I’m on a Southwest flight, half way from Boston to Denver. In my “Life Is Good” cloth bag, I’m toting a Kindle 6-inch and the iPad on which I’m drafting this post in the Pages app.  I told Bryan Person last month that if I had to choose between the iPad and the Kindle for a long flight, I’d take the iPad. That’s still probably true, but the Kindle has been coming back up in my world lately, to the point where I would probably now reply, “Why do I have to choose?”

If I had checked my Kindle along with my laptops in the suitcase, I would have missed a great read that occupied me for the first hour of the flight. At a Logan Airport newsstand, I saw that James Fallows has the cover story in the current issue of The Atlantic, titled “How to Save the News.” I pulled out the Kindle and bought the issue wirelessly for $1.49. It’s a fascinating piece, in which Fallows explores Google’s quiet but significant initiatives to help print news publications break through to the Promised Land of renewed ad strength for digital content. I read the article slowly enough to think about it as I was taking it in.  I find that my Kindle is the perfect way to follow a complex article, because I see fewer words at a time than is the case with print on paper.  The Kindle made getting the article (and paying The Atlantic something for Jim’s good work) almost as easy as simply thinking about doing so.

As for the iPad, it’s the perfect magical tool for a tray table in coach. My Apple iPad case lifts the top of the screen to a comfortable angle for typing and grips the tray, so there is no sliding around. In addition to writing this post, I’ve done some MindNode brainstorming for a Western States Arts Federation tech presentation I will give in St. Louis in September, and I read some from my Financial Times iPad app, which has a smart and simple way to download the latest content for off-line reading.  I haven’t had time to play Plants vs. Zombies or listen to the any podcasts.

So I agree with Mike Elgan, who says there are good reasons for using an iPad and a Kindle. BTW, if you haven’t seen it yet, click here for Mike’s brilliant comparison chart for an iPad, a Kindle — and a Rock. It was great to talk with him for Kindle Chronicles #97 last week.

There are about 10 laptop computers on this flight, one Kindle, one iPad (mine) and lots of print books and magazines.

Life is good, and the news is worth saving.

[Delayed upload, after getting home in Denver.]

We’re backing packing our bags at the Venetian just when the suite has become to feel like home.  An odd home indeed, but I enter our last day here for the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) invigorated and feeling mainly pro-Las Vegas.

Much of the good vibe comes from the show itself.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  We have focused on one small corner of the 2,500 exhibits, the eBook TechZone, but to get there each day we wander through the central hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center, past gargantuan mini-worlds created by Microsoft, Samsung, Canon, Casio and the other big players in consumer electronics.  I met a guy last night who had worked on the Samsung exhibit.  He said they worked 18-hour days for three weeks and that it cost $13 million.  You step into one of these exhibits and your feet begin to bounce on the thick carpet. The lights make everyone look marvelous, and the music plays loud and nonstop, making it necessary for the techno-hawkers to shout in your ear to be heard.   I know this doesn’t sound great, but for me what runs through the entire scene is a pulse of creativity and optimism.  Sure, it’s laced with greed and fear of getting edged out by the other competitors.  But the dark side does not overwhelm the forward motion and ambition evident in every booth, even the small ones.

Wendy Jenkins, president of Demy

One woman I interviewed yesterday for my soon-to-debut podcast, The Reading Edge, has sold out her startup’s first production run of the Demy, a dedicated recipe reader.  It’s designed for one thing in mind: to have your recipes available while you cook.  So you can angle it just higher than horizontal when you need to, or it can stand up nearly vertical.  You can load your own recipes into it or find others from the social-media community forming around the Demy.  We spoke with the president, Wendy Jenkins, who by yesterday afternoon had a glazed look on her face as she went through yet another demo.  Even in her fatigue, something sparkled.  This thing is selling.  The new production run is coming, and the price will be lower.

Darlene woke up this morning with an idea for how the Demy recipe reader could be improved. “It would be good if you could touch the screen when you’d added each ingredient, so you’d know what’s left to add,” she said.  Makes sense to me.  You get the feeling around CES that people everywhere are waking up in the morning with ideas on how to improve their product or service.  And then some of them go out and find a way to make it happen, so they can hold their idea in their hands and talk nonstop for three days to anyone who will listen.

