Kristen and I headed to Nederland last Saturday to check out the annual "Frozen Dead Guy Days" festival. The usual crowd of mountain people, sightseers, and generally interesting people showed up.


It started snowing pretty hard during the parade, but that didn't seem to slow anyone down.


A nice selection of hearses showed up, no flame throwers this year.


The coffin race teams also were also in the parade, a few looked a bit chilly.


We ate lunch in town, then drove around the mountains a bit in the snow.

Sunday involved sleeping in and me spending most of the day at work. Kristen and I did get a good run in in the evening. Training sessions have started up again, so it's time to dust off the legs.

Kristen also braved the garden meeting alone, we managed to hold on to half of our plot from last year. The increased interest in gardening resulted in half plots for everyone, and a lot more politics being played out. She did run into an ex-coworker of mine from way back in the Core Systems days, making the world seem a little smaller.

Two Saturdays ago, I headed up to Winter Park with Morrissey and several other friends. We rented the same condo that we were in last year. The snow started out good, and the weather was warm.


Luckily on Tuesday we got 7+ inches of fresh snow, although it was extremely wet heavy stuff. It was still a lot of fun to be up there mid-week with fresh snow.


Kristen showed up Wednesday night, the roads were nice and clear all the way up.

It snowed a bit more (4+ inches) on Thursday, luckily it was a lot lighter this time around, and made for some of the best boarding of the trip.


Kristen, Morrissey, Diane, and I tried our luck skiing on Friday. It's been probably 15 years since I've skiied, it was amazing what a change of perspective it brought on. Runs that I wouldn't even notice on a snowboard suddenly became terrifying chutes of death. Luckily we all survived, and it was good to remember what it's like to be new to the sport.


We did a bunch of hiking to less accessible spots. Vasquez Cirque once again was the most exciting, we wandered over to a few steeper spots than what we're used to. They were steep enough that you couldn't see the slope in front of you, steep enough to get the butterflies going in your stomach. Fun stuff!


We're planning on going to Silverton later this month for a guided ski tour. Hopefully it's still snowing, it promises to be quite an adventure if it all works out. I've got my avalanche probe and shovel ready!

Kristen and I are back from Winter Park. I'm struggling with getting any pictures or video out of the new cameras, so a full report will have to wait until later.

The trip was a lot of fun, I certainly got my fill of snowboarding. It feels good to be back in a familiar bed and eating normal food again.

More to come!

Happy Valentines Day! Happy Birthday Dad!

Kristen and I went out for a pre-valentines day dinner on Friday night. We ate at The Cork, which is a relatively well known Boulder restaurant that I hadn't been to before. The food was great, and our waiter's French accent was fairly hilarious. I half suspected he was putting us on, but he never slipped out of character, so maybe it was real...

We exchanged gifts, Kristen gave me all kinds of great stuff, including this Pabst Blue Ribbon "Tall Boy". You can see the excitement in my eyes.


Saturday evening I tried to recreate the famous Maxwell House "Roma". It turned out a bit bland, the Alfredo sauce was a bit boring. Oh well, it still tasted good.

Sunday we generally took things easy, and watched a marathon of "Flight Of The Conchords". Good stuff.

An exciting week at work awaits. Thursday and Friday involves a few corporate visitors, we're having our "Tech Summit". Hopefully we'll impress everyone with what we've been doing in the last 6 months or so. If not, back to the tree house for me!

This weekend involved a quick trip to Deadwood to meet up with the college friends. The original plan was to do some snowboarding on Saturday, but we didn't make it to bed until 5am or so, which curtailed the day of snowboarding.


We did a bit of gambling on Saturday until the wee hours of Sunday morning. As always it was fun seeing the guys. Brent announced his engagement which was a big surprise for everyone. Nate announced that he's having a second baby, which wasn't quite as big of a surprise, but still good to hear.


We're all getting older, oddly enough. We're coming up on the 20th year of knowing each other, which is pretty mind blowing. Having friends with teenage children is also a bit hard to comprehend.

Here are a few more pictures from this last weekend.

I'm still recovering from a long weekend at Steamboat. My friend Morrissey and I took off Thursday morning around 6, and were on the slopes around 10 am. It had snowed over a foot the night before, so the conditions were amazing.


We stayed at a friends-of-a-friends place that was within walking distance to the slopes. It snowed a bit on Thursday night, and the snow remained good throughout the weekend. I don't believe I've ever been in snow as deep as we saw on Thursday, there were several times where I was belt deep in the stuff. We truly shredded the gnar, to use the parlance of our times.


Kristen spent the weekend in Grand Junction with Katie and Jordan. They did some shopping and trading of books, as is their way.

I unfortunately caught a cold or the flu on the trip, so I've been feeling pretty low the last couple of days. Hopefully things turn around in time for the trip to Deadwood this weekend with the boys.

Short Snowboarding Video