Video: Smokin' ACES: An overview of my time in Denver

I shot this video using my Canon point-and-shoot digital camera, so again, the quality of sound and picture just isn't there. At least I finally mastered video exporting in Final Cut. My videos can only get better after this.

I used Viddler for this one because it allows larger files than YouTube. But if you want to see the YouTube version, go here.

Oh, and if I knew how to change that stupid look on the preview frame, I would.

So long to Denver's mediocre food, time difference, cold air

A river snakes probably somewhere in the South.

I'm getting the tiresome and routine posts out of the way. I eventually will get on with the controversial and critical ones about copy editors and all the things I learned and didn't learn during the ACES conference in Denver.

My blood obviously has thinned during my seven months in Florida. Denver's cold, dry air didn't go over so well.

For one, I noticed my nose getting drier during my time in the city, and the skin on my bones was becoming something akin to a flaky pasty. There's one good thing about Florida's humidity: It's an automatic body lotion.

The conference rooms at the Marriott, in which I heard informative ramblings about various aspects of copy editing, were kept at, I'm guessing, a chilly 68 degrees. Copy editing isn't a very aerobic exercise, so I had to do something other than moving around to stay warm. But even a combination of two T-shirts, a long-sleeve shirt, a sweater, a jacket and four cups of Earl Grey per hour didn't work.

By the last night of my stay in Denver, Saturday, the chill was in my bones. I shivered. I coughed. I couldn't get warm. For me, it effectively ruined the conference-capping party.

I suppose it didn't help that I couldn't get a lick of sleep in Denver. Maybe it was the air. Maybe it was the hotel bed. But most likely, it was the two-hour time difference. Besides the one-hour differences I've experienced by traveling to New Orleans and Maritime Canada, I had never been subjected to a two-hour jet lag.

It so messed me up that I woke up at 6 a.m. Sunday for my 6 a.m. shuttle ride to the airport. I made it, though.

And it was partially because I was tired and because of my lack of airplane experience that I didn't realized I had an assigned seat on my United for Ted flight back to Orlando.

I got onto the plane, picked a seat at random, sat in it and noticed that everyone else was trying to find assigned seats. Then, I looked at my ticket: 20F. I checked which seat I was in: 20F. It could have been the luckiest thing I had ever done. Too bad I didn't win a prize.

During the flight, I looked down and saw a distinct line with snow on one side and brown grass on the other. In the photo below, you can see snow on the right side but not on the left. Good riddance, Denver and your weather. Twenty-two years of living with snow and the cold as a native Mainer, and I can no longer handle it.

Smokin' ACES home

Denver food disappoints; Burger King has its number

Boo for cancerous burgers.

Cornbread isn't good unless it's in the South.

I must not have been ordering the right thing while I was in Denver. I had just one good restaurant meal in the mile-high city. And it was a wrap.

On Friday, copy editors from Florida assembled for lunch at Rialto Cafe on the 16th Street Mall. Because it's a local place, Rialto had an advantage over the U.S. chain Rock Bottom Brewery, where I had the cheese-shy mac 'n' chicken. But the food was even less impressive.

I didn't see any Rocky Mountain oysters (bull testicles) on the Rialto menu, but I still wanted beef for my lunch. It would have been a shame to leave Denver without having beef. So I went with the "Rialto Burger." Nothing special. Just a hamburger with cheese, onion and lettuce.

But Rialto made it especially bad. I asked for medium. They cooked it extremely well. Actually, it was burned. I've had juicier Whoppers after they've been warmed five times in a microwave. I spent $10.28 just to get closer to death because of the cancerous charring I consumed.

The cornbread served before the main course also was poor. It was dark and properly cooked in an iron skillet, according to my Southern co-worker, but it didn't taste corny at all.

I thought I ordered the chicken, not the salmon. Just by looking at the piece of chicken, the meat seems pink. The color was even more apparent after a few bites.

We didn't have a choice of dessert, but it was good nonetheless. You can't go wrong with strawberries and frosting. Sadly, it was the best food I ate Friday.

Meal No. 2 on Friday was served at the Marriott, the American Copy Editors Society's gracious host. The price of the meal was included in our conference fee. And just as meal No. 1 was overcooked, meal No. 2 was undercooked.

Attendees at Friday night's banquet were given a choice of chicken, salmon or some vegan or vegetarian substitute. Skeptical that Colorado would have good Rocky Mountain salmon, I went with the chicken. Big mistake.

The breast came smothered in cheese and mushrooms. It rested on a bed of rice with carrots and asparagus.

