We've been having an amazing December and January for snow. Early to mid December we were only at 60% of typical snowpack, but now we're up above 120%.

It threatened to snow in town on Saturday, but remained fairly warm and actually rained a little. I worked most of the day in hopes of taking Tuesday off to go snowboarding. The big storm that's blowing through should be done by then, hopefully depositing a bunch of snow in the mountains.

Early Sunday morning Morrissey and I headed up to Winter Park, since they were reporting 5 inches of new powder. The snow was great, but unfortunately Morrissey managed to break both of his bindings during the day, and I had some severe flu-like symptoms.


We did manage to get 6 or 7 good runs in, but ended up leaving around 2:00. The snow was really coming down, and we were somewhat afraid that they'd close Berthoud pass on us. The roads ended up being in good shape, and the trip back was non-eventful.

Happy New Year!

OK, I'm catching up quickly with the posts. New Year's Eve Kristen and I stayed at home, as has become the tradition. She cooked a big dinner, and we had a bit of wine. Kristen and I couldn't quite make it to midnight, turning in around 11:30.

Since Kristen and I both had Tuesday off, Kristen suggested we go snowshoeing. It seemed like a great idea, we haven't spent much time exercising outside for a long time. We found a few more friends who were interested, and soon headed off toward Nederland with Mike, Jeff, and Ann. We got a bit of a late start, as the rest of the party were still recovering from the previous night's festivities.


This gave us an excuse to use some of Christmas gifts. Kristen and I both wore our new REI shirts, and we got to use Kristen's new canvas bag to pack all our stuff in.


After a few miles of tromping around, we headed back into Nederland for some early dinner. Kristen has signed up for a 5k snowshoeing walk/race and vowed to get out a few more times before the event.

Merry belated Christmas!

I'm a bit late updating the blog. You'd think with all the time off it would have been easy to find some time to do this. Nope, too busy sleeping and reading, both of which were nice.

On Saturday morning, after loading the Focus to the brim, we took off for Casper around 8:30. The roads weren't too bad, although there was probably an hours worth of icy roads between Boulder and Casper. It took us five hours to get there, about an hour longer than normal. We met up with Brent, saw his new house, admired the work he'd done on it, then headed out for lunch. Brent had a sandwich named the "Quadruple Bypass", Kristen and I both enjoyed the "Angioplasty". The deep fried pickle spears really tied the sandwich together.

The rest of the drive to Cody wasn't too bad, another hour or so of bad roads were all that we saw. Ma & Pa were happy to see us, we unloaded the car, set up camp, and then had some chili and cornbread that Ma had made.

We slept in a bit the next morning, then headed out to the Sierra Trading Post, where Kristen picked up a few items. We also people-watched at Walmart for a bit, then headed up to the airport to pick up Becky & Jason. Afterwards, we headed up the North Fork to have appetizers at the Mummery's, visitng a place we'd lived at for two years in the mid '80s. The cabin we lived in seemed pretty tiny, it's hard to imagine four people living there.


Next we headed next door to Page & Pearre's for dinner. They were gracious hosts, and snapped a picture of the family in front of their tree.


The next day (Monday), was Christmas Eve. After a blueberry pancake breakfast there was much wrapping of gifts. Becky, Jason, Kristen and I went for a walk downtown to see what shops were open, and do a bit of last minute shopping. We stopped to investigate some schoolyard attractions on the way. I was tickled to hear some Black Sabbath at the Silver Dollar Bar while having a beer. Ma & Pa eventually came and picked us up as we stumbled back toward the compound.


That evening we went on another walk to look at the Christmas lights a few streets up from the house. It was snowing pretty hard, and the wind was blowing like mad. Lena joined us in the sub-freezing temperatures, and seemed OK going for a walk without either of her parents around. She still sometimes thinks that she is a lap dog.


To cap off the evening, we watched "Christmas Vacation", with all seven of us in the master bed.


Tuesday morning we awoke early to go through our stockings and open presents. There really was an obscene amount of stuff under the tree. It took us quite a while to get through it all. Ma served the traditional breakfast casserole to help keep up our strength during the ordeal.

That evening we headed up the South Fork to Pete & Melanie's for dinner. Pete didn't quite make it to the table for dinner. Melanie served up quite a feast, as always. I'd never had Oyster Rockefeller before, and enjoyed the experience.


The next morning Kristen and I packed up the furious Focus, and headed back to Boulder. The roads were about the same as they were on the way out, we made it back to the two lonesome cats in about 9 hours.

It was a very enjoyable trip. Thank you so much Ma & Pa for being such great hosts, and putting up with a full house!

Happy Birthday, Kristen!

