Colorado, Fossil Store, Political Ads, NFL Picks Week 6

I’m in Colorado right now, and holy crap is this state beautiful. I even included a second Instagram photo just so you could get another glimpse of it:

I mean, damn! I imagined myself living here: I’d have to take up skiing again, which is hella fun but has already cost me one knee surgery, but the summer hiking here is totally fantastic. I’d be crazy healthy from trudging through aspen forests and eating high-altitude farmed lettuce. (Apparently this was a thing.) I can see the appeal of mountain life.

• Also while here, we visited the By Nature Gallery, which is now my favorite store on Earth. Scientists digging for dino bones will usually donate the most choice pieces to museums, then this store purchases the best of the other fossils or mineral formations (quartzes, geodes, etc.) found in Utah, Ohio, South Carolina, Germany and other worldwide spots. (Apparently they tend to avoid purchases from China and Morocco because so many of the fossils there are high-quality fakes. The more you know.)

  This store sells only genuine fossils, and it blew my mind: you can walk in there and purchase an ichthyosaur skeleton, a hadrosaur egg, a saber-toothed tiger skull, an apatosaurus femur and even the full skeleton of a giant ground sloth. (At $900,000, the sloth fossil (slothssil?) is likely to end up in a museum.) Now I know where I’m going to blow all my money when I decide to adopt a high-powered destructive financial habit.

• Also, being in a battleground state, I initially felt bad about the huge number of political ads thrust upon the people here. But after just a few days, I’ve learned it’s fun to learn the lineup and guess by the first few ominous-sounding tones which ad it is. Romney has one that starts with a video of Obama saying “I’m Barack Obama,” but then it flies into all the questionably sourced ways that Obama is out to destroy all jobs and the middle class. They misdirection: that’s where they get ya.
• And the pro-football picks. I broke even last week – my ship is turning around, though that’s after it ran aground on an endangered coral reef and spilled millions of gallons in fuel oil into a marine reserve.

  Last week: 7-7; overall: 28-46
  Pittsburgh -6 At Tennessee
  Cincinnati -1 At Cleveland
  At NY Jets -3.5 Indianapolis
  At Tampa Bay -4 Kansas City
  At Atlanta -9 Oakland
  At Baltimore -3.5 Dallas
  At Philadelphia -4 Detroit
  At Miami -3.5 St. Louis
  New England -3.5 At Seattle
  At Arizona -4.5 Buffalo
  At Washington 0 Minnesota
  At San Francisco -5 NY Giants
  At Houston -3.5 Green Bay
  At San Diego -1.5 Denver