 km/month, not too shabby. final goal for this pitch is to do 4 km. in an hour. it’s going to be harsh to be up at 2000 m. soon, after all this dense sea-side air.

and another emphatic finally, with the Prescott house being liquidated. after more than four years in a severely depressed market across Arizona, one of the worst-hit states in the US housing market, after numerous realtors, open-houses, renters, showings, repairs, and on and on. a bit strange that the place is no longer in the family. after all the maintenance work that I did on it over the years, back to helping on the original construction in the early 1980’s. getting burned by the imploded market is painful: knowing that other investments with the capital would have expanded significantly rather than contracted over the intervening time. a fire-sale three years ago would have, could have, should have … etc …

it was fortuitous that I happened to be there when the eventual buyers happened by for their first walk-through, and I ended up giving them a hour’s pitch on the energy-efficiency and other features of the place. that sold it. the husband is an electrical engineer, so he appreciated the numerous design elements that my father incorporated (in the otherwise traditional wood-frame construction).

but, happy to close that chapter. period. now for a place here in Oz.

posted

CLUI: Day Twelve — Silver Island Mountains

Silver Island Mountains, Utah, April 2010

Neal makes it in from London after last weeks aborted attempt from having the flu.

A loop north around the Silver Island Mountains paralleling the Bonneville Salt Flats traces many textures of rock, sky, and the interface between. Numerous forays away from the truck into the landscape, looking at everything, smelling everything, hearing … nothing … or so. The space vehicle rumbles onward on the bad road. Bad road. All bad roads lead away from, further away from, Rome.

Leave the car, be here now. The desert commands that (or the fearful response, deny here now, and insulate the embodied self from any manifestation of here, get back to the car, now).

Turning to the west at the north end of the mountain fault-block, I am suddenly met by five huge white Maremma (or Great Pyrenees?) sheep dogs, each over 100 pounds, ready to shred whatever fleshly appendages might be protruding from the truck. They were guarding a sizable flock of sheep who were busy razing the already marginal winter foliage. gah, why they allow sheep farming up here, I’ll never know—the BLM’s “multi-use” philosophy destroying what land cover there is left in this place. The circuit continues across the playa from Pilot Peak and on to Leppy Pass and a human installation.

(Ed. note — have solved the image gallery as you can see. Seems to be relatively glitch-free and less work than my previous solutions. This is one image from a number — Pennsylvanian-Permian-aged lime/mud-stones, highly contorted. Do hope to get all of them up from this trip so far, sooner than later. But there is so much code to do for that — I still haven’t settled on a means to display images on this blog — there are several pre-packaged plug-ins for WordPress in this regard, but I haven’t decided. Not going to Flickr things nor use Facebook as the data management and control is passed off to those cloud services (not to mention the perverse End-User Licensing Agreement terms). The travelog blog means was good, but the file structure of WordPress does not lend itself to any automation if I use that older technique, and I desperately want to get out of the manual compilation work that I have been doing all along. It’s incredibly time consuming and easily bunged-up with (simple) code errors. Ach, as this site evolves into its 16th year, it remains something of a millstone, given the relative paucity of traffic (1 – 2,000 hits a day total).

posted

CLUI: Day Two

Get out to the grocery store, the only one in town, and a slow drive through town. It does seem like a differential planet. The Latino population is about 80% — workers in the casinos, and the rest are the owners and operators. An obvious imbalance. A majority of housing is either single- or double-wides, or, on the (impoverished-for-lack-of-casinos) Utah side, shacks surrounded by the flotsam of personal disorder — a metric of the desirability of energy expenditure on arrangement. Some of the lots approach the structure of middens in this. Middens are primarily defensive in function, shielding the inhabitant from predatory intrusion. Matt showed me one example here on the airbase, of an old man whose place was beyond being a junkyard, it was an accretionary gravitational field for (all) matter. But since his recent death, an increasing level of disorder was applied. Clearly, there is the possibility to distinguish between an active and an abandoned midden.

Otherwise, listening to the space, and, through the now sparkling south windows, watching the heavy weather rip through. Snow, sleet, hail, wind.