At first bite, I thought, "how delightfully moist and tasty." As I worked my way toward the bone, however, the taste became rawer and moister. A bit too moist. I looked more closely at the color of the meat, and it was a sure deep shade of pink. Too bad my burger wasn't like that.

I told everyone at my table about my likely discovery of salmonella. We were done; unfortunately, the chicken wasn't.

Smokin' ACES home

Copy editing = great; copy editing with a view = even better

John Boogert, news editor at the Rocky Mountain News with whom I joined on a panel about online editing, took a large group of copy editors on a tour of the building that houses the Rocky and The Denver Post. I'll post more about it later and more about the technical side of editing, but I just wanted to pass on a few photos of the view from atop the building. Rocky Mountain High, Colorado!

Smokin' ACES home

Not cool: Hot shower burns at Marriott in Denver

I'm not worried about libeling the above shower head. The best defense against libel is the truth. And this one is a real scorcher.

The stream of hot water it spits at me each morning at the Marriott Denver City Center is quite enjoyable, until things go south. About twice during each shower, I have been burned by a burst of extremely hot water. It comes without warning and lasts about a second, plenty of time to cook the Florida-thinned skin on my back.

I'm not in the Sunshine State anymore. I don't expect to be burned doing routine tasks. And at something like $200 a night, I expect to take a shower sans fear.

The shampoo is nice, though.

Smokin' ACES home

What food is Denver known for? Mac 'n' chicken, apparently

Jim Thompsen of the Kitsap Sun in Washington state took about 30 American Copy Editors Society members to the Rock Bottom Brewery for a pre-conference dinner Wednesday night. I was looking for something different on the menu, and I found the mac 'n' chicken, pasta shells smothered in a few types of cheese and mixed with chunks of white and dark chicken meat. It was $11.99. Ham goes well with mac 'n' cheese, but chicken? It's weird. The dish wasn't even very cheesy, which was perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the meal. But the accompanying house salad with blue cheese dressing was good. It was cheesier than the mac 'n' cheese.

Feeling quite unsatisfied after devouring the mac 'n' cheese, I ordered a piece of carrot cake for a good-bang-for-your-buck price of $5.99. The monstrosity sat in a lake (well, Floridians would call it a lake) of caramel sauce. The brown goo was a strange complement to carrot cake, but the cake itself was great. ...

... It was so great and so large that I needed three forks to eat it. Well, half of it. I ate the other half for lunch the next day.

Smokin' ACES home

I'm from Florida; what's all this white stuff?

The Weather Channel was right. It snowed in Denver this morning. Co-worker Beth, who has been stuck in Florida her whole life, has never experienced snow to such a large scale: 1 inch. Of course, Maine got 200 inches this year, so the novelty of it wasn't there for me. Above, she shoots the flakes.

This is the view from my 12th-story window at the Marriott in downtown Denver. My only complaint about the hotel is that the shower has spurts of scalding water that burned my backed twice this morning.

Beth obviously has no experience in making snowmen. This poor guy had the proper three sections, but he wasn't quite proportional. I equate the snowman with a reporter (it had a big head). Beth was upset when someone knocked him down, too. My guess is that the little snowperson just melted like M&M's in your hand.

Smokin' ACES home

Offlede visits real city, can't escape cheesy tropical 'plants'

Living in Florida makes me miss real cities with real culture. Orlando? Tourist town. Miami? Don't get me started. Melbourne? Some people call it Melboring. Denver, on the other hand, is loaded with cool restaurants, parks and the old prairie-style buildings that line many of the downtown streets. This city has real history. Before the American Copy Editors Society national conference began, I got a chance to walk around town Wednesday afternoon.

I would have given my stylebook to be at college hockey's Frozen Four during my junior year at the University of Maine, when my beloved Black Bears played Minnesota in the national championship game. Well, maybe I wouldn't have: They lost. Denver is the host this year. I noticed mostly just University of North Dakota fans clad in green shirts. But then I saw a University of New Hampshire fan, and I gave that guy a bad look. UNH is evil. Above, a banner features Paul Kariya, who played on Maine's first national championship team in 1993. The Black Bears' second title in 1999 was represented on a banner by Ben Guite.

I went to a funky little cafe near my hotel for lunch and had a "No Fad Thai" wrap, which contained chicken, lettuce, red cabbage, green onion, carrots, rice and peanut sauce. Quite moist and delicious. And at only $5.50, I saved my company some money.

