Atherton Family Notes

After driving out of the montains on Monday, we arrived in Boulder, where we visited the Celestial Seasonings tea company.  We had seen that they offered tours, and we were fmailiar enough with their products that we thought it might be fun to see how they operate.  Plus, the price was right: FREE!

We arrived in time to join a tour that had just started.  We saw a short video explain the “Summer of Love” origins of the company, along with an introduction to how they travel the world to collect the ingredients they use in the teas, the care they take when testing new blends, and a little bit of hand waving about how herbal teas are almost magical, etc… and then they took us to the manufacturing floor where we saw the highly sophisticated way they produce their products.

It was a little jarring at first to go from this sort of new-age-ish origin story to the high tech production plant, but it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.  The true products that Celestial Seasonings sells are specific blends of herbs, teas, and spices.  It is very important in that regard to be able to reproduce the recipe consistently, so the process is paramount.

The tour took us through the various aspects of the production, starting in the warehouse portion of the factory floor where incoming ingredients are inspected.  There are an amazing variety of smells in this area that change every ten feet or so depending on what ingredients you happen to be near.  The tea leaves and mint leaves are stored in their own areas, since tea tends to absorb the aromas of other ingredients, and since mint tends to be a major supplier of an aroma that can be absorbed.

Carissa, Cece and I were particularly impressed with the mint room.  The aroma is strong enough to clear your sinuses and make your eyes water.  You can even taste the mint if you breathe through your mouth.

The tour also included glimpses of how the ingredients are cleaned, chopped and mixed in preparation for bagging.  We didn’t get to see this part very close up due to safety concerns, but we did get to see the bagging and packaging process, which ran like a well-oiled machine should.  It was impressive to see how quickly each little 20-count box was produced — and it is nearly all automated, all the way to the computerized palletizer that stacks of the final product for shipping.

The best part of the visit came after the tour, in the tea shop.  Celestial Seasonings makes 90 or so varieties of tea and all of them are available for sampling.  There were about 10 varieties pre-made, but the staff will make you a cup of anything the have on request.  Everyone got to try a variety of teas (the kids warmed up to the idea after realizing that there were sweeteners that could be added), and we found a couple of favorites to bring back with us.

Carissa, Sandi and Sadie discovered that True Blueberry suited them well.  Cece discovered that Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride (one of their holiday teas) was her favorite.  Me?  I like the idea of trying a different cup every time.

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I’m going to write more about our trip to Garden of the Gods, but I wanted to put this picture up now.  The photos below comprise a stereogram.  If you relax your eyes and focus in the distance, you can make the two pictures merge into a single image that will appear in 3D.  I’ve wanted to experiment with this type of photography for a while, and this trip seemed like a good time to try.  I’ve collected a few other pairs of photographs during our vacation.  I’ll post some more of them later.

Note:  It may be easier to see the 3d effect if you don’t click on the picture to enlarge it to full size… I find it easier with the smaller version… Your mileage may vary.

Update:  It seems that by convention, most stereograms are viewed by crossing the eyes, not by staring into the distance.  Here’s a second version of the photo that can be viewed by eye-crossing.  Personally, I find that this version hurts my eyes, but I want to make sure that other people can view the picture.

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Garden of the Gods with Pikes Peak in the background, as seen from the visitor center.  This panorama didn’t come out as well as I hoped, but it gives you a good overview of the park.  I was using our point-and-shoot camera, and it blew out the highlights on the right side.

When I was growing up, I went camping several times in an area of the Shawnee National Forest called Garden of the Gods.  I always enjoyed visiting that place and exploring the various rock formations, but I was mystified when other people would assume I had been to Colorado when I told them about going there.

As it turns out, despite my apparently sheltered upbringing, the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs is the far more famous site. It was donated to the city of Colorado Springs by one Charles Eliot Perkins (that’s the second time the name Perkins has come up on this trip — we have to research the possible family connection) under the condition that the city never charges admission and does not alter the land in any way other than the bare minimum to make it sustainable.

It’s quite a sight. Apparently much of the front range of Colorado has this deep red sandstone buried underneath it, but there are not that many places where it can be seen, and fewer still where it can be seen in such a spectacular fashion. The pressure exerted by the mountain range in the distance has forced the red stone out of the ground and into the air at strange angles.

The park has attracted millions of people over the years and is probably one of the most photographed natural phenomena in the world. On bright sunny days the colors are spectacular and at the right times the rocks can be used to frame other natural phenomena such as the rising full moon.

We arrived in Colorado Springs in the late afternoon on Monday, which unfortunately, was not the best day for photography or even for walking outside. It was mostly cloudy and very cold, especially anytime we got up above the floor of the park when the winds picked up, but the rocks were still impressive.

We were also impressed by the amount of wildlife in the park. We saw rabbits, several different bird species, and deer — none of which seemed the least disturbed by our presence. I almost stepped on one of the rabbits while trying to photograph something else.

This is a stereogram of one of the smaller odd-angled rock formations jutting up from the ground. You should cross your eyes to make the image appear in 3D.  I’ve added two white dots at the bottom to help you judge when the images overlap properly.  This one definitely looks better in the larger version, so click to view the picture full size.

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OK, I just want to post one more of these and then I swear I’ll get off this topic:

I like the way this one turned out, especially the way the low stone wall looks.  Note that this stereogram is of the eye-crossing type.

Wait, did I say one? I meant two. And really, I’m done now…

This one should also be viewed with crossed eyes.

Actually, I did get a few more shots that could work as stereograms, but the 3D effect wasn’t good enough, so I’ll spare you.

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If you came by our site earlier today, this is what you saw:

OK, I added the part about the hackers being retards, but you get the point.

