Spinning On That Dizzy Edge

I woke up last Wednesday at 3 am with my head and the room spinning round and round. It was a bizarre sensation since I was lying down and had no other symptoms. I figured maybe it was dehydration, got up for some water and eventually made it back to sleep. I woke up feeling a little off but didn't think too much of it. When I attempted a weight workout that afternoon I found it more difficult than I thought it should have been, the weights felt heavier, definitely not motivated. Again woke up dizzy at 3 am and was still dizzy when I woke up and had a weird taste in my mouth. Walked the dogs then spent most of the day on the couch. I wasn't exhausted but I felt tired and unmotivated, just brain foggy enough to not want to attempt much. The trails were a mudfest anyway from 4" of snow the day before. No other symptoms. I finally suspected maybe it was a latent reaction to the COVID vaccination I'd had 2 weeks ago and sure enough, Google confirmed that people are having dizziness and a strange taste in their mouths 2 weeks after their first shot. Weird. And a week later the brain fog persists on and off. At least I'm not dizzy. Mostly. The fog lifted briefly on Monday and I thought I was through with it but it seems to be back with a vengeance today. Got all my dog and farm chores done and spent another day on the couch. Hopefully this post comes out somewhat coherent. Not sure if I should go through with shot #2, I guess I see how I feel next week. I do know someone who had actual COVID who had brain fog for months afterwards.

Thanks to the Pause Initiative, now called Initiative 16, I've been learning a lot about the initiative process in Colorado. Apparently not all states have this, the opportunity for any citizen to put any crackpot thing they want on the ballot as long as they get enough signatures. And the amount of signatures isn't all that much. I hate getting involved in politics and I struggle with ways to be effective in my involvement. At the moment Initiative 16 is still at the Title Board phase and a group of ag groups have formed a coalition to fight it. There are many hoops the Initiative has to jump through with the Title Board before the proponents can start gathering signatures and the coalition hopes to get it completely thrown out during this process or at least get the language toned down or changed. The Title Board only addresses certain aspects of the language of the Initiative - does it address only a single topic? Does the language convey the meaning/purpose of the issue that the authors are trying to address? They don't address whether it's constitutional (a part of it isn't) or legal or destructive or batshit crazy.

The initial objection from the ag coalition is that the Initiative addresses more than one subject, that it contains deceptive and incomplete language that doesn't convey the intent and meaning of the initiative and that it contains political catch words. The hearing for the objection is next week. The authors can re-word it and come back if the Title Board agrees with the objection. It's a long, drawn out process that will likely take until the end of the summer and there's not much anyone can do in the meantime other than financially supporting the ag groups. I'm already a member of one of them. So I guess I can save my panicking about it until them. There also seems to be a lot of initial opposition to it, of course the ag community has lost its mind over this but there are initial signs of opposition from Front Range, non-ag folks as well. Fall should get interesting. Hopefully it won't come to that though I imagine they'll try to get something on the ballot because what do they have to lose?

Activist groups are interesting, I've been to a few meetings over a few causes and never got involved beyond that. Because it almost always seems to be more about the egos of the people involved. They're social groups as well, sort of, with really weird dynamics to them. Animal Rights especially so. Because people who truly love animals donate their time and money to groups that directly help animals - rescues, shelters, vet care for low income people, cancer research, etc. They also don't care what their fellow humans eat. A lot of people involved in Animal Rights don't even have pets or particularly like being around animals unless it's part of their activism or a publicity stunt. And I don't get the whole thing of wanting to inflict veganism on everybody else, worrying so much about what other people eat and their values. It sounds exhausting. 

If this does make the ballot I'm interested to see how life for the authors will pan out. One rents a room in a vegan co-op in a multi-million dollar house surrounded by multi-million dollar houses in one of Boulder's toniest neighborhoods. Also Boulder is a smaller place than it seems. As it happens a friend who's coming down to visit this summer knows him. Many people are already irate about this, the effects will be huge and far reaching, and I suspect life may become unpleasant for these guys. Or maybe not, I don't know. I guess we'll find. out.

I'll leave with some photos from a week ago Monday. I stopped to share a moment of whimsy with Mesa Verde before dropping into the awesomeness of the Rib Cage. It was a wonderful, cathartic ride and I was finally done with worrying about Initiative 16. Then I got back to the car to the news of the mass shooting still in progress in Boulder. What can I say other than that I'm not surprised and that it was surreal and unnerving seeing such a familiar place on the news, crawling with SWAT. Even more upsetting was seeing the footage on YouTube of the bodies lying in the parking lot and inside the store and hearing the shots ringing out while the guy with the camera stood in the entryway. Because somebody actually posted this and I actually watched it because I didn't know what I was clicking on. I lived walking distance to that grocery store for 6 months and even after I moved to the opposite end of town I still popped in there on the way back from the mountains or after going to the Indian restaurant around the corner that we often frequented. No words.

