Rambling Thoughts

Veritas

According to the Collin’s dictionary, veritas means truth. If you look up the word in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, veritas is tied to speaking truth when drinking wine. Are people more truthful when they’ve had one drink, a few drinks, or when they are drunk? I’m leaning towards the last option, when they are drunk, right before they get sick or pass out.

This word veritas is used a lot - it’s in or is the name of several books, also an investment firm, a cannabis company, a tool company, a men’s clinic, a data management company, and so on. It’s also an acronym used by NASA and it stands for Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy. Ok then, what the hell is this? Veritas is a spacecraft that NASA is working on that will explore Venus. Scheduled launch date… no earlier than 2031. So if you’re really interested in knowing a lot more about the planet Venus, hang on for about 8 more years (at least).

Why this word? I’m reading the book Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man, and The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. It’s the story of the discovery of a small fragment (about the size of a business card) of an ancient papyrus thought to be written by Jesus. On it he refers to Mary Magdalene as “my wife”. I’m only a tenth of the way through the book, but if it’s anything like the last book I read about researchers and scientists, I’m sure it will contain lots of back stabbing and jealousy.

Update on the book - I got bogged down in all the details (and trust me, there are a lot of details). I fast forwarded through it and found out the con man was some person who was upset at the church. Experts verified the artifact, a star professor in Early Christianity studies (Dr Karen King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University) presented it as real in 2012, and by 2016 reversed her claims when different experts determined it was a fake. If you don’t want to read the book, you can read about it here on the CNN website.

Working Out

So I finally decided to work out a few weeks ago since I’m going out to
Palm Springs in about six weeks to do a 25 mile bike ride. My intention was to get on my peloton bike and do my training ride. I turned on the bike and up pops an error message, “metrics are not working, check the cables and try again”. In case you don’t know, metrics are the things that show you your speed, the resistance the bike is set at, and how many calories you are burning. Could I ride without this information? Yes, because at this point I could access classes. But I wanted the full experience so I could learn that after riding for 30 minutes I only burned off 1/2 of the piece of toast I ate for breakfast. So after checking cables and turning the bike off then back on and the display still not working, I called the peloton technical help line. I listened to awful hold music for about 20 minutes before being told by the representative to reboot the bike, which wipes out all the info and reset it back to original factory settings. That made the problem worse, now the bike turns on but I can’t access any classes. Alas, the service guy is coming in a week to see what the problem is.

Update: A few days after this happened, I turned the bike on to take a picture of the error message. To my surprise the screen came back on and once again I’m able to log into classes, but the metrics are still not working. So the service tech was scheduled to come in a week to check it out, but now I really have no excuse for not riding.

Further update: That original service call was cancelled because of the frigid cold weather - the service tech couldn’t get his van started. I’ve been rescheduled for two weeks from now, lets hope he gets the van going and makes it here. I’m not holding my breath.

National Western Stock Show

Who doesn’t love a parade? Since 1906, the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Colorado has been considered the premier livestock, rodeo, and horse show in the world. Over the past 117 years, animal breeders have brought their large animals to the show to be judged. And it all begins with a parade through downtown Denver. On January 4th, starting at noon, 30 longhorn cattle will be walking the 12 blocks from Union Station down 17th Ave to Glenarm Place.

I went to the parade, standing on the sidelines in 37 degree temperature. First up were the Denver mounted police, followed by a lot of cowboys (somewhere in the neighborhood of at least 20) ensuring the herd of 30 longhorn cattle stayed in the center of the street, far away from the spectators. Lots more riders on horseback along with people in horse drawn wagon continued coming down the street. See a theme here? Yup, horses.

Just four of probably 100 horses in the parade

The parade route through Denver; the longhorns look pretty focused going down the street

One week later:

So I made it to the stock show yesterday and got to see the baby animals - calves, piglets, and lambs. I also watched the shooting event - riders on horseback ride through the arena and attempt to shoot 10 balloons. During one round they use their pistols. On the next they switched mid-round from pistol to a rifle - during this the rider has to let go of the reins and trust that the horse knows what to do. There was even a round where they were dressed in old Calvary outfits while shooting. All I can say is that if I attempted to do any of this - especially letting go of the reins - I’d be on the ground in a heartbeat and I’d wind up shooting myself in the foot.

Note: they use special bullets which are blanks where the projectile only goes 20 feet or so. That’s why this sport is hard - the riders have to concentrate on staying close enough to the targets while guiding their horse through the figure eight pattern while also keeping their eye on the balloon and shooting before they are too far away.

Shooting at the balloon; rider in Calvary uniform riders go around the arena in a figure eight pattern to shoot all balloons

And Furthermore…

I’ve been busy planning my year of roaming around - a weekend in Palm Springs in February, several short camping trips around the state of Colorado, three longer multi-state road trips, and a trip to New York and Minnesota in July. Until the first adventure I’ll continue playing pickleball three times a week, working on my quilting skills, and learning more about photography and editing images using photoshop.

Here are some images to reflect our weather the past few weeks, when we had temperatures between -12° at night and a balmy 0° during the day.

Images were taken of partially frozen sections of Bear Creek at a hiking area called Lair ‘o the Bear in Idledale, CO.