Christmas 2009

Kristen and I survived the trip to the farm.  We had a great time, and will be posting a lot of pictures here shortly.  In the meantime, here's a timelapse video of us opening presents on Christmas day.

Running out of time!

We really thought we were on top of things this year.  We were so wrong.  We plann on taking off tomorrow evening for Indiana, and the last week has been nothing but chaos trying to get everything together.  The house will be a disaster area, and we'll probably forget a few things, but that's the way it goes.

Last Friday I headed to Winter Park and Steamboat with a few friends for a long weekend.  I took along a new helmet cam, but only had limited luck with it.  It either would fog up, or I would have it pointing too far down.  I did get a few good still photos out of it, and a few not very interesting videos. 

The snow was pretty good for this early in the season, especially at Steamboat.  It was a whirlwind couple of days, and was over before we knew it.  Driving back was a huge adventure, Rabbit Ears Pass was barely passable, you could often only see ten feet in front of you.  It was somewhat frustrating seeing all the new snow showing up right as we were leaving.

Meanwhile, back in Boulder Kristen hosted the annual cookie making event.  Friday night Maddock came over for a sleep over, and Kristen and he made several batches of blank cookies.  The next morning a large gaggle of relatives showed up to help decorate them all.

Kristen's birthday was on Monday, and she at least pretended to like my gifts.  I did get a few wrong sizes, and the lamp I bought didn't function quite right, so it was a bit of a mixed bag.  She seemed to be happy to see the 12 volt electric blanket that is tree house ready.

On Thursday night we met up with Kristen's dad Bruce to do a quick gift exchange.  He'd heard all kinds of stories about my fancy Shindaiwa chainsaw, and gave Kristen the chainsaw he had when she was born.  She'd asked about it several times in recent years, and was almost moved to tears when she saw it.

Winter Weekend

Things have really cooled down here, we were below 10 degrees for most of last week.  It warmed up a bit toward the end of the week, but otherwise it's really starting to feel like winter.

Zack has gotten into the Christmas mood a bit.  He opened an early Christmas gift, and occasionally will wander the house in his reindeer outfit.  It usually doesn't last long, and he's becoming suspicious of us anytime we have it in our hands.

Friday night was a Christmas present wrapping bonanza, at least for me.  Kristen, Maddock and Allison headed down town to watch a Disney on Ice type of thing.  Maddock is young enough that he believes he's seeing the real Tow-mato, SpongeBob Squarepants, etc.  It sounds like he had a lot of fun.

We went up into the mountains on Saturday to celebrate Kristen's birthday a little early.  I'll be out of town next weekend, and we're heading to the farm the weekend after that, so that left this weekend. We both ended up feeling a little sick, we're suspicious we ate something questionable at some point this weekend.  We still had fun, and enjoyed the winter landscape.

I made the mistake of watching a good snowboard movie Sunday night, and with the snow falling, I can't wait to get up to the mountains and do some snowboarding.  The resorts haven't been getting much snow so far, hopefully the storm that's moving through the area next week will really dump.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The long weekend is drawing to a close, and I feel ready to get back to work.  I don't think I could handle another day of holiday preparations.  At some point during the weekend we misplaced the camera, so no pictures until it resurfaces.

Kristen and I had originally planned on visiting her cousin Cassie and family for turkey day.  That got canceled at the last minute, and instead we met up with Katie and Jordan in Denver.  They were in town for the Broncos game on Thursday.  We met them downtown and ate way too much turkey.

Katie and Kristen went shopping early the next morning.  Jordan and I met up, and decidedly did not do any shopping.  We went for a run, then met the girls at The Med for lunch.  They weren't quite done yet, and took off for another round of shopping afterward.  They were pretty excited about their finds, claiming that they had "won at Christmas".  It looked pretty exhausting to me, they both ended up with blisters, but luckily no black eyes.

The four of us met up with Bruce and Teri the next morning in Hudson for breakfast.  Later in the day Joni showed up to give Kristen some pointers on her new sewing machine.  They seemed to be excited, the sewing machine will do some pretty fancy stitching.  I spent most of the day doing some top secret Christmas fabrication in the garage.

Sunday involved yet more shopping, this time around I needed to pick up some stuff for Kristen's birthday, and a few Christmas gifts.  I also snuck in some snowboard gear purchases for myself, which is my nature.

