Sweet, sweet internet.

After almost two and a half months, we have internet access at home again.  It's amazing that we survived.  Hopefully this translates into more blog posts.

Kristen and I (mostly Kristen) managed to get all our stuff out of the Mapleton house, and most of our stuff out of storage into the new place.  It's amazing how much, uh, stuff we had in storage.  We have a lot of boxes to go through, and a lot of hard decisions to be made yet.  Maybe by Christmas we'll have an organized house.

Becky, Jack, and Chelsea made it out to visit for five days last week.  They witnessed us at our most stressed-out moments, hopefully they managed to have some fun after everything was said and done.  Jacoby sure is cute when he's in the right mood.

The cats were curious, but not that curious.

We did spend Sunday driving up through Rocky Mountain National Park.  It was a lot of driving, but the scenery was great.  Everyone enjoyed posing with Jack.

It also gave me an excuse to take some panoramic photos.

Closed & Moving in!

Kristen and I closed yesterday on the new house, and are in the process of moving in.  We worked pretty late last night trying to get the essentials moved over.  The movers show up on Sunday to move the big things from the Mapleton house.  In the meantime we've started emptying the storage units, and gotten the cats into their new territory. 

Initial impressions are that the kitchen seems smaller than we remembered, and that master shower is tiny.  No other surprises so far, knock on wood.

Hopefully by the end of the weekend we'll have the majority of the work done.

A Hot Summer

We're roasting here.  We've had a few weeks of 90+ days, it's getting a little old.  The current rental house does not have an attic fan, a swamp cooler, or AC.  The cats often look like puddles of fur, plopped out on the floor in random spots.

Two weekends ago Kristen headed to Grand Junction to enjoy the "Cast And Blast" program from the Colorado Division of Wildlife.  It's a free program for women, and covers the basics of fly fishing, shotgun shooting, and archery.  They had fun, although Kristen didn't manage to catch a fish.

I have some new video/photo software, so I threw the following animation together:





I spent the weekend working mostly, although I had a few guy friends over for a movie and beer on Saturday night.

This weekend involved a trip to Colorado Springs to root Katie on in her half-marathon.  It started and ended at the Broadmoor, which is a pretty swanky looking place. 

My new photo software will automatically stitch together panoramic shots from multiple pictures.  Can you see the seams in the photo below?  I love technology...

Katie ran a strong race.  The course ended up hillier than she expected, which is never a good surprise.
 

Kristen and I hung out in down-town Colorado Springs for several hours afterward.  The parts we saw were interesting, it seems like a nice city.

We're only a few weeks away closing on our house.  Everything continues to be in place, so we're expecting smooth sailing from here on out.  The Canada trip is only a few weeks after that, so things will probably get a little crazy here for a while.

Parental Visit

Last week Kristen and I ran the Rollinsville 5 mile race, along with our friend Mary.  It was fun being in the mountains in a tiny community.  The race had a healthy turnout, which is always good to see.

The parents were in town starting on Thursday.  We had a lot of fun during the visit, cramming a lot of stuff into two-and-a-half days.

Thursday evening we walked down to the mall, leaving Lena to watch over the cats.  Luckily they seemed to tolerate one another to some degree, so there weren't big moments of drama between the two camps.  Ma & Pa were pretty pooped from the drive, so we kept things pretty low-key.  We walked around the mall a little, then ended up at Juanita's for dinner.  There were a lot of musicians and buskers out and about, so there was plenty to look at.

Friday morning involved swinging by my office so the folks could check that out.  We walked there and back, so we all got a bit of exercise.  Later, Dad napped while Ma and I rounded up supplies for the BBQ.  We did as much prep work as possible food-wise, and Dad and I put together some of our new patio furniture.

The party went well, and it didn't rain on us, I didn't kill anyone with my grilling skills, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.  Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures, although I believe Ma did.  We did a bit of clean-up afterward then Ma located the camera, and we finished up the evening by viewing their photos from the farm stay.

Saturday morning had another early start.  The four of us biked down to the farmers market to check things out.  No one got hit on the road, and I think I heard Mom having fun jumping curbs behind us.

We then headed up to Nederland, taking a scenic back route.  Nederland was having an "Art Festival", which apparently meant a bunch of vendors selling reproduced art in booths.  We had some yummy Indian food for lunch, and hiked around a bit.

We swung by Allenspark and met up with Rick Debiase.  We checked his place out for a bit, I enjoyed climbing around his tree fort/structure, and am now considering putting a fire escape pole on the Indiana tree house.

Rick mentioned that Stith Bennett was having a "Poetry Jam", so the five us headed that way at the appropriate time.  Rick warned us with something along the lines of "These things are usually pretty weird, but fun."  That seemed to sum things up pretty well.  4 or 5 musicians would improvise music as poets recited some of their work.  People were dancing around, randomly grabbing instruments, and generally enjoying themselves.  Kristen and I both passed on the "brownies", suspecting they weren't of the normal variety.  Stith's studio had a lot of exposed beams that were sawn in the sawmill back in '79 or '80, it was a lot of fun looking at the structure of the building.

We got home fairly late, and all crashed.  The folks were gone by the time I got up, heading back to Cody.  Kristen and I both really enjoyed having them in town.

Progress

Things are moving forward fine on the new house.  Our inspection is on Monday morning, we're very curious to see what it turns up.  All the banking and realtor stuff seems to be going smoothly so far.

The weather has been amazing this week.  Kristen and I have enjoyed walking and biking around from our new centralized location.  I've driven my car once in the last two weeks, and walked to work today.

We're planning on having a barbecue this upcoming Friday.  Swing by if you happen to be in town!

We're starting to think about the Canada trip more and more.  A few friends have dropped out partially, we'll have to wait and see how many actually make it up there.  It's a win-win situation, we'd be tickled to be the only two up there, and it'd be a lot of fun to have a camp overflowing with new people.

Update

The closing on the condo went off without a hitch.  We also are under contract for the place in Heatherwood.  I drove a Porsche for the first time yesterday.  Heady times indeed.

If all goes according to plan, we should be in the new place on July 23rd.  That gives us plenty of time to move, and we should be set for the big Canada trip.

Here's the MLS listing for the new place:

http://www.coloproperty.com/Reports/index.cfm?&Action=DetailReport&MLSNumber=630834

No Internet

We aren't signing up for internet access at our rental place, so these blog postings will be few and far between.

We're moved into the Mapleton house.  It's interesting being downtown.  We can walk to just about everywhere we'd want to go.  We already were eating out too much, now it's that much easier.  On the other hand, we have a outside grill set up at the new place, so that makes it more fun to cook at home.

The cats are adapting well.  It took them probably about 5 days before they made it out of the bedroom comfortably.  They are enjoying the yard, and have started up a rivalry with the neighborhood squirrels.

I close on the Condo today, that's expected to go smoothly.  Kristen and I have put offers down on two houses, the first time they went under contract about an hour before we submitted our offer.  Our second offer is still active, we should hear back today from the owner.  It's a nice house in the Gunbarrel area, it's much less expensive then the other places we were looking at.  The dream of living in town may not happen this time around.

It's been very rainy/drizzly here, it should clear up tomorrow.