Quick Update

I added some picks to the second days post on the touring ride. Enjoy, that is all.

Adventures in Baby Sitting and a Fargo update

Adventures in Babysitting!

Emily and I had a chance to babysit Tobin for Brooke and Steve, he's 9 months old and pretty cute little kid. It was Steve's Birthday, so they wanted to head out to Oktoberfest. When we showed up Tobin was sleeping. So we chatted with them for a while got the low down on the procedures and how to take care of the little guy for a bit. Then they took off.
With Tobin asleep, and making out on the couch seeming to be a bit immature we turned to the TV. We could keep an eye on the little feller through the security system they were using as a baby monitor with audio and video with an infra-red lens so that you can see him in the dark, so it was easy to keep an eye on him. Our first major challenge was to come.
The TV was on BBC, or something like that, and we didn't want to watch it with there being College Football on but, we couldn't work the TV. This was a major stumbling block. They had a universal remote so the buttons were a bit confusing. I was pretty stressed out at this point. After some relocating and playing with the remote we got it figured out! We watched TV for a while then Tobin woke up.
He was a little confused when we got him out of his crib. He's met us before but wasn't 100% sure of us. We played with him on the floor with the stack of toys he's got. Helped him chew on some books. He was pretty entertained by the squeaky noise that a straw makes in a soda cup. He was giggling pretty good every time Emily would make the noise. Check it out!

Told ya he is cute. Sorry about the poor video, it's only a cell phone. We put him in his little push cart on the wood floor. He could move that thing at a pretty good clip! Had a diaper change and played some more but he was worn out and getting ready for bed. We got him into his jammies and around then Brooke and Steve got home. We let them put the little guy to bed and we took off. Pretty good time, Tobin is an easy kid to watch.

Fargo Update

I've been trying to get a front Proteur style rack on the Fargo and I finally got it all figured out. The fork on the Fargo isn't quite like most other forks and the racks I'd had weren't actually working out. So I finally started really rigging something up. Here is what I ended up with:


Looks pretty good and is pretty solid. The crux of the problem with the rack/Fargo interface was that they were both threaded and different diameters. So the post on the rack didn't fit the hole on the Fargo. So I had to rig something up. I ended up using the mount for the front fender. I ran the post on the rack through the mount and bolted them together, you can see that here:

Then I used a mount for an SPD cleat and bridged down from the back side of the fork to support the back side of the post, as you can see here:
The threaded post was angled more downward than where it hit the cleat part, so ther spacer is loaded in tension, which I think is good. I tried to put a spacer in there, but due the rivets on the fender it didn't fit. Then I used some clamps to mount the bottom of the rack to the fork, see:


It is also really close to the head tube, yikes!


It isn't the cleanest of mounts but it seems to be working. I'm gonna try it out and see how it does. My only concern is that I'll shear the fender mount, then I won't have a rack or a fender, fun stuff. Thanks for reading talk to you later.

P.S.
Went for a quick test ride, looks like it works!

mmmmm hoptoberfest. September is one of the better months for beer.

Touring Ride Day 2

Welcome back!

I know you are all anxiously awaiting the report of Day two of James and I's touring ride. We got up and made some breakfast the next morning. I had a new device that allows me to make coffee in my Nalgene bottle. I've got an old BPA filled bottle that since I'm gonna start making coffee out of I should replace with a BPA free one. But, the coffee was good and helped get us started. James cooked up some Oatmeal and I had some dehydrated eggs. This may have been a bad choice for me. Once we were all packed up and ready to go we headed back down the hill, replaying all the free rides down hill we'd enjoyed the day before in my head. I rode a bit of the dirt road we had hiked up, seeing as how the Fargo is like the coolest bike ever. But I didn't ride it all as I wasn't in the mood to find out what I couldn't ride the hard way. Then it was a pretty easy ride up and out of the campground. Just past Deadmans hill, hidden in clouds we stopped at the top of this hill.

