O Canada

As you all know, I presented at a conference in Vancouver Canada. The Conference was Oct 26-30....We arrived on Tuesday, and my presentation was on Thursday. So the first few days were all about the conference and going to various presentations etc...

There are a lot of pictures below....but they are not all our pictures. I will have Kevin put more up on Picassa soon, so watch for them there.

Here is a view of the City...this is from our Hotel room....





Friday night we decided to get out and see a little bit. So Kevin and I and a few coworkers of mine took a ferry taxi over to Grannville Island.



We had a lot of fun, there is an excellent market place there, and then we had a good dinner at The Keg. By the time we were done with dinner it was raining and very cold....

Saturday was all fun for us. We decided to take a tour with one of the tour companies. We left in the morning about 9 am and didn't get back till 9 pm...but we got to do lots of cool things:

This is Kevin and I on the bus on as we began the day....

Our first thing is we had to get to the big Ferry boats to take us across to Vancouver Island so that we could visit Victoria....



The Tour bus just drove onto the ferry boat and so did lots of other cars and trucks....like this semi....



And this house......
This is the type of ferry we were on....








Once we got off the ferry boat (it is a 90 min ride each way), we were off for some fun site seeing

The Butchard Gardens
Even in the fall the colors were wonderful...I can only imagine how beautiful in late spring when most things are blooming too....



















After Buchart Gardens we went to Victoria...we only had a couple hours there, so we walked and did some shopping





Then we took the boat back to Vancouver...Sunday we had to go home....so we didn't get to do too many things...but we really enjoyed our time there and must plan a vacation there soon.

This conference is in Orlando (can you all say Disney World) next year....hmmmmm I think I may need to go present again :-) I am sure I can think of something to say

Overtaken by Birds

I love how large flocks flow and fly together as one....

More Cheeto Fun for Pauline

We went shopping the other day at WalMart and they had Cheetos that turn your tongue blue...



So we had to try them. They look and taste just like regular Cheetos...but...

Well you get the idea. :)

Brrrrr

Look what we woke up to today! Snow! It is still snowing, but I don't think that we will get too much today, it is only 16 out now, but should get up to about 25-30 today for our high. But by Wednesday...in the 70s....

Fortune Cookie

So we are revising one of our classes at work, and the courses always begin with an introduction. We want students and faculty to get to know each other before they work together for several weeks. In this course we are revisioning we are having students open a virtual fortune cookie:

We say "Take a moment to infuse some “randomness” into your thoughts on the course…go to http://www.myfortunecookie.co.uk/index.php, and open a “virtual fortune cookie,” and tell us what it says. Next, see if you can tell us how the message might relate to what lies ahead of you in this class!"

So now I have an assignment for all of you "Take a moment to infuse some “randomness” into your Life…go to http://www.myfortunecookie.co.uk/index.php, and open a “virtual fortune cookie,” and tell us what it says.

I of course did the homework first :) I am nerdy like that

My fortune cookie says:
This life is yours. Some of it was given to you; the rest, you made yourself.

I believe I was given many gifts and I hope I am able to use them to make a great life for me, my family and my friends....

what does your cookie say?

Day of Patriotism

So last weekend, we went down to the Post Office to mail some letters and found that a couple of the streets were blocked off by this


Yup, that is a giant flag hanging off of a crane. So we decided to go check it out and see what is going on. Turns out it was some historical, military show.

They had a Huey from the Vietnam era

And an anti-aircraft vehicle too..

There were seats for two guys in that front hatch. I wondered how I would get in there. It looked like it was made of 12yr olds. There is no way I would have fit over both seats let alone sit in one.

Also downtown there is a museum, that you can only visit by appointment, that we had never been in before. We only got into one of the rooms due to all the people but they had a nice display of aircraft models.

They had a nice display board of all the wars that our country has been involved in, and I was surprised to see newspaper articles in there from Revolutionary times and lots of German artifacts from WWI and WWII, including a WWII era Germany motorcycle with sidecar and machine gun. I expect to see them in normal museums, but not downtown Ft. Morgan. Anyway, it was surprising to see the neat things tucked away in our town.

