Our night turned interesting rather quickly!  I ran home from work to have dinner with Talina like I do most weeknights.  We had just sat down to a meal of chicken and asparagus when she started smelling something weird, like a burning smell.  Like most guys, the smell didn’t hit me for a few more minutes after my better half already noticed it.  Concerned about the smell, I ventured into the kitchen to see what was going on, expecting that maybe a small bit of food was burning in the oven or the burner on the stove was left on.  I found neither.  In fact the stove and oven had been turned off for more than an hour but yet there was a thin, blue smoke pouring out of the vents on back of the unit.

The fumes were burning my eyes and lungs but I figured simply unplugging the cord that provides electricity to the igniters on the gas stove would solve the problem and get rid of the smoke.   A few minutes later, smoke was still wafting from the back of the stove and filling up the house.  At this point I decided it was out of my hands and called 911.  They told us to evacuate the house until the fire department arrived.  Luckily we didn’t have to stand in the snow and cold for very long because the firehouse is right around the corner from our house!

The firemen were perplexed but decided to shut off the gas and haul the still billowing stove out into the snow in our backyard.  They used their nifty infrared heat device to figure out what was burning inside and began methodically taking the stove apart to work their way into the internal components.  Inside, the firemen found that one of the igniter wires for the burner had arched with another piece of metal or wire and started the insulation burning.  A few handfuls of snow and a couple cups of water later, they deemed the fire officially out.  Whew!  We dodged the big bullet on that one.  There was no damage to the house but it wreaks of electrical fire now and we’re without a stove.  Now we’ll have to get in touch with the property management company to get us a new one.  What fun!

Talina posted some pictures of the mayhem on her blog.  Check it out!

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It looks like we’ve got another massive round of winter weather heading our direction here in the mountains of Arizona.  The sun has been out the last two weeks but temperatures have been super cold and we still have a ton of snow left on the ground from the last storm!  It’s good though.  Our parched streams, rivers and lakes all need water and it will help to delay wildfire season a bit this year.  I knew it was going to be a good day…even a good week though when I opened the blinds in the bedroom to see the ice crystals forming feathery art on the window.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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You’d have to be like an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand if you haven’t heard one bit about the current state of our economy. Houses are foreclosing at record rates, new homes aren’t selling and there’s already an 8 month glut of unsold homes sitting on the market. Add to that the staggering amount of debt a lot of Americans are carrying around and the situation begins to take on some epic proportions.

I just finished watching an interesting documentary called “Maxxed Out“. While I was unsure about it during the first ten minutes, it actually turned into a pretty interesting piece looking at the real impacts of our love for credit. The impacts are extremely sad and disheartening and your left feeling like everyone is just preying on people, waiting to make a quick buck off of them. How did we ever get to that point where people became so engrossed with greed that they will absolutely crush the people underneath them to better themselves? Some would say it’s simply survival of the fittest. Luckily, I’ve never been too wrapped up in the rat race. I was for a time but quickly had a thought about two years ago that it just really wasn’t worth it. I’ve now paid off debts and am in the process of cleaning up my credit. We want to be able to bite while the housing market is down over the next year and get us into a home, so we can finally stop throwing money down the drain in rent every month.

Our government now wants to toss several hundred dollars at each of us so we can go out and “spur the economy”. While I’m honestly not going to sneeze at an $800 check headed my way from the federal government, I’m also not going to go spend it willy nilly like our President and representatives would like me too. Do we really need that new plasma screen TV? No! What you need is to spend more time with your family, get out and enjoy the fresh air or do something good for yourself and our environment. I’m hoping that most Americans will use the money to pay off a debt or throw into their savings account. I know how difficult it is to achieve that financial goal of 3 months worth of pay sitting in your savings account in case of emergency. This just makes it even easier to get there. If you can save 10% of your paycheck, in just a year you will be close to having one month’s worth of pay saved up. That’s not too hard, especially when you add in the “economic incentive” check that will show up in your mailbox.