I really hope that my shopping and Christmas preparations are about complete, I'm not sure how much more of this I can take!

Calm before the storm

This was the last weekend that Kristen and I have to ourselves before the holiday season really takes over.  We headed out Friday night with a few friends to grab dinner and see "Men Who Stare At Goats".  It's no "Big Lebowski", but it was still enjoyable.  It's hard to see Jeff Bridges and not instantly think "The Dude."

Kristen and I got a lot of Christmas shopping done on Saturday.  Kristen must be wearing off on me, I'm not usually this prepared so far in advance.  Kristen did a bunch of wrapping afterward, the Christmas box is slowing filling up.  We also picked up some fabric for various tree house items.  Now we just need to find the sewing machine so we can make a few storage curtains and table clothes.


Sunday involved sleeping in, and running to town for some grocery shopping.  The following is not a picture of some under-ripe tomatoes, those are huge under ripe persimmons! 

Several weeks have passed...

And we don't have a lot to show for it.  We've gotten bad about not taking pictures that often, so you'll have to settle for lots of text.

Three weekends ago Kristen and I laid pretty low.  As far as we can remember, we didn't do a whole lot of anything.  If we did, our collective memory apparently only goes back 2 weeks.

Two weekends ago we headed out on Friday night to the annual Warren Miller movie showing.  We had about a dozen friends show up, and there was a lot of talk about ski trips, both past and future.  It appears that we'll have some new blood hanging out with us on the slopes this year, which always livens things up.

Saturday I headed into work for a few hours to prepare for the upcoming Portland trip.  Kristen met up with sister Allison and nephew Maddock and headed to the museum.  They watched an IMax movie about sea monsters, and generally checked out the museum.

Sunday I headed up to university hill with Nate to try to offload an old couch of his.  We grabbed lunch at the Sink.  I had a burger named the "Fat Pig Burger":  Bacon, smoked ham, pork brisket, all on top of a burger.  I didn't feel so well afterward.

The trip to Portland went well.  The big bosses didn't shoot us on sight, so we must be doing OK.  I didn't seem to piss off the corporate developers as much this time around, so I'm marking that up as improved people skills.

This last Friday Nate and I headed back up to the Hill to see Hell's Belles, an all female AC/DC cover band.  It'd been many years since Nate and I hung out at the Fox Theater, we had a lot of fun reminiscing about past misadventures there.  Hell's Belles were great as always.

Saturday Kristen and I headed out to do a bit of shopping.  We stopped by Westminster Mall, which definitely has one foot in the grave.  Half the store fronts were empty, and the stores that were there weren't offering the greatest of wares.  The place really had a mid to late 80s vibe to it, so we bought an Orange Julius and hung out at the arcade and Spencer's Gifts in order to get the full effect.

That evening we headed down to Golden to meet up with Ted, Kathy, and their new baby Ellie.  It was snowing like crazy on the way down, and the drive back was pretty exciting.  Ellie is very cute, and it was good to catch up with crazy Ted and Kathy.

It continued snowing throughout the night, which prompted Kristen and I to skip the annual Panicking Poultry race on Sunday morning.  The race went on without us, I can't imagine running in sub-freezing temperatures through 5 inches of snow.

The ski slopes are opening at a pretty good rate with all this recent snow.  It won't be too long before we make it up the hill.

Snowy Weather

After returning from Indiana, Kristen headed to Winter Park for the rest of the week.  Her friend Laura had given her the keys to Laura's condo through the weekend.  She spent the time writing, reading, and knitting.  I met up with her Friday night after work.

It lightly snowed for most of the weekend, but there was no significant accumulation.  I spent a bit of time updating this and the tree house blog.  We went to all our favorite places in town, it was definitely a little emptier than ski season, but a lot of the popular places were still full of people.

Boulder is seeing some significant snow right now.  It started snowing Tuesday night, and really snowed today.  Kristen's work was canceled, only a few of us showed up to my office.  Over two feet of snow has fallen in nearby Louisville, although we haven't been hit that hard.

Kristen and I went for a walk after I got back from work.  We went around our local lake, and down a few trails we're used to jogging on.  It was very pretty, and we're supposed to get quite a bit more snow over night.