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Watch the (Hollywood) movie Above and Beyond about Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the B-29, Enola Gay, that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. “Gripping mellerdramer!” as my father would say, wandering through the teevee room on his way to his workshop or darkroom or outside to work on the car or the yard.

posted
  • place: Marrickville, NSW, Australia

no pix

decided not to acquire any new digital traces of movement and seeing until the new path opens fully. lunch with Norie yesterday begins a mapping of the process. meeting with a variety of Others. most completely unknown. stimulating but exhausting. housing still not 100% settled, at all. but a bed for the sleeping in the small studio space with the palm tree and the Cooks River out the window.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

ultraintelligence?

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. — Irving Good

aside from inventing a pretty damn smart off switch.

urban renewal is happening in Berlin. on another circuit walk, this time further to the East, I can stand in one spot and see a dozen construction cranes. they are all working on domestic housing units — mostly low, three story maximum, like row houses, condos. filling up vacant lots which were once filled with warehouses. most of the red brick warehouses are gone, and the lots are scraped clear, down to the golden beige sand that underlies the whole city. the top few feet are always full of detritus — porcelain, shattered bricks, glass, and mortar. somewhere I read that in the process of doing random construction in Germany, they also frequently discover WWII munitions accompanied by an occasional detonation and casualties. yikes! I am amazed by the intensity with which the city is still transforming itself.

posted
  • place: Margaretville, New York

to be done

the last day of the year is spent with Zander and Bill going falconing with a serious professional falconer, Tom, who was hawk-sitting Zander’s Harris Hawk (Parabuteo unicinctus) for the time they were away in Costa Rica. flushed a few rabbits and squirrels, but the juvenile bird didn’t quite manage to catch any of them. later we head to the ski house with Simon and a friend of his along with Tom and his wife, Peggy, for a quiet evening. Andrea stays home. and the year is over. the snow piles up. and the agenda for the new year seems to be one of a lot of work needing to be done: the environment, the elections, the war, the economy, the housing crisis, not to mention creative action.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

continuation

Workshop continues at a rare intensity. Only a good scene. Fine mix of intellects and spirits. Something good will come from this. While the situation in Sydney apparently continues to unfold, but with what characteristics and forms and potentials I do not know. There is a degree of stress heading to the unknown place.

Two participants, coming respectively from Melbourne and Southern California, used couch surfing sites for housing — I may need to make that scene in Oz if housing alternatives run out.

But the number of sand I know, and the measure of drops in the ocean;
The dumb man I understand, and I hear the speech of the speechless:
And there hath come to my soul the smell of a strong-shelled tortoise
Boiling in caldron of bronze, and the flesh of a lamb mingled with it;
Under it bronze is laid, it hath bronze as a clothing upon it.
— Pythian prophetess

No doubt a pithy oracle. Herodotus quotes. From the histories. Run across that after skyping with Loki around the histories of the Greco-Persian Wars — he saw the movie 300. Is there a difference between understanding history derived from Herodotus in translation and Hollywood scripting? Are the histories essentially the same in that they are subjective accounts of an individual as translated through a series of other individuals? As Herodotus is the primary source for any information regarding the wars, Hollywood has some relation to this, but what is the texture of relation? And the idea of telling the relation visually (and sonically) and in two hours. Complete. No answer. Though reviews point to the obvious glorification of the defeat of the Persian by the infidel hyper-militaristic Americo-Spartans.

posted
  • place: en route Aachen, Germany - Brussels, Belgium

migrations

a long day yesterday riding the rails from Kiel to Aachen, back into familiar spaces again there. a really nice but far too short visit with Günter, Christina, and Manon — who is now as tall as her mother! last time I saw her she was just a little child, maybe eight years ago?! lovely child. so, hanging out talking about books, art, life, music, so nice to re-connect after all this time.

re-creating the passage of time. young children grow up.

a leisurely breakfast with Christina, and she then drove me to the Hauptbahnhof for my train through Liege and on to Brussels Midi, a short walk to the hotel, where Dirk has faxed a three-day plan of meetings with a variety of artists, artist’s collectives, and educators working in that fuzzy space of new media. my room is not ready, so I stash my bag and start wandering towards the first agenda item: a round-table (albeit around a rectangular table) with two of the principles of LA[bau] — a laboratory for architecture and urbanism — Manuel Abendroth and Els Vermang.

