"Among the weblogs, the best coverage of the Churchill controversy has been in View from a Height..." -Dave Kopel, Rocky Mountain News
"In Colorado, the Rocky Mountain Alliance of Blogs is covering the hot GOP primary between beer magnate Pete Coors and former Rep. Bob Schaffer with a great deal more insight than the Denver newspapers." -John Fund, OpinionJournal.com
"The Rocky Mountain Alliance offers the best of what the blogosphere has to offer." -David Harsanyi, Denver Post
Got home last night to a new lawnmower still waiting to be used. Between the afternoon showers and the Campaign Coffees with Captains, it's been a lonely week for new hardware.
The Amazonians did deliver three offerings while I was at work, however. In The Gravest Extreme, by Massad Ayoub, and reputed to be one of the best primers about tactical and situational awareness in personal defense. The Denver Post may find it paradoxical that people carrying weapons aren't out there hunting big game on the mean streets of LoDo, but for most of us, it makes perfect sense not to want to shoot somebody. And no, not just because of all the paperwork.
Then there was the kochtopfe. A 10-piece cast aluminum with triple inner and outer non-stick layering. Of course, the "10-piece" business includes the tops, which it like saying that I have a three-piece car because the key and the gas cap aren't physically connected. And for some reason, the knobs on the tops were attached to the underside, and needed to be unscrewed and re-attached to the other side. They probably take up less room that way, but it's still the first cookware set I've gotten with some assembly required.
I gotta say, it's sturdy, heavier than cheap stuff and lighter than iron or copper, and the non-stick outside promises easier cleaning.
So we're finally moving the office. No, not putting it up on wheels and moving it across the parking lot. Given what happened to the roof a few weeks ago, the permit process itself would probably have to undergo Polar Bear review before that happened.
No, the whole happy lot of us is moving upstairs to a different conference room. I've working in offices (with and without office-mates), cubicles (with and without unendurably loud neighbors), at home, in coffee shops, and in quarters so temporary they'd make an army tent look like the Pentagon. But this is by far the weirdest set-up I've endured: 6 (now 5, soon to be 9) people in one conference room without walls, cubicles, or any semblence of privacy or climate control. Add to that the tendency to use the speaker phone when you're the only one on the call, and the room's transformation into an over-sized Easy Bake oven around 11:00 AM, and it wins the Environment Least Conducive to Productive Work running away.
Now we're getting ready to move upstairs into a larger conference room. There will be more space, and the opposite wall won't make you feel as though you're re-enacting the trash compactor scene from Star Wars. Since there are no windows, the room will be cooler, which will irritate some but which I find refreshing. We will have a clock, which, being that we're all contractors, we will occasionaly watch.
The hardest part wasn't the move itself, but the negotiations yesterday over the interior design. It was like the Paris Peace talks. We were literally talking about the shape of the table. Or at least, their arrangement. We all more or less wanted the same thing - a big horseshoe with a table for the projector in the middle, and then we spent 10 minutes moving them this way and, until they were just right.
There was a time when this sort of thing would have bothered me - just put them someplace and live with it! But now, I sort of accept it as the overhead of making everyone happy and feeling as though they've had a say. So I tend to stand there without much to say, which probably makes me look uninvolved. Oh, well. That's part of the overhead, too.
This came right after the Rosen interview yesterday. It's not often you get an hour to run free on the Blowtorch, with a chance to plug everything from the campaign to the blog, to the other radio show.
And then last night, the Colorado Union of Taxpayers spent about an hour on a briefing from legislative staff about the uses and misuses of Referendum C money. As with the Flatiron Building, what it looks like depends on where you stand, but it's pretty clear that the Legislature (and not just Democrats, unfortunately) has been playing pretty severe games in the expectation that they won't get caught.
So frankly, High Society last night was a much-needed tonic.
