Happy Holidays!

It's been a good 11 days since my last entry, and it's been a busy 11 days. On Tuesday the 19th, I came down with some kind of flu thing. A lot more was coming out of my body than was going in. I remember thinking, in a fever induced delirium, "At least I'm slimming down for the holidays." Luckily for everyone involved, I decided not to document that part of the week for the blog.

Tuesday night it started snowing like mad, and snowed through Wednesday and Thursday. We got about 20" of snow in our part of town. The cars were completely covered with snow, looking like large white bumps in the parking area. Kristen's work closed, and mine went down to a skeleton crew.



The Denver airport was utter chaos with thousands of flights canceled, and many thousands of people stranded. I was due to fly out on Saturday, right when things were supposed to be getting back to normal. By Saturday the airport officials were suggesting showing up 4 hours before your flight in order to not miss it. Kristen had plans on Saturday, and things worked out to where she dropped me off 6 hours before my flight.

After waiting through the longest security line I've ever seen and getting to my gate, they eventually delayed my flight two and a half hours. That resulted in my getting to Atlanta at 3 in the morning, after spending well over eight hours in the airport. I was glad the flu symptoms had passed.



I expected to see a very tired Becky at the airport to pick me up, but nearly the whole crew showed up, Ma, Pa, Becky, and Jason. Milly decided to stay home and hold down the fort.

Becky and Jason were great hosts over Christmas. Becky cooked some amazing meals, and Jason was a great tour guide through the city. There was a lot of cookie decorating, eating, playing with the dog, flying toy helicopters, touring various Atlanta neighborhoods, and general merriment. Ma cooked Christmas dinner, which was excellent, and we visited with a few of the Brown's friends in Atlanta. We packed a lot into the three days.




The trip back was fairly uneventful, I lucked out again and made it in right before the next big blizzard hit. We supposedly got 14" of snow in Boulder, but from what I've seen it appears to be closer to 10". I snowshoed in to work today with a co-worker, it took about 2 hours to do, and was a lot more work than I was expecting.




I hope everyone else had a great holiday, and that you're not experiencing the crazy weather we are. Happy Holidays!

We celebrated Kristen's birthday this weekend up at Winter Park. We headed out of town Friday night, ate dinner in Idaho Springs, and ended up at the condo around 8:30. Katie and Jordan met us up there, they'd arrived a bit earlier.

The next afternoon we headed out to the local tubing hill for some sledding. It's been a long time since I've rode a tube down a hill. It was a lot of fun, and the hill was steep enough to really give you some speed by the bottom. Katie lost a shoe a few times, but other than that we escaped unscathed. Here's some video of one of the runs.





After making it back to Boulder on Sunday, I decided to take advantage of a sale at the local board shop and picked up a new snowboard. My snowboarding buddies have been catching up to me skill wise the last few years. I'm hoping a healthy dose of technology will help stay ahead of the curve a bit. We'll see.

It was a much warmer week last week, with temperatures climbing into the low sixties at times. The cats have come out from hiding, and things are returning to normal.

I succeeded in getting some snowboarding in on Tuesday. A few of us met up at Winter Park and got a good full day in. The snow wasn't bad, we hit a few patches that had 12 inches of powder. The body seemed to remember how to snowboard, and I wasn't too sore afterwards.




The weekend was pretty slow. For me, Saturday consisted of sleeping, working in the garage, and a bit of online game playing. Kristen spent all day Saturday at the new job, continuing to learn the ropes. Sunday involved some Christmas shopping, and a big sushi dinner out with a few friends. It's starting to feel fairly festive around here!

It was a cold weekend in the garage. The temperature eeked above freezing today, the oil heater in the garage could barely keep up. I'm slowly honing my machining skills back to where they were. There a few critical parts to make yet for Motorama, here's hoping I don't screw up a complicated piece.

We skipped the final 5k run of the year, it was just too damn cold. With a week of no running, I can practically feel the paunch growing back. It's supposed to get above 40 tommorrow, hopefully that will knock the snow back a bit. It snowed pretty consistantly starting on Monday. I finally dug the Mustang out of the snow, there were at least 8" on it this morning.

Kristen starts her new job at Abacus tommorrow. She has slowly been building up her nervousness level, I imagine she'll be fairly insane by tommorrow morning. That is to say, she'll be a bit more insane than normal. ;-)

The mountains have also been getting dumped on. Winter Park got 12" on Friday. I'm hoping to skip some work this week with a few co-workers and see what the slopes are like.

With the colder weather the cats have been seeking shelter. Here are a few pictures of Zack and Ada trying to keep warm.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Kristen and I headed down to Denver for the holiday at her sister Allison's house. There was a lot of food of course, and we ate most of it. Luckily there wasn't a repeat of several years ago when everyone got sick after eating Thanksgiving dinner at her cousin Cassie's.

