Ang's Journal

Alan & I had an amazing date night last night. It was an Apology Date Night, because on Tuesday I invited my parents over for dinner & apparently didn't remember to tell Alan - until about an hour before they showed up. -100 Wife Points at least.

So I took him out for a fancy dinner at Eureka Station on Notorious Blair Street in Silverton. Every single thing we ate or drank was delicious.



Our waitress was a gem! She caught us up on all the local gossip, including a recent controversy in town when a long-time resident named Nancy Brockman died, was buried in the historic Silverton cemetery - & had a red UK-style phone booth installed as her grave marker. That settled our after-dinner plans! We headed up to the cemetery to check out the phone booth. Indeed, we could see the phone booth on the cemetery hillside above town from our dinner table. The red color really does catch the eye!



We wandered around the cemetery for a while, reading gravestones until it was too dark to see. The burials feature a high proportion of younger men, many immigrants, many killed in the mines.



It was a beautiful night & a truly peaceful place. Not a bad spot to choose for your eternal rest.



We drove home & let the dogs out when we arrived, walking with them down to the end of the driveway. There was no moon & very clear skies, so I took one last photo - the Milky Way over our house.



It was a very good evening.

I ganked this from krait, who reportedly ganked it from scribblemoose, spiced_wine, heartofoshun and others.

I'm asking those who love the outdoors to post a picture on your page. A picture that YOU took. Just a pic. No description. The goal is to regain peace and harmony without negativity. Please copy the text, put a picture on YOUR page, and let's look at these beautiful pictures.

Here you go:

music link

"Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most afflicts the gardener." — Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

Having spent $186.27* on raised bed soil, seeds, & plants for my two raised beds this year, I am unlikely to even earn my money back in produce from my garden. But I have gotten my money's worth & then some in pride & enjoyment from cultivating these plants.


Tomatoes! Green onions! Kale! Chard! Peppers! Strawberries!


Herb fountain. ::: Slow berry production. ::: Future pasta sauce.


* This is a pretty good estimate; however, I don't remember exactly how much I spent on one packet of marigold seeds. I estimated $4. They never sprouted.

I've now been in Leadville for just over a month, working on this project. So... what is it that we're doing here?

In short, we are working to prevent the formation of acid rock drainage (ARD) on one portion of the California Gulch Superfund Site. There are four parts to this project - three little ones & one big one. First, the little parts:

• We are running a generator-powered pump in a groundwater well containing uncontaminated water (the GAW well) 24 hours a day, pumping approximately one million gallons per day into California Gulch (a small creek). We are doing this to keep the clean water from mixing with a plume of contaminated water, which would force a water treatment plant owned by the US Bureau of Reclamation (USBOR) to treat an increased volume of water.
  
• We were trying to rehabilitate an injection well (the Marian well) that pours ARD about 200 feet down a 14-inch-diameter PVC pipe into an old mine lateral, where it flowed into the Leadville Deep Mine Tunnel (LDMT), & then to the USBOR water treatment plant. This well, unfortunately, has completely collapsed at about 135 feet below ground surface (bgs) & probably can't be repaired. There is some evidence that the lateral has also collapsed. Next year, we may attempt to replace this well with a directionally-drilled well going straight to the LDMT. This will be a tricky bit of drilling, as the LDMT is about 500 feet away, about 200 feet bgs, & only about five feet wide. Also, we don't have any maps or other information about its specific location (it was built in the 1940s). Hitting it with a directional drill rig will be like shooting a bullseye on a buried target while wearing a blindfold.
  
• We are placing limestone gravel into several ARD ponds to see if the limestone can neutralize the ARD & the pond sediments. The ARD at the California Gulch site is intensely acidic, with a pH that is usually less than 2 & often less than 1 (for comparison, stomach acid is usually between pH 1.5 to 3.5). It is our hope that if we can raise the pH, the ARD will pick up fewer heavy metals & therefore will be easier to treat when it reaches the USBOR plant.

Then there's the big part of the project - the clean water diversion channel. Background: the area around Leadville was intensively mined for over 100 years, producing gold, silver, lead, & variety of other metals. Part of the legacy of this activity are large piles of mine tailings. This is rock that was removed while accessing the veins of metal ore. It contains a lot of pyritic minerals, which contain sulfur, which can create sulfuric acid when in contact with water. Once the water becomes acidified, it starts leaching heavy metals from the mine tailings - arsenic, zinc, manganese, cadmium, lead, chromium, etc. The resulting effluent is ARD. Treating ARD is expensive, so our approach right now is to reduce the amount of water that comes into contact with the mine tailings so less ARD has to be treated.



To this end, we are digging a channel that will intercept all the surface runoff & snowmelt from the mountainside above one particular set of mine tailings piles located in Stray Horse Gulch. The channel is lined with a plastic membrane to prevent any water from seeping through it. On top of the plastic membrane is a honeycombed web of plastic, which is filled with gravel.



