I felt disappointed at first but then remembered seeing a reservoir on the map not too far north of where I parked. I’ve been working on paying attention to my intuition more, starting in small ways, and it began to kick in. I felt drawn to the reservoir as a secondary destination and so we set off. Twenty or so minutes later we approached the reservoir. At first, I thought the large chain link fence was blocking off some buildings around the reservoir, but as we got closer it became evident that the fence went all the way around the reservoir. This was part of Louisville’s water supply and protected as such.

Scotties meeting the young cow

As we emerged from the brush I was rewarded with a small herd of cows nearby and some very nice views of the mountains and flatirons with clear views to the north. Wow! I was quite happy we had kept going. We traversed the field down the narrow path, passing close amongst the cows. We reached the end and came back on the same path. At this point, some of the cows had gathered right on the path and both cows and scotties were very curious about each other. We found a curious young bovine who seemed just as interested in the pups as they were in her. It was a hoot to see them interact and I was really uplifted and happy despite the dreary day.

Great view from the cow field

Fresh made guacamole

Fresh made guac can bring new life to any Mexican meal and is oh so good with a bag of chips and a partner bowl of fresh salsa.  It’s super easy to make and well worth the minimal effort involved.  Definitely food for the soul, but also good food for your body as avocados are a good source of fiber and the good kind of fat and can help reduce cholesterol.

I wanted to post the simple ways that I make guacamole.  One of my favorite ways is to use a mortar and pestle to mash up the ingredients and give the green goodness a really nice texture.  Here are the basic ingredients that you’ll need for one avocado, which will make enough dip for about 2 people.  As with most recipes, treat this as a guide and feel free to customize amounts and flavors based on your own taste.

Basic Ingredients

• 1 avocado- To me organic avocados have the best flavor.  Look for one that’s slightly soft to the touch but doesn’t have pockets that collapse when you feel it
• 1/2 fresh lime
• 1/4 to 1/2 clove of garlic – depends on taste
• 1/2 Tablespoon minced onion
• fresh jalapeno or other pepper minced – optional
• fresh cilantro and tomato for garnish – optional
• sea salt or kosher salt

If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, simply use a bowl and a potato masher or even a fork.

Steps

1. Mince the garlic and onion.  You can play with the amount that you use depending on how strongly you want each flavor to come through
2. Mince the jalapeno or other chili if you are using it.
3. Add a pinch of salt to your mortar or mixing bowl
4. Add the minced garlic and onion and optional jalapeno and mash with pestle / masher / fork
5. Mash these ingredients for a bit to break them down even more and get the flavors blending
6. Cut the avocado in half, remove the pit and scoop out the green flesh into your mortar / mashing bowl
7. Mash away!  You can leave some larger chunks of avocado or mash it up to a smoother consistency depending you preference
8. Squeeze in the fresh lime juice from your 1/2 lime
9. Mix
10. Taste
11. Start with salt – it may need a bit more salt at this point.  Add more, mix and taste again.  Then add more lime juice as you like to get more tart
12. Garnish with diced fresh tomato and/or some cilantro leaves

Storing

If by some odd circumstance you don’t finish off the fresh guac in one setting, you can store it with some success in the fridge in the following way.

1. Put the leftovers in as small a container as you can to fit what’s left
2. Give a generous squeeze of fresh lime juice over the top of the guac, covering as much surface as you can.  The acid helps fight off oxidization and keeps the ugly browning away.
3. Place plastic wrap right on stop of the guac, so that it actually touches the surface.  Air is the enemy here so you want the entire surface contacting the plastic wrap.
4. Store in the fridge but enjoy again ASAP

That’s it folks.  Leave any questions in comments.

We all know deep down that everything around us is made up of energy at its core.  Einstein discovered this amazing relationship between matter and energy and quantum physics and cosmology continue to take us deeper into this idea today.

Our lives consist of energy, both giving and receiving it.  We can feel energy around us in the people we interact with and all around us in nature.  We feel it in the art we admire and love and even in the books we read.  We give energy to everything we do whether it’s spending time with someone, cooking a meal, writing some code or simply taking a walk.  Energy is everywhere.

I personally try to put good energy into the things I do everyday and I want to take in good energy to help me grow and help me flow.  A few weeks ago I discovered this great new broadcast, available live or via itunes downloads for free, that explores our relationship with energy in our lives.  A couple of our very own Boulder residents, David and Kristin Morelli host this show and have on some amazing guests to explore the energy in life and how they’ve grown and come to help others in life.  The show is called Everything is Energy and some of their guests include folks like Michael Beckwith, Colleen Cannon, Lynne McTaggart and Bob Doyle.  Give it a listen and check out their website.  I think you’ll find something here that can help you grow.

