Keystone

This past weekend Rene and I headed up to Keystone to finally do some snowboarding. This was our first trip to the mountains to ride as 'locals' and we were pretty excited about making the trip.

Nat's parents were in town and were heading to Keystone also, so they swung by the house at about 7am on Sat. morning and we headed up convoy-style. Nat has figured out that the best way to get there is up Clear Creek Canyon (hwy 6) in lieu of taking the highly congested I-70. It's a 2-lane, curvy-durvy road, but the views are amazing.

See the sign? Curvy-durvy indeed

One of the 6 tunnels on the way there

Getting closer....

After worming our way through Clear Creek Canyon we got to Loveland Pass which had been closed to traffic just a couple days prior. As you can see, the roads still weren't in the best of shape.

When we got there we hopped out and geared up for a day of riding...

A view from the lift

A shot from the front side of at the top of a run

Looking forward to next time....

My feet hurt...piggyback style

My co-worker Dave and I recently took a trip to Las Vegas to the Consumer Electronics Show. CES is a trade show where most of the big-hitters in the electronics industry come to flex their digital pectoral muscles for the world to ooooh and aaaah, and maybe rub a little.. slowly, gently.. that's nice.



Dave does a great job of covering the event so I'm going to piggyback his blog(s) and just post a link to them like the lazy B that I am.

Dave's Vegas Blog 1

Dave's Vegas Blog 2


Props to Dave for linking back to my blog... thanks!

Uphill - Part 2 - the quick, quick version

As you can see from my comments to Uphill- Part 1, I'm being harassed due to my lack of posting/finishing the blog. Here's to you, Dave.

- We found a place to live. We're renting a house in Golden just west of the North Table Mountain. The Table Mountains basically separate Golden from the rest of the suburban cityish area. It's still nice and small.. only 18K population and people in the neighborhood wave at you while driving. Actually, I wave at people. But they usually wave back! A trend setter, I am.

- The Friday before we left for Colorado to find the above-mentioned house, Rene and I turned in our respective resignations to our companies. Derse, who I never thought would, came through for me big-time. When they found out I was going to leave they offered me something I couldn't refuse: the ability to work remotely from my new house. Derse has done this in the past for some of the upper-level designers which led me to believe that they'd never consider it for a pee-on such as myself. So here I sit in my wreck-of-a-home-office (read: messy) designing with a view out the window of North Table Mountain. Dig it.

- Christmas day was spent with the Smullin's in Colleyville, TX. It was good to be able to finish out my time in Texas the same way that it started. The beginning and the end, so to speak. If it weren't for Bob and Lyn and family I would never have considered Texas as a place to call home.

When I was an intern designer at a small company in Farmers Branch I lived with the Smullins that summer. Four days of wakeboarding a week was tough to beat.


That pretty sums up the move in a quick swoop. Now I can move on to more current events that will be blogged three weeks after they happen.

Here are a few images of the foothills from the deck in our back yard.

Looking East to North Table Mountain
Western View 1
Western view 2

Uphill - Part 1

In an effort to keep my reader(s) satisfied with the verbal drippings of my chapped lips I will be posting in sections because so much has gone on since my last appearance that I don't want to make a marathon entry...

I just looked back at my last entry... Dec 7th. Like I said, a lot has gone on in the last month so I'll start where I figure I left off:

The move uphill started on November 30th when we got an offer on our house in Ft. Worth with a closing date scheduled for December 21st. THREE WEEKS!!! After Rene and I cleaned up the mess from puking at the gall of the buyers for asking only three weeks to have the house empty, we quickly put a plan together. I was to get in contact with the exhibit house I had a 'job offer' with and discuss the time line for the move and starting date. Rene was to do the same...to let the clinic owner know the official day she will arrive. We also figured that if we work till the end of the year it will give us each an extra paycheck vs. leaving our jobs mid-pay cycle.

So, where to stay post home evacuation? We had an offer from our good, long-time family friends in Colleyville, the Smullin's, that, if we needed to, we could stay with them to ease the transition...so we hit them up on the offer.

Let it be known that selling a house, moving 900 miles and starting new jobs is cause for a ridiculus amount of stress. During the inspection process the buyer took 4 days to get back to us with final fixes to be completed. Four days of a mere 21 wasted on indecisiveness. More puking.

That put us with about a week to pack our belongings (we had already started a bit, but how committed could we be to the process not knowing if anything was set in stone?) and find a place to live...