I spent a bunch of time in the garage on Friday and Saturday doing some robot stuff. At one point the table started to bind up in one direction, so I tore the entire mill apart, something I've never done before. I cleaned everything up, inspected the screws for problems, but couldn't find anything. I got it back together, it still binds a bit, but it's not too bad. It was a messy, greasy job.

I did end up finishing a couple of parts, the one below captures the planetary gears in a planetary gearbox, and supports the other end of the carrier pins, hopefully making the assembly stronger. There's a big bot competition in February, so I suspect I'll be doing a lot more bot related stuff on the upcoming weekends.



I also spent some time adding content to the treehouse blog. I still have a ways to go. I'm hoping once I get that out of my system I can start thinking about what the rest of the project will look like.

We went for a run on Sunday and saw a Bald Eagle up close and personal. The weather was great, and it felt good to be outside after spending most of the long weekend indoors.

Happy Birthday Ma! I hope you had a good one!

Kristen and I had a 5k race on Saturday in Brighton. We both shaved a good amount of time off of our previous 5k, which always feels good. We then headed up to Blackhawk to celebrate Kristen landing a new job. She's going to be a Senior Accounting Manager at Abacus in Lafayette. She's pretty excited about it, it should be a good career move for her. Plus, their holiday parties sound like a lot of fun, so I'm stoked! ;-)

We didn't do much gambling in Blackhawk, and headed back to Boulder early. We did another good run Sunday afternoon, and then got a few things done around the house. The weather was amazingly nice.

Last Thursday I met up with Jim Reynolds and his sister for dinner. It was fun hearing from someone who's spent some time on the farm and the place in Canada. It sounded like they were in for a long weekend of snowboarding.

Thanksgiving is coming up this Thursday, we're planning on spending it at Kristen's sister's place in Denver. It's starting to feel like the holidays!

Didn't do a whole lot this weekend, and that's the way I like it! It'd been a hectic week. My college friend Brent was in town Tuesday and Wednesday, so those were both late nights. Thursday a group of us headed to the annual Warren Miller movie. It was fun as always, and it really got us in the mood to snowboard.

Saturday was spent working away in the garage. Ted, Derek and I are ramping up for a few more bot competitions, the first one being in February. It'd been months since I cut metal on the mill, thankfully it all came back quickly.

Today Kristen, Morrissey and I ran the Panicking Poultry for the third straight year. We had decent times but were a bit slower than last year. It's always a fun race because they feed you well afterwards and have a huge set of door prizes that they give away. This year they also had free beer, which made for a rowdier than usual group of runners. I won a pink fleece jacket/shirt which Kristen happily claimed. Morrissey won a $30 gift certificate at the local spaghetti joint. Kristen's number didn't come up, but she's won big in the past.



We have another race next weekend and hope to do a bit of running this week so that we can hopefully improve our times.

What a week of work! Several 12 hour work days came and went, and I was in the office all weekend. Sunday was a 17 hour work day. I haven't had to put that kind of hours in for 4 or 5 years. The good news is that the roll out went very smoothly, and things should get back to normal starting today. We spent about 6 months working on the code that went out on Sunday, so it's nice to see such a milestone come and pass successfully.

Because of the work, I don't have much to report. We did call a merciful end to the mustache competition that a few co-workers and I had started. The best part of the contest was shaving it off!

Kristen and I ran the "Eerie Erie" 5k this Saturday. We figured that after running 13.1 miles the weekend before, 3.1 miles would be cake. We were wrong. I was secretly hoping that I could break my previous record of 23:35, but instead came in at 25:05. Kristen also added a few minutes to her normal time, coming in at around 36 minutes. It was surprising how difficult of a run it was. I'm not sure if it's because we've been training to run longer distances, or if we're just still worn out from last weekend.

Kristen then went to see her sister and mother for lunch, and then we took the rest of the day pretty easy.

Today (Sunday) was the annual "Critter Crunch" bot event down in south Denver. My team mate Ted and I headed down to show the local guys our mad skills. It didn't really work out that way, I ended up placing in the middle of the pack for both the 2 pound weight class and the 20 pound. Ted also did mediocre in the 2 pound class, but swept the 20 pound class with his vacuum assisted bot, "The Inhaler". Regardless of how we placed, we had fun hanging out with our local geek friends, and talking microprocessors, machining, autonomous logic theory and the like.

Ted's 2 pound bot was a new one he whipped up in the spirit of my two pounder, Sister Christian. "Uncle Sam's Daughter" made her debut with great success, at least from the audiences point of view. We had a grudge match between the two bots, and had a lot of fun karate chopping and punching one another.




