The People’s Republic of Boulder

There’s no sense mentioning this is my first blog in a long time. That much is painfully obvious. I should mention, however, a few reasons why: I moved to Boulder. Ok, so that was just one reason, but it pretty much encompasses every other smaller reason why I’ve been a mute as far as wordpress is concerned for a month. I moved the day after my last post, my roommates and I came up a bit early to acclimate ourselves to Boulder and our new home. The house is pretty nice, though the first few days it didn’t appear like it was going to be that way. Between the caked on grease, dirty dishes in the cabinets, and the coke straw in the kitchen, we started out on this path a little wary to say the least. Paint, Lysol and elbow grease can settle even the most skeptical mind, and after applying the three, we finally settled in. The first order of business was to get to know Boulder a little better (for me anyway). This proved easier than I thought it would and I quickly started looking for jobs. Even that ended up being much less difficult than I expected; I started my new job at McGuckin Hardware a week after I moved to the city. I started to feel very comfortable with the groove I was settling into. And that’s when school started and threw everything off.

Ok, speaking of school, I have a 9 am in the morning and taking the bus there means I have to get up even earlier than I should, so part 2 of this will have to come tomorrow night.

Harvest at the Pierson Farm

Tomorrow my family is celebrating joint occasions, my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary and my grandpa’s 80th birthday. Grandma and Grandpa (Mike and Marilyn) Pierson are my only remaining grandparents as my father’s parent’s (Irene and Bernard Westhoff) have both passed on. I love both sides of my family so much and we’ve been blessed with many cousins and aunts and uncles.

These family occasions always make me reminisce about the past and tonight I caught myself thinking about growing up visiting the Pierson farm near Wiley, CO. About this time of year all the cousins would flock to the little farm that Grandpa and Grandma made their home so many years ago. August was harvest time for Grandpa’s sweet corn, and we all gladly helped where we could. We had quite an operation going, too. Grandpa and a couple uncles and hired hands would patrol the field, picking ears by hand off the tall stalks and sending them back to the house in 5 gallon buckets. There, Jeff and Ryan and some of the other older cousins would chop off both sides of the cobs and once again toss them in buckets. Next, the cobs went to Daniel, Megan, the Peecher girls and my older sister (the “middle” cousins) for shucking and removing the silks (sometimes I got to help with this too, and that meant only one thing, I was growing up!). This is where Grandma finally got her hands on the corn as she boiled every single one for just the right amount of time. As I was so young most of the time at the farm, my duties came last. I helped take the freshly boiled corn and cut the kernels off the cob for freezing (we couldn’t eat all of it in one night, no matter how hard we tried). Sometimes, when you got lucky, the kernels would strip off the cob in giant slices, still connected at the bases. That was the pinnacle, that was what I worked for. Seeing that knife slice perfectly down the side of the cob like butter as the kernels peeled away like a strip of sod was the same as seeing a beautiful car cut through the summer air to my young eyes. Of course, not a single strip of kernels ever made it into the plastic freezer bags. No, I devoured those sweet slices as soon as they hit the cutting pan. They were too perfect for plastic baggies and freezing, they deserved to be eaten immediately.

I’ll write more tomorrow night about my grandparents, for tonight, I just wanted to record my memories of those wonderful times on the farm… God Bless.

Pointless

I opened this new entry up and then just stared at it for a long time as Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” played in my earbuds. Instead of writing anything, though, I drifted off into an almost asleep state. I could still hear the song, still feel the warmth of my laptop on my legs, but my body just became so relaxed. Indescribably relaxed. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so completely comfortable while still awake in my life (you know that feeling of a warm shower after a long day of work? It was kind of like that but…dry). I woke up when the song clicked over to Rock N’ Roll by Zeppelin (quite a jump, gotta love shuffle mode), and I looked at the totally blank wordpress screen and sighed. I had started this because I felt like I really needed to write something. Maybe you know the feeling, when there is definitely something profound inside of you and it’s just itching to burst out of your fingertips and into computer memory, but you can’t tap the well. It’s not like I needed to vent really, I did some of that already tonight. I guess I just felt like maybe there was something special in me tonight. Haha that sounds so vain. It’s hard to explain… Either way though, it doesn’t look like anything is going to come from it. When I finally got frustrated enough, I just started writing down what happened and that’s apparently what this entry is going to end up as. I guess it’s kind of a sad, cliche metaphor for my summer: a lot of meaningless, time-consuming moments and thoughts that ultimately end up being… pretty pointless.

First blog

So this is my first blog on wordpress. I got the idea from a friend who has been using it for quite some time now (without me really knowing haha) and I started reading some of his stuff. I’ve been writing off and on through the years, mainly in several notebooks I have, but I decided why not record it, right? I guess that’s where I’m at now. Some of my stuff will just be rants, some poems, some prose, and maybe even a story or two. These first that I’ll post tonight (or soon… it’s late and I have to study for a test tomorrow. Screw college) are all older and I’m just getting them off paper and into cyber-storage.

Brief content “warning” haha: My stuff is mainly about love… in it’s different forms. I think that is because it creates such strong emotions and I write best when I am feeling strongly about something. Anyway, it won’t ALL be that (I hope!), but I guess if you don’t like reading that… the internet practically infinite so you can find something else you like!

Also, all the “old stuff” I post will be in random order… I never really kept a time line, just opened to a blank page and tapped a vein…