The other thing I love about Las Vegas is the sheer excess of vision.  Here at the Venetian, if you go down to the second level from our suite in the tower, you come out into an area that at first seems to be outdoors.  There is beautiful sky high overhead with yummy blue tones and perfect clouds.  There’s a canal with gondolas and singing gondoliers.  It took me a few moments to realize the sky was fake — you can see little holes up there that must let air in and out.  But the effect of strolling along the canal, looking at the shops, and finding a nice little cafe with great linguini Bolognese – all that is pretty cool.  What I love is the image of someone sitting out here in the desert of Nevada, waking up some morning and thinking, “I know! We’ll create a canal with gondolas and singing guys in striped shirts where you’ll stroll along at any time of day and look up at the same romantic sky!”  It makes perfect sense here in Las Vegas.

Darlene and I have not put one quarter in a slot machine, and we have not turned on any of the three televisions in our suite. And, to be honest, there are sights we’ve seen that turned our stomachs.  Last night, returning to our room from a meeting, I rode the elevator with a guy and a prostitute who had a credit card lodged between her breasts.   He asked me a drunken question about football, which I said I didn’t follow much.  ”You’re kidding, right?” he replied in a tone that sounded as if thought I was mocking him and might respond with suitable agression.  ”Well, I live in Denver, so I’m for the Broncos,” I offered in hopes of defusing the fellow.  That gave him pause enough for the silent woman wearing the credit card to guide him out the elevator door into the hotel.

So yeah, there is plenty that we’re glad stays in Las Vegas.  But coming here opens a primal place of possibilities. Some ideas you wake up with in the morning need to be let go by noon.  Others may change your life.

Ah, Nebraska! It turns out I have roots there, which may explain the deep satisfaction I felt during Darlene’s and my long weekend in Omaha, visiting her family.  My great-grandfather Edgerly was born and raised in Omaha.  He wasn’t a farmer, but the family’s general merchandise and equipment business served many farmers as customers.  My grandfather Stuart Edgerly went East, young man, to Dartmouth, and raised his family in Syracuse and Sudbury, Mass.  My father and mother settled in the next town, where I grew up and eventually headed back West as a young man.  Now I live in East and West and feel at home in both.

There is lots of corn in Nebraska, and we wandered among some of it on Saturday, when Darlene’s brother Rod and wife Connie took us to the SkinnyBones corn maze south of Blair, Nebraska.  Here’s what it was like:

I loved the corn maze!  The six of us wandered through its spider-webby paths, looking for posts where we could punch a clever card given to us at the start. “If you punch all eight locations, you can turn the card in for a drawing for a t-shirt,” the woman at the ticket booth had informed us.  We and everyone else in the corn maze dutifully hunted for the eight posts with paper punches at them.  It reminded me of Napoleon’s famous discovery, that “men will die for ribbons.”  The corn was over our heads and so thick that there was no sneaking off the path into the Amazonian tangle of husks and stalks.  It was impossible to really know where you were, so I soon began to enjoy the ramble, sometimes following Connie or Rod, sometimes peeling off to walk solo.  Each of us eventually became familiar with a small portion of the maze, so we could pass snippets of recon to each other.  “If you go right, you’ll come to the bridge,” my nephew would tell me.  The bridge didn’t go anywhere, but climbing its steps gave you a view of the tops of the corn stalks (see photo above).

I felt refreshed after my time in the corn maze.  For one thing, I had no signal on my iPhone, so there was no checking satellite photos for clues, or seeing if an email had arrived.  It was me and my feet for an hour, giving in to confusion about where I was heading, and where I’d been.

Our delayed flight from Minneapolis had landed in Omaha on Thursday, September 24th, just in time for Darlene’s sister to whisk us from Eppley Field to a cross-country meet in Fort Calhoun, where we surprised and cheered on our niece and nephew, wearing our brilliantly orange Fort Calhoun Pioneers booster sweatshirts.  The kids ran long courses in and around Fort Atkinson, a restored historic site surrounded by tall grass.  That night we attended the homecoming football game at Fort Calhoun Junior-Senior High School.  The Pioneers won, and the rain didn’t arrive until halftime, at which point my nephew (tuba) and niece (clarinet) were wrapping up their junior-high band duties.  For a sample of the music, click on the triangle “Play” button in this AudioBoo:

The news from Nebraska is that things are okay. The kids are pumped up about their school. The parents go crazy cheering their student athletes. You don’t always have to know where you’re going to enjoy a walk in the tall corn. If I had to pick a word that summed up my impressions of Nebraska it would be “earnest.” I suspect there’s less irony per capita in Nebraska than in Massachusetts. Or maybe the truth is that I felt more earnest while I was in Omaha, and the feeling lingers, now that I’m back in Harvard Square.  It’s a good feeling.  It’s good to have roots in Nebraska, and it’s good to have family there still, who welcomed us with such renewing wit and warmth.

