Greetings from Denver!
I’m out in Colorado for work right, and if you read this thing between now and Thursday and have any suggestions for things I can do in my downtime, please send them my way.I thought I’d get this out before I came back from Colorado, but nope, I’m very, very late with this month’s installment. My apologies readers, it’s been a crazy month. Speaking of crazy, one of only non-work things I got to do while in Denver was visit this immersive art exhibition called Meow Wolf. As you can see from the pictures below, the place is pretty unique. Thanks to Nick Bruce for the recommendation:
A New Tradition
For the second year in row, the Bilski clan spent our Thanksgiving morning at The Duck Inn. We participated in the duck race, or whatever it’s actually called.
Your question right now should be: What the hell is the duck race? Simple. The duck race is a Thanksgiving Day event hosted by The Duck Inn. You purchase tiny rubber ducks for $5/duck from a Duck Inn staffer who writes your name on the bottom and tosses them in among the hundreds of others by holiday revelers who did the same. Then, at the stroke of noon, scores of yellow, pink and blue rubber duckies are tossed into the Mighty Perkiomen a few hundred yards upstream for establishment, and the duck that makes it to The Duck Inn first is chosen as the winner. The winner’s name is announced over a microphone to great fanfare and that lucky person is entitled to the pot of money that was collected.
Sounds ridiculous, right? It is. It’s also sooo much fun! I promise you, if you participate in one duck race, you’ll be hooked. Picture hundreds of well-lubricated of adults of all ages combined with a healthy sprinkling of kids and teenagers spilling out of a packed bar and covering the hill along a picturesque hillside creek, screaming madly for rubber ducks that move even slower than my mother-in-law on the Jersey-shore boardwalk.
It’s a genius marketing tactic — come out for a few drinks to take the edge off before you see your family for the oft-awkward holiday get-together — by the Duck’s owner Mark, a tireless entrepreneur who’s withstood not one, but two, recording-setting floods in his first three years as the owner of a former dump of a biker bar that many locals were afraid to even set foot in before it was The Duck Inn.
Of course, I’m biased. Mark got crushed by the same storm (Hurricane Ida) that nearly took out my home, and I looked to him as a source of inspiration when shit was really, really dark for me. If a small, independently owned operation in one of the most difficult industries on the planet, could come back stronger after sustaining TWO “100-year floods,” one of which poured more than 24-feet of water into his newly rebuilt establishment, then so could my family and me.
I was gripped by Mark’s story and even wrote about for my local paper in an article titled, “Water off a duck’s back” (they kept my original headline!). Now here we are a year later, the Duck and the Bilskis, stunned but still standing. I try to go to The Duck as frequently as possibly, and when I do, I also take a second to stop and look at the framed copy of the article that’s housed in the bar’s entranceway.
Bilski’s Bits
Did I just throw this section in because I was looking for a way to incorporate the phrase Bilski’s Bits into this edition of the newsletter? Absolutely. That said, here’s a smattering of things I enjoyed since the last newsletter was published:
An amazing guitar-learning resource. This dude is not only a ridiculous guitar player, he’s also an incredible teacher. I’m embarrassed to admit how much of the past month I’ve spent watching Nikola Gugoski painstakingly going through Radiohead, Zeppelin and Hendrix riffs so I could learn to play them badly.
My friend is in The New Yorker! Talia Argondezzi, a brilliant and hilarious writer, wrote a comedy piece that takes a common phrase on a journey you could never see coming, complete with razor-sharp jokes and striking imagery.
A movie worth watching. It’s rare I watch movies that aren’t on DisneyPlus and rarer still that I make it all the way through the ones I do, but Raymond and Ray, starring Ethan Hawk, Hawke, Ewen McGregor and Anne Hathaway, is worth the two-hour time commitment.
Jared and Julia. I always try to keep my work-work and my personal work separate, but every now and then the two converge. That’s what happened when I got the opportunity to interview comedian Julia Scotti for a podcast my company recently launched.
Another Reader Question!
‘Do you regret not evacuating before your home was flooded?’
Submitted by Sarah D.
I don’t. Of course, that’s only because everything worked out. We were able to safely hoist our kids through the second-floor window and plop them down on the dry land of our front yard, while also sparing them the trauma of seeing their beloved toys floating around in the creek that had formed in the first floor of our home overnight. I give full credit to my wife here. I thought we had no choice but carry them through the first-floor wreckage, but Liz’s parenting instincts are impeccable; her mind is always formulating a plan. She knew if we could just get them out of the house without seeing the downstairs, they’d have a much easier time feeling safe in their home again.
We also didn’t have to rip them from their beds in the middle of the night to make the panicked evacuation we were seriously considering. When they woke up with a full night of sleep under their belts, we made the window exit feel like an adventure.
That said, we would never put ourselves and our littles in a dangerous situation if we thought there was even the slightest possibility our home would be washed away. Based on a faulty water level reading, I thought the creek in our yard had crested and we had nowhere to go when the water entered our home. We didn’t think we knew our neighbors well enough at the time to show up at 2 a.m. asking for shelter. Today, though we wouldn’t hesitate to knock on Tara and Johnny Q Wilson’s door.
Thanks for the question – please keep sending them my way. And as always, feel free to leave your in the comments section (or in any post) or email me directly at jrdbilski@gmail. Finally, if you’re enjoying what you read, consider sharing with others using either of buttons below my signature.
Til Next Time,
Jared