That is after I say: Today's run got shot down because my boot drive on my laptop took a great big dump. Instead of running, I got to visit Best Buy.
aside:: Now is a time where I can observe that Chuck is arguably my favorite show on television right now..........Alllriiiiight it's between Chuck and Fringe, but I have trouble giving FOX credit for anything ::/asideAnyway
Today, I did get a brief run in. Car seat was in Nataly's vehicle and I had to pick up the Beanery::Good news/bad news, I was running late and only had the Bean's chariot to grab him with. Absolutely humped it for the 1.75 miles to day care to grab him and managed to get in just under Nataly's preferred 5:30 pick up time - 5:29! So I ran 3.5 miles today in something like 30 minutes, but it's really tough to actually say how long today's run took, it's really fun running with the Beanery.
Saturday the 30th, will be his first race. I'm going to push him in a 5K in Louisville and then we'll see about a 100 meter dash. If it's ok for him to join, he'll be running. Maybe he'll DNF, but that's OK it's kind of a jumping frog story anyway. I'll be with him and I expect he might have some fun....
All right, back to yesterday's run.
I had some pretty random thoughts while I was out.
When I hit the head of Gregory Canyon, there was a CU bus sitting and waiting for a class to return. It made me think of when I was a GEOG undergrad and they took us out there to look at the Riparian Zone. I then thought about Net Primary Productivity.
Very simply put, NPP is a descriptor for how an ecosystem grows - that is how efficiently an area can turn Carbon into something useful, like leaves or tendons over a given period of time. The mouth of Gregory Canyon is quite the jungle as far as Boulder County is concerned, and as such is something of a statistical anomaly. Most of Boulder county is either essentially savannah or mountainous, but there's quite the diversity at the mouth of the canyons... Why does that matter? It matters because, when one looks at the Average NPP for Boulder County, there are datapoints which aren't representative for the ecosystems present and they skew Boulder's average NPP.
Anyway, I was quite distracted by the thought of how much the productivity at the mouth of Gregory Canyon (and other similar riparian zones), might skew the overall NPP of Boulder County. They represent a pretty small sample of Boulder County as a whole, but probably account for a very significant portion of Boulder's NPP. I then started wondering, what other systems might demonstrate a similar kind of behavior and my thought waves eventually wandered into the realm of economics - how much does the "Net Economic Productivity" of Denver skew the overall view of NEP for the State of Colorado?
It occurred to me that there is probably a similar effect. Generally speaking, there's quite a bit more wealth in and around Denver than there is in the rest of the state and it kind of begs the question, because things are rosy in Denver are decisions at the legislative level here in our great state informed by the comfort level of the legislators living at the mouth of the canyon (metaphorically speaking)?
I sure don't know the answer to that question, but much of the work I've done over the last several years has been ostensibly to help the kids in places like La Junta, Alamosa and Longmont, and not so much the kids in Boulder, Denver and Colorado Springs.
Apologies and thanks for reading,
J
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