We are tearing through the darkness aboard Amtrak #94 to Boston. Maybe the engineer is trying to make up for lost time. At Old Saybrook, Connecticut, we waited 45 minutes for the 94 to navigate a problem to the west – a train broken down on the track, resulting in rerouting and waiting.  So we’ll arrive at South Station closer to 11 p.m. than to the scheduled arrival of 10 p.m. No matter.  Even when the train is late I love this way of traveling from A to B.  In Business Class I have a regular power outlet for the MacBook Air and iPhone charger.  We can spread out across four seats tonight. Plenty of room on the night train to Boston.

Our day at Buffalo Bay, an old enclave on the shore in Madison, Connecticut, was a feast of good food, sun, kayaks, old friends and new acquaintances. I even got in a nap upstairs in the 100-year-old cottage, next to an open window scented with breeze from the sea. My friends Ben and Carol were hosting friends from all periods of their lives, along with associated kids collecting stones and gluing them into sculpture under the guidance of one of the guests, who has several years of experience working with four-year-olds.  All the ages blended together during a day at the beach.  Ben and I glided along the beach in two kayaks.  I learned a new way to make lobster rolls after decades of assuming it’s always about mayo and maybe some celery.  This crowd served hot lobster rolls, in which melted butter was poured over the meat in a bowl, then scooped into the buns. There were freshly picked blueberries in huge bowls for snacking.  At the end of the final meal, Carol entered the front porch carrying a hot dish of blueberry crisp.  More blueberries!  With vanilla ice cream melting over the tart blue goodness.

While we waited for the train at the Old Saybrook station, I showed Ben around the Twitterhood. He’s a marathoner, which may explain why he’s not likely to tumble to the world of 140 characters soon.  He likes to clip articles from real newspapers and send them to me, so he’s not a hot prospect for a Kindle, though Carol is a devoted user. “When did you become so technological?” he asked me during lunch. I tried to remember what tech stuff I was doing in college, but came up blank.  “It must have started when I got my first Mac,” I said. I did love my Hermes 3000 typewriter in those days.  I really felt as if I were banging out copy when I typed on that sleek, green beauty. The keys were smooth to the fingertip, and the letters struck the page with a satisfying thwack! It’s a direct line from the Hermes to an IBM Selectric, a Radio Shack Model 100, and then the machine that changed everything, my first Mac.  Somewhere in that progression of cherished technology I got hooked and gave up the outdoors, or pretending to like the outdoors.  What I really love are gadgets that do new stuff, especially if they let me write or create images or sounds that tell stories. Twitter is part of it, of course, and WordPress and podcasting. It’s a lot to explain in response to a casual question from an old friend at lunch. No need to, really.  Getting together with old friends is like riding a fast train at night.  They both just feel right, and they get better every time.

A Kindle makes a perfect companion on the train...

We’re approaching Old Saybrook, Connecticut, aboard an Amtrak regional train, number 93, which left Boston’s South Station about an hour ago.  I was surprised to learn that this train travels at speeds up to 120 miles per hour.  That’s snail rail compared with the TGV in France, but still. Not bad for old Amtrak. The views out the left side of the car alternate between deep woods and glimpses of the shore, today shrouded in light fog.

Our destination is a rendezvous with old friends Ben and Carol Beach at the place where Ben has been summering since he was born, or thereabouts.  I’ve never seen this mythical “Buffalo Bay” he’s always raved about.  Tonight we will return by Amtrak after a day of lobster rolls, beach, and stories old and new.

My wife’s quilting habit is a lot less portable than podcasting and social media.  We checked two huge bags for her, filled with fabric and I don’t know what else — needles?  We’re gradually setting up clothing and supplies at each home, so there’s no need to bring the usual stuff for a six-month sojourn.