The hack wasn’t particularly devastating and only affected the front page — If you came here by an email link to a specific article, you didn’t see a thing wrong.

The problem is that I don’t know how the hackers got access to rewrite the main index page.  That means that they could do it again at any time.

I searched on the internet to see if this was some on-going event and that maybe someone else had figured out how the hackers are getting in and how to prevent it.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that is the case.

I did see that the British Transport Minister’s blog got hit by the same thing this morning, though… Red Virus wasn’t quite as nice to him.

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Just a note to our email subscribers: You probably got an enormous email today with all of the posts we’ve made since March 1st. This is because on that date, I made a post containing a single character that Feedburner didn’t like. This tiny error caused Feedburner to stop processing the new posts and also stop sending emails as the posts were submitted like it should have.

After a fair amount of trial and error, I figured out that there was a hidden character that Feedburner didn’t like next to the “é” in the word “risqué” in the post I wrote about Cholet. Since my keyboard doesn’t have an “é” on it (a limitation of most non-European keyboards), I cut and pasted the letter from somewhere else, and must have snagged a hidden character along with it. Oddly enough, the problem didn’t seem to affect the word “Ribeauvillé” in the very same paragraph. Go figure.

Once I replaced the character with one that Feedburner could understand, it immediately saw all of the changes we’ve made in the last month, and issued a giant-sized compilation mail. Sorry about that.

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Flat Stanley, who I met at school, came with us on our trip to Colorado. Here is his story:

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Pikes Peak, as viewed from the Crystal Reservoir.

Pikes peak is one of the most famous and most often visited mountains in the world. It’s not immediately clear why this would be — it’s not even the biggest mountain in Colorado. For a mountain of greater than 14,000 feet, though, it is surprisingly accessible, and that is the secret to its success as a place for visitors. There is a cog railway and a toll road that lead to the top.

We originally intended to go up Pikes Peak on the cog railroad from Manitou Springs, but since we were delayed getting into Colorado, we arrived on a day that the railway wasn’t operating. As it turns out, it probably wouldn’t have mattered if we had gotten there on a day they run the train– the had just gotten fresh snow cover on the peak, and it’s likely that the train wouldn’t have been able to pass anyway.

So we drove around to the other side of the mountain to get on the toll road, where we found out that the peak itself was inaccessible, but we could drive up to the lodge at the 11,000 feet, just below the tree line. It was a beautiful day, so we elected to go ahead.

The toll road also doubles as the track for the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. It’s an extremely twisty road that is intentionally left as dirt for a fair distance, but on the plus side the road is fairly wide to accommodate the racers. This is important since there are no guard rails. This video gives some sense of what the road is like:

Note: despite what Sandi and the kids might tell you, I never once drifted our car.

At the lodge, we spent some time talking to the store operator and one of the members of the snow removal crew. It seems that the winter was fairly mild, but the spring so far had been pretty harsh, with a couple of heavy snowfalls and more expected. With the wind approaching 60 miles an hour, the crew was having a lot of trouble keeping the road clear above the tree line at 12,000 feet.

The snow crew uses some heavy-duty equipment to clear the snow. They also told us that sometimes they misjudge where the road is, which can be a pretty big mistake when you are in one of these.

Yes, this is another stereogram. I can’t help myself, even when Sandi is doing the photography.

On the way down, I captured this panorama of the view:

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Before heading onto Cañon City, we stopped in Manitou Springs to shop and visit Arcade Amusements, an arcade that maintain a room full of antique pinball machines and other coin-operated novelty mechanical devices.

This wasn’t exactly a must-do part of our trip, but I have always been impressed by pinball machines, so I figured if we got close to it, I would have to check it out. I’m old enough that pinball machines were still the king of coin-operated amusements when I was a kid, and video games were just getting started. I’ve been saddened by the death of the industry, so it was fun to see some of these classic machines in action.

And it was a lot of fun. The best part is that all of the machines still carry the original prices. If a machine originally cost 1 cent to operate, it still costs 1 cent to operate. If the pinball machine was 3 plays for a quarter in the fifties, it still is today.

Here are some of the machines we tried out:

This is a flip-book style Mutoscope viewer, one of the earliest widely available ways for people to watch film clips. I don’t know anything about the history of this particular one, except that it seems to be one of the post-1926 models (based on the fact that the name on the machine was “International Mutoscope”). Mutoscope viewers were first built in the early 1890s.

This is a variation on a strength-tester type of machine, in the sense that it has a mechanism that looks like it should take force to squeeze. In fact, this machine is very easy to operate and seems to generate its “random” result depending on how long the user squeezes the trigger. Should I be worried that the machine says Sadie is “tempting”????

There’s nothing like the classic entertainment of cranking your monkey turning a crank to see a monkey crashing cymbals to circus music.

This is an unusual (at least to me) variation of the mechanical style hockey games. This particular one plays less like Foosball and more like Pong. It took the girls a few minutes to get used to it, but they eventually got a few good volleys going.

We finished the day trying out several pinball machines machines from different eras of advancement, from early machines that play more like pachinko, to machines where you helplessly bat at the ball with tiny flippers on the sides of giant drains, to the fully automated (but not yet electronic) machines that I remember from the skating rink I went to as a kid.

We spent about an hour in the arcade and spent less than three dollars. Not bad for this day and age. Unfortunately, this extra hour in town meant that we would ultimately miss the chance to visit the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, but I made my choice and spent some time with the fossils I wanted to spend time with.

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I’ve been uploading a lot of random things to YouTube in the last few days, and I added this video to the list after remembering that it existed, just by chance. The video was made on August 29, 2004 during a day trip to Angers, France.

Carissa has never said truer words.

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