a nice lunch (those dang baguette-sandwiches are always so crunchy that they cut the skin in my mouth at first, I forget to remember this and take care, flipping the sandwich over so that the smoother side of the baguette is up). but mmmm. on the way to lunch, however, a strange event. walking towards a building under reconstruction, a scaffolding is being set up, maybe four stories high at the moment. I catch the eye of a guy who is stacking parts to be hauled up on a cable winch, nothing unusual there. I am looking at the structure which looks somehow unstable. I decide to walk off the sidewalk instead of under the structure. I am looking up at the structure, calculating it’s condition. a pass it by, return to the sidewalk and hear a clang, then a meter in front of me a wrench, a heavy one, smashes to the ground. there is a group of 4 guys walking towards me about the same distance from the landing point as I am. faugh! how weird is that. I had the prior intuition something was wrong with the situation, and I can’t really say that the slight detour I made brought me closer or further away from my head intersecting with this tool which must have fallen from around 15 meters up. far enough up that is could easily have killed me or those other people.

so the rest of the day, I am watching things more carefully, but what difference does it make? if you look one way, you miss what is coming the other.

at any rate, they outlined their program and a couple of the main projects they have undertaking recently. tough to cross over my lack of background in architecture — it has always been a distant field of interest, but seldom the opportunity to crack the conceptual world that it is embedded in. the one time jumping in on a final critique with some of EJ’s students at Boulder was interesting — along with a surficial awareness of functionality in housing design — but does not provide any preparation for the contemporary conceptual spaces of inquiry. it does seem that innovative, and especially decorative design elements in architecture are about something. but the connection between the about-ness and what I would understand as the reason for the existence of architecture is not clear to me. but this is perhaps my own weakness combined with a deep frustration at the frequent appearance of non-functional design in built structures and in objects, for that matter.

at any rate, their work shows the presence of superior economic capital, and the consequent high production values which is nice. professional. sleek, designer, urban.

been in the desert too long, or, not long enough.

Crabbit (cra-bit) dialect, chiefly Scot. – adj. 1. ill-tempered, grumpy, curt, disagreeable; in a bad mood [esp. in the morning]. (often used in ‘ken this, yer a crabbit get, so ye are’). n. by their nature or temperament conveys an aura of irritability. — drink coaster at Christina & Günter’s place

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

emptiness

a last look out the guest bedroom window towards Granite Mountain from the house my father built. twenty-three years after finishing the construction, and the death of those living here, the house now sits empty, victim of the housing crash of ’07 that hit this region harder than many others after the mortgage-swaps-driven real-estate hyper-inflation of the last three years, and the questionable banking practices that are ongoing. a crash was inevitable. the house is completely empty. the banks have filled their coffers through deception, the state has emptied its coffers through war, and old folks die.

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

development rant

The local controversy around widening Williamson Valley Road continues. It is a microcosm of the more general issue of development in the southwest of the US. Arizona has one of, if not the fastest growth rate of any state and the Prescott – Prescott Valley – Chino Valley “Tri-city” area is near the fastest in the state. When the folks moved here and built their retirement home (purely my father’s impetus — the clear-sky suitability for his astronomy), theirs was the second or third home on the street, and the view — a 200-degree panorama that reached 100 miles to the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff — was long and relatively free of any spurious Lighting at night. Williamson Valley was still populated by several large ranch spreads, and the road was narrow and twisting as it approached Iron Springs Road and the fringe of northern Prescott proper. more “development rant”