Living in two different cities, six months at a time, is like leading parallel lives.  My wife says I’m a different guy in Denver than I am in Cambridge, Mass.  It’s more difficult to perceive the difference from inside myself, but I can sense what she means.  One big difference is that my roots are in the East. I grew up in Wayland, Mass., went to high school in Belmont, and attended college and graduate school in Cambridge.  But when I was 30 I moved to Casper, Wyoming, to take a job starting an energy magazine.  I was full of “Go West, Young Man” fervor, and I completely fell in love with Wyoming.  My wife and I met there and lived at the foot of Casper Mountain until 2000, when we moved to downtown Denver. All my adventures in Wyoming and Colorado have been of my own making, for good and sometimes ill.

But even in my cowboy boots and Stetson phase, New England was never far from me.  And now the lure of a grandson and the joy of reconnecting with parents, sister, daughters, and other extended family make our time in Cambridge a delight.

In each place, there is a shadow life lived by email, phone, and some video chats.  Condo association work gets done at a distance from Cambridge, and family stuff gets done remotely from Denver.

Boarding begins.  The show heads East. Long live the show…

Adrian Wooldridge, The Economist‘s Washington bureau chief and, for the past 13 years, author of the paper’s “Lexington” column, suitably chose July 4th for a farewell column titled “Two Cheers for America.” It’s a great read, one of my first pleasures in having a new subscription to The Economist on my Kindle.

Wooldridge echoes Alex de Tocqueville’s seminal portrait of the United States in 1831, noting that the Frenchman’s initial enthusiasm for the U.S. darkened after 1840, according to a new collection of his writing, Tocqueville on America After 1840: Letters and Other Writings.  Wooldridge writes,

It is presumptuous to mention oneself alongside the author of the greatest book written about America. But during the 13 years that the author of this column has spent in the United States, he too has found his initial exuberance clouded by darker thoughts. When he arrived in 1996, America was lord of all it surveyed, the world’s only remaining superpower, convinced of its supreme benevolence, and the engine of a productivity miracle that left Europeans in awe. Social pathologies such as violent crime were being brought under control; almost half of households owned shares. The place had an air of what Mark Twain once called “the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces”.

Today, this serene confidence has long gone. Americans are more pessimistic than the Indians or Chinese, worried that their children will not enjoy the opportunities that they have taken for granted. Xenophobia is on the rise, as is nostalgia for a time of stable families and solid values. California, the state that has always reached the future first, is preparing to pay its bills with IOUs.

The departing columnist continues with what I found to be an even-handed account of this nation’s recent troubles, but what I like about The Economist is a certain detachment and distance which makes even its forcefully stated opinions seem like reasonable accounts, not ideological rants.  It’s not shy in criticizing Obama.  “Whether Mr. Obama can deliver on his promises is open to doubt:” Wooldridge writes, “his inspiring rhetoric is marred by a willingness to compromise with his party’s free-spending establishment in Congress.”   As opposed to emotional/ideological attacks on Obama from the right and the left, The Economist‘s brand of analysis fits my stubbornly moderate view of the world.

And by the end of Wooldridge’s farewell, he widens the perspective beyond any one administration, to find the following solid reason for optimism regarding the American experiment:

That is the country’s taste for entrepreneurial capitalism, a taste that arrived with the first settlers and is becoming an ever greater resource, as the global economy is shaken by wave upon wave of disruptive technologies. America still has a genius for incubating entrepreneurs and giving those entrepreneurs the wherewithal to turn bright ideas into global behemoths. America’s biggest company, Wal-Mart, was founded only in 1962; its sexiest, Google, was conceived in a Californian dorm room at about the time that your columnist arrived on these shores. Even as de Tocqueville despaired about the future of his half-adopted country in the 1840s and 1850s, the likes of Carnegie and Rockefeller were about to unleash the greatest productivity miracle the world has seen. That is the America that still promises much.

Well said, old chap!  And I for one would not consider it presumptuous if you turned this sane farewell into an introduction for your own contribution to the genre that de Tocqueville initiated nearly 80 years ago.

My friend Mary Anderson is 83 years old, and I had occasion to drive her and a another friend, Nancy, from Denver to the Limon Correctional Facility yesterday evening to participate in a program for offenders.  In Limon, we had time for a quick supper at Denny‘s before heading over to the prison, and this gave me a chance to demonstrate Twitter to Mary on my iPhone.  To say she was skeptical is to  exaggerate her openness to the whole thing.