Deadman Hill's Summit is hidden in these ominous looking clouds. I think this is the storm that was creating all the wind we fought the day before. At this point, sadly the battery in the camera died. Not like the battery light came on and I stopped using it. Like DEAD, the lens wouldn't retract or close. So I packed it away for the trip. I'm working on getting images off of cell phones and will fill them in when I have it figured out. But, there was a sign at the top of this hill that warned of 12% grades ahead. So that explained part of why we were tired, I guess!

We dropped down the 12% grade ahead all the way back into Masonville. At Masonville James and I agreed that 11% grade is probably the limit for comfortable descending fully loaded with out braking. Also some where around 42 mph, as I hit 44 max through there. All the excitement from the day before activities had cleared out leaving behind only the porta-johns, which I appreciated. We pushed on after giving a lost motorist some direction to Estes Park.

We had made plans to stop on the South side of Longmont to get lunch and pushed on in that direction. We ate and drank and chatted the miles away all the way into Longmont. Having not enjoyed our earlier route through Longmont we navigated a new way. Using some multi-use trails around a lake. All the way around the lake. We didn't know the trail very well and had to turn, we guessed wrong. But are very familiar with the trail system there now. We did manage to come out very close to our intended lunch stop. Which upon arrival was obviously not open. Not like "closed on Sunday", more like we are still building the place and unless you're a contractor with a brown bag lunch, you'll be eating else where. So we trotted back into Longmont and finally found a Wendy's. It was pretty good, something about a Coke in the middle of a long ride that always tastes good. We got a few looks wandering into the Wendy's in bike gear, all be it baggy bike gear, and loaded bikes. We wondered what the people there thought of us seeing as how other cyclists look at us like we are crazy...


*** UPDATE

This is what our bikes looked like. Such a pretty image I put it into sepia tone as well.

***

From here we headed back to the house. Simple ride with good weather. Although, my stomach started to bother me a bit. About 10 miles (40 min) from the house I made James bust a U turn to get to a gas station. My stomach decided I NEEDED to stop, NOW! The bib cycling shorts altered the time line I had in my mind upon entering the gas station and seeing the bathroom door making the whole situation a lot closer that I would have liked. Considering that James and I had eaten almost exactly the same thing, except the eggs, I won't be eating those eggs again.

It was a tentative ride home for the rest of the way but I made it. James and I had a really good time as well. James and I will definitely be doing this all again! If anyone would like to join us let us know and we can plan a great weekend.


And now for something completely different.....

First off, sorry it's taken me so long to get back to this. I had nasal surgery on Tuesday. I was pretty busy getting ready for that and then trying to recover and get caught back up from it. For those of you that didn't know, I pretty much got a roto-router for my nose, open things up a bit. Hopefully I won't be waking up in the middle of the night gasping for air. For the folks that missed out on my recovery period, I had to wear this lovely thing to keep control of all the gross stuff coming out of my nose.
I only had to wear it for about 24 hours, so not terrible. It's a self shot, can you tell?

Emily and I also got to see one of our favorite bands in concert. First we had to sit through taking back Sunday. These guys weren't great. But, you can see the beautiful view out the back of Fiddlers Green Amphitheater of the Front Range.
I'm not even gonna mention how bad the band that came on ahead of them was. Also, if you aren't concerned about the youth of this nation, you better get to a pop band concert. Emily and I were there to see Weezer! They came on next and for the next half hour rocked the house and had everyone signing along in front of this sweet gold banner!


We had a pretty good time. Blink 182, the headliner for the show, played next and were pretty medium. Very "Meh". So we managed to act like old folks and not stay for the encore and beat the traffic. We'd seen what we payed for.

You are all mostly caught up on our lives for now, been pretty boring as I can exert, bend, or lift for another week. Did get in some Wake Boarding, 2 parties, and a Union Ceremony Reception over the holiday weekend before surgery though!

Also, if you didn't on the 11th, take a few moments to remember the 3000+ people who died and the 343 FF's who ran headlong into danger on 9/11, 8 years ago.

Thanks for reading talk to ya soon!

Hey All,

So I'm gonna give this blogging thing one more try. Mostly cause I went on a cool ride and would like to make everyone as jealous as possible.

