A man for all seasons

Randy, at age 12. I am now at his home in Ft. Collins Cdolorado and he is now 13 plus 38.

Ramona and I flew to Denver last Saturday and I stayed that evening with Ramona in Loveland,Colorado. On Sunday we celebrated Randy's birthday and also honored the three fathers that were present, namely, Randy ,Greg and Glenn.

Ramona was to work the next three nights as charge nurse in the Loveland hospital so I transferred my residence to Randy and Ellen's home.

They are at 4940 feet altitude here in Fort Collins and their backyard opens unto a 25 acre city park and 110 acres that is being added by the county and up the foothills are another 800 acres that is open area.

When we had the 7 acres in California Randy was actiive with the animals and grew a garden and was really aclimated with the great outdoors.

Outside his backyard here he has cleared some of the wetlands and mowed th wild grass, plated pine trees and effectivedly increased his backyard by asserting squatter's rights to this area. One block from the back of their home are running paths, bike paths and horse trails with people passing regularly- some of them are pretty wild but not as wild as the three deer that passed by yesterday. Two moved on quickly but one stopped 50 feet from his backyard fenced and grazed. Then he started eating the lower branches of a choke cherry tree that was recently planted on the park ground by his squatting neighbor. Randy clapped his hands, shouted but was duly ignored by the deer. So he walked out to the area and was less that 25 feet away before the deer chose to move about 20 feet..

I also saw and eagle fly over and land way up on the ridge that surrounds horsetooth lake, a lake-reservoir about ten miles long.. The name is derived from an outcropping of the mountain that resembles a horses's tooth. The early settlers saw in from the flatlands and dubbed it so.

Yesterday we witnessed Greg and Lisa's son ,Sam.Age 8, practice at a British sponsored soccer camp.

Last night, Ramona, hosted a dinner at her home in Loveland.

Dr. Greg Rye, D.C., gave me two gratis adjustments and I was too busy to take an hour for a session of acupuncture treatment, also gratis.

Today is the first day of summer and the temprature her at 5:30 was 58 down from a high of 96 yesterday. A nice spread indeed.

Randy is a management exceutive with Hewlitt Packard and has worked out of his home office by phone and computer for at least the last 5 years.

He has 5 computers in his office and this one here has a window for guests so I qualify. I was trying to copy a photo image of one of Randy's painting but failed the last two mornings so I settled for this image of hime at 12 years of age.

Randy was 13 when we moved to Loveland and the merchants were sponsoring a youth paintings contest.The prize wa $25.00 but you had to pay an entry fee.Randy chose not too and then he realized that the prize was out of his grasp so he paid the fee. The merchant then said that your 13 years old but Randy replied honestly that he had painted it before the age of 12. Randy won the contest but his painting career ended then.

He had taken private lessons from our nieghbor, Phyllis Pope in Riverside, Ca. and Randy was 5 when we traveled through Taos one summer and we farmed him out to a local resident artist for a half a day.

But he chose an accademic and business career. He has his MBA from Cornell University in Ithica, New york.