HAO is reading madly for her comps so she suggested an earlier walk for yesterday. I biked over to make it by 9:00 and forgot, again, how much more uphill it is from my house to hers than it looks, for someone who's not used to hills. We started walking southeast toward Cherry Creek Reservoir and lo, walked all the way there. We walked three hours, ten miles I think, or I hope. We were nearly back to her house when I stopped abruptly and declared that I had hit my wall and she'd have to fetch me in her car, but I was only whining.

About a mile and a half out, I whipped off my t-shirt and folded it into the back of my shorts. HAO eyed my new bra. I announced it like a monster truck event. She pointed out that I was wearing an exercise outfit, Nike shorts and Nike bra. They don't match, I insisted; it's not deliberate and only the swishes match. And I didn't have the perky ponytail that really would complete the ensemble.

Soon before RDC and I moved to Denver, we saw footage of Cherry Creek Reservoir on CNN for something or other. The camera panned from the trees in the state park over the tops of the buildlings in DTC and stopped short of the dam. I saw peoply playing in the water, and I was happy. Fresh water, even if dammed, reassured me. So that was one of our first bike rides. We huffed and puffed up the side of the dam then whizzed through the park to the water.

The roped-in swimmng area is puny, reaching out only deep enough to be chest-high on an eight-year-old. People anchor their motor boats within feet of the rope and of course the "personal water-craft" enthusiasts buzz extremely close by, so it would be dangerous to swim out of the ropes. It's dangerous to swim within the ropes, too: I had never before been in a swimming beach that had to post its levels of bacteria, never swum anywhere it was an issue at all. So I have never swum there.

Two years ago I was fed up and sought out the reservoir on the southwest side of town. Its swimming area stretched out far enough that I could swim a good distance along the ropes in water deep enough that my fingers didn't scrape bottom every stroke. When I emerged, my white bathing suit wasn't white.

Since then I've stuck to my complex's pool, the rec center's, and Grand Lake.

I got good sun in the morning, but the afternoon clouded up with remnants of the recent Texas hurricane (name?) and RDC, who is still sick, and I spent the rest of the day reading. I have finally made a dent in Anna Karenina, which I have interrupted with Little Altars Everywhere. Chris McCandless (of Into the Wild) liked how Tolstoy wanted to walk amongst the peasants, and what finally endeared the novel to me was the chapter in which Levin mows with the peasants. If I start talking about living off the land in Alaska, please slap me.

Today we had considered going up to Grand Lake but thought Boulder would be gentler on RDC. So we did the Pearl Street Mall, watching hucksters and browsing in shops.

The first street performer we saw was a magician whose real strength lay in his patter. He didn't really do tricks but instead performance art of patter plus audience interaction. I stopped to watch him because he had a bird in his vest pocket whom he briefly, teasingly, flashed and who would perform a trick later. The bird turned out not to be the conure or little Amazon a glimpse of green plumage made me suspect but a lovebird. What kind of trick could that perform? Eventually, when Logo's turn came, the huckster asked an audience member for a bill of "any denomination, fifty, hundred, whatever....even this...five," disappointed. He folded up the bill into a wad, showed it to the bird, and dropped it on his little table. The lovebird scooted from one corner of the table to the other, retrieved the bill, and waddled back to deposit it in its master's hand. Of course, this took three tries, the first two of which were interrupted by some very important preening, preening desperately needed since the bird had been in a pocket for several minutes and gotten all mussed. You can't teach a lovebird much. You can, apparently, teach a huckster, however: he returned the bill to its owner, an act that impressed the audience enough for that one and several others to find their way into his hat.

Also we saw a contortionist who says this is how he makes his living. Maybe that's possible: he can't eat much. You just can't be a contortionist with any superfluous flesh, and he had none. He did have double-jointed shoulders, or non-jointed shoulders. He put his hands, fingertips touching, perpindicularly in front of his feet, walked though his arms, and, without unclasping his hands, brought his hands in a full circle up his back, over his head, and down his front, then walked through once more before making two circles back. I could see him shift vertebrae individually as he folded himself up. And he suggested that one day, after he's been made famous on David Letterman or Jay Leno, we could tell our friends, "I saw that man on the Pearl Street Mall and I gave him ten dollars."

My mother has a pair of turkey salt and pepper shakers. Every Thanksgiving, they sit on the table, the tom for pepper and the hen for salt. I didn't realize for a long time that the usual Thanksgiving turkey bears no resemblance to the wild turkey that gobbles through New England forests. The wild one is the more colorful; I guess the domestic one is white so that turkey farmers can more easily see which has been pecked to a fester by its fellows. Anyway, the shakers are the wild sort, the original ones Pilgrims ate.

This past Christmas, my mother began a collection of a Christmas "Dickens" village. Satis House, Stone Lodge, a work house, another house stuck in probate, coal smog. The appeal of accumulating "collectibles" I do not understand in the slightest, but as a hobby it will make buying Christmas presents for her easier, no longer fraught with emotional baggage. It will be a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done, and a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known, when I complete the thing for her.

Nevertheless I snicker up my sleeve.

My father used to hunt quite a bit. I have eaten duck, pheasant, and turkey shot as game; eventually I wondered who did the plucking.

So anyway (this does all relate) we were browsing in a superb kitchen store, Peppercorn, in Boulder. A softball-sized brace of pheasants, they each opened in halves to hold whatever you serve with pheasant, I guess. "My mother would like these," I pointed them out to RDC, thinking of presents. "They're her kind of kitsch."

He picked up the cock and began walking it like a hammer from "The Wall" along the shelf. "Then a giant pheasant could stomp through the Dickens village!"

I sank to the floor until I recovered.

Elsewhere in the store I used an oven mitt in the shape of a moose like a puppet and continued, "And then this moose sweeps through dispatching the survivors." As with the dog's name in "Jaws," I should have stayed off the coat tails of the joke.

We found lunch at an Italian place whose name I forget. I had a homemade pasta with mushrooms in a garlicky white sauce. RDC had pasta di formo (?), and for once, I made the better choice of entrŽe.

Driving between Denver and Boulder, you notice how very very little is left undeveloped in the 30 miles between. There are large prairie dog colonies, small farms whose property value must far outweigh their incomes, horses and llamas, all of which won't exist in another five years. The most distressing effect of this is upon the curvature of the earth. Development flattens the earth, I am sure. Montana and other western states have such a big skies because the planet has room to stretch there. Asphalt flattens, structures constrict, the grid strangles. This flat earth is in your gentle hands.

Was any actual Nazi criminal called Gentlehands or was that M.E. Kerr's invention?

I'm watching "Dr. Strangelove" on TMC. I've never seen it.