Here's the gist, James and I rode from my house up to the Roosevelt National Forest and camped for the night then rode home.

Here is a link to the GPS Data that I collected along the way.
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/8704098

You can click on the images and get a way bigger one, if you dare.......

Dad gave me his old GPS unit. A Garmin Etrex Vista. I was able to plug the route into the GPS from the computer and follow it right up to the campsite. I mounted it to the handle bars with a mount that James gave me. It was great! I've used it for the various hut trips as well, it has been killer for that stuff. The display is going out and will disappear after hitting bumps and you gotta give it a whack to bring it back I perfected an on the bike whacking technique over the miles. Until it dies completely, it works for me! I really like it.

So here's the story

James came up Friday night and we finished some final things and got packed up. I had to teach James how Handlebar Bags worked. He had some crazy stuff going on but we got him all squared away. He also helped me get rid of a bunch of stuff I didn't need to take. We left Saturday morning. This is the two of us all packed up and ready to go on the left. I'm a little dark in the picture so here is a close up of MY bike, on the right. I managed to cram everything into the two rear panniers so I didn't need to use the front ones. I can pull stuff out of the two little pockets on the front of the rear panniers while I'm riding, like snacks and the camera. So I didn't need my handle bar bag either. All of which was given to my by my Dad. THANKS!

Basically we headed up 95th street to Loveland. However, we had to detour over to my work to get a lock, I left it locked to the bike rack at work, oops! From there we took the toe path to the cut off across the rail road tracks and back onto the road. This got us onto 95th St., basically. We hit our first obstacle at 95th and Valmont road in Lafayette. 95th was closed! Supposedly the bridge over the creek on 95th was out, so churned the Louisville Fire rumor mill. Well, we went for it, it wasn't too far up to the bridge as you can see here from my on the bike pic:

We are already past the closure signs but you can see the construction is the light part at the "end" of the road. Turns out the bridge is still there, so we road through some dirt, across the bridge and through more dirt, back onto the road. I accidentally took a quick video, check it out:



It turned out to be a non-issue, as the road was still actually open to cyclists. I spotted a runner who must have come from the "closed" bridge that emboldened me to "Go For It". It actually was really nice cause there was no traffic on a large section of this road which doesn't have a great shoulder. To the LFD rumor mill's credit I wouldn't take a fire engine across it!

We took 95th up to Longmont. In the planning this was one of my worries....Longmont isn't a big town but there is a lot of traffic. We also noted the new Oskar Blues Tap House and Brewery at the south side of Longmont, where we would be the next day conveniently around noon. We made it about half way through town on 95th and gave up and took to the sidewalk. I hate riding on the sidewalk, but it was better than the alternative. Once we got out of Longmont things got a lot better.

95th was a lot less busy and we didn't have any issues with traffic the rest of the way. We weren't in any city areas for the rest of the trip. Because of that we didn't find a very good spot to stop for lunch. So we just pulled off the road at a private drive. Plunked down in the grass and had lunch there. We sat in the grass at the front of my bike and ate, it was good!

Here is James making some adjustments to his bars, you can see how far from the route (the blacktop there) we were willing to go.

We got back on the road and headed up toward Masonville. Masonville was our planned stop to water up for the campsite. Off we went. I think we managed to wander into Masonville on the coolest day of the year for Masonville. Here is what we saw:













Turns out there was a bike festival in Masonville this day. They had music from a Bluegrass band and port-a-johns, and free beer. James had a Dales' Pale Ale and I went with the Gordons' IPA, both from Oskar Blues Brewery. We missed the race, but got to see the award ceremony. Can't argue with free beers and live music in the middle of a beautiful bike ride.


The steeds got a rest as well.From Masonville we headed up into the Mountains. You can see them lurking in the background of the two pics earlier. This next section certainly taught us a lesson about touring rides. Turns out, a bike is a lot harder to ride up hill with a bunch of extra gear on it. James and I did the Copper Triangle, you can learn more about it here, together. We climb a decent amount, we were surprised. Ther ride was generally rolling up hill all the way to the National Forest. Here are a couple of images from our ride up into the National forest. It was a beauiful day and the area to the West of Fort Collins is amaizing. Here is one hill:


Here is another hill:


Even though it was slow going we were still having a great time, as you can see.

