Kristen and I ran the "Eerie Erie" 5k this Saturday. We figured that after running 13.1 miles the weekend before, 3.1 miles would be cake. We were wrong. I was secretly hoping that I could break my previous record of 23:35, but instead came in at 25:05. Kristen also added a few minutes to her normal time, coming in at around 36 minutes. It was surprising how difficult of a run it was. I'm not sure if it's because we've been training to run longer distances, or if we're just still worn out from last weekend.

Kristen then went to see her sister and mother for lunch, and then we took the rest of the day pretty easy.

Today (Sunday) was the annual "Critter Crunch" bot event down in south Denver. My team mate Ted and I headed down to show the local guys our mad skills. It didn't really work out that way, I ended up placing in the middle of the pack for both the 2 pound weight class and the 20 pound. Ted also did mediocre in the 2 pound class, but swept the 20 pound class with his vacuum assisted bot, "The Inhaler". Regardless of how we placed, we had fun hanging out with our local geek friends, and talking microprocessors, machining, autonomous logic theory and the like.

Ted's 2 pound bot was a new one he whipped up in the spirit of my two pounder, Sister Christian. "Uncle Sam's Daughter" made her debut with great success, at least from the audiences point of view. We had a grudge match between the two bots, and had a lot of fun karate chopping and punching one another.




Next week is going to be hell at work, we're planning on releasing a major version of our software next Sunday, and I'm sure we'll be running around like mad trying to prepare for the big event. Hopefully it'll go smoothly, we've put a lot of effort into it.

Ouch! We are both sore after a long weekend trip to Moab for our half marathon.

We took off on Friday morning and headed east on I-70. Going over the various passes was a bit tricky, it was snowing pretty good in spots. We were glad we'd left a day early, Vail pass was supposed to get a foot of snow on Saturday.




We stopped in Grand Junction to eat lunch with Katie. Her boss Jack graciously paid for our lunch. He was pretty excited about us running a half marathon. The guy's living in the wrong town.

After getting into Utah, we followed highway 128 for a while, driving through scenic downtown Cisco. I believe there's a lot of affordable real estate available there.



We drove along the race route, and noted a few daunting hills. The scenery was amazing though, at least we'd have something pretty to look at while we punished our bodies.




We checked into our room at Red Cliffs Lodge, it was pretty posh. Our deck overlooked the nearby Colorado river, and had quite a backdrop. The pictures don't do it justice.





We ran into town, did some grocery shopping, then headed back to the room for the night. The next day we headed off to Arches National Park. We spent a good part of the day hiking around and admiring the impressive scenery. The weather was great, we hoped for more of the same the next day.






We hung out in Moab a bit, then headed back to the room for a nap. We had a less than impressive dinner at the restaurant at the lodge, then off to bed.

The next morning we got up around 6:00, got dressed, got on the bus, and was dropped off at the start of the race. About a thousand people ran it. Kristen and I had slacked off on our training a bit, so we didn't know how we'd do. I was aiming for getting done in about two hours, Kristen was hoping to finish in three.

The race started, and my first mile clicked off in 11 minutes. My goal pace was about 9 minutes per mile, so I didn't have much hope of making my 2 hour goal. However, my pace quickened, and eventually I could tell I was averaging below 10 minutes per mile. Around mile 7 the hills started up, and my memory gets a bit fuzzy. I do remember the glorious last mile, which was all downhill. I made that last mile in under 8 minutes, which felt great. I crossed the finish line at 2:02:46, a few minutes slower than I'd hoped, but I am still very satisfied with the run.

I met up with Jordan and Katie who had driven down from Grand Junction. We eagerly awaited Kristen who finished at 3:00:30, only 30 seconds behind her goal. She dropped her running gloves twice, having to backtrack significantly to go pick them up again. She was very happy with her time.

We ate lunch with Katie & Jordan, then headed back to the room for a big nap. We laid around for the rest of the night, and the next morning, trying to recover. Today we awoke with sore legs, and started the long drive back.

The weather was great on the way back, much better than on the way out. We stopped in Idaho Springs for some pizza, and were back at the house around 4. There were two lonely cats here, and we've spent the rest of the evening attending to their needs.