This channel will divert the water around the piles & down another watershed (No-Name Gulch). The channel is about 2,400 feet long & ten feet wide. In order to give it enough slope to make sure the water flows across the hillside, we had to dig it pretty deep in some places - as much as 10 feet below the existing grade. The design requires us to make the side slopes no steeper than 3:1, so in places, the channel is 70 feet wide (30 feet on one side slope, 10-foot wide channel, 30 feet on the other side slope). We are moving about 8,000 cubic yards of soil, all told. It will look pretty nice once we get the side slopes revegetated.



One of the trickier parts of this project is that this channel runs smack dab through the middle of an eligible historic site, the Pyrenees headframe. It is a towering timber structure built over a mine shaft that extended 1,257 feet underground. Our channel runs right past its foundations, in part following the grade from a rail spur that used to haul off the bonanza of ore coming up from the Pyrenees mine. While excavating this section of the channel, we had an archaeologist on site to document anything we found. We have also had to excavate around some large concrete foundations, which probably used to house the giant hoist wheels that lifted men & materials out of the heart of the mountain. My nightmare is that one of the 50,000-lb. pieces of equipment I've got operating on this site will find a near-surface lateral by caving it in.



I think the project is going pretty well. We've been incredibly lucky with weather & I hope our luck last for just a couple more weeks. We've got to finish putting the layers in the channel, the gravel in the layers, then finish re-grading all the side slopes, covering all the slopes with erosion control blankets & seeding them with a blend of native grasses. We have one more culvert to install (in a berm at the outlet of the channel, which will control any floods that come down the channel, releasing them slowly through the culvert). We're building a small pond in an area where we dug out some topsoil. Then we will remove all of our construction roads, demobilize the office trailer, get all the equipment sent off, & go HOME.

Sleep: good. About 7.5 hours, so a little shorter than some other nights, but Skyrim needs love too.

Breakfast: "Bloodless" coffee (that's my Kvothe joke for the day), S&SBC, kim-chi, strawberries.

I went to Palm Sunday services, then went to Sprouts & Marczyk's for some groceries. I bought one yogurt & one milk chocolate bar for Wednesday (dairy reintroduction). That's the first reintro I'm really looking forward to! Legumes? Sure, I'll take 'em but I haven't been craving them. Corn tortilla chips & Crispix? I don't think I *CAN* eat them in a sane fashion. But dairy? I'd like a little dairy in my life.

Snack: cup of decaf coffee at church after services, Epic turkey bar.

Lunch: monkey salad & kombucha. I wasn't in the mood for a hot meal, nor for a green salad.

I baked a 9x13 dish of S&SBC, so I'm ready to go for breakfasts this week. I wonder if I could freeze half of it, then make the sweet potato quiche & freeze half of THAT, & then alternate between the two for extra variable breakfast variety. Hmmm, sounds like a lot of work.

Dinner: grilled salmon with avocado salsa, actually cooked on the grill, with asparagus. I ate it like I was imitating a tornado ripping through Kansas. Holy cow, so delicious. Apple pie Larabar for dessert.



Snack: coconut cream Larabar.

Sleep: a little low on quantity (I didn't start getting ready for bed until almost 11 PM) but high on quality (did the pre-bedtime routine & conked right out once I made it to bed). Slept until 7 AM.

Breakfast: big slice of S&SBC, monkey salad, black Scottish breakfast tea.

Work was slow this morning, so I cleaned the refrigerator (as in, pulled out all the contents & scrubbed the walls, shelves, & drawers) & got Philippine Chicken Adobo with Sweet Potatoes started in the slow cooker. I used ghee in the skillet to cook the chicken - should be more flavorful than "nonstick cooking spray". Tripling the cayenne pepper will give it some extra punch. I also replaced the soy sauce with coconut aminos & fish sauce, & the rice vinegar with coconut vinegar. So now this dish is Whole30-compliant & features coconut three ways.

Snack: cup of herbal tea.

Lunch: same basic meal as last night (pork chops, squash, apple-cabbage stew) but with an added bonus from the freezer - leftover cranberry sauce I made at Thanksgiving! It's Whole30-compliant because the only sweetener in it is date paste. This addition went perfectly with the pork & the cabbage, & really amped the meal up another notch. YUM.

Snack: kombucha. I really need to learn how to make my own; at about three bucks a bottle, my kombucha habit is expensive.

Dinner: Philippine chicken adobo, sweet potatoes, & steamed broccoli. Topped with onions & the sauce from the slow cooker, along with salt, pepper, & diced chives. Nomnomnom.


Colorful, tasty, Whole30-compliant. YAY.

My (clean) fridge is full of leftovers again: casserole, jicama salad, pork, cabbage, squash, cranberry sauce, chicken, sweet potatoes, & broccoli.

Snack: chamomile tea.

