Sunday, January 29, 2012

Barr Camp + Freeze Your Thorns Off 'Race'

So, remember the middle of last year I told everyone about crazy race that people were doing on the internet, but were actually running, but not together, but online? Yeah, that is happening again, only it is winter this time!! Well, the Boring Runner (no, not me, it is actually the guy's name) Adam put together another one for the winter, calling it Freeze Your Thorns Off (he is in Arizona, lots of cactus).

Unfortunately he did it on Saturday the 28th, so I am a day late. To make up for it, I added some extra credit. Last year I also forgot to print out the bib, and completely forgot to take pictures. Whoops. This year I just forgot the bib, next time I'll be right on! Back to that in a little bit.

I have been running with the Incline Club since about Thanksgiving training for the Ascent again this year (probably). They do routes which take us up Ute Pass and up service roads and around local hiking trails, it is pretty neat. Lots of elevation gain, which is necessary for the Ascent. Unfortunately the lack of snow this year, combined with the relatively hot temperatures have made most of the trails quite icy, and it is kind of annoying. I wanted to get away from that a bit this week, so I decided to run up to Barr Camp, and it worked!

So with the introduction out of the way, I ran 15 miles with 3900' of elevation gain, and it was awesome!

Running up to Barr Camp included some obstacles, including ice, snow and fallen trees!


Pikes Peak from lightning point (so named because it not somewhere you want to be when it is lightning).


This is the closest I got to a self-shot during the run. I hung out at Barr Camp for about 30 minutes, completely forgot to get a picture there. Hosed. At least I can show off my awesome shoes and the spikes that keep me upright on the run!


One of the few pictures I took at Barr Camp, the creek is quite frozen, but there is enough flow to get some water if you need it. There is a guy filling up a bucket in the background.


No shortage of cool stuff to show off on the Barr Trail:


Colorado Springs from the trail:


The route up Barr Trail, it really is a lot more interesting than just a strait line through the forest.


OK, yeah I'm showing off a bit, this is the elevation chart from the run:


Finally, the bib I forgot to print out once again. Dang it.


Thanks for putting this together again Adam, and thanks for reading!

Friday, January 27, 2012

So just a fair warning...

Hi everyone... well I just wanted to let you know you are going to be seeing some food in the future on our blog. So, I decided to sign up to bake a recipe once or twice a month with a group baking their way through Dorie Greenspan's book, Baking with Julia. The group is called Tuesdays with Dorie, and a few years ago they decided that on Tuesday's that they would all post their experiences through their blogs about cooking that week's recipe. The group has gone through a few other cookbook's and they cook every recipe. Well, when I saw the chance to join the group and to do it by baking, I was in!

Mikey ordered the book right up for me and we are planning on doing the first recipe next weekend. The first posting date is 2/7 so you all can look to see the results then! If anyone wants to join me and the other 250 people who have already signed up, just visit the link above and check out the rules and send them an email to sign up! Also, if you want to come help me bake just come on over! I think my co-workers are going to love me once I start to make the Truffles and the wedding cake!

There is not much going on... we'll let you know if something exciting comes up!

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Home Repair Weekend

Not too long ago our dryer started to make a pretty loud clicking noise when it was running. When I investigated, it looked like a small ball bearing in the back was the cause of the noise, and I didn't know much more beyond that. Fortunately, the internet was able to figure out what I needed with that little bit of information (thanks Google!) and I ordered the necessary parts and downloaded the instruction videos.

The part came in quite quickly, and we decided to tackle the operation on Saturday. We figured this would end either in our dryer working well (about a 25% chance) or us calling a repair-man to undo what I did (this has the best chance). Fortunately armed with the internet, a flashlight and some patience, we got it working in about 90 minutes!

The empty dryer shell:


This is where the parts are! You can see some of the lint that accumulated over the years, Julie expertly vacuumed it right out.



Julie thought there should be some action shots, but we only managed to get one of me fixing stuff, applying the lubrication to the joint.


Laundry day came on Sunday, and the dryer sounded normal!! *PHEW* A clean, working dryer and the parts only cost about $12, not too shabby.

Just before the operation, we decided to go for a nice walk in Ute Valley park just by our house, it was kind of windy, but not too bad for mid-January in Colorado. Julie wanted to take my picture in front of Pikes Peak, so she did.



After that, since my hands were already dirty, I oiled the chain and the rollers in the garage door, fixed Julie's squeaky car door and we even found time for some snacks at Costco. On Sunday I re-caulked the shower since that needed to be done too. It seems that we have a functional house once again, and I could use a day off! Unfortunately this round of wind storms took down a section of our fence, so it looks like I'll be doing that soon! Wish me luck.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

December still going...

