Ponder Post: 2nd Chance

James Patterson's second book in his Women's Murder Club series is titled 2nd Chance. I read the first book, 1st to Die, just a few weeks ago and posted a review on it July 13, 2015. 2nd Chance focused on a series of murders with no seeming correlation among the victims... a young girl, an old woman, a middle aged man, an older man. Only blacks were murdered, and so racial discrimination as a motive was considered highly probable. Subsequent disclosure of self-contradictory clues kept the investigation oscillating between support or dismissal of a hate crime theory. I found the hate crime scenario distasteful. Even though murder is hardly palatable in general, it bothers me more when the victims are so innocent. It may be perverse, but I like it better when the victims have a personal connection to the murderer, when they are somewhat nasty or dishonest, or when, to some extent "they had it coming".

In a murder mystery, I like to sleuth along with the detective and prefer having a fighting chance of identifying the killer before he is revealed. This mystery was not really soluble until nearly the end; however, I do acknowledge that in real life, police would rarely get all the clues up front either. A reassuring aspect of a book series is that the cast of characters is familiar. As second in the series, 2nd Chance had some redeeming features in that I did not need to learn an entire new suite of names, skills, and personalities since many of them had been introduced in 1st to Die.

One thing I do like about a TV or book series is that there is often an over-arching storyline, usually a back story about one of the key characters. The main San Francisco police detective Lindsay Boxer is confronted with the reappearance of a very key person from her past and it was that plot line that interested me more than the series of murders. In that respect this book series reminds me more and more of the Castle TV series and there are many parallels between the main characters in it and those in the James Patterson's Women's Murder Club series. In Castle there is a mysterious relationship between Rick Castle (Nathan Fillion) and his father (James Brolin).

Hmmm, I wonder. Does James Patterson gets some royalties from the TV series? Mostly because I like the TV series so much, I will continue reading subsequent novels in this book series. They may not be stellar, but I am not quite ready to give up on them yet.

Ponder Post: Lighthouse Bay

Lighthouse Bay, a novel by Kimberley Freeman, takes place in an Australian seaside town. It tells the tale with a completely different set of characters in two distinct time periods, one in 1901 and one in 2011. The chapters randomly flit back and forth from one era with its set of characters to the other.

I found the 1901 tale of a shipwreck and the mystery of its possible survivor the better of the two stories – and two stories it was. The main characters are two supposedly strong women and most certainly they endured some heart-breaking tragedies such as the loss of a child and the loss of a lover. But, each of these women was filled with such self-doubts and angst that I found the purported portrayal of strength not credible enough for my taste. The concept of jewelry design as a skill outlet for these pseudo career women was a weak common theme, and seemed somewhat stereotypically sexist to me.

The concrete connection between the two eras was not revealed until the final pages of the book unless you count geography as being a suitable link. This is definitely "chick lit" certainly not at its insipid worst but surely not at its admirable finest either. Instead of breezing through Lighthouse Bay as a light and refreshing read, I found myself trudging through the pages as if I myself were dragging my feet through sand. I was captive on an airplane so I listlessly continued going through the motions of turning the pages. Amazon gave this book 4½ stars but I would grudgingly give it only 2.

Colorado Springs: Games and Good-bye

Friday, August 14th, was to be our last day in our, "Luxurious 7,844 square foot, 5 Bedroom, 6 bath, 5 fireplace rental home situated on 3 acres in a gated community." We had only one activity scheduled for the day, a 1:00pm appointment to get locked in a room with a one hour window to figure our way out from a set of clues. More about that game, later.

In the morning we entertained ourselves by doing a 300 piece jigsaw puzzle. Frank and I had picked up two puzzles on one of our numerous trips to – you guessed it – Walmart Supercenter!

We also played some Swish and Set Cubed Friday morning and one of the evenings earlier in the week. Swish is a game of pattern matching using transparent cards printed with dots and rings. The players are challenged to flip and rotate the cards to pair up dots and rings to form solid circles. It is fun and fast. It is also a game that travels well but you do need a light colored table surface large enough to spread out sixteen cards at the same time. Do not try this on the lap tray of an airplane.

Set Cubed is a game of forming trios of cubes that either match or differ in the three attributes of color, shape, and number. The cubes are placed on a gridded board and build off a horizontal or vertical pattern much like in Scrabble. It is more of a pondering, thinking, and brooding slower-moving game with just enough luck filtered in that each player can find a good excuse when he loses.

The game we went out to Friday afternoon was not a competition. It was a team game where all six of us were to work against the clock to escape a locked room. The company offering the experience was called Escape the Place and was located just about 30 minutes away, not far east of the entrance to the Garden of the Gods.

Here is the puzzle on the board in their waiting room. See if you can complete the sequence.

O,  T,  T,  F,  F,  S,  S,  ?,   ?,   ?

They offered different room lockup experiences. The one with six open slots when we wanted to go was titled The Hangover. Lack of sobriety just referred to the premise by which you found yourself locked in a hotel room. Drinking was not necessary to be successful; being drunk probably would have made things harder to figure out. After we entered and were locked in, a sheet of paper was slid under the door – the bill for our room. Or was it more than that? Our first clue! Or one of our first clues anyway. The room was seeded with many more: keys to find, locks to unlock, puzzles to solve, hints at references to find hidden somewhere, and red herrings of clues that did absolutely nothing.

