The weather was perfect yesterday, so we went for a hike. It had been too long since our last one, we were finally feeling well enough to go. Thanks Ron & Fran for the great hiking book! We would have never found this place without the book. We drove along Boulder Creek for a few miles, up into the mountains and continued on a dirt road. There was a warning sign for mountain lions, we saw none. It was a nice 3 mile loop that is closed to bikers Wednesdays and Saturdays. In an hour and a half, we saw only 4 people on the trail.

new love seat!!!

We are going to be comfortable tonight, finally!

Update

Sorry John, no pics of us suffering.

Lauren took a part-time job, she starts June 1st. We will be watching the kids from 6:45am-12:15pm during the week, except Wednesdays.

Our living room furniture is on it's last leg (pun intended). We have been using 2 foldable camping chairs for the last 10 weeks. One has a broken leg, the other has a broken joint and the canvas (butt area) is about to rip through. We just bought a reclining love seat that will be here Tuesday...we will finally be VERY comfortable.

I almost finished reading "Limited Liability Companies for Dummies," it's raised nearly as many questions as it's answered. We are pretty sure that we are going to set that up soon, probably within the next couple weeks. As soon as it is, there will be a massive spending spree. Websites, electronics, possibly accounting and legal fees, filing/permit fees, etc. As a reminder, I am doing wedding photography and Julie is doing crafts.

We spent the last few days going through my photos to put on a site to show other photographers in an attempt to get work as an assistant/2nd shooter. That will help me gain experience, confidence, and build my portfolio.

Weather has been interesting, bright and warm one day, gloomy and warm the next, then rainy with possible thunder (today and next several days). So no hiking.
Monday brings summer and millions to Boulder, we'll be avoiding the pretty town like the plague for a few days. The Boulder Boulder (10k) is also Monday, something we will definitely not be participating in.

Julie's parents and brother will be visiting us next weekend. We look forward to having more visitors!

We showed that pig who's boss

We are mostly better, finally. We still have some congestion and feel weak. Last week we registered our cars in CO and got our CO plates, yipee! Now we have to deal with CA dmv, which sucks. They are telling us to fill out forms which seem completely irrelevant, they wont recognize our address change and are forcing us to return our CA plates. Curses! Hopefully we will be done dealing with those commies soon enough. We also watched a lot of TV-that was about all we did for nearly a week, the cold hit us both hard. Julie needed to sit after walking up our stairs, we weren't up for much. Plus, we were quarantined from the healthy folks upstairs. It's been nearly 90 degrees and, strangely, humid for the last 3 days. Thunderstorms, rain and 50's are on the way!

ugh.....

Yuck! We're both sick! Hoping to pass (*sniff*) it off as allergies but not happening (*cough*)......so time to get back to bed....ugh...(*hack*)

New Photos

We finally added some photos from Friday's hike to our new photobucket site. See them at www.photobucket.com/gandjinco
In the future, we will note on the blog when we add more pictures to photobucket.
You may notice that there are two trail signs that show the distance to Alberta Falls as .6 miles. They were on the same trail...nowhere near each other. What gives!? 5 minutes Turkish (for those of you who've seen Snatch).

We saw an unfortunately small amount of wildlife. A couple birds, squirrelish things, and humans.

We watched the kids last night while Lauren and Chris went to dinner to celebrate Mother's Day. But before they left, Lauren brought Taylor (the little one) downstairs to show us that she is crawling now! It's not a full on crawl, it's more like a bunny hop....but shes getting there.

We're alive, mostly

There was way more snow than we expected, it was also much more windy that we thought it would be. We were unable to find the trail in the deep snow so we were unable to take the loop. We got to Dream Lake, walked along it, snow to our knees. Water filled our prints as soon as we pulled our feet out-the trail was dangerously close to the water's edge. We drove to Glacier Gorge trail head after walking back to Bear Lake. We then hiked to Alberta Falls, it was beautiful. The wind burned our faces and the uneven and, at times, deep snow made hiking much more strenuous than anticipated. That plus not being able to follow our trail of choice meant we couldn't go nearly as far as we wanted. Reaching at least 10,000ft didn't help matters either. The snow proved beneficial in at least one way, it made descending steep hills particularly swift and effortless (using our extremely handy booty sleds). Pics should be posted sometime this weekend.