I began in the usual way, Twittering the following message:

Showing my 83-year-old friend Mary how Twitter works at Denny’s. Please say Hi…

Before our grilled cheese sandwich, shrimp salad, and meatloaf had arrived, the replies began showing up in Tweetie on my iPhone. Teeg was first up, with a simple “Hi Mary! ” Then came a chorus of tweets, a sample of which I read to Mary in our booth:

goldiekatsu – Say hi to Mary for me.

mjmontagne – Hello Mary and welcome to Twitter! My name is Matt and I’m “Tweeting” from my home here in Menlo Park, CA.

atlas100 – Hi Mary. This is fun huh?

RickWolff – Hello to Mary! Denny’s, eh? Avoid any food with the word “slam” in the name.

Jim_OConnell Hi Mary! Order the onion rings!

hollyhock100 – Hi Mary! After you’ve mastered Twitter get yourself a Facebook page. If my 85-year-old Mum can do it-so can you!

Otir – Hi Mary! It works very easily

abrahamlloyd – Hey Mary — welcome to the Twittersphere. Can you put up a picture of you and @lenedgerly ?

I thought Abraham had a great idea, and Nancy took the above photo with my iPhone 3GS.  Once it was up via Twitpic, the tweets just kept on coming:

mjmontagne – after you get her going on Twitter, what’s next?? Perhaps a Kindle DX for Mary? Great photo!

roxannedarling – Not only Hi to Mary, but Aloha too!

JBMONCO – Nice pic. Maroon color is good on Mary

jimhill – Hi Mary. Skip the Grand Salm at Denny’s!

CathleenRitt – Is the picture of and Mary at Denny’s in support of @ChrisBrogan taking his kids to McDonald’s? It’s a great pic either way

abrahamlloyd – You two look great!

stevegarfield – Say to Mary for me and have her read my mom’s blog. @milliegarfield

I didn’t make a Twitter convert of Mary, but she said she’d been following Twitter’s role in the Iran protests, and she really liked the compliment directed at her maroon sweatshirt.  She was humoring me.  We were having a great time.  But soon it was time to pay the check and drive to the edge of town where a partial rainbow had formed over the stark, squat buildings of the state prison.  Once past the security desk, wearing our red visitor badges, we passed through high gates and rolls of concertina wire and were met with the incongruous sight of little brown bunnies hopping along the grass on the walkway to the visitors’ area.

Mary has been driving the 90 miles to and from Limon to help put on programs for offenders ever since the prison opened in 1992.  The regular group of six men showed up for the meeting, and we all had a chance to participate.  When it was Mary’s turn to speak, I watched the faces of the guys, young and old, lifers and who knows?  They sat across a table from a very small woman with snow-white hair and a smile that came from inside.  I wish you could have seen the depth of their listening to her, and how she listened back.

I’m well into the book my friend Tom recommended in Casper, and I’ve begun daily 45-minute workouts as prescribed. Another piece of the book’s thesis is to commit, to engage, to participate in the lives of others.  Mary Anderson is Exhibits A through Z on the benefits of this kind of commitment.  She talks of the offenders she’s come to know over the years as if they’re family.  She gets angry when things go poorly, and she can’t understand why more people don’t volunteer for the programs which Colorado’s Department of Corrections enable to come into the prisons.

As I sat at the table listening to Mary during the meeting, I tried to imagine myself 25 years hence and hoped I’d see a little old guy with a head of snow-white hair, toting the latest pocket tech gizmo and caring about something strongly enough to fight for it and to drive for hours to make it happen.

Mary doesn’t need Twitter to connect. She was a good sport, putting up with a dollop of Twitter attention. I want to thank my Twitter friends who responded with such warmth to my invitation.  I had a ball.

We return to Denver this morning after three days visiting Casper, Wyoming, where my wife and I met 27 years ago and lived till moving to the city in 2000.  I’ve never really enjoyed the outdoors, to tell you the truth, so city life suits me fine.  But being back here in Wyoming and reconnecting with old friends seem to have updated my operating system.  I’ll see if I can explain what’s new in this version.

