Catch up!

So it's been a while, and we (Emily) apologize. It's been my turn to blog and I've been lazy. We won't discuss the fact that I am addicted to a game called packrat on Facebook..... it's a sore subject! :) (right Hillary?!)
So we've been busy! We've had some gourmet meals. Yes, hamburgers are gourmet when you have them with wine! I also tried my hand at homemade steak fries. They are VERY simple, and turned out quite delicious! I can't remember what wine we were drinking with this, but it was good as well.

Yeah, it's not the best photo, but you get the idea, we're fancy!

We've been very busy with other projects as well. A couple of months ago I got the itch to redo some of the downstairs bathroom. We affectionately call it the "Playboy" bathroom. Unfortunately I don't think we have any before pictures of the bathroom, but I'll try to describe it for those who haven't seen it.
1) There was a giant mirror.... It covered the entire wall above the sink and toliet, I believe it's dimensions are about 2 feet tall by 4 feet wide. But I'm not positive. It was big.
2) There was a giant mirrored light bar above that, it would hold about 9 clear glass globe lightbulbs. That bathroom isn't the size of the Taj Mahal. Really.... 9 lightbulbs!
3) The black tile and toliet don't help the playboy image.

Ok, so here's what we did. We took down the giant mirror and large light fixture. We replaced it with a small 2 light fixture. There used to be a recessed medicine cabinet on the wall to the right of the sink. We took that out and patched the hole. We patched a couple of other small holes discovered behind the mirror and from where the old light fixture was. Then we added texture to match the rest of the walls and painted. We hung a new medicine cabinet over the sink, and a couple of decorative shelves over the toilet. Topped it all off with a new towel bar by the sink.

It wasn't a huge project, but we're pleased with the result and glad it's done!
I have to admit I don't know when we would have gotten this done, but a phone call from my Dad, who was ready to come visit, that was a great motivator!

And finally, we hung some curtains downstairs. This was a HUGE remodel last year, we do have before and afters for this one. Looks a little different now! And finally today we hung the curtains down there.TaDa! No more house projects for the next week or so I think..... hehehehehe But soon.... the mailbox! (I loathe our mailbox!)
Thanks for checking in! Hope all is well!

Back Home Again in Indiana

Hello all,

Emily and I made it home for another trip. It was really good for us to see the families. You'll have to get an update from Emily on her trip but here goes mine.

In an effort to save a couple bucks on the tickets we flew out pretty early so we got into town in time to actually do something. The parents and I stopped at their new Whiz-Bang grocery store. It looks like something right out of Boulder, Colorado! They had a fancy version of just about everything like potato salad, chocolate, turkey, and even pre-burnt wood (cowboy charcoal). We got a little bit of all but the chocolate. I have to admit the turkey was better than the Oscar Mayer stuff I had later in the week. It was pretty nice and if your looking for fresh food they'll have it. But, that place will never be able to say it was the place where David Letterman had his first job.

We hung out at the house then headed into theBroad Ripple Brew Pub for some beverages and to throw some darts. As lame as it might sound hanging out with my parents friends at a bar really is a good time. The beer there is good, and I wholly approve of drinking locally (ehhem Budwieser). To top it off Kelly and I killed it at darts, despite being an underdog team! We won 3 of the 5 games we played! Beating my Dad and her boyfriend teamed up. The last two we lost I think mostly cause we had too much aiming fluid, Dad had an advantage being a the driver! It was a good time though. Nice to see that your parents are normal people with friends and hobbies, despite being parents.

We spent most of Friday day getting ready for the upcoming cook out on Saturday and trying to get some shade set up for the deck, Dad will have to start a blog of his own to explain all that. After that we headed down to the Canal downtown to gauck at some people. There was a guy down there with a remote controlled sail boat, pretty neat little gadget. There were all kinds of people doing strange things for our entertainment. Finally we headed over to Victory Field for a baseball game and some fireworks. The game was pretty fun and we had a good time watching the fireworks. Then a mad dash back to the car to dodge the downtown fireworks traffic and called it a night.