Kristen's birthday was on Friday. She took the day off of work, and spent the day playing with her new KitchenAid mixer. In the evening we headed up to Nederland for the night. Kristen saw a mountain lion on the way up, unfortunately I was too busy white-knuckling the car along the icy road to see the lion in time.

We had a nice dinner, and stayed in our favorite hotel. The next morning we headed to Blackhawk for some high stakes gambling. We both lost about $20 on the penny slots after several hours. Luckily the weather had warmed up and the drive back to Boulder was a lot less stressful.



Sunday involved me spending a bunch of time at work doing a big software delivery. Kristen headed to her sister Allison's house to do some cookie baking. Kristen really enjoys hanging out with her nephew Maddock.

Winter is here! We've had a good amount of snow falling in the Boulder area for the last week or so. The mountains are really getting pounded, which is great news for the ski and snowboard enthusiasts. My co-worker Mike managed to play hooky on Friday, and made it up to Winter Park to enjoy the 20"+ of new snow.



The weather kept us pretty close to home all weekend. We did make it to a party at a co-worker's house on Friday night.

I managed to update the treehouse blog with the last details of this fall's trip. Kristen studied, we both pet the cats, and generally tried to stay warm.

Not much to report for last week. I'm having a hard time getting in the Christmas spirit, I still have a lot of shopping to do. Kristen's in better shape than I am shopping-wise, and is impatiently waiting for me to find that spirit.

It was a cold weekend, creeping into the 40s by Sunday. Kristen did a lot of studying, I did a lot of programming for a few projects I'm working on. Unfortunately, neither activity is very interesting when photographed.

The cats managed to get a lot of attention. Now that the weather is considerably cooler, they've both been crowding in on the bed at night. They seem to wait until you're in the most awkward position of the night, then they plant themselves in such a way that you can't move.

The end of year work rush is in full swing. We're in pretty good shape though, so I think we'll survive the crunch.

Happy Turkey Day!

Having four days off from work has sure felt good. Things were getting a little crazy at the office by Wednesday, I hope everyone is well rested. I for one did not spend any time thinking about work this long weekend.


Kristen spent most of Thursday cooking various side dishes for the big feast. This year we went to her father's place, which is about an hour east of our place. She cooked up a metric boatload of stuffing, including one batch of oyster dressing. I had to cut the oysters for her, they were freaking her out.

She also made some stuffed mushrooms that turned out great, and a chocolate pecan pie which was also very good. For my part, I farted around the place, trying to stay out of her way. We did have to make a grocery run, things were calmer at the store than we expected.

We arrived at the ranch around 5, just in time to eat. I was starving, and managed to eat more food more quickly then anyone else, at least initially. I think some of slower paced gentlemen caught up to me eventually. I even had 3 servings of the oyster stuffing, although by the last serving I was definitely done with it.

The highlight of the evening was playing bowling game that was hooked up to the TV. You had to hold the game controller like a ball, then time your swing and release properly. Bruce (Kristen's dad) got so excited that he ran downstairs and got out his bowling shoes, and his bowling towel. It seemed to work, as he consistently won each game.


A boxing video game came out shortly afterwards, and it was hugely entertaining watching two people swing in the air violently, sweating profusely and cussing the whole time.


The rest of the weekend was non eventful. I did a lot of game programming, Kristen e-bayed and did some post turkey day cleanup. The weather was remaining cold, so we didn't make it outside much. It didn't break 30 degrees for quite a few days.


We did make it out to meet up with Katie and Jordan for some cake tasting in preparation for their wedding. It was a fairly painless process, but I think that was partially due to us being hungry and all the cake tasting good. We also visited Muttropolis with Rocco, he seemed to like almost every chew toy.

Our last fish died recently, so we did take the time to clean up the fish tank, and ended up giving most of the gear to the Salvation Army. We continued to pack up other stuff, giving about half of it away, and putting the rest in storage. The place is slowly looking better, but it always seems like we have a ways to go.

We did go to one open house for a "quaint" brick house in downtown Boulder. By quaint, I mean small. It was a neat old house (built in 1900), but everything was tiny. The location was good, the house itself seemed in good shape, but it was too small and too expensive. We almost walked into an open house for a brand new loft right off the Pearl Street Mall, but I chickened out when I saw how fancy the reception area was. I'm guessing the asking prices was well over a million dollars. We weren't dressed appropriately, and couldn't have been unless we first went clothes shopping.


We tried getting the cats to pose for a x-mas style photo. Unfortunately they knew something was up, and quickly hid under various beds and furniture. We eventually coaxed them out, and got them to sit still for a while, but the photos didn't match what we had hoped for.