We had a great time and from that point of view we were extremely successful. We did not get the door unlocked in under an hour, though. But we took heart that the success rate for that particular scenario is 8%. Our host showed us what we had missed and assured us we had been very close to solving. Yeah, sure. I bet they tell all their teams that to make them feel better. He also said we worked well as a team, dividing up labor and exploring different interpretations. Escape the Place took our photo at the end and posted it on their Facebook page.

Did you figure out the last three entries for the sequence I mentioned earlier? Hint – I am counting on you that you can figure it out.

We went back to home base and starting gearing up for packing to leave the next day. We had pizza for dinner and then decided that each of us wanted to leave a memento of ourselves in that home. Where better to leave it than in that grand entry? The ladies of our group posed in the upper statuary niches while the gentlemen chose the niches on the lower level. The marble Grecian women were gracious in allowing us a fitting space to voice our fleeting farewell messages.

Frank stoically states "Once more we have gallantly faced the fracas, my fellow companions. My heartfelt thanks I extend for this year along with my deeply seated hopes that we may all be together again the year next".

I was speechless and merely struck a pose symbolizing that we'd had a strikingly good time in gold strike territory.

John say, "Duh, were we on vacation?"

Sue says, "Now John, you know it was beatific!"

Joe say. "What? Is it over already?"

Margaret says, "Toodle-oo. See you all same time next year!"

Joe & Margaret and Frank & I had flights close to noon on Saturday, August 15th and so the four of us drove to the airport together. John & Sue caught a red-eye later Saturday evening. Frank's quote summarizing the trip was "Tumultuous but Terrific".

Colorado Springs: It's Golden

Frank and Joe were especially looking forward to Thursday, August 20th. We would drive to Golden Colorado, about 85 miles and 1½ hours north, to visit both the Colorado Train Museum and the Coors Brewery.

Train Museum
Colorado is known for its narrow gauge railroads that can negotiate steep mountains with sharp curves in the rails. We never did get to ride a narrow gauge railroad (time constraints) and we never did ride the cog rail to Pike's Peak (elevation constraints) but we did tour a railroad museum.

We knew we were at the right place from the welcome sign.

Joe was about to park the car in a chalk marked stall. Notice anything strange? A set of rails runs right through the parking spaces and, when we were arriving and parking, a train was moving along those tracks. It can be seen in the distance at the center of the photo. We picked a different parking spot – even though our vehicle was only a rental.

The depot general store building was painted in the mustardy yellow color historically emblematic of the Rio Grande railway line.

Railroad stations were a key place to go to send off a telegram. A small area of the museum building was set up as a as a telegraph station. Visitors could try their hand at tapping out a message in Morse code.

– • •    • •    • –    – •    •

    D      I     A      N     E

It was a hot day, or maybe part of it was that we had come down to a lower elevation 5674'. Denver the mile high city is at 5280'. A friendly co-visitor took a photo of our entire motley crew.

It was bright and sunny and many of the outdoor photos appeared washed out. I darkened this one so as to showcase biologist Sue near the rattlesnake sign. A ring of railroad tracks encloses the museum are and we were cautioned NOT to go outside that ring.

Riding the rails would have been even hotter, especially in the kitchen car where it was usually over 90° since the stove was kept at high heat not only to cook but to have hot water for washing. Pies were a popular item on the menu; altitude was not a factor in their successful preparation.

Off duty railmen slept in the caboose with its cots. Joe apparently got the memo on the color of the day.

There was also an upper area to look down the length of the track over the roofs of the other cars on the train. Note from the outer door that the exterior of the caboose was indeed the familiar red usually associated with cabooses.

Later, Frank was indeed excited to come upon a black caboose within the stockyard ground of the museum. This is a rarity and its discovery intrigued him as to how it came to be.

The day may have been hot but that is not always the case when traversing the mountains. Here is an example of one kind of snow plow rail car.

The museum had an extensive G-gauge outdoor railway layout. The small trees in the layout are not bonsai trees. They are just the careful and meticulous work of a volunteer who keeps them pruned to scale.

I liked the houses that portrayed a flashback view to an old railroad side western town. They were even tinier than those we viewed the previous day at the Western Museum of Mining and Industry.

The museum has a large round house where personnel do restoration work on old cars and engines.

The railing down to the restoration center was formed from a section of rail. It was baking in the sun and it was HOT!

A fan of radial track spokes surrounding a central turn table stored a variety of railroad cars in many sizes, colors, and functions.

You can see the extent of the spoke-like aspect of this storage area for rolling stock better in the lower right corner of this aerial view of the museum grounds. The restoration roundhouse and turn table is adjacent.

It felt refreshing to return back to the cool of the basement of the museum station where there was an indoor model railroad display in HO gauge running among mountain scenery. The large layout spanned three large size glass picture windows

Every vacation seems to have at least one American Gothic inspired photo of Frank and me and this is the one for Colorado Springs. Frank is wearing his hat from the train museum in Duncan, Oklahoma.