So, I said we would cover the rest of the month and hopefully I don't write too much so that this can be the last post about December 2011! I even scrounged up a few pictures, thanks Jo Ann and Mom!

We went to Mikey's work Christmas party again this year. It was held at the Broadmoor and they served a full dinner with drinks and door prizes. We didn't win anything but we had a great time with his co-workers. We got all dressed up and we didn't have a single picture taken... whoops! I even wore a dress! I guess we will just have to go again this year and make sure to bring a camera with us!

Later that weekend we had the chance to go celebrate Andy's graduation from UCCS! Yeah he did it! It was nice to see all of the family and help celebrate his accomplishment!

After Andy's graduation party, we were off to a neighborhood progressive dinner. Somehow we got roped into hanging out with the neighbors! Well not really roped into it, we said yes and then hesitently decided not to cancel on them. It actually turned out to be a fun evening! We started out across our street for appetizers and drinks and then we had everyone over to our house for some soup and some tamales that our nieghbor brought over. After the main courses at our house we headed down the road a little for dessert and after dinner drinks! The neighbor even supplied homemade kaluha, and it made the egg nog much better! We had a good time getting to know everyone a little bit more and it is really nice to have friendly neighbors around!

Later in the week we had a good snow storm come through, but we had made plans to head over to Jeff and Heather's and watch White Christmas. It had somehow been brought up that we had never seen it before and apparently it is a Christmas favorite over at their house. We headed over and watched it for the first time! It was a great movie and will definitely have to be added our Christmas movie collection.

Well that about wraps up everything except for our Christmas's! So I guess this will just be a long post!

For Christmas Eve, Mikey and I decided to stay home and watch movies and make snacks. It was a nice relaxing day and we made a lot of snacks so we gave some away to the neighbors and a few friends that live nearby! For Christmas Day we went and spent it with Mikey's side of the family and had a great breakfast, did a puzzle, opened presents and hung around until all of David's family got there for an afternoon of celebration. We headed home after lunch and napped and ate more snacks! Then the day after Christmas we made our way up to Mom and Dad's house for brunch, another puzzle, more presents and we even decided to take our snowshoes for a spin. They still had some good snow in the field behind their house so we didn't want to pass up the chance to be outside and get some exercise. We had a great weekend of Christmas festivities!

December came and went

And it went fast. It flew by actually. We were busy bees all month and over New Year's Eve weekend we didn't know what to do with all our free time. Well we seem to be doing a lot of recaps lately, hopefully that will change through out this year! It really would be a lot easier if I could just copy our calendar on here and you could just make up the stories about what went on, but I guess I can start with the beginning of the month. And we were pretty bad at taking any pictures...

We decided to host another Wine and Cheese party at our house like we did a few years ago. It turned out to be a great night with friends and we definitely were glad that we decided to have everyone over again. It also turns out that there are quite a few of our friends who had never been to our house so we are glad we could fix that and have them over. We will have to have an annual Wine and Cheese party and then we might have to introduce an annual BBQ in the summer to get our friends to come over.


So moving on... oh man this is going to be at least a two parter.... on the 7th we got tickets to go watch a movie. But this was not just any movie, it was a movie about running. It was filmed by runners. There was a question and answer time after the movie with runners. It was about runners who run 100 miles. Are you catching my excitement?!?! Well we got tickets with Jim and made our way to the Stargazer Theater downtown and watched Unbreakable : The Western States 100 with our closest running friends. The movie was pretty impressive, the runners came from all over the world and ran the 100 miles in about 13 hours. The winner of the race for 2010 was a guy named Jeff and the guy who got second was Anthony. Both of who live in Boulder (or close to it) and both of who answered every runners unimportant question after the movie was over. Mikey has been a fan of Anthony's for a while now so he was excited to see him in person. The movie was alright, a little wobbly since the camera man was running to keep up with the guys, but if you like running it might help get you motivated for a good run.


Should I stop there... nah... I'm not even half way through the month... So I'll continue.

The following weekend we had a wonderful time with friends and family. Mikey's parents came over to check out our Christmas lights. We got to help celebrate Andy's 30th birthday (man I am going to have to do that this year)! We got to hang out with Cary and Adrienne, which we always enjoy! We got to make cookies with my family, Reagan still can't control her excitement when it comes to sprinkles and Breckin thought icing was ice cream and ate a spoonful or two! Yeah that was all pretty much in one weekend!

Coming up next... Mikey's Christmas party, Andy's Graduations party, a nieghborhood progressive dinner, A White Christmas, and of course the family Christmas's!