Saturday we got the rest of the house and food ready for the cook out. Had a great showing from the family and had a really good time. All the food was good and had a good chance to catch up with all the family. Thanks to everybody that came out. It means quite a bit to me to know that everyone took time out of thier busy schedules to see me. Even though I'm selfish and moved away. I snuck out to my buddy Dave's house for some late night hanging out playing pool and video games. Indy brings me back to high school, I guess.

Barely made an early flight to Denver, Silly I-69 shootings almost got us in trouble. But made it home and picked up the dog, and got back to normal life, after a 4 hour nap.

Home

So I don't know if all of you guys know this but Emily and I really like living in Colorado. It's hard for us to be away from family and friends. This blog helps (and would help more if you jamooks would leave a comment or two using the comment button at the end of the posts) and trips home help a lot. When you guys get to come out here and see us that helps the most, for me (Jon) at least. Emily and I get a chance to share with you all the great things that we love about CO. That's sorda the plan with the blog as well. I had one of those "This is why I love Colorado" moments today on the way home from lunch. I pass this view every day going to and from work:

It was a beautiful day and a great day to be out on a bike. Yesterday was just as good. So I know the distance is hard on all of us, but Emily and I get a lot out days like this.

POSram Crank Rant

***UPDATE***
So I pulled all the washers out of the system that weren't needed and put the whole thing back together. It seams to be working pretty well now. Got 50 miles in on it and felt good so I think I have it pretty well dialed in. Thanks for your concern.
***UPDATE***

So, most of you don't know that I have Sram Force Crank set. I doubt that any of you are as disappointed with it as I am. Being who I am and that I am superior to instruction manuals I put the crank on all by myself. It was great for a while. Then my knee started hurting. So I found that the drive side crank was 1/8" closer to the frame than the non-drive one (I am going to double check this again). Not a big deal, until your hip and ankle are fighting about where you leg goes. Just so you know your knee looses. So I went to my LBS (Local Bike Shop), mine happens to be former employer Golden Bear Bikes. My old roommate Tyler had some parts and suggestions for me. Back into the garage I crawled. After several attempts and a few chunks of fragile precious carbon fiber removed I again tucked my tail and sought answers. None were to be found on the Internet so I acquired a phone number for the saviors, so I thought, at Sram technical support. I was told there is absolutely nothing I could do to fix my problem and that there is no way to adjust the crank to meet the spec's that Sram defines. As an engineer I find this to be, well, infuriating. So, back together the crank shall go. I'll remeasure to verify if there is a discrepancy. Also the alignment of the frame comes into question as well and will be checked. Whew. Ok, I feel a lot better. Thanks for listening to that

In an update to the FGI I haven't driven my car all week. I figured out a way to get all my FF gear in the trailer for my bike and can take it to the fire house for my scheduled crews. Me and the trailer even survived a slight creek crossing. The route needs a bit of a tweak, sometimes the lake is there sometimes not, yesterday it was along with it's feeder creek. Still working on the compost bin thing, got some education coming down the pike on that.

The yardwork never ends!

So besides triathlon training, I've been work in the yard plenty too. All those Saturday's while Jon was off playing firefighter, I was sitting in the yard. And not always with a beer in my hand!
Most of my time is spent picking the leaves out of the lava rock.... oh what a joyous task. I seriously would rather scrub a bathroom than do this! Here's where I'm at... you can see on the left where the lava rock is a lovely leaf color, and on the right where it looks black, like lava rock! Underneath the tree is the worst spot of course!

Our first real "landscaping" were these barberry bushes we planted. They survived the winter and are growing again! I managed to not kill them! They are planted in the lava rock, and yes I'm not good enough to get ALL of the leaves out!