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

on lawns

mowing lawns, in the expanse of time that is the summer of childhood. the noise, wonder deafness isn’t a factor these days, the smell, well, the smell of cut grass. it is the smell of summer. that and watermelon in the lightning-bug twiLight. but the mowing, the lawn. this projection on nature, this habitus of class, measure of English rectitude. social status determined by the status of greenery around the house. manor or tract suburbia. essence of control. and with this control of the landscape comes subtle and not-so-subtle shifts. consider, for example, as environments shift to ever more homogeneous conceptualized ideals, species which are more adaptable to that particular ideal explode in number, while more specialized species are squeezed out. this is why there is a proliferation of ‘pest’ species — deer, raccoons, starlings, Canada geese — the so-called “Wal-Mart” effect. all the fuel, time, and effort used in primping lawns would be better used for (at least) simply defining (controlling) a small area of the total available land used for housing clusters, with the rest used as natural environmental buffers. developers generally hate this concept. rather using 1-2 acre lot grids evenly spaced over the entire available land. ah well, seems there is no limit to the greed and avarice of said developers, so, what to do? so far, if what I have seen in the West in the last 30 years is any measure. it’s hopeless. more humans, more pressure on the environment. period.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

scoring

score. life goes the right direction, so it seems. university faculty housing comes through, a relatively inexpensive apartment for the academic year. car is now registered in Colorado, drivers license is next. maybe even re-registering to vote, after the long hiatus of cynical attitude and expatriate status. but voting only to stick it to the folks who engineered the coup d’etat in the previous presidential election. the results don’t really matter anyway, as the core of the empire, the ranks and ranks surrounding the centers of power “inside the Beltway” are rotten and corrupt.

I penetrate the earth and sustain creatures by my strength; becoming Soma, the liquid of moonLight, I nurture all healing herbs.
I am the universal fire within the body of living beings; I work with the flow of vital breath to digest the foods that men consume.
I dwell deep in the heart of everyone; memory, knowledge, and reasoning come from me I am the object to be known through all sacred lore; and I am its knower, the creator of its final truth.
— Lord Krishna
posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

Who?

end of the week. move out from the university housing. over to Christian’s place for the night. and hang in the lab, finishing up. closing down, over and out. and so on. drop by to say good-bye to Margret and Thordís, and so on, moving into moving mode. ramblin’ and this is playing when I get to Chris’ place:

Only love can make it rain The way the beach is kissed by the sea Only love can make it rain Like the sweat of lovers Laying in the fields … On the dry and dusty road The nights we spend alone I need to get back home To cool cool rain I can’t sleep and I lay and I think The nights are hot and black as ink Oh God I need a drink Of cool cool rain. Release. — The Who Quadrophenia

post-nuclear glow of sunshine jams a neon input through the dormer. sun impaled on a chimney and outlining a 1960’s administrative office building that looks like the Bureau of Standards where my dad worked in the remote suburbs of Washington, D.C. sunset. and Andrei Ujica’s “Out of the Present” plays on the tube. images from the Soviet/Russian MIR space station. which probably passes right over head as I write this. later in the evening, heading over to Hannes’ place for a party. never made it home, slept in the basement. among shelves of books.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

post-doldrum

well, actually, things ended up alright. the entire week has been filled with high-energy dialogues covering critical issues. from a bewildering variety of viewpoints. but all energizing. pump-it-up. a relief after last week’s doldrums where I had to suspend lectures in the face of impossible lack of continuity. okay, so I flexed enough, though it always takes such an effort to alter expectations. cooler outside, prepping me for the north-lands in a few days. complications with the housing here forces me to relocate for two nights before leaving for Amsterdam on Sunday. probably head to Hannes’ place, he has been so generous, loaning me his bike for the whole time. makes a total difference in living styles — wheels versus hooves.

posted
  • place: Lahti, Finland

dreaming of something

dreams about multi-media authoring or something. and waiting for Helsinki and Sanna as soon as possible. the time here in Lahti has been something of an annoyance, my schedule was totally screwed up, and I end up teaching only three or four days a week. teaching is always okay, the momentary challenges and pathways of going with the individuals, but the administrative confusion is something that I can’t bear. living on the road, there are two levels of chaos that stress me — one, the main one, is the problem of unsure/unsafe housing. the other is problems with money. this confusion dealt with both, and so, caused me great stress. enough said.