We anticipated hittting a dirt road once we got into Roosevelt National Forest. Then another fire road, or jeep road to an area where camping is allowed. The main rule is to be 100 feet from the road and you can pitch your tent where you would like, for free! The dirt road in the park was pretty much what I would expect. The fire road was more like a jeep road than I had hoped. Here is what we found.


To give you some perspective on it, here is James pulling a little Hike-a-Bike action up the hill.


Needless to say we didn't go to teribbly far up this road. It continued on like this for miles.


This was an open spot we found to pitch the tent. Lots of space and only one couple on a four-wheeler came off the road into our camp area. Hung the clothes on the bikes to dry and cooked some dinner. Dehydrated Jamacian Chicken and Rice, we both picked out independently, was the dinner of choice. After a decent aount of reading we hung a pannier full of food from a tree, by linking our tie down straps togehter, and hit the sack. We borrowed a lighter 2 man tent from a friend. The 2-man part of a 2-man tent is a bit over rated. We were in there pretty tight. We opened the rainfly to get some extra ventilation and enjoy the cool night air. Moments later, it started to rain. Rainfly got closed back up. But rain passed quickly and the fly came back open and we got a good nights sleep.

You'll have to tune in soon for the rest of the story of the ride home. But we got in 56 miles and over 3000' vertical feet in gain. Good day for sure with another one to come!

Paris

Hey All,

We are in Paris, France. It's 6pm here, and 10 am in Colorado. We got some light sleep on the plane, 2-3 hours. We left Colorado around 10 am yesterday. So Emily is grabbing a quick nap before we go out to eat. Here is a snap shot of some big metal thing...Here is some proof that we really were there:

After the Eifel Tower we headed over to have some Cafe. As you could image we were pretty tired! Here is the view from the cafe.

After some wondering and a little guidance from TomTom we found the Arch D' Triumph!On the way there we saw some neat stuff. Here is a picture of a bike lane. There is a 6" tall by 12" wide curb between you and the cars! Now that's what I call a bike lane!
OK, that's all for now. There is plenty more to come!

Quick Update

Hey All,

Emily and I are doing very well! Emily threw me a fun Birthday Party last weekend. This Weekend I think we'll head to Paris. France! Then on to Italy to watch the Giro d'Italia and take in some sights! I'll try and post some images and some stories here at night or when realaxing in a cafe! Keep checking in, worst case I'll update it all at the end of the trip when we are back!

New Toy

Emily is pretty much awesome.  She got me a new bike for my Birthday.  It's a goofy bike for sure.  It's a mountain bike with 29", instead of 26" wheels.  That means I can run knobby tires or road tires (700c) on it.  It has touring bike geometry and braze ons so I can put racks and bags on it and disappear for a week.  I can also go for mountain bike rides on it.  It'll hold 5 water bottle cages as well.  I'll use it mostly to replace my car so I don't have to use it much anymore.  Here is a link to some pictures on Flickr.  I have an account there and I have some other pictures to check out.  Enjoy!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jfearnow/sets/72157617328345874/

Openings

It was a pretty busy weekend here in CO. Started Thursday night. Emily, Jason and I went to the Avalanche Hockey Game. It went to a shoot out at the end, pretty exciting. The Stars of Dallas had some pretty lucky dribbler goals and the Ave's put on a shootout clinic. Unfortunately the phrase is right, it's better to be lucky than good. So the Ave's lost in a heart breaker. But the Stars made the playoffs.

