Denver, Aqui Estoy

I've been in Denver almost exactly a week now. I arrived safely last Saturday to the Meyers, after getting a speeding ticket in Iowa, and had only a day before work started. The company I'm working for is Down to Earth Compliances, and is mainly an erosion-control company that works with storm water. I wish I could say that I am fascinated by the methods in which we control erosion, but it's really not that interesting. There is a lot of digging, a lot of hard manual type activities, without a lot of machinery. I did get to use the 4-wheeler and bobcat a little this week, but otherwise it's just labor. AND A LOT of labor it is. Between Monday and Friday of this week, I put in about 65 hours of work (approximately 13 hours a day). I get up at 5:30 am, and get back between 6pm and 8pm. Then I go to bed, and repeat the process the next day. My spanish is improving daily, as I am the only white person at the company that doesn't work in the office. That's right, me and 30 Mexicans are out on the field doing the work. My name has officially been changed from Jon to whatever they want to call me.....usually something that I have no idea how to spell in Spanish so I'm just going to phinetically spell it in English----- "Where-o". It means white skinned person or something like that, kind of like Gringo. I, in return, have started calling them by whatever name I feel like too. For instance, my boss for the week (I'm going to be a crew leader starting this next week) was named Omar and he is a tiny little Mexican probably about 5 foot nothing. Therefore I call him "tiny dark skinned Mexican". Most of them don't speak much English at all, so I spend the day speaking Mexican and trying to teach them Spanish.

This weekend I'm going to try to learn the area a little bit better. I went with Mark last Sunday into the mountains and we climbed up St. Mary's glacier which is the southern most glacier in the states and pretty sad looking as I'm guessing there is only a couple years left of its existence. Brent and friends went into the mountains this weekend to do some hiking, but I needed a bit of rest so I stayed back. All of my soreness has disappeared, and the work should get easier now that my body has adjusted back to the hard manual labor that I once performed in Seattle (pipeline construction).

Until later.