Secret Santa

I got a little crafty this year. The $50 minimum meant that I couldn’t get a nice jewelry box….so I went with the trusty Michael’s approach. A plain wooden box some gold leaf and metallic leafing materials and I was all set…

The finished product

and here it is!

SO SCARY and WEIRD
How does that say Happy Holidays?!

The tour begins

This is in an atrium off of Park Ave. I don’t normally walk through buildings on my way to work, but it was for a good cause.

Now here comes the candy factory as referenced earlier….

Candy Canes CookiesEek! So creepy and not even the scary mole man thing…that is still to come…

Random holiday decorations

Midtown is a melange (big word!) of “holiday decorations” this time of year. We’ve got the obvious Christmas Decorations, the mixture of “Christmas” and “Hanukkah” decorations, such as my office which has huge wreaths in a Christmas motif then small trees decorated in blue and gold.

But then we get the buildings that don’t want to offend anyone so they are more winter themed as opposed to holiday themed. On Park Ave, there is an animatronic candy shop complete with gingerbread cookies and striped aprons on the creepy little dolls.

The building next to me takes it to a whole new level though…creepy Madame Alexander-esqe dolls of every race and creed ice skating on frozen ponds, amidst the cotton ball snow drifts. What is the real kicker though is the smattering of gopher holes around each pond. Expecting a cute fuzzy animal to provide some cheer? Oh no. What you get is a creepy bearded man/mole type of thing that pops in and out of its hole. Hands down the most disturbing decorations I’ve seen in my years here. Pictures to follow….

O Christmas Tree

Helped J&T pick out their tree yesterday-9 foot Balsam fir. I am from CO after all, gotta be good for something She’ll have much better pics eventually, but these’ll do for now.

Back to Normal

Home after Thanksgiving….Spent Wednesday in LA, saw Felicity Huffman, whoohoo! Thursday and Friday in Boulder/Denver, brrr 11 degrees at one point!

The cat is back home from the vet after 7 days. I think we’re back to normal….

In Honor of Halloween!!

When I was little and we lived in Denver, we lived a few blocks away from Cheesman park. One year I had a Halloween party and my parents decided to take us on a “ghost walk” around Cheesman park. Basically it was dark and a bunch of little girls in costumes walked to the park and were scared out of our minds before we even got there…mostly having to do with the story below. I do remember though, some poor biker, coming around a corner and scaring us, we all shrieked at the top of our lungs and he fell off his bike! Poor guy never knew what was coming.

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_7324470

Eerie past haunts Cheesman Park
STUDENTS TACKLE ARCHAEOLOGY CORPSE-WORK
By Allison Sherry The Denver Post

Professor Lawrence Conyers has found some pretty fascinating stuff in this world with his ground-penetrating radar machine - a Christian church in Tunisia, a buried Mayan farming village in El Salvador, Roman temples in Jordan.

And, this month, a child’s coffin 4 feet below the ground in Cheesman Park.

At the request of a cable television show called “Scariest Places on Earth” a few years ago, University of Denver professor Conyers lugged the machine to the park for a staged stunt.
Now he uses the park - a former graveyard - and its interesting subterranean activity to teach archaeology students how to map grave sites.

“My students want to dig it up, and I said ‘No way,”‘ said Conyers, one of the world’s leading experts in ground-penetrating radar, which he compares to a CT scan of the ground. “People put them in the ground for a reason, they shouldn’t be dug out. They should be left here.”
Cheesman Park’s botched transition more than 100 years ago from graveyard to gathering place makes the sprawling lawn a great classroom for Conyers’ students and, according to many paranormal types, angrily haunted.

“Our outlook on this is that cemeteries normally aren’t haunted, there is no reason for them to be,” said Bryan Bonner, an investigator for the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society. “At Cheesman, there was desecration.”

Bonner and other paranormal investigators have done about six investigations in houses around Cheesman in the last 10 years.

In 1858, when Gen. William Larimer claim-jumped land from the Arapaho Indians to create Denver, he put the city’s cemetery in a field where the current Cheesman and Congress parks and the Denver Botanic Gardens are. The cemetery, called Prospect Hill, had Protestant, Jewish and Catholic burial areas, as well as a section for Denver’s Chinese population.

But in the next 30 or so years, the cemetery fell into disrepair. It was weedy and ugly, cattle were grazing there, and some of Denver’s more affluent residents decided that they wanted the bodies moved. One of Colorado’s senators persuaded Congress to allow the site to be converted to a park.

An undertaker, E.P. McGovern, was hired to exhume the bodies from the lower park and move them to Riverside and Fairmount cemeteries. For every casket delivered to Riverside, McGovern received $1.90.

News reports at the time said McGovern was cutting up bodies and putting them in more than one coffin to get more money. Some of his workers were taking “souvenirs” from the grave sites.
Eventually, the whole mess was stopped. McGovern’s contract was yanked, and the city graded and leveled the land and created a park. Historians guess 1,000 bodies are probably still buried there.

A jawbone was recently found in the park, Bonner said.

The first thing Conyers, who says he approaches investigations purely scientifically, notices along the lower road of Denver’s historic park is lumpy depressions in the land.
The topsoil covering graveyards often appears bumpy because of collapsed wooden caskets, Conyers said. Even in the places where bodies were exhumed, refilling the hole with different soil can cause pits in the land.

In Conyers’ archaeology work, he looks for any kind of change in the sediment beneath the ground as evidence something is going on down there.

The Cheesman exercise is purely educational. In his professional work, Conyers has studied sediment on Grand Mesa for evidence of climate change, and will go to Wyoming next year to try and find the rest of a woolly mammoth a scientist unearthed.

The small coffin he found near a sprinkler pipe in Cheesman, between the lower road and the white pavilion, is probably made of lead, Conyers said, because it hasn’t deteriorated.
DU alumna Jessica Gabriel, who is helping Conyers investigate the park, said she may “swing by” Cheesman tonight to celebrate Halloween.

“But I don’t think I’ll go out of my way,” she said.

Someone’s ready for Halloween!

Brooklyn Saturday Nights!

PBR!

Cheeeese!

Carving Pumpkins

My pumpkin rocked!