Meadow on West Bench Trail

I parked at the Mesa Lakes recreation area, paying a $5 fee to get in.  I’m guessing you can park out on the main , Groad for free and find your way to the trail head, but this was my first time here so I thought I’d take the easy route.  Picking up the trail from the parking area I was in was farily straight forward, just riding down past the lake overflow you pick up the trail.  It started a bit rocky, literally, but I soon fell into the groove and found a good pace.  Some of the hills were a bit steep for me and I wound up walking the bike up them.  There were at least a dozen downed trees that I had to navigate over and I got more confident on my way back and was able to bike over a few of the medium sized ones without losing the saddle.

West Bench Trail, Ski Lift 1

I only ran into a handfull of people on the trail and only one other group of 3 bikers who were coming down.  Views from the ski lifts were quite nice but I wasn’t able to capture them very well with just the iPhone camera along.  Several water crossings added to the fun as well as a fall into a bog on the way back.  I stopped at the fence boundary not too far past the second ski lift and decided to turn around, figuring I should save some of my mojo for the ride down.  The mosquitos were definitely out in force and stopping left you open to their hungry attacks.  I think this would definitely make a great late summer or fall ride.  Beautiful, excellent ride!

View From Top of First Chair Lift

More info can be found at these sources:
West Bench Trail
MTBR Trail Review
Trail on Trail.com

Full Gallery:

Dan was basically sharing his thoughts on tech past and present and talking a little bit about his new book.

Jen brought one of the pods from her “Pool” project which has been featured at Burning Man and is set for a cool looking event coming Aug 15th.

Spry
Finally. Everything about your project… in one place. Spry is working to integrate lots of disparate workflow and tracking sties into one actionable stream so your team and those managing your team know where things stand.  They integrate tools like bugzilla, github, capistrano,  error tracking, deployment servers and such to give current status and one consilidated view.  Seems like it has some good potential.

Vanilla Forums
Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, theme-able, pluggable discussion forum for the web. A really great looking, highly customizable, plugable forum and discussion system, these guys were here to show off some of their latest work, announce version 2 and a new hosted service offering.  This forum system seems to have a lot of traction and is already in use by a ton of people.  Elegant and not over cluttered it allows for easy focus on the discussions and lots of opportunity for plugin development.  Need a forum?  Definitely give this one a try.

Take Comics
Welcoming Publishing into the On-Demand Digital Age.  The short on this one is “iTunes for Comics”.  I was really impressed by the image quality that these guys were able to get on the comic book art.  This is a great idea and could actully expand the comic book market by making comics more accessible, interactive and expand tie-in marketing opportunities.  The abilityt to tie in data about characters and events and to provide background info or ablities summaries, etc was really cool.  One thing I wasn’t clear on was when making purchases in their system if users actually also get a hard copy of the comic or if it’s only digital, or if there is a choice.  Comic fans I think will love this.

ReTel
Advanced Video Content Analysis and Search Solutions. These guys are working on providing advanced surveillance video mining.  The idea is that there is sooo many hours of video being generated by retail surveillance cams that it’s really impossible to analyze it all.  There are clearly insights to be gained from the footage, such as poor employee behavior or store cleanliness.  ReTel’s solution uses “micro transactions” where a large pool of human workers label and tag short segments of the video footage.  They can then compile all this parallel processed video and present very interesting, mineable data about the footage.  Definitely seems like there is huge value here, especially for retail location owners and particularly those who are trying to manage / monitor multiple sites.

NextBigSound
Actionable Intelligence for the Music Industry.  Very cool idea of bringing together buzz from all over the web on music artists to give insights to industry insiders.  Seems like a really nice way for bands large and small to keep a finger on the pulse of the buzz they are generating. Keep an eye on these guys.

SendGrid
We Get Your Email Delivered. Better email delivery for your transactional email.  As a developer I certainly know that getting email delivered from my web apps can be frustrating.  What I’m talking about are the kinds of emails you are used to getting when you signup on a site and they send you an account verification email, or amazon send you that order summary.  These guys are working on these problems and look like they have a nice non-intrusive solution that also brings other value adds like analytics  and nice wrapping of your plain old text email.