Chaos and some fine spirits

Yesterday's activities were rather tranquil and easy-going. The parents-in-law went on an all-day horseback riding trip. I'm not really in to that, and Sarah isn't either. So the rest of us spent the morning lounging around the house. Sarah and I have a deck outside of our bedroom, and I went out there early in the morning, checked my email, and just enjoyed the mountain wilderness. This house has a small library of fiction and nonfiction works that you have to scour a bookstore to find. I picked up a book by James Gleick, call Chaos - Making a New Science. Chaos is, according to this book, the study of non-linear systems, and often is described as the "Butterfly Effect". Although as of now I am only about 15% through the book, it is enthralling. Though I know what fractals are and understand what the so called Butterfly Effect is, I never really understood the beginnings of this discipline, which interestingly has at its roots a strange intersection of meteorology and pure mathematics.

Observing the clouds passing by and having a hummingbird fly three feet in front of my face, stop, face me, and fly away again, I could see Chaos in action -- why do clouds not move in regular patterns? The answer of course is turbulence, but what causes turbulence, and why does it not have the same effect on an object at different times? Chaos theory attempts to explain the phenomenon.

Eventually, all of us became hungry and we decided to go to town for lunch. We found some Mexican restaurant to lunch at. I'm not normally one to start drinking before noon, but after the day we had yesterday, I needed some relaxation. A Negra Modelo hit the spot. It also made up for the total absence of service at this restaurant. We toured around town after that, not finding much of interest other than a wine tasting room. At $5 per person, we got to choose eight wines to sample.

I am convinced that Colorado does not have the weather or soil for growing wines that match my palate. We tried some wines I had never had before: a Gewurtzaminer, a Blaufrankish, as well as a Claret. None of those were very good, and in fact of all of the wines we tried, including the Cabernets and Pinots, really did not have flavor markedly similar to their Sonoma or Napa counterparts. Their Blaufrankish had won some awards, so it could be that I simply have not yet acquired the taste for this sort of wine. We ended up really enjoying a local Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc and bought a bottle of each. Everything else was extremely earthy and overly acidic.

We returned back to our house, where I continued reading my book on Chaos until Steve and Debbie returned. We grilled out hamburgers and watching thunderstorms roll over our house throughout the evening. The night ended with Sarah and I getting in an argument with her parents, at which point everybody went to be except for me. I stayed up, thought about posting to this blog, but then decided against it, at the risk of it turning into a rant that nobody would have enjoyed and I likely would have regretted.

...you can see a couple of photos of the rain coming in, as well as some unique illuminations of the snow-capped mountains from a mostly-cloudy sunset on picasa.

-RMz