The event was a lot of fun, and it actually got me excited about running again. We've signed up for a winter running program that runs through new years, a lot of 5k races are included. I'm hoping to get my time down below 23 minutes, into the 22 minute range. We'll see how well we do at running in the colder weather.

Whew! A lot has happened since our last posting.

I took off for Indiana on 7th. I spent the following week working on the platform for the treehouse I've been dreaming about for 4 or 5 months.

The short version of the story is that with a whole lot of help we got the platform built and put up in the tree. It was a lot of work, but things turned out great. It was a good feeling to see something come into reality that I'd planned on paper for so long. I couldn't have done this without the help of a lot of people.

It was a real team project. I'd discussed the design of the platform with 8 to 10 people. A lot of the ideas that came up during these discussions made it into the final plans. Thanks go to Derek, Nate and his dad, Ted, Matt and his dad, and Dad for a lot of good ideas.

The building of the platform was also a group effort. Tommy Burkhart helped in a million different ways, from accepting 200 pounds of shipped material to recieving my lost luggage in the middle of the night. He also lent us a lot of valuable tools that we couldn't have gotten by without. Thanks Tommy!

Thanks to Jason & Becky for their help. Jason showed up right when we needed some extra muscle the most. We couldn't have gotten the thing up in the tree without you. Becky helped keep our bellies full at critical moments, and didn't complain when we stole her husband away for most of the weekend.

Andy Roller helped us tear down and pack up. It was great seeing Andy again after all these years. Thanks Andy!

Most of all, Thanks Ma & Pa for all that you did!

Mom, thanks for all the food you supplied, the great breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. Thanks for doing the dishes when dad and I were too pooped to lend a hand.

Dad, thanks for everything. It was a lot of fun working with you on this, and I certainly learned a lot. Thanks for drilling the critical holes, thanks for coming up with so many ideas on how to get things done. Thanks for sticking in there for that last item when we were both so whooped.

Instead of documenting the building process here, I've started another blog that is solely treehouse related here. It's empty now, but I'm hoping to add to it over the next couple of days or weeks to document the steps we took to get this done.

Here are a few pictures from the trip.

Our weekend didn't turn out anything like we expected. We were supposed to go up to Winter Park to do some work on a friends condo. We were planning on staying up there the entire weekend, doing a bit of touch up here and there, and generally hanging out in WP. After the two hour drive, we walked up to the door only to find all the lights on and a dog barking feverishly at us. The place was not supposed to be rented out, and the owners are in England. We knocked, but no one came to the door.

Either the place had been mistakingly rented, or there were squatters afoot. Regardless, after hanging out for a bit, we turned around and drove back to Boulder. It was a very frustrating experience, I'll be curious to find out what happened.

That freed us up to go to a house warming party down in Denver. My buddy Ted and his wife Kathy bought a really run down house, and worked hard fixing it up. It was amazing to see how great the place looked after all their work.

We did a 1.5 hour run today, we're "tapering", meaning that each run is getting shorter and shorter leading up to the big half-marathon run on the 22nd. We also did a bit of gardening, things are really starting to die off out there. We tore out the remaining cucumber plants, but managed to find a few giant cukes hiding out.



I also spent some time preparing for the impending Indiana trip. Trying to buy everything I expect to need, and getting it to the farm is proving to be a logistical challenge. Luckily, Tommy Burkhart was kind enough to let me ship a bunch of stuff to him. Some heavy duty angle brackets have made it there (8" X 6" X 7", .5" thick), and I've just gotten about 40 pounds of hardware in the mail here which I hope to turn around and ship to Tommy tommorrow. I'm still missing the 6" X 1" lag eye bolts that should show up late this week. Those were hell to find and procure, so hopefully they'll show.

I'm sure I've gone drastically overkill on the hardware I'm using, but I figure it's better to go too big than too small. Plus big bolts are just plain cool. Below is a picture of the new hardware, versus the first stuff that I bought.



Watching the weath in Dryden, it looks like Ma & Pa are in for a nice last week up there.

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: