Hello everyone, sorry for the double post today but I would really like to invite anyone near Telluride, Colorado to join in a celebration of International Women's Week.

I just received this invitation and I wanted to pass it on!

I believe….

That we can live in a more equal and fair world

That we can significantly decrease violence---against women, men and children.

That to make change we have to be vocal, visible and hopeful.

Phenomenal Woman, a celebration of international women’s week in Telluride, is coming up March 9th-13th. The aim of this week’s worth of events is equality. I would like to ask you to check out the attachment of the schedule of events, to participate where you can and to forward the attachment on to friends who you think would like any and all of the events. Remember, everything is free and open to men and women, young and old (except the yoga class, which is just for women).

Be Phenomenal. Join in the Celebration of International Women's Week in Telluride

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Combine bored people, with vivid imaginations, and a little too much knowledge of how others live their lives, and conspiracy theories abound. A close cousin to gossip, conspiracy theories go one step beyond reporting a persons actions and go directly into explaining why they did it and how they got away with it.

It’s easy to spot a conspiracy theory if you use your head. Anytime you hear the words “I think the reason might be..” or “This is possibly because of...” be on your guard. Some people go straight for the “It is so because I say it is so” approach. These kinds of people should be approached with great caution.

My favorite local conspiracy theory comes not from local gossip, but from the internet. According to several “Top” UFO sites, our area is home to a secret underground mind control base. This base is supposedly located somewhere around Paradox. It is what is known as a Deep Military Underground Base, or D.U.M.B. for short.

The people who developed this theory couldn’t possibly have visited our area, if they did they would understand how very unlikely this possibility really is. A military convoy passing through town unnoticed is about as believable as aliens landing on the lawn of the White House without us knowing about it.

You think big media has their eyes on everything? They have nothing on small town conspiracy theorists. Though I must admit, the thought is highly entertaining, and it would explain some of our more colorful residents. Local residents wouldn't let something like this slip by unnoticed, and most are too stubborn to be subjected to mind control anyhow.

Our reliable source doesn’t stop there, apparently our state is a veritable hotbed of alien activity. There are saucer bases in Alamosa, Fort Collins, and on the Grand Mesa. In Boulder, we have the headquarters for EMC, a type of electro-magnetic mind control that is being broadcast to modify the thinking of Americans and slaves. This is no doubt connected to not only the Paradox base, but NORAD itself. Did you know that NORAD has 1278 miles of underground road? I didn’t either!

So where are they sending these people once they are programmed? To Colorado Springs of course! To a network of daycare centers established by the illuminati, and youth hostels originally created by the communists have all been widely used by the communist faction of the World Order.

I've mentioned this to a few locals, and no one else has ever even heard of it. Some of these people know what their neighbor had for breakfast last Tuesday but they haven’t noticed all of the underground activities, men in black, or gray aliens?

Now that, I do find amazing!

I for one will be watching my neighbors more closely, at least one of them could be a government programmed mind slave. Though, it might possibly explain where the zombie rumors come from, I think the reason is clear. Some people are strange, and others are just plain nuts.

Instead of devoting our lives to uncovering conspiracy theories, we should probably do all we can to avoid boredom. This is what comes from a bored minds, and nosy neighbors.

I’ve seen a lot of conspiracy theories come out of my fair town. None so pressing as this, but in reality they are all the same aren’t they. They may be a close cousin to gossip and rumors, but they are the ugly cousin.

Have a nice Monday, and don’t forget, “The Truth is Out There.”

I’ve often joked that Nucla is the dirty secret of Colorado. It’s not that we are doing anything all that sordid, but rather people like to forget us. There are three roads branching off of the highway that lead into Nucla, and only one of them is marked. When I find a map of Colorado I look for Nucla, and more often than not it isn’t there. Naturita is usually there, sometimes Uravan (which doesn’t really exist anymore) but when it came to Nucla? “Shhh, we’d rather not talk about it.”

Nobody knows why this came to be, it just happened like all things do in a small town, somewhere way, way, back before any of us can remember, someone decided that was the way it was going to be, so that is the way it is. Outsiders often lump Nucla and Naturita into a single town, but to local residents that distinction has always been a major deal. In the past mistaking a Nucla person for a Naturita person would lead to dirty looks at the very least. Between the two towns there are less than 1500 residents.

Even our own county forgets we are here sometimes. It is nearly a two hour drive to get to our county seat, and using the main road we have to pass through two other counties before looping back to our own county. Montrose is still a small town by many standards, not as small as us, but still small.

When government services cut funding, we are usually the first area they cut. We no longer have a social worker in our area. Instead personnel from Health and Human Services drive down once a week. A representative used to come up from the Department of Motor Vehicles once a week too, but he stopped a few years ago. We don’t have local law enforcement, though we have in the past. Montrose County contracts out services to us, supplying us with a few full time deputies and the occasional nod from the Sheriff. We do have a representative from Vocational Rehabilitation that comes down once a month to meet with clients, but many services are overlooked entirely.

Our grocery store closed it doors last spring when the previous owner suffered financial difficulties, there are rumors that it will reopen sometime this fall under new ownership, but with only two stores in the area it made a huge impact on local residents. The store was Nucla’s main source of tax revenue, and what little money did flow into the town from this source will be at least halved this year.

Last Christmas my mother spoke with a woman who came to Nucla from Telluride with a group of kids. The woman said she wanted the kids to see what it was like to be poor, so she chose our community to illustrate this. While people all over the country, and even the world are talking about financial hardship, people in Nucla have already been there. We’ve been there for a long time, and for us it is nothing new.

I’ve thought about this a lot as people talk about crashing economies, rising gas prices, and corporate bailouts. Some people even go as far as announcing the oncoming of a second great depression. I don’t doubt it, but I don’t worry about it so much either. I guess I already figured out that people in the city will have to learn to live without a lot more than we will.

We’ve had a median income of $28,000 for a long time now. We still know how to grow our own food, we know what it is like to live without conveniences that others take for granted. We still live close to nature, and we still know how to use it to survive. It will hurt us too, it already has, but we have survived economic hardship for so long that the news of more economic hardship isn’t really news to us.

Above all we still have something the sprawling urban areas have lost, we have a sense of community. We might have to draw a little closer now, but we will make it. There are many reasons I choose to live in a small town, and this is only one of them.

So maybe we aren’t such a dirty secret these days, as others are having to learn to live the way we already do. Maybe we are just choosing to be a well kept secret now, maybe we like it that way.