The Fort Morgan Times has an article on this

Oktoberfest in Brush

Americans have a habit of stealing holidays and turning it in to a party and a car show. Take St. Patricks day for example. Every year Brush holds Oktoberfest downtown, nevermind that it is still September and that the majority of the people in Brush are not from German decent anymore. But what the heck, it is a holiday to celebrate.

So here are some of the cars that we liked

Not a bad turn out for 11am in Brush

Good old fashioned tree downing

Today we had a celebration in the the family (not the title of this post). Desirae and Tim's little girl, Joslyn was baptised today. After church we all went to Kim and Curt's house to have lunch.

While at their house, we realized that the tree next door was split and we didn't want that part of the tree to fall and do any damage, so the decision was that piece should come off today. Here is the tree before....
Here is Curt getting ready to take off that big branch.

Here is when it first fell off

You can see here it was a big split in the tree and so it took a little more persuading to get it to come all the way off.

Once it was down, the next step was to move it over to the side of the street so that cars could get by.

Here it is all cleaned up....they had 2 trailers of small branches

And a full truck load of bigger pieces that they took to Doug's to dry and then will be firewood next year.

And here is Caelum with the socket wrench, fixing the tree (this isn't the tree that was broken and this was after it was all cleaned up, as you can tell by the street)

Furniture shopping

We would like some new dining room furniture. What we have was used before Jody got it and she had it before we met. So we took an adventure to Denver yesterday to look. Why is it that everything is so expensive, and in designs that are ugly and poor quality. Sigh. We will keep looking....

On Sat the 12th, we were invited to Desirae’s and Tim’s house to celebrate birthdays. Desirae and Cindy have birthday’s that are just a couple days apart. Dez cooked a chicken dinner, and then we had cake and homemade ice cream.

We sat outside with Kim and Curt.

Caelum was eating his cake and ice cream, and wanted you to see that he had mini chocolate chips in his cup of ice cream.

For Pauline

First we went to Walmart.....bought
Opened them....

And ate them all....

YUM YUM YUM

Wish you were here to enjoy them with us.

A Shadow in the shadow

Why dogs always find the littlest corner to lay in...I don't know.

Triple Bogey!!!

Desirae and Tim had to take Joslyn to Children’s hospital for some tests, so Kevin and I are watching Caelum overnight.

We are having a lot of fun playing with him. We played all the games in Wii, and with the tractor, and ate some fruit snacks, had a great dinner…but we did have one question for Uncle Steve. We were playing Wii Golf and were wondering if a Triple Bogey was good? Every time Caelum got one we all had to cheer! It was quite funny. Maybe it is only good if you are 3 years old? Or if your name is Jody…she isn’t too good either ;)

Tattoos

So right before Pauline went home, she bought some temporary tattoos. She put some on to go home with (I hope her parents didn't think they were real). And she left us some to put on later.

So here are the pictures for Pauline so she can see our tattoos....

Kevin put on the baseball glove

and I went for the traditional ankle tattoo.

This is probably as close to a real tattoo I will get as I am very very very very very very afraid of needles....just thinking about it makes me want to cry.

Pauline's Last Colorado Weekend

So this last weekend was Pauline's last weekend with us. She left here on Monday, and arrived home on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday she was back in school.

For her last weekend we wanted to go to the Mountains again, so we decided to take a trip on the Georgetown Loop Railroad., and then do the mine tour.

While we were waiting for the train to get going, we snapped this picture. I call it "Pouty Pauline" I am sure this is just her being sad she had to go home.

When we got ready to go on the tour of the mine we had to have our hardhats on...notice our gorgeous necklaces, mine is a gift from Pauline.

Here is the three of us at the mine tour.

On Pauline's last day on Sunday, we wanted to make sure she got a chance to do some of her favorite things. She had never driven before, but loved to drive our workhorse cart...she would take it to go get the mail. On Sunday, she helped Kevin by dumping the grass he had from mowing the lawn. This was the first time she drove the cart alone.

Then she had to try out the new lawn mower (I haven't even driven it yet....Kevin says it is because I break them)

After the yard work was done, we went to the park to play basketball

And softball....Pauline loved our trip to the Rockies Game...I think she is a lifelong baseball fan now.

And what trip to isn't complete with out this picture to remember :)

We had a great time with Pauline this summer. We hope she is able to come back sometime, and that we can get a chance to go visit her as well.