Hike and such

Well, it looks like the weather is going to permit our hike planned for tomorrow. We will be starting at Bear Lake and taking the loop; we'll see 5 lakes plus Alberta Falls (unless we're up for more and decide to go south to The Loch or Mills Lake). The daily high is supposed to be 48F, mostly sunny and a breeze up to 14mph. We recently bought: water proof hiking shoes, bear deterrent (pepper spray), a large backpack, survival kit, 1st aid kit, nylon convertible pants/shorts, and a mini led maglite. For my b-day I got a sweet hat, compass, reusable heat pack and water bottle friendly ice tray. Following our trend of over packing, I will also bring my huge camera with 2 lenses, 2 batteries, and 2 memory cards (12gb total). Now all we need is a damn mule to carry it all. As it has been warming up and there has been some recent rainfall, we hope that some plants will have begun flowering. Barring anything weird, expect some (hopefully decent) pictures to be posted this weekend. After the big hike we will be going to BJ's for dinner!
If you care to see a map of the area...Bear Lake is at the dead end of Bear Lake Rd (towards middle of map)
http://www.nps.gov/romo/planyourvisit/upload/detailedmap.pdf
If we don't report back, you'll know where to send the search party. In case you couldn't tell, the recently discovered Elk carcass has us somewhat concerned about...large predatory animals. I hadn't been a huge fan of guns, I just may put a 45 on my wish list for Christmas. Just kidding. But, no...seriously. I think that would be a good idea. Nature is great and all, but I would rather not be eaten...mauled...devoured by it.
On a lighter note, I got my diploma yesterday and we got our Colorado drivers licenses today! Now it will be much easier for them to identify our remains.

Happy Birthday!

Yes! Today is Greg's birthday! We went to REI this afternoon for their annual sale and bought a TON of stuff for hiking. Then went to a simple dinner (Red Robin) and home for some cake and presents! This Friday will be the real celebration....we are going on an all day hike with our new gear. We think we are going to eat breakfast, pack a lunch and go into the wilderness! Then after we burn off all those calories, we will replenish them at BJ's for dinner! Yum!

Visit

My dad and Loretta visited us for the weekend, a great early b-day gift! Sadly, they are on their way home right now. We had a great time playing cards and Yahtzee, doing the Celestial Seasonings tour, driving around Boulder and RMNP. We saw a deer on a Boulder lawn, we saw a 3-legged elk carcass in RMNP only 100yds off the road (likely devoured by a mountain lion) and we looked at a model home in Lyons (25 minutes from Boulder, 10 from Longmont and about 30 minutes from Estes Park). It had the St. Vrain river flowing 75ft from the back door, 3car garage, 3bd, 2bath, ~3300sqft including the basement which could be converted into a 4th bed, 3rd bath and a game room. It also had wood floors and a 360degree view of the mountains. All of this can be had for about the price of a townhouse in Boulder or a delapidated 2bd in Santa Ana. Still expensive by Colorado standards, it was around $500k. It was gorgeous, we want it, badly-alas, we have no jobs.

The accompanying tulip pics were taken by Julie as we walked down Pearl St in Boulder. We bought mother's day gifts and stepped into a bar to watch the Ducks beat Detroit in the 3rd OT. The 60 minute game lasted about 110.

All fixed!

Finally figured out where the water was coming from! There was a cracked pipe in the ceiling of the basement that was coming down the wall and getting the carpet nice and squishy. We did a test and everything is all good! We moved all our stuff back and we are getting back into our normal routine.

Weather has been cold and gloomy last few days and we are expecting more rain this weekend. Looks like we might skip over most of spring and get straight into summer....at least things will be green and sunny.

We are expecting my (Greg) dad and Loretta to come tomorrow and stay until Monday. Hopefully it won't rain too much and we can show them the area and take some more pictures to post. Otherwise it will be quite some time before we can take more pictures due to weather, trying to start our own businesses and general life stuff.