On the road again and back in Denver.  No green grass, snow still on the mountains, pollen everywhere as spring approaches, but a BIG sky and space to shrug your shoulders.  I think growing up in Kenya just gave me a love of wide open spaces and big sky.  I am never happy in big cities, too many people, noise and bustle…I have come to enjoy the solitude of the high plains desert..being back here is OK!  

These can be cold days in Colorado or they can be blazing hot days.  The weather is totally unpredictable.  But every now and then in May, you wake up and the sky is blue, the Continental divide is covered with snow, the grass is green, the air is crisp and all is right with the world.  Today was such a day. I share it with you….

Spring is really sprung now.  When the wild plum trees bloom at the bottom of my garden I know that the last snow storm as come and gone.  The wild plums never wrong, they always appear after the last snow storm.  Nature works in strange ways.  TV stations pay millions of dollars to get weather forecasts.  Wild plum trees just know…..

At last, the snow is beginning to melt and the green green grass of previously fertilized autumn lawns appear.  I think our gardens are beginning to resemble golf courses in the degree of chemicals and pesticides and herbicides etc that we spray on the foliage and lawns.  They look good but are not good for us.  What is wrong with that statement?  We are the mass victims of mass marketing?  A green lawn sprayed with stuff that then has a sign with a skull and crossbones on it that says “Dogs and Children keep off” stuck in the ground is good for nature?  I’m going to see what happens to my lawn if I don’t apply chemicals…I’ll keep you updated.

One of the advantages of jet lag is that you can schedule REALLY EARLY breakfast meetings.  Normally these are events that I avoid.  In fact the first time I was invited to one in 1971 when I first arrived in this country, I was horrified.  It seemed to me uncivilized to want to talk business at breakfast.  I mean the English can hardly speak until around 10am or so..its a national agreement. I have lived too long in the US though and now accept them as a matter of norm.  Not that I like them, just that I accept them.  This is sunrise in Boulder taken on my way to a 6.30 breakfast meeting!

Well that didn’t last long!!  No sooner than the Daffodils had emerged than old man winter came roaring back and dumped a load of snow on us. Colorado in March and April is a bi-polar weather state, it veers around all over the place…calm one day, insanely warm the next, insanely cold a day later.  If I was a Daffodil I’d stay under ground until at least May….

From 110F to snow packed mountains and slushy, icy roads.  Global travel is now so common that coping with these dramatic changes are just part of everyday life in the world of international business.  One element that has not changed is the ability of ones body to adjust to the sudden time changes. Known to everybody as “jet lag”.  I hope that scientists are working on a pill because I am facing a 14 hour time change and I am not looking forward to it. The older I get the faster the world seems to move. I will have a lot of time to contemplate this deeply philosophical question as I sit in my study at 2 am, wide awake, writing my blog.