Friday I had the day off for Good Friday. My company isn't 100% on the religious equality band wagon. It also happened to be the day of the Home opener for the Rockies. So I took the bus, that FF's get to ride for free in CO, downtown and hit the bars around the stadium to check stuff out. It was packed, I was quite surprised. I was expecting it to be busy but there were lines to get into all the bars from 1pm, when I got there, till 6pm, when Emily got there. Several of my friends came along and we had a pretty good time all in all. Emily came downtown for dinner and we went to the Wynkoop Brewery. They make some tasty beer there for sure. This is also the place that the Mayor owned partial stock in until they got busted for serving under-agers. It was a good time for sure, might have to take the day off next year.

Saturday was pretty lazy in the morning. In the afternoon Emily ran off to swim and run, to continue training for her Triathlon, which has earned her some personal best times already! Go EM! I went off to a buddies house. He has a field behind his house and he borrowed a couple of monster tillers from work. Armed with shovels and the tillers we cut a Pump Track into a flat section of land.

Here is a quick description of what a pump track is: http://www.leelikesbikes.com/build-your-own-pump-track.html

It's designed to work on strength, skills and be a lot of fun, especially when it's cold out.

After building the pump track, Emily and I went to dinner with some friends. It was very adult of us. We met some friends at their place along with another couple. Lots of talk about raising kids, as we were the only ones with out child there. Lots of talk about being pregnant as well. We did have a very enjoyable time. After getting a solid dose of adult hood Emily and I headed over to a "Kegger" at a buddies. He and his new roommate just got the place and wanted to have some folks over to check it out. Good times there as well.

Sunday morning we got up and headed to Centennial to visit James and Hillary and get a little Easter Brunch. We went to the Dusty Boot. Fortunately the food was better than it sounds like it would be. It was really good actually. Then off to the OUTLET MALL! Lots of walking but a lot of deals as well. All shopped out we headed back to James and Hill's place. James and I finished all the heavy construction on a set of corn hole boards to be played in the back yard. All that's left is the major painting, we got the base coat down for the stripes, and creating the bags. Not really sure where were are gonna find like 20 cups of dried corn kernels, but we will.

With that done and full weekend coming to a close the wife and I headed home to call it a night. It was a good weekend. BBQ season is coming so we'll have the corn hole boards all ready to go. We designed them to fold flat for transport! OK, thanks for reading more news to come. Hope everyone had a good Easter and we'll talk to ya laters alligators!

Is it Spring yet?

Hopefully it has finally arrived in Colorado! We are expecting rain later this week..... glad it's not snow! I'm still hopeful our tulips and daffodils will make it. They are out of the ground, but after all the cold and snow I'm not sure if they will bloom!
Brewski got an early Easter surprise today. He caught a giant bunny rabbit! Here are some pics.

He's so proud of his skills catching the rabbit!
Then things got ugly and Brewski decided to eat the Easter Bunny!! Oh No!!
Later we see all is fine and they are cuddling the evening away! Phew!

On another note, I (Emily) have been spending lots of time at the gym. I am training for an olympic distance triathlon. Check out www.5430sports.com The race is July 12th, so I have lots of time to train. I'm doing another shorter distance triathlon in early June.... I think it's the 8th. Now if I could just get Jon to the gym..... :)

Pillow Update

It worked pretty well. We'll see how much I get to use it tonight. I'm staying at the firehouse for crew and we are getting dumped on again with snow. I had a pretty good nights sleep. The pillow isn't very even across the bottom. So I might try to rig up something to even it out a bit. I've got some extra foam to play with so I might try some other cutting methods. Shorting a car battery with some wire might make a nice knife.... We'll see. OK, that's all for now.

A little Pillow Talk

OK, first off I'll apologize. It has been a LONG time since the last blog. January 18th actually. Life is good for both of us. I am off an on 4-5 days a week at work as a cost saving measure, back to 5 day work weeks and my whole pay check this week. Emily's job is going well, no major cut backs there. Not a whole lot of excitement. We got a day off with all the snow, more on the way they say. It's OK though because almost all of the 15 inches we got have melted. I've banished the Jeep to the street and have claimed it's spot in the garage for the Element. At least till the weather is better. Here is a picture of the drift against the sliding door to our bedroom.


