Picto Diary - 20 to 23 August 2023 - Hoover and the Duc
Above: The Event at Archer, Cheyenne, WY. 20 August 2023.
Mynduveroan and Glinda Good Witch (five-year-old former racehorse new to eventing. 1st place. Blue Ribbon. Image by father, B1b. We are all very proud of her in this epic performance!
Above: Maverick. Kemmerer, WY. 20 August 2023.
Out and about on the Duc.
Kemmerer. Coal power plant, responsible for most area jobs, to be decommissioned circa 2030 to be replaced by one of nations first mini nuclear power plants (which won't provide as many jobs). Economic vibrancy forecast between now and then, however, due nuclear plant construction. In image, check "K" for Kemmerer out on the mountainside.
Above: Conoco convenience store. Daniel, Wyoming. 20 August 2023.
Out and about on the Duc.
Bishop and stuffed moose (which is which?).
Above: Stagecoach. Broadway. Jackson, WY. 20 August 2023.
After dining together at The Wort, Daggett, Bernie Niece and Mwah (sic) walked up Broadway towards our respective hotels. We parted ways at City Park. So, I missed an interesting event that they saw: an empty, runaway stagecoach pulled by two galloping horses. No one was hurt. The horses, apparently, were OK. Image by Daggett.
Above: Hoover Institution Jackson Hole Retreat. Four Seasons Hotel, Alpine Village, Wyoming. 21 August 2023.
John Cogan, Hoover Fellow, slide. Entitlements are Source of Spending Growth. The mud WILL hit the fan. It's just a matter of when. I have to admit, it was good living at the apex, and I am very grateful to younger Boomers, Millennials, and Gen X for my Ruths Chris Social Security money coming directly out of their pockets. You have to respect their eleemosynary bent as there is zero chance (IMHO) they'll benefit from Social Security themselves despite paying into it. I have frequently put forward a solution to stave off the coming disaster, but no one listens to me: Abolish Social Security now. Grandfather all participants born 12 August 1945 or before. It's the only way to save the nation.
At lunch in Westbank Grill, I was seated next to Colin Stewart, Chief Development Officer at Hoover Institution. Hoover, as an avatar of free market ideas, financially, is doing well. Hoover operates via donor funds. Methinks Colin may have something to do with Hoover's strong financial position. There can never be too much effort in pushing free market ideas in a world where many with influence now question free market philosophies.
Above: Conoco. Arco, Idaho. 22 August 2023.
Out and about on the Duc.
Packing legerdemain.
Above: Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho. 22 August 2023.
Out and about on the Duc.
Selfie?
GASP!
Above: Hoover Institution Luncheon, Sun Valley Inn, Sun Valley, ID. 23 August 2023.
Steven J. Davis slide. Work from Home over Time in the US. Stabilizing at 28% of full days working at home as a percent of total workdays. Sun Valley, ID. This presentation was updated from an earlier version I had seen before. Davis concludes that the current work at home numbers will stabilize about where they are marking a significant change in working at home from the pre-Covid world.
In Q and A, Davis acknowledged that intangibles deriving from being at the office were important in weighing the success, or not, of the work at home experiment. What benefits to the business arise from an employee saying hi to the boss in the hallway or participating in impromptu meetings with colleagues around the proverbial water cooler? Davis acknowledged the value of intangibles at the office. He said, "companies that allow significant work at home days might have to engineer collegiality moments on the few days that employees do come to work at the office.
After lunch and Davis's talk, my lunch table mate, Mary Jane, wife of a well-known money center bank CEO back in my day ('80's/90's), expressed her concern to me that her grandson, with a newly minted MBA, had been told by his first job new employer, a large commercial bank, to work at home. She feared he would lose something important - see comment on intangibles above - by not being able to work at the office. I am in agreement with Mary Jane. Work at home benefits, IMHO, do not outweigh the exigencies of working at the office. Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk are in agreement with me!
I noted to Mary Jane and Hubby that I had once worked in the Citibank overseas consumer banking world run by Hoover Overseer (and later CEO Wells Fargo Bank), Dick Kovacevich. Mary Jane and Hubby brightened up and said they were good friends with the Kovaceviches and held them in the highest regard.
After the luncheon event, circa 2:00 PM, Mary Jane and her husband approached me under the Sun Valley Inn portico as I was prepping the Duc for the ride home. "Where will you be riding to?" asked Hubby. "Park City, Utah, 325 miles," I replied. "Better you than me," responded Hubby.
Above: Chevron. Burley, ID. 23 August 2023.
Out and about on the Duc.