I planted some Dahlias a couple of weeks ago, and they are starting to come up as well! So guess I haven't killed those yet. Hopefully we'll get some pretty flowers out of these!

And finally, after visiting Indiana and seeing lots of Hostas, I decided to try some in our yard. I heard they are pretty easy to maintain and hardy as well. For now they are tiny baby hostas.... hopefully they become grownup hostas one day!Hope so, cause I can be pretty good at killing plants. Just wish that talent also worked on dandelions! I planted 3 hostas total in front of the house, if you look VERY closely you can see 2 of them. (yes the grass here is a little shaggy.... but cutting the grass isn't my department!)

What's been going on

So we haven't had a lot of time to work on the posts lately. Emily has been training her little butt off for a quickly upcoming triathlon. She is going to a class to get pointers twice a week. Here is a preview from last year’s tri.
In the picture Emily is making her transition from the swim to the bike portion of the race. She will be doing the Mini Haha race right here in Broomfield.Emily has also been handling a lot of the issues with Maggie. She is still sick and was causing a lot of extra work for her, taking away from the blogging time. Maggie was super lazy again and not feeling very active. Here is a pretty good shot of Maggie making our lazy dog look like a marathoner.So, we decided that Maggie needed more attention than we could give her. Some days she needed to go out more often than once every 3 hours. So we have resigned from the Great Dane rescuing business. It was pretty sad for me to see Maggie go she is a great dog! But the lady taking care of her now will do a much better job than we ever could. Hope fully Maggie’s tumors, worms, and bad teeth will all get cleaned up and she’ll make someone a great companion.I have been busy helping out with the Louisville and Lafayette Fire Academy. So, pretty much, all of the Saturdays were taken up for me. That is finally finished up. I missed out on the picture and final burn building because I make poor decisions.They are a rag tag crew but they’ll do in a pinch. I guess I hadn't taken enough abuse so I decided to take a Wildland fire fighting class. That ended up being every bit of free time I had from Monday night to Sunday afternoon, including the final day of structure academy. But it was pretty cool. Here are some photos from the prescribed burn we did.The pictures above are my crew watching a fire line and the one below is a fire whirl. That’s a tiny little tornado of fire. A prescribed burn is used to safely thin out the forest to it's appropriate levels without endangering any of the community around it. We got to see a lot of pretty fun stuff and sucked a lot of smoke.
After all that Emily and I had a couple of days to get our stuff together to go to Fort Wayne. Emily put together an informal BBQ for her Dad. It was a fun gathering of the closer friends and family to say “congratulations” for Mike’s retirement (Congrats Mike!). Hopefully he is stress free and spending less time picking out ties and more time picking out hobbies! The kids got together and got him a tent. It’s conditional though, he has to come out and go camping with us. As you can see Mikey Likes it!

I managed to sneak out and see some friends and take in the 500! Here I am with Carl, Justin and Me, from Right to left.
Don’t worry, it’s Carl’s hat, and it looks a lot better on him. Speaking of Carl, he met his Dream Girl, too bad he’s married and she didn’t really care that he existed!

It was a whirlwind trip to Indy, as they always are. Sorry I didn’t have time to meet with family. I caught enough guilt from Mom as it was, so don’t worry about that. It was sad to leave but nice to be in our house again. The offer always stands; the guest room is ready for company at all times! We just need like a couple hours notice so we can be home.
That pretty much covers what all we have been up to. Emily has been as busy as I have and we’ll both try and make more updates. Hopefully they won’t be this long!

Green Update

For a quick update on our going green initiatives. The latest big step is the addition of an electric lawn mower to our landscaping arsenal. It's a beaut! Bright red metal deck with black accents. It's battery powered and works pretty well. The grass was at least a foot longer before being cut than it was after and I got the whole yard mowed on a single charge. The mower is made by Homelite and we got it over at Home Depot. Getting the commuter bike set up for bad weather and compost bin are the next steps in the FGI (that would be the Fearnow Green Initiative).