Kirkwood

Well, we missed out on the snowstorm in Denver, but with our extra 3 days in California, we made the best of it and had some good times on our own. Thursday we both worked, so as to have to take less vacation, but working on a day you thought was going to be vacation is kind of difficult, especially when there's a big snowstorm headed for the Sierra and you're thinking about going skiing... more on that later.

So how we're spending our extra time here:

1) Enjoying at the Christmas lights in our neighborhood:

These are a couple of our favorites. Our neighborhood seems particularly festive. Or particularly Christian, not sure which. Maybe both. There was this one house that had about a batrillion lawn ornaments, lights, figures, banners, etc, but when we turned around at the end of the street to come back and photograph it, they had turned out the lights! Doh.

2) Skiing at Kirkwood:


Kate, Dustin, and I took a day trip up to Kirkwood for our first day skiing of the year. The 16" of snow the night before was a big incentive, as were my new skis. We had a great time, and the trusty Subaru got us through chain controls again without a problem. It was a perfect bluebird day, not too cold, but up at the top of chair 6 (at the ridge of the mountain) the wind was whipping over the ridge so fast and blowing snow and ice with it that it was nearly impossible to get from where the lift dumps you to the start of the slope. It was a sight to see - the picture doesn't do it justice. You could lean down the hill at about 45 deg and the wind would hold you stationary. Anyways, we wore ourselves out skiing, and then stopped for the traditional post-Kirkwood pizza in Jackson. mmmm.

3) More moving in! This will take a while, but we're slowly getting things in place and setting our house up as we like it.

We should be off for Denver tomorrow early, then to NC on the 26th, then back here on the 31st. We're sad to be missing the Greenmen NYE gathering in Amherst, but can't wait to see our families - better late than never!

Moving - Day 2 and beyond

Just wanted to put up a couple pictures of our house-in-progress.

We bought three new cabinets and a butcher block table from ikea that really help make the kitchen feel a lot larger.


We’ve started putting up some pictures and paintings but wish we had a few more “art” pieces to spread around the house.


Check out the pink/peach bathroom! If Id’a known we were getting a bathroom like that I might have picked some different towel colors to register for – ours are “maize” and “royal blue”. Hahahaha!


The beautiful quilt in the bedroom was a wedding gift from Amanda and Gordie!

Stuck in CA

Hopefully noone else out there is trying to travel through Denver in the next few days. Our Thursday morning flight was cancelled, along with some 600 other United flights in or out of DIA. Unfortunately, all other flights are so booked it looks like we can't get there until the morning of the 24th now. Oh well, at least we're not stuck in an airport somewhere. I can't decide if I'm more bummed about missing out on some vacation (and probably working instead) or missing out on being in a giant blizzard of a snowstorm. Last year it was 60 and sunny and we were playing football in the Ebel's backyard in T-shirts. Well, maybe this will give us some extra moving-in time. Or extra blogging-about-moving-in time.

Moving – Day 1

Tom and I woke up early to do that last bit of packing before the movers showed up at 10 am. We felt like we were in pretty good shape, having packed every night for the last week or so, but there were a couple big things (clothes in the closet, plants on the porch, etc.) that still needed to get done. I was cutting down the final vines of our bougainvillea at 9:45 or so when Tom came running inside to tell me that the movers and their very graffiti-covered truck had arrived. I had found these guys (AA movers) on Craigslist, of course, where for a low rate they offered to bring two men and a 24 foot truck, which apparently they didn’t park in a very safe neighborhood. At least we gave our neighbors something to snicker about, eh?

On the phone, they claimed that they could move a 2-3 bedroom house with a truck that size, so we figured it would be no problem. Especially since we really try not to accumulate too much “stuff” in our lives, and don’t have many things that we don’t use relatively frequently. However, the stuff we do have is relatively massive, as it turns out. You can’t exactly pack a foosball table or a 250 lb burl oak coffee table into a tight little corner of the truck. So there was much pushing and prodding and re-arranging, until we finally got all our worldly goods packed into this truck. All in all, moving all our stuff into the truck took about 3 hours.

Moving everything out of the truck was much quicker, as Tom and I felt like we could jump in and help shlep stuff around. 45 minutes later we paid off the movers and were alone with our huge piles of boxes in our new house! Welcome to 864 Grape Ave, Tommenkate!

Global Cooling

I just readthe headline to this article and for some reason thought it was going to be about some way that nuclear war would be an (albeit possibly undesirable) answer to global warming. Turns out that nuclear winter is still accepted to be uniformly bad, but what does that say about either me or the times that I see an article that says "Small nuclear war could severely cool the planet" and think "oooh, tell me more! That might be easier than getting us to stop driving SUVs..." Weird.

Speaking of soot, I guess it's time to go home and paint over the soot stains above our fireplace from when we forgot to open the flu. And I have to practice my 10-slide presentation for our big review with NASA folks tomorrow. Don't get excited, it's like 10 slides out of 200 or so that will last most of the day. Mine are on "Facilities readiness," which basically means "How much of the stuff we need to run some tests we actually have." I might get some free pastries out of it, though.

Craigslist Adventures

Tom and I have been a little quiet recently - probably a combination of short days (dark at 4:30 round here) and relatively unbloggable evenings. We've been packing and prepping for our move to Grape Street a fair amount, and hope to be all ready to go by next Friday. So far we've taken 3 trips to Goodwill and packed a bunch of boxes into the garage, but the house still looks exactly the same. Sigh.

Craigslist, which you are all probably very familiar with, is a mover's best friend. We have used it before to buy a few things (some snowshoes, a chest freezer, etc.) but had never attempted to sell anything before. We didn't go in with particularly high expectations, as people are notoriously flakey on craigslist, and often will not follow through on various promises. But last weekend, with our move date rapidly approaching, we decided that it was high time to get rid of some big-ticket items that we've been accumulating, including an old bike, a laptop computer, and a bunch of vases. We also decided to post our current apartment - our lease allows us to "sublet" the apartment to avoid having to pay double rent for the next couple of months. I had low expectations for this last item, as I couldn't imagine many people would want to move into a new apartment the week before Christmas, but we figured it was worth a shot. We had tried to negotiate a later date at the new duplex but weren't meeting with much success.

Anyway, we were overwhelmed with responses within the first day. We sold the bike (the infamous Giant Butte) and the laptop (vintage 1998) and had about 10 responses about the apartment. The final apartment paperwork came through this week, and Tom and I are absolutely thrilled. We had basically written off two months worth of double rent, so it feels like an enormous windfall!

So all the pieces are in order for our move next weekend. The next step - turning around and buying a kitchen island and maybe some new shelving to accent our new (smaller) kitchen. Craigslist, here we come....