I know people who just aren’t being smart right now, who still think they’re going to make a mint off someone else. That’s just not going to happen and people really need to buckle down, analyze their spending and be smart about what their paying for. The feds just cut another key interest rate by 0.75% so now would be the time to look at refinancing major purchases like homes and cars. Haggle with your credit card companies to see if you can get a lower APR and save yourself some money on all those interest payments. There’s a lot of websites out there that can help you shop for better deals in the banking system like Finance Genius. If you shop around, you could potentially save yourself hundreds if not thousands of dollars in finance charges and interest. Do something good for yourself in 2008 and become financially fit.

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Did you make a New Year’s resolution to take a college class or learn something new this year? How about taking more online classes if you’re already a student, saving you the money spent on gas to get to campus? Well, another fun blurb in this week’s edition of U.S. News & World Report is about the free, online classes offered by major universities like MIT, Yale and the University of Tokyo. The caveat of course is that you don’t get credit for taking the classes but I think it’s a pretty cool way to expand your mind and learn something new from the comfort of your home. I think it’s a pretty cool idea, although I wish you could get the credit for it!

Nonetheless, MIT offers the most free classes online with dozens of complete courses available. Just click onto the MIT Open Courseware site, pick some classes and start learning! They also launched a new sub-site aimed at high schoolers this year. It offers fun, “how-to” courses like building stereo speakers and guitars and even some AP courses for science and math students.

Yale offers full video versions of it’s most popular courses in astronomy, poetry, philosophy and psychology. They say they have plans to add up to 30 more classes in the near future. Check out their online courses by going to Open Yale.

There’s also an Open Coursework Consortium that can link you to dozens of free courses from Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins and several schools overseas.

If that’s not enough and you’re still yearning for more education, you can head to iTunes University. There you can find free audio and video lectures from Berkeley, Duke, Standford and several other schools and download them to your portable device. Now get out and learn something new!

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It’s Not Easy Being Beautiful

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While my yard is blanketed in white, the onset of the gardening catolog season is already beginning to flush our post office box with fun new catalogs. I’ve already spent more than an hour pouring through hundreds of tomato varieties in the Totally Tomatoes catalog that arrived two weeks ago. I probably earmarked about 30 different varieties I’d like to grow but I guess I better think about slimming that list down!

I’ve also spent the morning relishing over a couple of food blogs that do a great job of combining gardening information with some delicious looking recipes. I quickly became a fan of Kalyn’s Kitchen blog and the myriad of healthy recipes she’s concocting and sharing with readers. I also got a lot of great ideas from reading her summer blog post on the bounty growing in her backyard garden and the recipes utilizing it.

I now have food blogs on the brain too. Maybe it’s the delight of eating yourself silly during the holidays that’s got me on the subject. I regularly read Farmgirl Susan’s Rural Food Blog and enjoy every single post. It’s partly because I’m jealous of her life on the farm. She also suggested some great food blogs including Nami-Nami from Estonia, Garlic Breath from France and Lucullian Delights from Italy. I think they’re enough to transport you to another country, if only for a few minutes!

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This early October weekend marked the 5th Annual Jerome Historical Society Ghost Walk, a tourist draw for people looking for that quintessential “feeling of fall” activity. Looking for that experience myself, I purchased tickets over the phone a few weeks back and grew excited about the event with each passing day.

Loading up in the car for our 75 minute jaunt down the highway to the relic of a mining town, my girlfriend and I were still excited about the 90 minute walk into historical deaths at what’s often dubbed “The Largest Ghost Town in America”. That moniker turns out to be anything but! In the 1920’s, Jerome’s population boomed to 15,000 people, spurred by the explosive demand for copper and the large mine on which the town sat. Eventually, the demand for copper dropped and so the mine shut it’s doors. The town eventually evaporated to a lone 50 inhabitants that decided to remain on the side of Cleopatra Hill. Most buildings of the once bustling mining town sat empty for years, picking up the “Largest Ghost Town” slug.