Mad World

'We drove through the hills with the moon in our eyes
We bought a house in the country where we could lose our minds' - Nick Cave

I moved out here, the middle of nowhere, for a quiet life. All I want to do is raise as much of my own food as I can and ride my bike. Play with my dogs, run, hike. A simple life. A very human life. We evolved eating meat and moving around in the natural world and I'm trying to mimic these things as best I can while navigating the Zoo that humans are currently inhabiting. These things don't seem that unreasonable, in fact they should be inalienable rights as humans if human health and living our best lives was the goal of humanity. But unfortunately it's not. Having the woods taken away is a terrible blow. I'm not sure how to fight going forward but I'm going to fight. And now I've become aware of a 2022 ballot initiative that would shut down animal agriculture in Colorado. I'm not exaggerating. I wish I was. Two animal rights activists, one from Boulder and another from Broomfield (a Boulder suburb) have created the initiative and it's couched in the language of preventing animal cruelty, which it will not do, but the intention is to shut down animal agriculture, which it absolutely will do. And because it's an amendment to the Colorado statutes and not the constitution they only need 124,000 or so signatures to get it onto the ballot. And those signatures can be from anywhere in the state, they don't have to have a certain amount from each county or judicial district, meaning they can stand outside a few coffee shops in Boulder and Denver and probably get all the signatures they need in a few afternoons. Because who isn't in favor of ending animal cruelty and exploitation? That's how they'll present it to people but that's not what it is. It's beyond incomprehensible that two vegan transplants who've lived here 10 minutes can bring the whole state to its knees so easily. I would like to brush it off, to say there's no possible way people here would allow this. And if we were talking about Colorado 10 years ago this would be true. The state's very ethos is (was?) Live and Let Live, there's no way folks would fall for this. But the state has been inundated with newcomers, one of the main reasons the Front Range has become so intolerable, and they narrowly approved a measure to release wolves back into the wild here, something I NEVER thought I would see in my lifetime.

How do you fight a ballot initiative? I'm not into politics, I really loathe politics, I just want to live my life, I'm not interested in influencing other people. If someone wants to be vegan, whatever, I truly don't care what someone else puts on their plate for dinner. But vegan activists aren't happy enough to live their lives, they're driven to force their beliefs and agenda onto anybody and everybody. Vegan activism is a cult and the people involved are deeply entrenched. Trying to reason with them is pointless and boy do they love the sound of their own voices.

Thirty years of vegetarianism was a FAIL, I'm not going back to an even worse diet. But I don't know what to do. Arguing with vegans is pointless and aggravating, I won't do it and it gets nowhere. The majority of the public are not vegans. How to make them understand what they're voting for? I don't know. As a side note, artificial insemination will also be illegal for dogs so dog breeders are effected too. In fact, artificial insemination of all animals, domestic pets and livestock, will be re-categorized as a sexual act with an animal, a felony. I can't even make this up. For some reason AI really really infuriates the vegans. This could be the end of spay/neuter in Colorado as well. There is no exception for it and anyone could interpret the law to include it. 

The effects of this are huge, rural life in Colorado will be lost, a multi-billion dollar industry shuttered overnight. The economic effects of this will be felt state wide. Widespread unemployment, hunger, food shortages, skyrocketing food prices, I can't fathom it. This will have a ripple effect in other states, especially on food prices and availability. As meat becomes a luxury for only the super rich, folks will turn to the soy kibble fake meat products and those prices will soar as well. I'm not exaggerating. I wish I was. If the pandemic has taught us nothing it's that we need MORE locally produced food, not less.

Never mind how they're going to enforce this. 

This is video that explains everything pretty succinctly. Spoiler alert, she bursts into tears at the end. The animals matter, absolutely, but the people matter more. I'm crying for Colorado right along with you Rachel. I hardly understand the world anymore.

The Needle Tears a Hole

It's turning out to be a mostly happy and productive week. We arrived at the Ute's free COVID vaccination clinic an hour early and there was already a pretty good line going but they decided to start a half hour early and everything went very quickly and efficiently. All told it took about an hour twenty minutes plus 35 minutes of driving. SO grateful to the Utes for sharing their excess vaccine with the community, I was probably 4-6 weeks from being eligible for a vaccine never mind when I actually would have gotten the shot in my arm. The Utes accepted all comers 18 and over so this was a great opportunity and the community took full advantage of it. The woman in front of me in line had come all the way from Telluride, about 2 hours away. When I left at 9:48 (clinic was supposed to start at 9:30) the line snaked around the parking lot seemingly forever. So glad we decided to go early. I hope everyone who wanted a shot got one eventually. 

Huge thanks to the Utes for their wonderful generosity.