A visit to the gift shop snagged us another train museum hat for Frank. The D&RGW and K-37 embroidered under the prominent 491 signifies the Denver & Rio Grande Western K-37 steam engine that had been restored by the volunteers at the Colorado Railroad Museum. It had made its public debut there on August 30, 2014, less than a year before our visit. I also bought these wooden checkers that are carved with locomotives and cabooses.

During our stay we could not miss taking a photo in front of an especially well decorated billboard boxcar. Joe liked it, but even more so, what it foretold for our next tour stop.

Coors Brewery
The Coors Brewery in Golden Colorado was less than 2½ miles from the train museum. In theory it was only 6 minutes away but we scouted around the area and found a sandwich shop to get some lunch first. Now you would not want to go beer tasting on an empty stomach, would you?

At the parking lot for the brewery tour, we waited on a line with thirsty beer aficionados, sheltered from the blazing sun under some canvas shade cloth and moisturizing cooling misters. Fairly soon a tour bus pulled up that would shuttle us to the plant entrance a few blocks away.

The walking tour was of the self-guided, self-paced variety with a few strategically placed staff at stations along the way. We were each given a phone that hung on a cord about our neck. By pushing a button corresponding to the tour stop, we heard a pre-recorded talk about the area we were viewing.

Coors uses only two row barley. Two-row barley has a lower protein content than six-row barley, and thus has a more fermentable sugar content than barley with more rows per stalk. Couple that selectivity with the water unique from the mountain aquifers, and Coors beer proudly boasts to have something special going for it. We also learned about the hops and flavorings that were added to the basic mash of barley. The room temperatures throughout most of the tour were warm with a kind of yeasty scent floating through the air.

I found the packing part the most interesting. It was fascinating to watch rows and rows of cans stream in clusters, massaged into by single file rows, ordered neatly into columns, slid into cardboard packages, and then boxed up. Next time you see on the road a Coors trailer truck, fully packed with six packs of beer, remember this fact. If you took one six-pack out every day, it would take 90 years to empty the truck!

Those boxed packages zoomed up a conveyor belt and zipped right past the viewing window. The entire shipping operation is performed in a cooled facility. I think facility  engineers must have designed the air exchange system to dump the heat out into the viewing areas. This approach is not only energy efficient, but I also think it is crowd control wise, subliminally encouraging people to move along to the cooler, final tour stop in the tasting room.

Each person on the tour had a wrist band and was allowed three free samples. Coors was fairly generous. These samples were the size of a full glass of beer, larger than the soft drink cup in the center of the table. I had the lemonade. Even it was really good!

Drive Home
Just as we'd had a weather surprise on the day we toured the Garden of the Gods, the sky opened up and dumped torrential rains on us during our journey home. The weather was a far cry from the "blazing sun" and "moisturizing misters" we'd experienced a couple of hours before while waiting for the Coors shuttle bus. The 1½ hour drive north turned into a well over 2½ hour return drive going south. Traffic at points just crawled because visibility was so poor. Frank had not imbibed beer and was the driver for us. He was glad he was alert.

As we crept along, John was assiduously searching for a restaurant to perhaps stop and have dinner and wait till the conditions improved. He found no restaurants on our route and we queried that if the rain did not let up, did we really want to be driving in pouring rain and in the dark of night as well? No, we did not. We pushed onward and arrived back at home base safely before nightfall, stressed and hungry, but none the worse for wear.

It was great to kick off our shoes upon arrival and chill out. Fortunately, we had had the foresight the night when we bought steaks to grill, to also buy some boxed pasta and jarred marinara sauce. Sue grilled up some peppers and onions to go with it and we feasted, rounding out the meal with red wine. Where had the pasta and sauce come from? Where else but Walmart Supercenter!

In keeping with our RED theme – cabooses, checkers, red tail lights, velvet chair, marinara sauce, wine,  – we retired to the downstairs video room and watched the movie RED. We had actually seen the previews for RED 2 when we'd watched the Now You See Me DVD the previous night and RED 2 had looked interesting. None of us had ever seen RED, though. Co-incidentally John and Sue earlier on this trip had purchased the DVD RED at the bargain price of $5, the store clerk raving to them about how good it was. Where had they bought it? Walmart Supercenter, of course!

The cast of the movie consists of Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren. IMDB describes the movie as:

When his peaceful life is threatened by a high-tech assassin, former black-ops agent Frank Moses (Bruce Wills) reassembles his old team in a last ditch effort to survive and uncover his assailants.

Bruce Willis plays a retired CIA agent who strikes up a love interest with the gal he keeps telephoning to straighten out his messed up retirement checks. The movie was action packed but carried with it a sheepish type of humor. The theme was engaging and demographically appropriate to our group of six. Aging agents still know their stuff and do great! The movie RED sure was golden!

Afterward each couple retired to their room:
Joe & Margaret to theirs...

... John & Sue to theirs...

... Frank & me to ours.

Tomorrow, Friday, would be our last full day together. We planned to go easy since we were all flying back on Saturday.