Hmmmnh.  It’s January.  But it’s raining.  All roads will, after dusk, become skating rinks.  Glad I’m home, toasty warm in my house looking out at the, amazingly, rain.  I’d take a picture to prove it, but I can’t find my camera.  Oh well.  Estes Park weather has some constants.  January and February are windy (every paradise has its snakes).  March, too, sometimes.  March, April and May are winter, the time we get most of our snow.  One day in June is spring, the day the aspens bud.  After that is summer, which lasts until Labor Day, after which we have, sometimes two glorious months of fall, with weeks of gold, the aspen gilding every mountain and meadow.  And of course the Elk coming down and herding in the Estes Valley itself.  But rain in January comes as quite a surprise.  Here’s a picture of the entrance to the Estes Park valley I found on the web.

Last night, some friends — Greig and Ann Steiner and Bert and Marti Bergland — got together at the Bergland house for movie night.  We ended up watching “Birdcage,” a very funny movie from 1996.  All of us found it funny, charming and touching and I thought that comedies made today don’t seem to have the same level of funny, let alone touching.  But then again, I haven’t seen “Bridesmaids” yet, which I’m told is a very funny movie.  One of the subplots of “Birdcage” is a political scandal and I reflected, too, that what we charmingly call the political process doesn’t seem to have changed very much from 1996 to the present day.

My weekend will be taken up with work on “World Enough and Time”, for which I owe my writing partner, Sharon Goldstein, quite a few notes.  But I will manage the time so that I can watch my newest addiction, “Downton Abbey”, and continue to read “Nazi Germany: A New History”, which is a fascinating and horrifying study of how such a terrible situation happened.

My paternal great-grandfather emigrated from Munich in Bavaria in the 19th century and married a woman from Germany.  One of their sons was my grandfather, who married a woman of German extraction from Pennsylvania.  So my father, while as American as a person can get, was ethnically German.  He served in the Quartermaster Corps of the United States Army in World War II in what was then called Persia.  He married a woman of Swedish, English, French, and Scotch-Irish background, so I am fully an American mutt.  Worse than that, since I was born in Colorado, I identify most with the western United States.  However, German history in the 20th century has an appalling fascination for me.  How could it have happened?

Time I moved on to another topic, I think.  Although genealogy is becoming quite a hobby of mine.  As it happens, I have been able to follow the line of my mother’s Swedish ancestors more than any other link to the past.  Unfortunately, I cannot read or understand Swedish, so I’ve come to a stop because once the records are in Sweden, they’re, amazingly enough, in Swedish.

And it’s time this blog came to a stop, too.  More soon!  That’s either a promise or a threat, depending on how you’re enjoying (or not) this blog.  Thanks for reading.