Now, on to the Pillow Talk. So Emily and I got a TempurPedic mattress. First off, YES. You should get one. It's great. I don't sweat at night any more and I can't remember the last time I've woken up with a sore back, even after 10 hours of sleep. Emily and I both consistently sleep through the other getting up in the middle of the night and I have no idea how much she tosses and turns at night. OK, so we got two free pillows with the mattress. Emily got this sweet one that is super comfy. I picked out one that is horrible. I end up staring at my feet if I lay on my back and can't breath cause my chin is on my chest. So I wake up with neck pain a lot. So I finally gave up on it tonight. I have been sleeping on a folded up blanket, which I actually kinda like. I kinda lost it and decided to "Fix" the pillow. Have you ever fixed a pillow, using a saw?


So I pulled it out and cut it, roughly in half with the saw. That stuff is pretty tough, I tried an 8" bread knife, scissors, an 8" chef knife and then finally the saw. The saw worked and the pillow has been cut. I'm sleeping on it tonight. I'll get an update on how it works soon.

Friday, after all the snow I went up to Vail to shred some snow on the snowboard. I was pretty sure I could have already hung up the snowboard for the season, but we got dumped on. Vail had 72" of snow in 48 hours. That plus a day off work, anyway, meant hitting the slopes. Here is a pic from the back bowl area of Vail.

OK, another bit of info. I went to the North American Hand Made Bike Show in Indy. Another whirlwind tour of the Circle City. Here is a link to my flickr.com account. You can checkout some photos I took at the show!

You can also look around at some other photos I have on there. Enjoy.


OK, so trying to get into this again. Please keep checking in, I'll try and update. Leave your comments so I know where to point this and who all is reading. Thanks.

A Weekend to Move to CO

Hey All,

Just a quick update on the weekend we had. Mostly cause it was a pretty good one. Friday night we had dinner at the Empire, always a good time. One of the FF's on the department runs the joint. Then we headed home to watch a video of the Red Bull Soap Box Race. Red Bull has a company put together a DVD of the whole thing. Emily and I had a pretty good time watching the video.

Saturday we got up and cleaned up the house up a bit. Then James and Hillary came over and we headed up to the Brainard Lake Receation area to do some snowshoeing. We hiked about a mile out and a mile back on the Sourdough trail from Brainard Lake Road. The snow was pretty good and the weather was beautiful. James didn't have waterproof pants on, I say "on" cause he has them he just wasn't wearing them. So his pants got all wet. I loaned him my extra pants so he could finish the hike. Emily had to loan Hillary a coat for the hike as well. These things happen when you don't start from your house. We had a great time. The picture below us at the turn around point.
We all came back and had a nice dinner together at Old Chicago's. It was a good time for sure. Then Emily and I went over to some friends of ours to hang out for a bit, then headed home.

Sunday we got up and made some breakfast, Chocolate Chip Waffels. Emily and I went for a bike ride. Emily got out on her Mountain Bike for hte first time since her shoulder surgery. We road about 10 miles or so. Oh, yeah it was very nice out, we were in shorts and shirt sleeves for the ride and we worked up a pretty good sweat. We also saw a pair of Bald Eagles resting in a tree together. We have seen them in the area previously and I think they are a pair. We're on the look out for the nest! We also got the Christmas lights down, finally. Pretty much the reason for living here on the Front Range. We are loving it out here!

Then we settled in to watch the AFC Championship game and update the Blog!

Thanks for checking in and thanks for all the emails and comments. We love to hear them!

Bikes, Boards, Blowouts and Shootouts

Yes, it has been a long time. Yes, there have been holidays, and visitors and all kinds of things going on. Now that I think about it, this thing should really only get updated when there isn’t anything going on. So if it were to be updated a lot it would be even more boring than in it’s current state. Think about that for a while….

I was on a holiday Shutdown from the 19th of Dec. till the 5th of Jan.. So that was a nice little vacation for me. I took the time to get out on some mid-week days on the slopes and get back into snowboarding. Monday I hit up Loveland Ski resort by myself to try and remember how to snowboard. That went pretty well, had a good time. Got up the next day and went to A-Basin with some friends. This was my first trip to A-Basin and I really liked it. There was a bunch of fresh deep powder to ride in. Below is the first real tree run I've done, look at all that snow.

