Consider the vile political environment at the national level – and please leave it there. As we move forward with our election, let’s remember that what makes our community so special is that we’re neighbors.

Buena Vista just had a week historians will note in the future, the baseball equivalent of hitting back-to-back home runs in the ninth inning while trailing in Game 7.

Considering the old adage “No news is good news,” perhaps the most notable difference between last year’s ballot proposal to build new middle and high schools and this year’s effort has been the lack of campaign signage.

A year ago, during a contested presidential election on down through state and county races, local 3A signs for and against outnumbered the other campaign signs in the Buena Vista area. Fast forward one year, and Vote No signs are nowhere to be seen. Vote Yes signs began popping up just recently.

The difference this year, proponents say, is that they listened to the objections of homeowners and business owners in the district by holding numerous information-gathering sessions following last year’s failed effort.

Reitter’s resignation last Wednesday, announced by the mayor 2 days later as he left town and the state, means yet another chaotic transition for Buena Vista.

I hadn’t been here very long back in 2012. We were waiting to see if the Mayans were going to be right about their calendar come year’s end. Drought gripped the state.

What a perfect time for a hike that mid-afternoon near Marion in 1990, where I worked my first newspaper job as a stringer at 50 cents a column inch and five bucks a photo.

I was 9 years old back in the summer of ‘69, a boy whose suburban neighborhood and world were filled with riding bikes, scouring the golf course property lines for errant shots that landed in backyards, swimming in the back yard pool – and baseball.

Political affiliations don’t carry as much weight or importance in local elections, where name and character are what matter.

Contingent, of course, on Madison House Presents accepting earlier music curfews and a little less bass thump.

Earlier this summer, I did something I hadn’t done since my college days – had fun at a music festival.

Now, to be clear, I’m not talking about those people who couldn’t wait to spew vile and vitriol on social media at any and every one who didn’t share their opinions.

If there’s one thing that can be said about last weekend that would be in complete agreement all over town, it’s Vertex shook Buena Vista.

I was there, from Thursday until late Sunday evening, researching everything there was to be seen and heard as thoroughly as possible.

The Vertex music festival brought all genres to be sampled, enjoyed and danced to – and there was dancing everywhere to be watched or joined in – as 8,000 or so souls smiled their way through the weekend.

Vertex’s official tagline is “A summer celebration of music, imagination, and the best of the Colorado Outdoors.”

Tuesday I watched a deeply gray storm build in intensity over Mount Yale from the relative safety of Fourmile North while thunder also rumbled behind me to the southeast over Park County.

An in-district email last Thursday announced Holmes was resigning.

There are still a couple of vacant buildings on Main, but very few these days.

By a 4-1 vote, the new board of trustees denied a tire shop’s request to move into a building that had previously housed the business.

I can understand teachers being upset at the way the change was handled, and that could and should have been handled better and with more communication. That way, it wouldn’t have the appearance of being shoved through.

We contacted Colorado’s Petroleum Marketers Association director Mark Carson, who advised, then admonished us to be careful using the word collusion.

Precinct 7 approved Amendment 64 to allow recreational marijuana use 571-505 (53 percent) in 2012, while Precinct 8 voted 326-301 (52 percent) in favor of it. Precinct 9, which includes a small part of town, voted Amendment 64 down 412-294 (58 percent).

You’d think Buena Vista was doomed to be the set for a bad sci-fi movie about a pot-smoke fueled apocalypse where doobie-smokin’ bearded hipsters and the like are turned into zombies looking for brain munchies.

The idea of bringing upwards of 20,000 festivalgoers to Buena Vista is an exciting one, especially considering the outstanding job Madison House Presents did last year with Salida’s Gentlemen of the Road event.

Change – and Selby – were back in the news again late last week, the result of a question posed during Tuesday’s town trustees meeting.

Winning a state championship takes effort that begins years in advance.

I’ve been battling what many of you call fall weather in the Rocky Mountains, nursing along three tomato plants in my garden.

When livestock get branded, the hot iron burns hair and hide, and presumably, if you are the animal, hurts a little. At least I think it would.

In this gig, one has to be part duck, and just let the barbs slide off the end of the tailfeathers. It comes with the turf, quite literally sometimes.

While the critical gateway effort at U.S. 24 and Main Street has languished under conflicting approaches to the corner’s redevelopment, East Main Street has taken its own initiative to implement ideas suggested to the community by Downtown Colorado Inc.