posted
  • place: Winfield, Colorado

dads & kids camping

around noon Loki and I arrive at Rick and Sally’s place after a morning cleaning the house and straightening things up. father’s and kids weekend camping trip is the activity planned. Chris will come with Sonja, his 18-month daughter, Rick with Holly, 7, and Natalie, 2, and Loki and I. it is a funny reunion for the three of us — we lived together in what seems to be a previous life-time at 148 Washington Street in Golden. The second-to-last house on the way out of town to Boulder, we would say in the way of directions. nothing like that in this moment — the old place is swamped by California-style tract-housing! now here we are, 18 years later. the biggest change being the presence of parent and child units. but the energy of the weekend is compact and intense, like the history of this relationship, or complex of relationships. formative relationships from a time when life was short yet, waxing, and made with the broad statements of being-in-the-moment. making a start on Saturday, shortly after noon, Rick and I and the kids in one car, Chris and Sonya in the other. the first planned meeting at the Safeway in Frisco. we make that meeting with no problems and stock-up on food for the next 24-hours, the thought weighing on us all in one way or another. it takes awhile because the issue of getting a Hibachi to cook the chicken on. that solved, we make the run to Winfield, Colorado. about one-hundred miles from Denver. in the middle of the Collegiate Peaks region. we find a camp-spot that I had used several times in ancient history. the kids pile out while dads erected tents, cooked dinners, tried to keep everybody happy and safe, and attempted to relax in the splendid location.

posted
  • place: Manhattan, New York

pilot’s strike

Well, days later. I sit, house-bound, stewing, steaming, simmering, stressed. An appallingly bad day yesterday dealing with Icelandair and the cancellation of my flight to Reykjavík. The stupid pilots went on strike a few hours before the flight was to leave … I was actually told to go to the airport last night by the telephone reservations people and ended up standing there for three hours before being told nothing would happen … And I was so wiped from that (including riding out there on the subway from Tribeca) I had to take a cab back to Stefan and Ellen’s place, for a cool U$D 39. Faugh! I actually get rather irritated with traveling through NYC each time I leave the country. I think that when I move my belongings from the storage unit in north-west New Jersey to Colorado or Arizona in August, I will rarely come through NYC in further travels. Every time I feel like I am being drained of cash reserves. Of course, I have a number of friends here, and visiting them is important, but it is so expensive just passing through. The suspension of the traveler in-transit is a suspension inanimate. A preservation outside of sanity within the crystal glass of potential movement, disconnection is complete from all possibilities. I shuddered in the jarring stop of this disruption. Angry. Upset. Thinking of the little boy who was/is counting down the days until he sees his Pabby. And me closer but still an ocean apart. I do not understand the torrent of emotion circulating around this permutation. As it is not technology that is the cause, but more, a measuring of the expanse of human greed in the realm of corporations — how those at the bottom are exploited more or less, and those at the top exploit more or less. No, I do understand the emotions. I am extremely insecure about certain aspects of my traveling. There are so many indeterminate things to cope with that I am rather rigid about the big steps like plane trips, and housing (something I have written about before in this travelog), and when these big steps go awry, I feel very vulnerable, and most of all, when disruptions affect my monetary situation. My monetary arrangements are made with basically no slack. And my fund this time is calculated for food for the three months of travel, and small daily expenses like swimming with Loki. Two days in NYC extra blows the entire thing (well, not quite). Money is my only disgressionary tool — but the quantities I work with are so minimal that it provides only the most primitive buffer — for example, the first time I went to the airport (Kennedy) this week, I went by subway, Friday afternoon, plenty of other people on it, so it is safe, and it saves me U$D 20 at least over the next cheapest form of transportation. However, I am so exhausted after the scene at the airport and pissed about the plane not leaving that I end up taking a taxi back into the City and again, the next time I head to the airport, I also take a taxi because it was a Sunday afternoon and the subway is a bit more questionable (safe?) (and a much further walk away from Stefan’s as some platforms are closed on weekends). So I take a taxi again. This really blows the budget. I do not make phone calls to people here in town. I have cut those connections. It is possible to deal with email, but there is no heart in it. I spend the day fixing up the travelog site to begin entries on this present trip that will go on until August where I will most likely end up in Boulder, Colorado, teaching a few classes in Electronic Media at one of the old alma maters — the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Colorado. Long road ahead that hopefully will not have too many potholes like the present one.