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.

A lot was going on this weekend, enough that we had to skip a few items that we were hoping to do. Friday night I headed out with Nate, Mike and Ted to celebrate Nate's last few weeks as a non-father. We had a few too many beers, but managed to stay out of trouble, and not make too big of fools out of ourselves.

Saturday, Kristen and her mother Joni headed to Estes Park for the Scottish/Irish Highland Festival. They had a lot of fun checking out all things Celtic. Meanwhile, Ted and I went over tree house plans. He has a masters in mechanical engineering, so he had several suggested modifications. I'm having one other person look over the plans for any last minute suggestions, then I'm going to have to go with what I have in order to get things ready for the Indiana trip.

Saturday evening Kristen and I volunteered for manning a run aid station at a race at the Boulder Resevoir. The race was called "24 Hours of Triatholon", and was basically a 24 hour continuous triatholon race. We knew at least one person in the race, and had fun cheering everyone on. Our volunteer shift started at 8 pm, and ended at midnight. We met all kinds of interesting people, from the guy who had just flown in from the alps after running a 100 mile race, to a little old lady who was walking her 4 mile runs, and just enjoying the nearly full moon. She was in no hurry, seemed to be having a good time, and even asked us to smell her peach that she was about to eat.

We'd shifted our long weekly run to Sunday, and ran out near the resevoir. We'd gotten to the farthest point of the run, and it started raining cats and dogs. We've been lucky this year with the weather, so we owed a bit of running in the rain. We laid pretty low afterwards for the remainder of the day, and grilled some burgers for dinner.

I don't have any relevant pictures, so here's a random one:

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

We had a great weekend, and kept ourselves pretty busy. Saturday we met up with the running group for our long run of the week. We ended up on some new running trails that were a nice change of pace. Saturday evening we headed into Denver to celebrate Kristen's mother's birthday.

Sunday involved making tomato sauce from all the Roma tomatoes that the garden had produced. We froze most of it for later use. I also spent a lot of time refining the treehouse platform design, and started a list of all the hardware I was going to need. We cooked stir-fry for dinner, using up a lot more vegetables from the garden. Several naps were taken during the day.

Monday we decided to head out to Chautauqua park to do some hiking. We'd hiked a particular trail about a year ago, and hadn't quite made it to the end. The trail ended at a cave that housed various species of bats. Hoping that we were in better shape than last year, we took off toward the cave around 9:00 am.



After a couple hours of hiking we found the same rock we'd eaten lunch at the year before, and stopped again for PB&J sandwiches. We were still feeling strong, and figured we only had a little farther to go. Kristen was developing blister issues, but decided to push on.



It turned out we had quite a bit further to go, and it was almost all straight up. We got a pretty good work out climbing up the very steep trail. We eventually made it to the cave, which was unfortunately closed until October 1st to protect the bats. The final 30 feet to the cave opening was interesting, as you had to climb up a fairly intimidating rock wall.




We vowed to come back after October 1st to give it another shot. We headed back into town and had some ice cream to celebrate our partial victory.

Here's this week's "Engineering Challenge"!

Below is the top view of the proposed treehouse platform. It's 8' X 16', and will be nestled between 5 trunks.



How can I suspend the platform via chain by four connection points, and have it "float" between the trunks, without touching any of them? The four chains will connect to the platform via one of the bolts that connect the cross members. The four connection points will not be a constant distance from the trunks, due to the trunk placement. The other end of the chain will be attached to the tree at any necessary angle.

The simplest solution would seem to be to have the chains run almost parallel to the ground. Then it seems to me that it would only be a matter of tightening and loosening the turnbuckles to get the desired orientation of the frame. However, trees are going to be a lot stronger in the vertical direction, so I'm nervous that this could pull the trunks together as the treehouse gets built and becomes heavier. Plus, I'll need a little vertical slack, so that as the tree trunks move independently in the wind, the treehouse can raise or lower to take up the slack. If all trunks moved outward at the same time, the treehouse would need to be able to rise a bit.

At the other extreme, I could hang all chains nearly vertically. I think this would make centering the frame between the trunks a lot more complicated, since all chains would be at slightly different angles, which I believe would cause the frame to want to twist unpredictably. Also, this would allow the treehouse to swing back and forth a lot more easily, which doesn't seem preferable.

Any ideas? I suspect that this is a non trivial problem, especially given the organic nature of the tree trunk spacing. If they were all equal distance apart, and I used the exact same angle for all four chains in both dimensions, it would work. Is this a hopeless problem to solve? Should I just moor one corner of the platform to the trunk, and let the other three corners float?

Any suggestions or comments are welcome!

Our garden has entered it's senior era. The peas, lettus, and cilantro are pretty well done. The cukes are finally slowing down. However, our carrots, onions, perppers, and tomatos are starting to ripen up.

All our carrots so far are a little funky looking. We don't think the ground was tilled very deeply, as our carrots are always about 4 inches tall. They taste good, so we're not complaining.

We did a lot of running last week, starting with a 4 mile time trial on Tuesday. We survived that, and then did a 13.2 mile run on Saturday. We barely survived that, and got to run in the rain a bit. I made a bad route decision, and we ended up running along a road with too much traffic. Luckily that was only for a few miles.

We went and saw "Little Miss Sunshine" on Friday which was a hoot. I was hoping to see "The Descent", a horror flick about caving that got good reviews, but we apparently missed it by a day.

Sunday consisted of making large quantities of Potato Salad for a BBQ in the afternoon. 10 pounds of potatos dedicated their lives to the project. We ended up with about 5 pounds of leftovers, lesson learned.

I'm pointing my brain back toward treehouse thoughts, since the time is nearing to head back to Indiana. I've sent off some drawings to Dad for review, and will probably fire Becky & Jason off an e-mail with a few mech-e questions that I can't quite think through.

Busy end of week, slow weekend.

Kristen and I had a 1 mile race last Thursday. It was called "The Pearl Street Mile", the race was along the Pearl Street Mall, so there were a lot of onlookers. My friend Morrissey ran it as well, and beat me by 13 seconds. I thought he was behind me, and started really thinking I whooped him as the minutes clicked by. Kristen ran a good race, afterwards we had a beer and dinner on the mall.

Friday we headed up into the local hills to cash in one of Kristen's birthday presents from years past. I'd promised to take her to a murder mystery at an old hotel in Gold Hill, a little old mining town above Boulder. I'd never driven up there before, and we both were getting pretty nervous about the dirt road and sheer cliffs. Not a guard rail in sight. The clouds were rolling in, so we had a very atmospheric beginning for the evening. The murder mystery experience itself was a lot of fun, much more than I expected. Afterwards we went to the bar next door for a beer and people watching. Lot's of fun. I didn't bring a camera, and really regret it.

We stayed at the old Gold Hill Inn. Kristen may or may not have heard a ghost in the middle of the night, but I suspect it was a combination of the alcohol and creepy atmosphere. She did shake me awake pretty sternly in the middle of the night, and was very seriously scared. I kept telling her it made for a better story, but she didn't seem to care.

The rest of the weekend was laid back. I went on a bike ride with a buddy who just got a mountain bike, so we've been exploring a few trails here and there. We're trying to get him ramped up before the season is over, but the end is approaching rapidly. We're going to try one ambitious trail before the end of October, but haven't selected one yet.

Since I have no relevant pictures to post, here's one of Zack, who hasn't been feeling too well lately. His eyes strike me as "Fishing Lure Green" in this picture.