When attaching sandals to the luggage on the Duc, it is important to ensure that they don't hang behind the Duc exhaust pipe.
After a rain free three days of riding the Duc, the heavens opened up when I was five miles from home. The storm was right on top of the town. Lottsa lightning. To make matters worse, for two to three miles the lanes were rerouted due to road construction. I found maneuvering the bike, even at low speeds, around road barriers, in the dark, pretty tricky. Fortunately, TIMDT had left open the garage. I rode in. Parked the bike. I quickly changed out of my wet clothing and returned to enjoy a fine meal of Mom's Meatloaf expertly prepared by TIMDT.
Because of its intensity, the ride into Park City in the rain may have been a top ten rain ride over the last 25 years of riding motorcycles. But it did not hold a candle to riding into Tokyo on the Tomei Expressway in a typhoon at 10:00 PM (2006), or riding one Sunday from Costa Mesa, CA to Ojai, CA in full on rain (2010), 125 miles, or descending through twenty miles on US 12 from Mt. Rainier towards Yakama (2012) in the worst downpour I have ever experienced.
Addendum
I, too, love thistles. Once I let one grow in my backyard in SLC—just to watch it bloom, you know. Never could get rid of them after that single blossom. Much earlier, on one of our childhood drives to Jerusalem (Sanpete County) my sister, then about 8 yrs. old, sat on a thistle somewhere around Thistle when she had to pee by the side of the road. The real tragedy was the tweezer attack.
Moreover, I was working at the Manti welfare office when the Thistle slide occurred—spent months poking around to determine eligibility for FEMA funds. Free money attracts all kinds of people. We had almost hourly updates from one of the office husbands who was an engineer on site. A very interesting year. At the same time, one of the older couples of Mayfield were on a drive up 12-Mile Canyon above Mayfield when a fairly large slide blocked the road below them. Ultimately, they were airlifted out, but their pickup had to stay until the forest service could rebuild the road later that summer.
I think the most special characteristic of the thistle is its inimitable color—unless it's an artichoke.
Cheers!
Diana,
Mayfield, UT
Margaret and Steve:
Sometimes it takes a while for things to line themselves up. News of the death of Margaret's mother finally had me remembering that I had written a poem about the death of my mother. It was, in the end, part of my mourning.
I know each of us takes these events in in varying ways. And, that you are remembering your mother's life in your own way. The experience will be uniquely yours.
But, as a gesture of empathy, I want to share with you one of my takes on the death of a mother, mine. There were some interesting discoveries.
All the best and my condolences.
John,
Montreal, QC
The morning I last spoke with my mother
she was in her hospice bed, waiting for death. She said
they had “just come down the canyon from Wildwood,”
something she’d been doing during the summers for nearly
all of her ninety-six years.
This time, though, the trip was all in her mind, drawn deep
from within the wrinkles of her muddled memory, her
strengthening forgetfulness, her diminishing sense of place.
A decade or so before, Matthias had told her, as we were
on the road to Taos, that he had seen a picture of God at school
and knew where He dwells. “God lives in the mountains,
at Wildwood,” he said with absolute certainty, the kind
that only five- or six-year-olds possess.
My mother agreed, hedging a little, subtly altering gender
on him, hoping he wouldn’t notice: “You’re right, Matthias,
She might live at Wildwood.”
Wildwood is the kind of place where God might dwell —
the place where my grandfather built a Lincoln-logged
mountain cabin with his own hands, furnished it with leather
couches and chairs, soft beds, Sharp’s paintings, a player piano
and antique checkerboard Navajo rugs, after he finished law
school about the time my mother was born just before the ‘20s.
Wildwood, with its mystery water tap, its sand paintings,
its puzzling Burma Shave rhymes, its swinging bridge,
its God-blessed Nature, its glacier-fed, boulder-bound,
bumbling creek, its hummingbirds and noisy, toe-nibbling
geese, its kick-the-can nights, its obligatory Scott’s Hollow
moose, and, its Chapel under the Box Elders, where, on Sundays,
dappled by the sunbeams coming through the trees, we learned
to ask for God to be with us, until those Edgemont men told us
we shouldn’t do that anymore. They needed “God with us,”
they said, “nearer to town.”
At her funeral, wanting to believe Matthias, expressing a kind
of mysticism I hadn’t felt before, I said that the next time I went
to Wildwood I expected to feel her spirit there in God’s company.
The next year, near mid-summer, I went there and failed to sense
the presence of either of them.
I guess I expected too much. I hope that their absence is not
in any way my fault. Long ago, taking those men at their word,
I had stopped asking.