It was the first time I’ve gotten to snowboard in snow that was knee deep! My fellow Fire Fighter, Brian Hastey went up with me, as did a few of his co-workers. All of them are in the medical industry, technicians to doctors; they are afforded a flexible schedule allowing them to get up the hill on the weekdays. Then it was time to make sure the house was in order for our guest. Here is me one of the last times up the lift, notice the helmet I also wear wrist guards to stay safe. Being able to wipe my own butt is still a high priority for me.

Emily’s Mom, Deb, came into town on Christmas day. Well, she was scheduled for Christmas Day but ended up getting here Christmas Night. We did the Christmas thing and had a good time. Emily and I would like to thank everyone for all the generous donations. We understand that things are tight and we appreciate all that everyone did! While Deb was in town we had a very nice dinner at Ted’s Montana Grill and took the factory tour at Celestial Seasonings. The tour was actually pretty interesting, more so than I expected. Don’t worry; I’d be willing to take it again. We also managed to take in hockey game. Not just any hockey game, my beloved Red Wings of Detroit were playing the dastardly Colorado Avalanche (Or “The Lanch” as I like to call them).

It’s one of the few times a year I get to see them play, TV included, so it’s a good time for me. I think Emily enjoys it as well. We also got to expose Deb to the NHL.

It was a good game! The “Lanch” came out firing and took an early lead. The maturity of the Wings showed through as they held their game and managed to send the game into overtime. After no scoring in overtime it went to a shoot out. Unfourtunately the “Lanch” are a much better shoot out team than the Wings. The good guys lost, what could you do.

Steve, Brooke, and now Tobin Galaty's dog Sonja got to stay with us for a while as Tobin made his debut in this world. Well live debut, he'd been seen on camera a few times prior. Brooke ended up needing a C-section so we got to hang out with Sonja for several days. As you can see her and Brewski got along just fine, even in the car. She's super easy to take care of and is a sweet dog. Brooke, Steve and Tobin are doing great and everyone is just as happy as a pig in slop!

Emily and I got a hike in and I exposed Emily to the Blue Dot trails up in Nederaland. There is a pretty good network of fun rolling hill trials that start by Nederalnd High School. We hiked around there for a little while and had a pretty good time.

There were a couple of nice warm days over the break and I managed to get out on my bike. The first ride was a short one but nice. The second ride was riddled with Karma. I called late the night before to bail on a buddy to go snowboarding to enjoy the 60+ degree day they were forecasting. About 2 miles from the house I dropped the chain and wrapped it around the crank arm, scratching it all up, as I was trying to cross a busy road and make a left turn. So I was stuck under an overpass on the left shoulder in a left turn lane trying to fix my bike. Got rolling again and noticed that the chain wouldn’t stay on so well, mostly because the chain ring it sits on was bent. I got to fight with that for the rest of the ride! Then about 4 miles from home I had a huge cut in my tire. The tube was flat before I could get the bike stopped. The cut was about an inch long. I called in the Sag wagon and made Emily come and get me.

I also got another first this weekend. I went backcountry snowboarding at Berthoud Pass. There were 7 of us in the group and we had two Avalanche beacons and some probes. The South side of Berthoud pass is supposed to be less avalanche-prone than other sections. We hiked about 500 vertical feet up from the parking lot and cut across and down to the road we drove up on. Then we sent the guy with the pickup to hitch back to the parking lot and come back for us in the truck. If you follow this link it will take you to the Motion Based GPS info from the trip. Below is a graph of the trip for elevation vs. time. So the flat parts are where we aren’t moving. Steep drops in elevation are snowboarding, steep gains in elevation are riding in the truck back to the top, and the shallower increases are the hiking sections. There should be 3 of each.

That is about it for now. Emily is getting back in the pool and has been hitting the gym pretty hard. Her shoulder is doing great and she is getting close to being better. Talk to ya soon!