Merry Christmas!

Kristen and I have survived another trip to Cody for the holidays. I headed out on the 23rd, and had a smooth trip out. The roads were 99% dry, and other than almost running out of gas near Casper, it was a pleasant drive. The folks were happy that I made it alive. I had to challenge Dad to the "Feats of Strength" at some point.


Kristen showed up the evening of the 24th fresh from England. She was a little jet-lagged, but overall she had a good trip and no snafus on the way to Cody. We drove around Cody to see the Christmas lights before heading back to the house.

For only having four people at the house, the number of gifts under the tree was a bit obscene. Mom had fun lighting the candles and watching them burn.


Christmas morning came, and we proceeded to open the gifts. The place looked like a bomb hit it, which is par for the course. Lena helped open a few of her gifts, but never got too crazy. She seemed a little confused to what all the commotion was about.


We all received a bounty of wonderful gifts. Of note was my Honduras key chain holder. I'm still debating exactly where to place it. I had fun trying to guess which of Becky and Jason's gifts was the one that didn't cost them any money.


At some point we fed Linda and Elijah's chickens. The turkey found Kristen's pants (or maybe butt) interesting, and kept pecking at it. I found it hilarious.


After a few days of taking it easy, Kristen and I headed back to Boulder. The roads weren't bad, there were a few slick spots. We watched a car load of teenagers pass us, then skid off the road after a few miles. We helped them get started up and pointed in the right direction again.


Back in Boulder, the harsh reality of going back to work loomed. It was lessened somewhat by the enjoyment of many of our gifts.

Last week was pretty busy trying to clean up the water mess and get things taken care of at work. I did manage to get all my Christmas shopping done, along with all the "leaving town for a while" errands.

On Friday a few friends and I played hooky to do some snowboarding. The mountains have really be getting hit hard with the snow, so it seemed like a good time to take a vacation day. We got 16 challenging runs in on Friday, and another 11 in on Saturday. I was pretty spent after Friday, Saturday was a lot rougher going. The snow conditions were great, and the crowds were non-existent. The high on Saturday was 6 degrees, which may have scared a few people off. We all got a bit of wind-burn on our faces, but it was worth it.

Sunday involved a little work, more trip and Christmas errands, and a lot of recovering from snowboarding. I tried petting the cats a bit extra since neither Kristen and I would be around for a bit.

Kristen did make it to England OK and has been sending me updates on the trip via e-mail. She just recently returned from a trip to Wales and took some great pictures.

I ended staying up until 4:30 fighting the various water issues coming through my ceiling. I think I used every pot, pan, bowl, and bucket that we own. Very little got on the carpet, but there is some drywall damage. Luckily the condo association will pay fix it, so other than some inconvenience, it wasn't too big of a deal.

I'm having a hard time keeping up with timely posts. Just not enough hours in the day.

Last week was pretty crazy. We had corporate visitors in town for the first half of the week, and the fallout of their visit kept us really busy through Friday. My brain was frazzled by the end of the week. Friday while brushing my teeth I thought I had dropped the toothpaste off of the toothbrush before it made it to my mouth. As I was brushing I looked around the floor to see if I could see where it dropped. Not finding it on the floor, I felt around in my mouth, thinking perhaps that it was hiding out in there somewhere. No luck there. I mentally retraced my steps, and came to the horrifying realization that I'd put face lotion on the toothbrush, not toothpaste. Yuck!

Kristen and I met up with her Dad and Step mom for dinner in Platteville. Bruce told a joke about a woman receiving a fax from her butt, which received a mixture of laughter and rolling of eyes. Later, Kristen and I headed out for a beer with a few of my coworkers to celebrate the end of the week. Unfortunately we were all so burnt that it was a pretty lackluster affair.

Saturday involved going to the mall to do yet more X-mas shopping. It seems to never end. Afterward Kristen and I headed to the mountains to celebrate her birthday. It snowed like crazy on Saturday night, which gave me more excuses to try out the new vehicle on icy roads. It's pretty sweet.

We got back to town early on Sunday. Most of Sunday was spent getting Kristen ready for her England trip. She got all packed up, and was ready to go.

Monday I drove her to the airport around noon. I haven't gotten the "I've arrived" e-mail yet, but I'm assuming she made it. Meanwhile the cats and I have been trying to stay warm. Cody's has had it worse, but we had a high of -4 on Monday.

I love technology. Here's a picture of Aida taken with my new camcorder. The resolution on the thing is crazy. Oops, it looks like this actually a quarter of the resolution that it normally is, I can't quite yet figure out how to get a full resolution picture off of the thing yet.



It can store about 2 hours of video at that resolution at 30 frames per second on a 16 gig SDHC card. Here's a picture of the card next to a quarter. To put things in perspective, our Commodore 64 we had in the early eighties had 64K of memory. That tiny card can store 262,144 times more data than that first computer could.




I was just about to hit "Publish Post" when a strange noise came from the other room. The vacant upstairs condo had a pipe bust, and apparently it just thawed out. The Fire Department was here, I have all my buckets and pots out trying to contain the deluge. Looks like I'll be up late tonight.

The doldrums of fall have passed, and we had yet another active weekend. Friday my boss was in town, we had a pretty exciting meeting. Meanwhile, Kristen picked up her date for the weekend, Maddock, and sister Allison was more than happy to pawn the guy off for a night. Luckily Katie showed up to help out, and between the two of them they kept him out of trouble.


The three of them slept on the pull out bed. I got up early to go snowboarding only to find Kristen and Katie wide awake with Maddock sleeping between them, snoring loudly. They quickly whispered that they had been up for hours, dealing with the kicking, punching, and weird noises that were emanating from the diminutive boy. Unfortunately I was too preoccupied with snowboarding to snap a picture.

My day was a lot of fun, the snow wasn't too bad, and Morrissey and I managed to find some runs that were challenging enough to keep us interested. We brought a new friend Josh with us who is new to snowboarding. He had a lot of fun, even through all the falls.

I returned home to the aftermath of a large cookie baking party. Allison and Cassie (and Ashley) had shown up to help bake cookies, it sounds like there was a bit of pandemonium. Maddock had fun helping.


Everyone left except for Katie. Kristen, Katie and myself were exhausted from our days activities, and went to bed pretty early. Katie took off early on Sunday. Kristen and I headed out for some Christmas shopping and lunch.

At various points during the day Kristen mocked me a bit for being so sore from my day of snowboarding. I heard things like "I HURT ALL OVER!" and "I'M AN OLD MAN AND CAN BARELY MOOOVE!". Hilarious, that girl.

We relaxed for the rest of the day, in preparation for the week ahead.