Happy Holidays!

Everyone survived the visit.  Kristen and I are still getting the house back together, and finding all kinds of left-behind gifts.

Christmas is closer

The week ends are flying by.  Only one more before people start showing up!  This weekend was particularly crazy.

I took Friday off from work, and headed to the mountains with Morrissey and Weaver.  The mountains were supposed to really get a big hit on Friday and Saturday, so we were pretty excited.

We didn't get the kind of snow we were hoping for, but still managed to put in a good day.  It snowed on and off during the day.  Morrissey had decided to spend the night in Winter Park, Weaver and I unfortunately had to head back.  It ended up snowing 5 inches Friday night, far short of the 14 inches that had been originally forecast.  However, I'm sure Morrissey enjoyed the snow, and will tell us all about it come Monday.

When I returned home Friday evening, Kristen had picked up her 4 year old nephew Maddock for the evening.  We had fun jumping on the bean bag, and playing a little bit of Wii Sports.  He's a little too young to pick up a lot of the video game stuff, but seemed to enjoy things nonetheless.  He eventually demonstrated some of his ninja moves.

Saturday morning we headed out and got a Christmas tree.  We've never selected our own tree before, hopefully we chose wisely.  We got it set up, but still have a lot of ornaments and decorations to put on it.

A little later in the day we headed in to town to hit the skating rink.  Kristen quickly remembered how to skate, and dragged Maddock around for several laps.  He looked like he had spaghetti legs, they were flying every direction, all at once.  He picked things up pretty quickly, and was able to maneuver around the edge of the rink pretty well by the end of an hour.

We dropped Maddock off with his parents in the early afternoon.  Kristen and I then headed up to Nederland to celebrate her birthday a little early.  We stayed at our favorite hotel, and took in the sights and sounds of Nederland.  I fit right in with my wacky hair.

We drove around the mountains a bit on Sunday.  We ended up at Blackhawk for an hour or two.  Kristen tripled her money, I lost about $10.

We headed back to the house for a present wrapping marathon.  I also tried stringing some lights on the house, but am missing a few critical pieces.  Hopefully I'll get everything lit up in a day or two.

Two Weeks Ago

I'm falling behind.  Here's our best recollection of what we did two weekends ago.

Saturday morning I headed in to town to run the annual Colder Bolder 5k race.  The race has grown considerably since the last time I ran it (four years ago?).  I finished predictably in the middle of my age group, which is fine by me.  Morrissey was hoping to get a sub 20 minute time, but missed it by 20 seconds or so.  I was feeling good enough during the race to give the photographer the devil horn salute.

A little later in the day, Kristen and I headed into town and did a bit of Christmas shopping.  We are finding that we have a lot of little gifts for everybody, but still need to figure out what to get several people for "real" gifts.  The shops were a little crazy, but bearable.

On Sunday I headed up to Winter Park with a guy I've been trying to snowboard with for several years.  He broke his arm at the beginning of last season.  Luckily we didn't incur any additional injuries, and he seemed to be picking things up again pretty easily.  It was a short day, I was back home by the early afternoon.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Whew!  What a whirlwind of activity.

 On Monday of last week, we released the next big version of our software at work.  Preparing for that, and dealing with the aftermath has kept the office pretty busy.  Luckily, with that out of the way, things should slow down a bit for the holidays.

I took Wednesday off, and headed up to Winter Park / Mary Jane for my first day of snowboarding of the season.  Even though Boulder has been fairly temperate, the mountains have been getting a lot of early season snow.  Things are much better than they were last year at this time.  It was a bit chilly up there, but the snow was unbelievable.  Morrissey and I got a very full day in, showing up right when the lifts opened, and riding them until it was getting dark.  I was sore for several days afterward.

Thursday of course was Thanksgiving.  Kristen had put together quite a feast.  We had 10 people show up, and things went very smoothly.  There was plenty of food, every one got along, and fun was had by all.  Things ramped down around six o'clock.

A few hours later Katie and Jordan showed up with Rocco and Olie in tow.  There were a few tense moments between Zack and Rocco, but for the most part things went well there.

Kristen and Katie took off early on Friday to hit some Black Friday deals.  Jordan and I took it a little easier, and managed to stay fairly stress free for most of the day.  Jordan and I did head out to Disco Friday night, in painfully embarrassing get-ups.  Disco was sort of a bust, but we managed to have fun regardless.

Saturday morning saw Katie and Jordan heading back to Grand Junction.  Kristen and I spent the rest of the weekend cleaning up the house and relaxing.  The cats were glad that things settled down again, and that something that resembled normal life had returned.

The calm before the storm

Next week is going to be exciting. At work, we roll out our product for another part of our corporation. That will keep me busy. Shortly afterward Thanksgiving comes a-knocking, that will keep both Kristen and I busy.

So, we took it pretty easy this weekend. I worked a bit on Saturday, Kristen ran a bunch of errands. Sunday involved some yard work, and various small tasks around the house for me. Kristen headed down to Denver to meet up with some family. Maddock got to visit Santa. I think he looks a little suspicious about the whole deal.

A month ago or two I bought a robotic vacuum cleaner. I didn't think it'd be that effective, just a cool gadget. It works better than I expected, our house is getting vacuumed a lot more than it used to, mostly because the thing is fun to watch. Here's 5x normal speed timelapse of "Flo" cleaning the sun room.  Hmm, I just noticed that there 6 minutes of black at the end of the video.  Oh well.

Last Year's Snowboarding

After many hours of editing, here's the summary of last year's snowboarding:

Ada is not amused!

We had a pretty slow weekend.  Both of our work situations have been a bit hectic, so we didn't feel like doing much.  We did head out on Friday night for the annual viewing of the new Warren Miller ski movie.  It was a lot of fun, as always.

We've gotten some colder weather, and a few traces of snow here and there.  The mountains are starting to get some accumulation, which means that the snowboarding season is just right around the corner.  I'm getting pretty excited.

We got our front drapes hung, the mattress for the guest bed showed up, we picked up some bedding, and generally tried to finish up any other house duties that are outstanding.  We have yet to really tackle the garage, neither of us really felt like getting out there in the colder air this weekend.

We did manage to figure out to get the fireplace open, so we had a good fire on Saturday night.  However, on Sunday the downdraft was strong enough that we failed to get it lit then.  I'm sure we'll get better with practice.