Now, more than 400 people live in Jerome and have rehabilitated many of it’s turn of the century buildings. It’s now known as an enclave for artisans. But, the town continues to look for creative ways to draw people in and the yearly Ghost Walk is one way they try to do it.

We bit hard at the opportunity. Who isn’t fascinated by historical accounts of mysterious deaths and murders in what once was a bustling boom town? We turned in our tickets at “Spook Hall” and were shuffled into a packed community center for the first of three tours that night. A fiddle, banjo and bass player entertained the crowd with ghostly ballads until it was time to depart for the walk. Dividing the group of 100+ people turned into a complete cluster! Tour guides seemed lost and visitors just wanted to run all over the place and do their own thing. As our group was led out of “Spook Hall”, we were taken all the way around one downtown block. We walked past the “Spirit Room” where dozens of drunk bikers had assembled outside the front door, laughing in uproar about the “ghost walkers”. My favorite was the drunk standing on the sidewalk that questioned at the top of his lungs, “Is there a subway station somewhere? Where they hell did all these tourists come from?”.

Filtering through the crazies, we were brought back to the very spot where we had just left. Mind you, all 100 people were in the same spot. So we all staged for the “Shooting of Sebastian Valuenzuella”, complete with armed gunman staged around the shell of an old hotel. One western gunman, wired up to a microphone and speaker system, couldn’t be understood with the exception of the few people in the front row around him. With the muffled speech bouncing off nearby walls, visitors did more looking around and gawking instead of paying attention to the impending gunfight. Then, without warning, blanks start popping from inside the building and unintelligible dialogue starts between the dueling characters. This proceeds for an agonizingly long five minutes before a final series of gun shots and cheers from the front row of spectators. The first scene had ended before we even knew what was going on! End Scene.

Our personal guide, “The Black Widdow”, dressed in appropriate black and white victorian attire, hurridly swept us across the street and up one level of switchbacks. The hope for comprehending the next scene we were enroute to was quickly dashed once we reached it. A smoking “stand-in” joined our group and strangely was the one person selected to have her palm read in front of the whole group. She wanted information on her long lost relative who mysteriously died. The audience was asked to hold hands to channel our energy for a “seance”. The spirit arrives and talks cryptically about her life and death and then leaves before sharing her true story with us. This wouldn’t be the last time we witnessed palm reading on the ghost walk! End Scene.

The next stop a short walk up the road where we assemble in an auditorium to learn about the death of Freda Schutz. This is where were truely understood how good the acting was! During the re-enactment of a conversation leading up to the young girl’s death, the mother forgot what railroad they were to ride on for their family vacation. So, without missing a beat, she turns into a palm reader, reading the railroad’s lengthy name off the handwritten note on her hand. You could feel the laughter burbling inside the audience at that point, just waiting for a chance to get outside and release it. End Scene.

Next, the Murder of Carmen Aros. After a short walk back down the switchback, we assemble at the gates of the next scene. Standing hillside, a group of drunk 20 somethings proceed to make a mockery of the event and themselves after one girl repeatedly falls to the ground…stumbling drunk! We’re finally let into the small courtyard where we’re greated by the most profound actors of the entire night. Truely, they were the best. Not because they were trying to “act” like someone else but because they became their character. Standing in the cool breeze blowing down Cleopatra Hill, actresses Rochelle Garcia and Elissa Bellew presented the poignant tale of a love triangle gone wrong. It was an interesting historical account and watching audience members squeamish to breathe in the smoke from smoldering sage sticks was to-die for (no pun intended of course)! End Scene.

Lastly, we were led back up the hill to the last and final scene we’d be treated to: The Suicide of Dora Cook. These actors moved from palm reading to just reading off the whole dang script, leaving some of us to look at each other as if we had really paid $10 a piece to see this. With that, the scene ended and we were sent on our merry way. Disappointed children asked their parents if they could rent scary movies on the way home. Others questioned what exactly they had just experienced. In the end it was truely homegrown theater.

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