The issue of physical health kept butting into my consciousness yesterday as I did the rounds.  One old friend’s body has been ravaged by stroke, lung condition, and a fall down a flight of stairs.  I had not seen him for nearly 10 years before lunch yesterday at the Casper Petroleum Club, one of my old haunts.  He was on oxygen, and his left arm was bruised and taped.  He’s in his early 80s, just as full of piss and fire as in the old days, when he was a state senator, and my job was often to lobby for things he opposed and to kill things he held dear.  It was an odd setting in which to form a friendship, but that’s what happened.  I enjoyed my dealings with Tom more than my encounters with so-called allies, because he was fierce,  principled, and irreverent.  He was always a one-man lightning bolt with thunder, and he still is. I saw it in his eyes yesterday as he clawed at his sandwich and laughed at our reliving of the old battles.

Another friend, about the same age as Tom, just returned from a trip to Israel and is planning trips this year to Denali Park in Alaska and the Galapagos Islands.  He plays two rounds of golf each week and goes to the nursing home each noon to feed his wife, who has advanced Alzheimer’s.  I don’t remember Jack working out or eating tofu, but for some reason he’s reached his early 80s relatively intact.  He’s cranky as ever, in a playful way that always makes me smile.

As if I were being led around Casper by a cosmic tour guide, my visit with a friend who at 57 is a year younger than I am included a moment in his office when he nearly leaped out of his chair, he was so excited to recommend a book he’s reading.  It’s Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You’re 80 and Beyond (click here for Kindle edition) by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge, M.D. The thesis is that you can, by exercise and sensible diet, dramatically improve your chances of good health in your eighties by getting ready in your 50s.  My friend said the diet boils down to “don’t eat crap.”  That and 45 minutes a day, six days a week, of aerobics and core strength exercises are, the book, claims, the Rx for an old age barely worth surviving for.

Last night I was a warmly welcomed visitor to the men’s group that I helped organize in 1990, inspired by Robert Bly and the then sure-to-change-the-world Men’s Movement.   Well, not so much.  But this particular group of men has been meeting uninterruptedly for nearly 19 years.  My old drum was still there in the upstairs meeting room, along with the talking stick I decorated with feathers and leather.  There were seven us there last night, and a couple of things had changed: not as much hugging, and no junk food.  Had they read the book?  Back in the day, each of us would bring a bag of something crunchy and harmful, and there were lots of back-slapping hugs that always felt a little awkward, but okay.  Since I’ve been gone, the awkwardness seems to have prevailed, and the hugless greetings last night seemed more natural.

The drumming was fantastic.  It went on for a good 15 minutes, a din of rhythmic energy and thrumming mind.  “I guess you can’t do that in your condo,” one of the guys said afterward.  At Men’s Group, whoever holds the stick talks, and the rest of us listen.  It’s a brilliant mode of conversation. As the stick made its circle a few times before being passed in silence for a full rotation, I kept hearing about the body, and the land.

One guy is gearing up for yet another commitment to work out regularly.  But on his first day of jogging, he pulled a muscle.  This provoked an instant roar of knowing laughter.  Another guy’s work with concrete countertops provides him days of physical effort that leave him happily spent.  Another is enjoying an orgy of healthy outdoor activities during his summer break from a job at a high school – biking, hiking, and hockey.  He glowed with physical well-being.  I heard stories of elk hunting, rodeos, and trespassing on a local landowner’s ranch spread outside of town.  The latter came with a question about whether to ask the owner’s permission.  “I recommend against it,” one of us said. “If he says no, you’ll probably need to avoid his place, and if he says yes, it won’t be as much fun to go there.”

At one point, after I’d asserted my preference for life indoors and online, William did not mock or contradict me when the stick arrived in his grasp, but his passionate recounting of the joys of being oudoors in sun, blizzard, rain, and all other conditions almost convinced me I’m missing something.

I do plan to read this book, and I do plan to get serious about whatever might help me arrive in my 80s as healthy as Jack, or as my father, for that matter, who at 82 strides a mile to his office each day in Cambridge, Mass., frequently whistling a happy tune.  I don’t have to love exercise to embrace its obvious benefits.  The land here in Wyoming does know something.  It is relentless, and the people who come and stay here are originals.  Even those who live here for a decade or two and then return to the city, leave changed.  It was good to be reminded of that during this visit to Casper.

I had a tour of the Limon Correctional Facility yesterday, in order to be cleared for helping to bring alcohol and drug addiction meetings into the prison.  It’s a sobering place, a state penitentiary plopped out in the middle of the eastern plains of Colorado, a drive of an hour and a half from Denver.