By the afternoon I was feeling feisty so I decided to go for a short, easy run just to stretch my legs and get some sunshine. But my knees felt good and the music got me a little carried away so the run ended up being harder than I was intending. I wasn't tired or sore but about 20 minutes after I got home I had multiple rapid fire sneezing attacks which were very strange. I've never sneezed so violently and so many times in succession. At first I thought maybe something had crawled into the crawl space under the house and died and I was allergic to it. I do have seasonal allergies sometimes, especially since I've moved out here, but never with sneezing like that. I had several bouts of sneezing attacks throughout the evening and a couple good sneezes this morning but now it seems to have passed. Had to have had something to do with the vaccine and maybe also with the run lowering my immune response. I had no runny nose at all which is something I always have with my seasonal allergies. Very strange but thankfully seems to have passed. Other than that I had a mildly sore, achy arm, not too bad compared to how sore my arms get from weight lifting, and no other symptoms. Jonny had more severe arm pain and is woozy this morning. He had a good nap this morning after our not very long dog walk. I'm going to take a rest day today even though I'm feeling feisty again. I go back in a month (this was the Moderna vaccine) for the second shot and after that one I'll absolutely have a rest day or two.

I'm looking forward to going back to the pool. It'll be mid-April until I have full immunity but I may not wait until then. Our local infection rates seem to have stalled and the pool is taking good precautions so I think I finally feel good about going back, at least for very short swims to get back into it. I may enter a race in June in Arizona, I'll see how things go. Base training for biking and running feels good but the swimming, ugh, that's going to be a long haul.

I also managed to finish getting my tax info. together for the tax preparer. This is always a major stressor for me, I hate that kind of paperwork. And I finally managed to write a comment to the forest service about the logging slated to take place at Boggy Draw. This has been very nauseous making for me for the past month or so, keeping me up at night and worrying me throughout the day. My beloved Boggy Draw is slated to be logged as part of a 10 YEAR logging project. Awful. Nauseous making. Those woods and trails are one of the main reasons we moved here. I can't believe it. But here we are. The Forest Service is taking comments, this is National Forest land so anybody can comment. If anybody is inclined to comment you can do so here, it's very easy: https://cara.ecosystem-management.org/Public//CommentInput?Project=57671

The bike club has a lot of information about the project and the issues in this post: https://www.facebook.com/swcocycling/posts/3924110237610920

In short, the main issues are that they are going to open logging roads that will cross the trails, bringing heavy logging traffic right through the recreation area and destroying the trails. They're also going to log in the recreation area, forever changing the scenery. The area will be closed to the public due to logging as well. If they were going to do the right thing they should leave the whole recreation area out of the logging plan, preserve the trails, re-route the logging traffic around the recreation area. There are other issues but those are the ones that keep me up at night. Comments are due by this Friday, March 12.

 

In happier news I took a little day trip to Hovenweep over the weekend. Such a beautiful, special place. And they allow dogs. Ruby was pretty happy but Tess, well, she sees Dead People everywhere that isn't home.

I better publish this post before I run out of Mediocre Internet and enter the realm of Hillbilly Internet. I just found out there's a virtual public meeting tonight over Boggy Draw and I need to save those gigs.

Hope Unknown, Part 2

At the start of the week I'd pretty much decided that triathlon racing would be out of the question this year. Somehow I thought I'd be vaccinated by April easily but then Biden said end of May for the regular folks and that's just too late for me to start swimming from scratch and be ready for even Xterra Nationals in September. But I found out the Ute Tribe had a vaccination clinic for everybody over 18 a few days ago and they plan on having another one next week! So I'm going to try for it. Not sure how long the lines are, we're going to go early and hope we get lucky. I could go back to the pool any time, it's open and they're being careful from what I hear, but I've just not been comfortable with it. The pool is usually nearly empty when I go but it seems poorly ventilated and stuffy. And I have plenty of other ways to exercise, the pool is a luxury. The break from the harsh pool chemicals isn't a bad thing either, my hair is doing so much better. But I miss it and it's good for me, physically, mentally. So we'll see. Trying not to get my hopes up too high in case it doesn't work out. A few more months isn't the end of the world and another summer without racing is no big deal. But it would be nice to have a goal of sorts. I've been feeling a bit not anchored lately, perhaps drifting a bit too far out to sea. Along with everyone else.

In the meantime this isn't a bad way to get in a good workout. Sand Canyon seldom disappoints. The lizards were out in full force so perhaps spring is nearly here.

I did hear a meadowlark the other day which is a good sign of spring. When the vultures return I know we're there for sure. Though I don't mind winter.

I saw 4 bald eagles flying over the house the other day, so very cool. Not sure what it was about and the crows chased them off pretty sharpish. The crows around here don't stand for much in the way of interlopers.

I suppose I'd better formulate a rough training plan of sorts. Just in case.