Next week is going to be hell at work, we're planning on releasing a major version of our software next Sunday, and I'm sure we'll be running around like mad trying to prepare for the big event. Hopefully it'll go smoothly, we've put a lot of effort into it.

Ouch! We are both sore after a long weekend trip to Moab for our half marathon.

We took off on Friday morning and headed east on I-70. Going over the various passes was a bit tricky, it was snowing pretty good in spots. We were glad we'd left a day early, Vail pass was supposed to get a foot of snow on Saturday.




We stopped in Grand Junction to eat lunch with Katie. Her boss Jack graciously paid for our lunch. He was pretty excited about us running a half marathon. The guy's living in the wrong town.

After getting into Utah, we followed highway 128 for a while, driving through scenic downtown Cisco. I believe there's a lot of affordable real estate available there.



We drove along the race route, and noted a few daunting hills. The scenery was amazing though, at least we'd have something pretty to look at while we punished our bodies.




We checked into our room at Red Cliffs Lodge, it was pretty posh. Our deck overlooked the nearby Colorado river, and had quite a backdrop. The pictures don't do it justice.





We ran into town, did some grocery shopping, then headed back to the room for the night. The next day we headed off to Arches National Park. We spent a good part of the day hiking around and admiring the impressive scenery. The weather was great, we hoped for more of the same the next day.






We hung out in Moab a bit, then headed back to the room for a nap. We had a less than impressive dinner at the restaurant at the lodge, then off to bed.

The next morning we got up around 6:00, got dressed, got on the bus, and was dropped off at the start of the race. About a thousand people ran it. Kristen and I had slacked off on our training a bit, so we didn't know how we'd do. I was aiming for getting done in about two hours, Kristen was hoping to finish in three.

The race started, and my first mile clicked off in 11 minutes. My goal pace was about 9 minutes per mile, so I didn't have much hope of making my 2 hour goal. However, my pace quickened, and eventually I could tell I was averaging below 10 minutes per mile. Around mile 7 the hills started up, and my memory gets a bit fuzzy. I do remember the glorious last mile, which was all downhill. I made that last mile in under 8 minutes, which felt great. I crossed the finish line at 2:02:46, a few minutes slower than I'd hoped, but I am still very satisfied with the run.

I met up with Jordan and Katie who had driven down from Grand Junction. We eagerly awaited Kristen who finished at 3:00:30, only 30 seconds behind her goal. She dropped her running gloves twice, having to backtrack significantly to go pick them up again. She was very happy with her time.

We ate lunch with Katie & Jordan, then headed back to the room for a big nap. We laid around for the rest of the night, and the next morning, trying to recover. Today we awoke with sore legs, and started the long drive back.

The weather was great on the way back, much better than on the way out. We stopped in Idaho Springs for some pizza, and were back at the house around 4. There were two lonely cats here, and we've spent the rest of the evening attending to their needs.

The event was a lot of fun, and it actually got me excited about running again. We've signed up for a winter running program that runs through new years, a lot of 5k races are included. I'm hoping to get my time down below 23 minutes, into the 22 minute range. We'll see how well we do at running in the colder weather.

Whew! A lot has happened since our last posting.

I took off for Indiana on 7th. I spent the following week working on the platform for the treehouse I've been dreaming about for 4 or 5 months.

The short version of the story is that with a whole lot of help we got the platform built and put up in the tree. It was a lot of work, but things turned out great. It was a good feeling to see something come into reality that I'd planned on paper for so long. I couldn't have done this without the help of a lot of people.

It was a real team project. I'd discussed the design of the platform with 8 to 10 people. A lot of the ideas that came up during these discussions made it into the final plans. Thanks go to Derek, Nate and his dad, Ted, Matt and his dad, and Dad for a lot of good ideas.

The building of the platform was also a group effort. Tommy Burkhart helped in a million different ways, from accepting 200 pounds of shipped material to recieving my lost luggage in the middle of the night. He also lent us a lot of valuable tools that we couldn't have gotten by without. Thanks Tommy!

Thanks to Jason & Becky for their help. Jason showed up right when we needed some extra muscle the most. We couldn't have gotten the thing up in the tree without you. Becky helped keep our bellies full at critical moments, and didn't complain when we stole her husband away for most of the weekend.

Andy Roller helped us tear down and pack up. It was great seeing Andy again after all these years. Thanks Andy!

Most of all, Thanks Ma & Pa for all that you did!

Mom, thanks for all the food you supplied, the great breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. Thanks for doing the dishes when dad and I were too pooped to lend a hand.

Dad, thanks for everything. It was a lot of fun working with you on this, and I certainly learned a lot. Thanks for drilling the critical holes, thanks for coming up with so many ideas on how to get things done. Thanks for sticking in there for that last item when we were both so whooped.