Ah, die-hards. I used to be one during my childhood in Maine. I would play golf on the frozen lake in the winter. I would ride floating sheets of ice as they broke away in the spring. I didn't go running with my dogs wearing only shorts, though: I didn't have a dog.

The lower part of the downtown is expanding with condos. But unlike the growth in Florida, Denver's is being done with some taste. There's something about red brick that looks prettier than stucco. But why did the developer of the above complex feel the need to put a fake coconut tree on the top? It's 40 degrees, man. It's not going to grow. Maybe it's just the coconut part of a frozen pina colada.

The 13th step of the Colorado state Capitol is exactly one mile above sea level, according to the engraving below my feet. A cold rain was falling on me when this was taken, hence the constipated look.

Smokin' ACES home

Life in 111 words: Toto, I've a feeling we're not in KansasFlorida anymore

Subdivisions of Florida

Fields of Colorado

I woke up this morning, and the television was flashing something about canceled flights. "Oh, no," I said. Thankfully, I was flying Southwest, not American Airlines.

I arrived two hours early at Orlando International Airport. But I got through security in five minutes, even after the TSA agent flagged me for not taking my computer out of its bag.

As the plane lifted off and just before the clouds enveloped it, I saw subdivision, subdivision, subdivision. Typical Florida.

As the plane descended below the clouds over Colorado, I saw brown fields, silos, tractors. For some reason, they were more beautiful than the commercial growth planted amid the natural growth in Florida.

Small-town Northern man from south goes west on a jet plane

Goin' fishin' with pops is a favorite pastime in a small town that has a lake.

I'm not sure why, but I've been listening to a lot of country music lately. It's likely because I live in the south now (but not the South).

It seems that every country song has something to do with a small town. Some feature "small town" in their titles: Miranda Lambert's "Famous In A Small Town," Kenny Chesney's "In A Small Town," Alan Jackson's "Small Town Southern Man," Kellie Pickler's "Small Town Girl" and Hal Ketchum's "Small Town Saturday Night."

And then it seems that every so-called "good" memoir is about a poor kid from a small town who makes it big, i.e. Al Neuharth.

Please. Stop.

"Small town" these days means 30,000 people. Where I grew up in Princeton, Maine, 30,000 was a big city.

To be exact, Bangor, a city of about that many people, was two hours away. As a child, I would look forward to the once-monthly, two-hour treks to the big city to do some shopping. Bangor had a Wal-Mart and a mall with a Dunkin' Donuts, a treat I couldn't get back my hometown of 892 people (I got mad when they discontinued the strawberry cheesecake doughnut). The nearest city, Calais (about 2,000 people), had shopping meccas such as the salvage-surplus store, Marden's, and the now-defunct Rich's, which was like an expensive but trashy Kmart.

And just tonight, I heard a country song that said "a left will take you to the interstate." There was no interstate where I grew up, only two-lane paved roads and one-and-a-half-lane dirt roads.

People who say they're from a small town here in Florida are partially lying. Most every little town here is located near a big city. Suburbs don't count as small towns. A co-worker is from the rural Lawtey (673 people), but it's only an hour from Jacksonville, Florida's most populous city at more than 800,000 people. Maine's biggest city is Portland, which has about 60,000, but it's five hours away from my hometown.

I'm going to segue this rant against "small town" wannabes into my current predicament: impending air travel. As a small-town sheltered boy, I rarely traveled to another state. Most of my trips were to another country: Canada was only 20 minutes away (but even that was rural).

My first time on an airliner was when my parents took me to Florida as an infant. I don't remember that. The second time was when I flew to Orlando in July for an interview with my current employer. Yup. That's right. I don't get out much.

But this year, I have four air trips planned, and the first is coming Wednesday when I fly to Denver for the American Copy Editors Society conference. I've been checking out Southwest Airlines' Web site for regulations on how much luggage I can lug onto the plane. I think I'll be set with my computer bag also holding my camera and a backpack of clothes. I'll be in Denver until Sunday.

This trip will be the farthest I've ever traveled from Maine, the farthest west I've ever been and tied for the highest in elevation. Maine has a mile-high peak that I've climbed several times, so Denver doesn't quite take the entire cake for that honor.

But this small-town boy is a big fan of big cities now, so I guess Denver is just next on my list (after New York, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Washington, Baltimore, Hartford, Halifax, to name a few). But the best cities are ones that still have the small-town feel of some of the more rural areas of their host states. New Orleans, for one, is a town I described as a sort of "urban bayou," which means it still has down-home characters amid the excitement that a city has to offer.

So I'm saddling up, expecting a unique Western experience in a big town (call it what it is).


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