Happy Holidays!

It's been a good 11 days since my last entry, and it's been a busy 11 days. On Tuesday the 19th, I came down with some kind of flu thing. A lot more was coming out of my body than was going in. I remember thinking, in a fever induced delirium, "At least I'm slimming down for the holidays." Luckily for everyone involved, I decided not to document that part of the week for the blog.

Tuesday night it started snowing like mad, and snowed through Wednesday and Thursday. We got about 20" of snow in our part of town. The cars were completely covered with snow, looking like large white bumps in the parking area. Kristen's work closed, and mine went down to a skeleton crew.



The Denver airport was utter chaos with thousands of flights canceled, and many thousands of people stranded. I was due to fly out on Saturday, right when things were supposed to be getting back to normal. By Saturday the airport officials were suggesting showing up 4 hours before your flight in order to not miss it. Kristen had plans on Saturday, and things worked out to where she dropped me off 6 hours before my flight.

After waiting through the longest security line I've ever seen and getting to my gate, they eventually delayed my flight two and a half hours. That resulted in my getting to Atlanta at 3 in the morning, after spending well over eight hours in the airport. I was glad the flu symptoms had passed.



I expected to see a very tired Becky at the airport to pick me up, but nearly the whole crew showed up, Ma, Pa, Becky, and Jason. Milly decided to stay home and hold down the fort.

Becky and Jason were great hosts over Christmas. Becky cooked some amazing meals, and Jason was a great tour guide through the city. There was a lot of cookie decorating, eating, playing with the dog, flying toy helicopters, touring various Atlanta neighborhoods, and general merriment. Ma cooked Christmas dinner, which was excellent, and we visited with a few of the Brown's friends in Atlanta. We packed a lot into the three days.




The trip back was fairly uneventful, I lucked out again and made it in right before the next big blizzard hit. We supposedly got 14" of snow in Boulder, but from what I've seen it appears to be closer to 10". I snowshoed in to work today with a co-worker, it took about 2 hours to do, and was a lot more work than I was expecting.




I hope everyone else had a great holiday, and that you're not experiencing the crazy weather we are. Happy Holidays!

We celebrated Kristen's birthday this weekend up at Winter Park. We headed out of town Friday night, ate dinner in Idaho Springs, and ended up at the condo around 8:30. Katie and Jordan met us up there, they'd arrived a bit earlier.

The next afternoon we headed out to the local tubing hill for some sledding. It's been a long time since I've rode a tube down a hill. It was a lot of fun, and the hill was steep enough to really give you some speed by the bottom. Katie lost a shoe a few times, but other than that we escaped unscathed. Here's some video of one of the runs.





After making it back to Boulder on Sunday, I decided to take advantage of a sale at the local board shop and picked up a new snowboard. My snowboarding buddies have been catching up to me skill wise the last few years. I'm hoping a healthy dose of technology will help stay ahead of the curve a bit. We'll see.

It was a much warmer week last week, with temperatures climbing into the low sixties at times. The cats have come out from hiding, and things are returning to normal.

I succeeded in getting some snowboarding in on Tuesday. A few of us met up at Winter Park and got a good full day in. The snow wasn't bad, we hit a few patches that had 12 inches of powder. The body seemed to remember how to snowboard, and I wasn't too sore afterwards.




The weekend was pretty slow. For me, Saturday consisted of sleeping, working in the garage, and a bit of online game playing. Kristen spent all day Saturday at the new job, continuing to learn the ropes. Sunday involved some Christmas shopping, and a big sushi dinner out with a few friends. It's starting to feel fairly festive around here!

It was a cold weekend in the garage. The temperature eeked above freezing today, the oil heater in the garage could barely keep up. I'm slowly honing my machining skills back to where they were. There a few critical parts to make yet for Motorama, here's hoping I don't screw up a complicated piece.

We skipped the final 5k run of the year, it was just too damn cold. With a week of no running, I can practically feel the paunch growing back. It's supposed to get above 40 tommorrow, hopefully that will knock the snow back a bit. It snowed pretty consistantly starting on Monday. I finally dug the Mustang out of the snow, there were at least 8" on it this morning.

Kristen starts her new job at Abacus tommorrow. She has slowly been building up her nervousness level, I imagine she'll be fairly insane by tommorrow morning. That is to say, she'll be a bit more insane than normal. ;-)

The mountains have also been getting dumped on. Winter Park got 12" on Friday. I'm hoping to skip some work this week with a few co-workers and see what the slopes are like.

With the colder weather the cats have been seeking shelter. Here are a few pictures of Zack and Ada trying to keep warm.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Kristen and I headed down to Denver for the holiday at her sister Allison's house. There was a lot of food of course, and we ate most of it. Luckily there wasn't a repeat of several years ago when everyone got sick after eating Thanksgiving dinner at her cousin Cassie's.

I spent a bunch of time in the garage on Friday and Saturday doing some robot stuff. At one point the table started to bind up in one direction, so I tore the entire mill apart, something I've never done before. I cleaned everything up, inspected the screws for problems, but couldn't find anything. I got it back together, it still binds a bit, but it's not too bad. It was a messy, greasy job.

I did end up finishing a couple of parts, the one below captures the planetary gears in a planetary gearbox, and supports the other end of the carrier pins, hopefully making the assembly stronger. There's a big bot competition in February, so I suspect I'll be doing a lot more bot related stuff on the upcoming weekends.



I also spent some time adding content to the treehouse blog. I still have a ways to go. I'm hoping once I get that out of my system I can start thinking about what the rest of the project will look like.

We went for a run on Sunday and saw a Bald Eagle up close and personal. The weather was great, and it felt good to be outside after spending most of the long weekend indoors.

Happy Birthday Ma! I hope you had a good one!

Kristen and I had a 5k race on Saturday in Brighton. We both shaved a good amount of time off of our previous 5k, which always feels good. We then headed up to Blackhawk to celebrate Kristen landing a new job. She's going to be a Senior Accounting Manager at Abacus in Lafayette. She's pretty excited about it, it should be a good career move for her. Plus, their holiday parties sound like a lot of fun, so I'm stoked! ;-)

We didn't do much gambling in Blackhawk, and headed back to Boulder early. We did another good run Sunday afternoon, and then got a few things done around the house. The weather was amazingly nice.

Last Thursday I met up with Jim Reynolds and his sister for dinner. It was fun hearing from someone who's spent some time on the farm and the place in Canada. It sounded like they were in for a long weekend of snowboarding.

Thanksgiving is coming up this Thursday, we're planning on spending it at Kristen's sister's place in Denver. It's starting to feel like the holidays!

Didn't do a whole lot this weekend, and that's the way I like it! It'd been a hectic week. My college friend Brent was in town Tuesday and Wednesday, so those were both late nights. Thursday a group of us headed to the annual Warren Miller movie. It was fun as always, and it really got us in the mood to snowboard.

Saturday was spent working away in the garage. Ted, Derek and I are ramping up for a few more bot competitions, the first one being in February. It'd been months since I cut metal on the mill, thankfully it all came back quickly.

Today Kristen, Morrissey and I ran the Panicking Poultry for the third straight year. We had decent times but were a bit slower than last year. It's always a fun race because they feed you well afterwards and have a huge set of door prizes that they give away. This year they also had free beer, which made for a rowdier than usual group of runners. I won a pink fleece jacket/shirt which Kristen happily claimed. Morrissey won a $30 gift certificate at the local spaghetti joint. Kristen's number didn't come up, but she's won big in the past.



We have another race next weekend and hope to do a bit of running this week so that we can hopefully improve our times.