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

Argh, running behind again.

Here's a quick recap. Last week was amazingly warm. We hit the 70's a few days. That let me get a few days of running in.

On Friday, I was originally going to head to Deadwood to meet up with the boys to do some gambling and snowboarding. Unfortunately the weather from Casper to Deadwood was horrid, and they were forecasting highs in the low single digits all weekend long. We decided to postpone the trip for a few weeks.

With the weekend free, I ended up working most of it, and Kristen took it easy. The weather turned nasty on Sunday, and we haven't recovered from that cold spell quite yet.

I've slowly been sucked into Facebook. It's more fun than I expected reconnecting with high-school friends. A lot of entertaining pictures have been uncovered, most of them quite embarrassing.

Things have been warming up around here, which is a nice change of pace after the non-typical frigid weather we'd been having. I managed to get out on a few runs last week, realizing just how much the winter has slowed me down.

Thursday night I headed down to Golden to meet up with crazy Ted to see how he's doing. His wife Kathy is 6 months pregnant, which was a surprise. He had a zillion treehouse questions, I wouldn't be surprised if he makes it back out to the farm before too long, assuming he can slip away from his fatherhood duties.

The drywall guys showed up on Friday, and spent a good portion of the day repairing the water damage from the busted pipe that wreaked havoc a month ago or so. The repairs look great, they fixed a few issues that weren't water damage related, so the place seems a little better than before.

Kristen and I headed into town Friday night to use up a gift certificate at the Chop House. We somehow managed to spend all of the certificate, and had a good time doing it. We hung out on Pearl Street for a bit, taking in the sights on a warm Friday night.

Saturday we slept in a bit, then headed into town. Kristen rode her bike, I pulled up the rear on foot. The weather was amazing, near 60 degrees without a cloud in the sky. We enjoyed some lunch on the mall, and a little window shopping. Afterward I headed into work for the rest of the afternoon.

Sunday involved cleaning up after the drywall experience, involving a lot of vacuuming and nervous cat action. We had to move all the furniture back to their original spots, re-do the bookshelves, etc.

We also drove up to Jamestown to do a drive by on a house that had caught our eye online. We were sure that Jamestown was too far of a commute, and we came to the conclusion that it is. The house looked good, but was on a ridiculously steep road above Jamestown, making winter living seem like an impossibility. We did stop at the "Jamestown Mercantile" for lunch. It was an interesting mix of mountain hippies and Lycra clad cyclists.

We took an exploratory route home, and spotted several other houses that were for sale that looked nice. We later realized that they looked so nice due to being so far out of our budget. We did get to see a lot of the recent fire damage on the trip, it's amazing how many houses survived, even though their yards had burnt completely up.

We once again ended up on Pearl Street, this time with a few more gift certificates in hand, and picked up some nice clothing. We watched a few movies Sunday night, and generally took it easy.

This upcoming weekend involves a trip to Deadwood with the college friends, and hopefully part of a day on Teri Peak to relive the college skiing days. It ought to be interesting to see what the mountain is like now that I've seen a bit more of the snowboarding world. I'm hoping we can get Vince and Tony out on some skis, I'm sure hilarity will ensue.

Last week the time just flew by. Wednesday night Boulder had some high winds and field/forest fires burning. Some of our friends had their fence and tree catch on fire, but luckily their house survived the ordeal. A large portion of our western horizon was lit up with flames. It was quite a sight.

I was afraid that all the time off would make it hard to put in a full week. Before I knew it, it was Friday, and time for another weekend.


Friday night we tried grilling in the fireplace, using the propane grill Jason and Becky gave us for Christmas a year ago. It fit perfectly, and it seemed to work well. Kristen made some excellent Cheese & Bacon grits to accompany the grilled beef, and we ate ourselves silly.


We got up early on Saturday and headed over the Lafayette Oatmeal Festival. We watched three friends run the race. We'd forgotten about the race, and were in no shape to run it, but still had fun watching our friends put themselves through hell. We'll have to be careful about being spectators instead of runners, it was a little too easy to do.

In the related Oatmeal cooking contest, Matt ended up winning first place in the Dessert category for his upside down pear/oatmeal cake. He also took home the grand overall prize for his honey-oatmeal bread. He's done well in the past, but was obviously really tickled with his performance this year.

Kristen and I did a little furniture browsing afterward, more for fun than anything. We're simply out of room for more furniture. It's always fun to look though. We then grabbed some lunch, and then had a staggering 2 hour nap. Where did the day go? We groggily arose, then headed downtown for dinner with Morrissey and Sharon.

Sunday morning I got up early, and headed up to Copper Mountain with Morrissey for a crazy day of snowboarding. We logged in 45 miles, 31,000 vertical feat of descent, 18 runs, all in five and a half hours of riding.

We jumped off a few cornices, which was definitely the highlight of the day. Even though the drop was only 3 or 4 feet, if you had any speed when you left the lip, you'd drop about 10 feet before hitting the slope. It was quite a rush. I had one good face plant, and several bigger-than-normal crashes. I'm more sore today then I've been in years. Kristen points out that every year I hurt a little more afterward. Hmm.