Instead of documenting the building process here, I've started another blog that is solely treehouse related here. It's empty now, but I'm hoping to add to it over the next couple of days or weeks to document the steps we took to get this done.

Here are a few pictures from the trip.

Our weekend didn't turn out anything like we expected. We were supposed to go up to Winter Park to do some work on a friends condo. We were planning on staying up there the entire weekend, doing a bit of touch up here and there, and generally hanging out in WP. After the two hour drive, we walked up to the door only to find all the lights on and a dog barking feverishly at us. The place was not supposed to be rented out, and the owners are in England. We knocked, but no one came to the door.

Either the place had been mistakingly rented, or there were squatters afoot. Regardless, after hanging out for a bit, we turned around and drove back to Boulder. It was a very frustrating experience, I'll be curious to find out what happened.

That freed us up to go to a house warming party down in Denver. My buddy Ted and his wife Kathy bought a really run down house, and worked hard fixing it up. It was amazing to see how great the place looked after all their work.

We did a 1.5 hour run today, we're "tapering", meaning that each run is getting shorter and shorter leading up to the big half-marathon run on the 22nd. We also did a bit of gardening, things are really starting to die off out there. We tore out the remaining cucumber plants, but managed to find a few giant cukes hiding out.



I also spent some time preparing for the impending Indiana trip. Trying to buy everything I expect to need, and getting it to the farm is proving to be a logistical challenge. Luckily, Tommy Burkhart was kind enough to let me ship a bunch of stuff to him. Some heavy duty angle brackets have made it there (8" X 6" X 7", .5" thick), and I've just gotten about 40 pounds of hardware in the mail here which I hope to turn around and ship to Tommy tommorrow. I'm still missing the 6" X 1" lag eye bolts that should show up late this week. Those were hell to find and procure, so hopefully they'll show.

I'm sure I've gone drastically overkill on the hardware I'm using, but I figure it's better to go too big than too small. Plus big bolts are just plain cool. Below is a picture of the new hardware, versus the first stuff that I bought.



Watching the weath in Dryden, it looks like Ma & Pa are in for a nice last week up there.

This was our last relaxing weekend that we'll get for a while. We slept in on Saturday, then spent some time at Sam's Club picking up bulk items we were running low on. We then went and met our neighbor's cat, since we may be cat sitting for her a bit in the future.

Kristen and I then drove down to "Furniture Row" which is a street in Denver lined with furniture stores. Our couch has been shredded by the cats, so we're in the market for a new one. We saw a lot of great couches, and a lot of mediocre furniture. The only interesting furniture we saw was all Amish made, it was definitely higher quality than a majority of the other stuff.

Sunday entailed a 2 hour run. We tried out a new path that went past some beautiful houses. That inspired me to check out online a few neighborhoods we'd seen over the summer that we liked. They were all drastically out of our price range. One neighborhood we'd seen from a distance only had one house in it under $700,000. D'oh! Even the neigbhorhood in Longmont that we liked was averaging in the $700,000s. I guess we need to lower our standards.

I talked to Ma & Pa on Sunday, they were getting ready to head up north to Canada. I wish I was going up with them, I regret not making it up there this year. Hopefully the weather will cooperate with them.

Not much to take pictures of this weekend, so here are a few Canada sunsets.

Thursday was the fall company picnic. Matt cooked up some of his amazing barbeque, and we all ate and drank until we were stuffed. It was pretty much what you'd expect at such a function.

Friday Kristen and I took off around noon to head to Grand Junction for our annual "Tour of the Vineyards" bike ride. Her sister Katie lives there with her boyfriend Jordan. This was their second year, and our third for biking the tour.

The scenery heading up was beautiful, it's a great stretch of interstate. The aspen were just starting to change color, in another week they'll be amazing.





We got up around 6am on Saturday in order to get ready, eat, and be at the starting line at 8. The weather started out windy, rainy, and overcast, but then cleared up to being just windy. We had to fight the wind for about 10 miles until we got to ride along with the wind for the other 15. Katie got a flat, but we were prepared this year, and got it fixed without incident.



We then did our typical touring of the wineries via car afterwards. Kristen ended up buying a case of wine, Jordan & Katie picked up a similar amount.



We were more whooped than last year, so we had a pretty laid back evening. Then up at 7 to head back to Denver. A rock slide had killed someone on I 70, and we had to make a detour through some very badland-esque territory. We were back in town by 2.







A few friends from out of town were in Boulder on Sunday, so we headed out and ate a huge indian dinner. I probably consumed about 5,000 calories a day, starting on Thursday. I'll be happy to get back to a more sane eating pattern.

Tonight my friend Derek came over to machine a few plastic blocks on the mill for a biped robot he's working on. It's been a while since we hung out in the garage and talked bots. It was good to get back in there.