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.

Is it really? It is.......

Jim and Carol made it to Colorado!

No I am not kidding...here they are in Downtown Boulder!

We have really been having a good time visiting and showing them around the area a little bit. This last weekend we saw the sites in Boulder, Longmont and Estes Park. We are so glad they were able to make the trip and come to visit. We hope they enjoyed it as much as we did.

Summer Fun

We have been having fun with Pauline our exchange student from Germany. She have gone to the Wild Animal Sanctuary, the Morgan County Fair, and Boulder and Estes Park.

Pauline speaks great English and has a wonderful personality. We have really enjoyed getting to know her....

She also has a talent taking pictures. Check out this picture she took of Stormy. I love it.

This weekend we went to Boulder, Longmont and Estes Park. Pauline, Kevin and I went into Rocky Mountain National Park for a short hike around Bear Lake...

The Colorado Mountain air really makes Pauline strong....check this out :)

Wild Animal Sanctuary

So Pauline has been here about a week now and so we thought we would do some site seeing. Since Jody and I had never been to the Wild Animal Sanctuary we thought it would be a good place to take Pauline. They are know for having several big cats like lions and tigers and I have to say that I have never seen so many tigers in one spot. I think they have about 25 of them.

This is one of the 40 acre parcels where they keep the animals. This one should have a lion in it, but I think they are inside at the moment.

This is one of the jaguars that lives there.

One of the sections of where they keep the tigers. They put them in small groups so that they can get used to one another and then they move them to larger pens as they become socialized.


The walkway to view the animals is above them, so you can look right down to them. Here are two LARGE tigers just sleeping the day away...

They had some lions too, but they were sleeping...


I didn't get any pictures of the bears because they were in a far away area that you could not get real close to. They also had some wolves, but by the time I got closer to them, they had went back into their den.


So hope you enjoyed learning about the Wild Animal Sanctuary.

Chicago adventures

We had a good time in Chicago and while I was there for work, I did get out a little bit. Kevin showed you the Sears tower outing...those glass boxes are cool...but what a strange feeling to be standing over "nothing".

While at the work meetings, I received a nice surprise in that I was given the Vice President's award from our VP of our Vertical. (a vertical at our university is several schools together). What an honor to be recognized for my hard work. Though at times my job is stressful, so on Thursday evening, Kevin and I am some of my faculty went down to Navy Pier for a walk. My faculty thought I needed to spend some time with Bob Newhart....so here I am telling him my troubles. LOL

Here is Kevin and I as we entered into the Navy Pier area

We also got to go the the Harry Potter exhibit....this is outside the museum.

Before we went into the exhibit we saw the flying car that Harry and Ron took to Hogwarts.....sooo cool, I wanted to sit inside....

Once inside the exhibit you are not allowed to take pictures...but the movie memorabilia was AMAZING. They put such detail into the witches and wizard robes, the school robes, the quidditch uniforms...and it was really neat to pull a mandrake up and hear it scream, play quidditch and throw the quaffle, and sitting in Hagrid's giant chair. For me one of the highlights was seeing Snape's things....He is my absolute favorite character!

Saturday morning before we heading home, we attended graduation. America Ferrera (Ugly Betty star) was one of the graduation speakers.

Graduation was also at Navy Pier...This is my assistant chair Heather and I outside after the ceremony. Heather is new so last week was the first time we had met in person.

After graduation we headed home, and we were even lucky enough to catch and earlier flight, we were at DIA, before our original scheduled departure from O'Hare...awesome!