Kidney Class

K and I went to Kidney transplant class on Tuesday afternoon, and dialysis class on Wednesday morning. Our neighbors came for moral support. We learned about Fistulas, and how they create one intentionally in the forearm, to assist with the hemodialysis process. We learned a little about peritoneal dialysis. We learned that a transplant is far more preferable than either kind of dialysis. We even learned that there are classes for learning (or getting up the nerve) to ask friends and family about the possibility of donating a kidney for a transplant. We learned that doing nothing would have fatal consequences. Here's a link to the NIH writeup on Chronic Kidney Disease. Having gone to the classes, she's now on track to proceed to the next steps in the process. As always, K was thinking ahead, and kept us entertained with a trip to the Museum of Nature and Science after the Tuesday class.

The usual Thursday afternoon Lee Gulch / Chatfield / Platte bike ride was well supported by nice weather. Here's a pic from one of the few moments when everyone was behind me... coming down the hill off Chatfield Dam. As usual, we had a great dinner afterwards at Platte River Bar and Grille.

I rode along as safety pilot with Mike on Friday afternoon, flying out of Front Range airport. It was just a bit bumpy for me, but I survived long enough for him to make it through the six instrument approaches he needed for his IFR currency.

Saturday started out with another ride to Bear Creek Dam with the guys from work. After that, K and I ran a few errands, picked up some meds at Kaiser, then took up temporary residence at Costco, long enough to load up on a pile of groceries, and pick out some new T-Mobile phones. I settled on a Blackberry Pearl and we got K a nice Nokia 6133 flip phone. Oh, and while we were at it, I picked out a new Dell computer to replace my desktop that's never worked quite right, after being slammed around by United Parcel Service, and even after replacing several major components. I think I sprained my wrist, trying to wrestle the big box into the back seat of K's car. The monitor on this thing is huge. If a screen can be too big, I think this might be the one.

K had the idea we should go to the Denver Zoo on Sunday. It was a beautiful day for it. As always, we were taken with the Lions and Tigers and Leopards. The giraffes were pretty cool, too. I think we had almost as much fun watching the kids going ga-ga over all the stuffed animals in the gift shop.

Bear Creek

What a difference a week makes. Last weekend we were out playing with the results of yet another snowfall. This week, the TV weather forecast called for a huge snowstorm on Friday, but it never materialized, at least not here in our area. They say it "wiggled by to the South." Instead, we've got a delightful weekend to enjoy.

This is so cool: Google recently introduced their "My Maps" feature, and I used it to capture the route of our regular Thursday afternoon Lee Gulch bike ride, an 18 mile loop. What makes this cooler than just posting a map image, is that you can zoom in and pan around on the map, and switch to satellite view to see all the geographical features. Fun!

I went on a bike ride on Sunday morning. This route was new to me - out to Bear Creek Dam and back, 33 miles round trip. This panorama picture is from on top of the dam - it's very wide, so you may have to do some scrolling to see it all. I find it truly amazing that, not unlike when flying somewhere, there was a headwind going both ways.

Snow Again

We got another 2-3 inches of snow last night. KD and I walked to breakfast at Neighborhood Grille, previously known as Boulevard Grille. Nice people, and a perfect little breakfast of silver dollar pancakes, a scrambled egg, and bacon. After I got home, I looked outside, and noticed our neighbor's dog Kona sprawled out in the snow, perkily looking around to keep an eye on the neighborhood. He clearly just plain loves the snow.

Spring Snow

We woke up to a light layer of Spring snow this morning. It's been drizzly and freezing so far this weekend, which caused JB to cancel our IFR practice flight on Friday morning. There's nothing like a little freezing rain, to put the big damper on our plans. K and I had gone out for breakfast at the Original Pancake House, so we took advantage of our unexpected free time together, to run a few errands.

When we got home, I fired up Flight Simulator X, and attempted the Yakutat challenge again. It's the FSX mission where you have a short hop from Burwash, Canada, over the coastal mountain range to Yakutat, Alaska, with an ILS approach at the end, and a few twists thrown into the mix, just for fun. This time I succeeded in getting the King Air on the ground in one piece, even with a failed vacuum system, the ground ATC radar out of service, the left engine on fire and not producing power, at night in low overcast and snow, and a black bear on the runway. What a great little program, for practicing my flying skills!

Lonely Ride

I did the usual Thursday afternoon bike ride without the guys. There was some talk about skipping the ride, due to cold (47F) temperature and threat of showers, but was I raring to go anyway, and it sounded like at least a couple of them were going. I got down to our usual meeting place a few minutes late, and didn't see anyone, so I took off and tried to catch up with them, racing around our 18 mile circuit, up Lee Gulch, along the Highline Canal and C-470, up and down the Chatfield Dam, and down the Platte River. About a mile from the end, my cell phone rang, and it was Dave - the three of them had just arrived at the Platte River Bar and Grille, after riding the entire circuit just behind me. They'd decided to skip doing the dam, so they beat me to the end. The last couple miles were cold and challenging with a good headwind. It was really nice to bask in the heat of those nice infrared heaters, especially the one right over our table!

Biking, Willow Hacking

Ken and I went for a bike ride this morning, out to Chatfield dam and back, 17 miles or so. We weren't quite ready to tackle climbing the front of the dam yet, so we took the back way up, then zoomed down the front, and headed back down the Platte River. We stopped for lunch at Panera Bread - their half sandwich/soup combo is perfect.

I thought I was going to just relax and maybe take a nap afterwards, but Ken's a real energizer. He remembered that I'd mentioned I wanted to rip out one of our two arctic willows, and came back up with a wheelbarrow full of tools to help get me going. We spent several hours hacking away at that 60-pound monster with a reciprocating saw, finally getting down to the roots under the stump, and finished with just a hole in the ground, which I refilled with the dirt we'd taken out, and covered up with some weed barrier. That was an amazing accomplishment -- I've been wanting to do that for several years. We celebrated by going out for dinner, then watched "The Dresden Files", a really fun show for taking our minds off anything important.