Sleep: pretty good. I forgot to drag Shadeaux's Cozy Cave into the bedroom before going to sleep, & once I realized, I was too stubborn/lazy to get up & move it. She was very sad to not be sleeping in the den/bedroom with the rest of her pack, & kept coming in to check on us. Around 5 AM, I relented & let her into the bed. She curled up against me, sighed deeply, & we all slept like spoons until about 7 AM.

Breakfast: prosciutto muffin, slice of sweet potato quiche, half an avocado, blackberries, half a grapefruit, black Constant Comment tea.

I pulled a batch of barnyard bone broth out of the slow cooker - it's pretty good. I used the garlic spice mix from Wildtree.

Lunch: monkey salad. Yeah, not a balanced meal.

Dinner: I found this recipe for Sweet Potato Waffle BLTs a while ago & thought it looked like sex on a plate. So I made it last night - & was greatly disappointed. Not only was it an immense pain in the ass to make, but the waffles were greasy, had no body (duh, no gluten), & didn't even really taste like sweet potato. The batter was so greasy & runny, I ended up making pancakes instead of waffles. So the expectations I had from the food blog photos were definitely not met:


Food blog fantasy....


....my kitchen reality.

While I was disappointed in how my sandwiches turned out, they weren't awful. They were an acceptable dinner in any case. But it took two runs of the dishwasher & an hour of cleaning to re-set the kitchen, so I don't imagine I'll be making Waffle BLATs again any time soon.

Sleep: lovely. 11 PM-7:30 AM. Finally, finally, FINALLY feeling adjusted to DST. Maybe.

Breakfast: We tried a new restaurant today, the Sassafras American Eatery. It had a New Orleans theme to both the decor & the menu. I had their daily special: braised pork shoulder, two poached eggs, fried potatoes, & pico de gallo. I also had a cup of black coffee, which sadly was not chicory coffee. It was a delicious meal, reasonably priced, & the restaurant featured no waiting & vey gracious service. A great new find for breakfast.

I put another Wildtree meal in the slow cooker: Beef Bourguignon (made with bone broth, not red wine).

Lunch: went to Braun Taphaus & had the ahi tuna salad with avocado, mango, cucumber, & tons of greens, with a lime-cilantro dressing. So good.

hotpantsgalore & I stopped at Sprouts while out & about today.

Snack: Monkey Salad (raw cashews, coconut flakes, banana). HPG was eating sweet treats from Rheinlander Bakery & I felt left out.


No, it's not made from real monkeys. It's a salad a monkey would eat.

Dinner: a tiny serving of the beef bourguignon. Best Wildtree dish yet!

The first time I tried the #whole30 back in November, I flunked out on Day 22. That's not gonna happen today.

Sleep: pretty good. I did my pre-bedtime routine & was in bed by about 10:15 PM. I had a bit of trouble getting to sleep (cramps). But I did finally drift off & I woke up around 7 AM.

Breakfast: 2 slices of sweet potato quiche, half an avocado, half a grapefruit, & black Scottish breakfast tea.

We've had a week of gorgeous spring weather here, which Shadeaux & I enjoy on twice-daily walks through Paco Sanchez Park.


Panorama from the park's footbridge: snow-capped mountains to the west, downtown skyline to the east.
Snack: black Constant Comment tea.

Lunch: the rest of the Madras chicken salad, salad (spring mix, bell peppers, carrot, cucumber, Bragg's dressing), kombucha. Once again, I ate on the front porch in the spring sunshine, which was as restorative as any food could ever be.

I did a quick produce-only grocery run, & then made a batch of prosciutto muffins.


Another tasty way to sneak kale (& mushrooms & tomatoes) into breakfast.

Dinner: one-quarter of a Colorado cottage pie (with a little extra tomato paste as a condiment), steamed broccoli with powdered ginger & coconut aminos, coconut pie Larabar, apple pie Larabar.

Snack: prosciutto muffin. Yummy! The rest of the batch represents 8 more days of breakfast.

Sleep: so good. So tired after skiing. Followed pre-bedtime routine & was in bed by 9:30 PM. Slept through until almost 7 AM. My legs are a little bit stiff, but compared to other post-skiing days I feel like a million bucks. Still hate Daylight Savings Time though. So disorienting.

Breakfast: tuna cake, kim-chi, blueberries, black Constant Comment tea. Forgot the avocado, so I was hungry pretty soon.

I went to Whole Foods.

Snack: banana.

Lunch: one-quarter of a Colorado cottage pie & a bunch of steamed broccoli (spiced with coconut aminos & powdered ginger), kombucha. I should remember that spice combination - it was fast, easy, & tasty.


Who doesn't like fast, easy, & tasty?

Dinner: Holy cow, I made Nom Nom Paleo's Madras Chicken Salad with chicken I had stripped off the roasted whole chicken I made a couple of weeks ago (it's been in the freezer). It was super-fast to prepare & SO FREAKIN' GOOD. I'm trying not to eat the entire 1-lb. batch in one sitting, but it's hard.

I made a batch of sweet potato quiche. I think I've almost got that recipe memorized.

Snack: slice of sweet potato quiche.