Fall Colors

Here are some pics of fall colors and leaves I collected with my phone cam, while walking with Ken and Mandy today...

Boulder Baked Reopens!

We drove up to Boulder for the grand re-opening of our friends' Boulder Baked Cafe at its new location, 1911 Broadway. They've found themselves a nice spot near the corner of Broadway and Walnut, and right next door to a Migun beds store, which is also someplace very fun to visit. Their desserts were as great as usual, and visiting the Cafe was a very pleasant experience. I told Katie their colors reminded me a lot of the Cal Poly University Union, which turned out to be very well accepted, back in the day. 

We had a fun day overall. We started by driving up to Arvada at noon, to visit with Dee, the woodworker who did great things with our window sills and the doors for the living room TV. At K's request for my birthday, Dee had made me a tool carry box from Aspen, a very light hardwood. It's a real work of art. She showed us around her workroom, and that was fun, looking over all her cool woodworking tools. Then K asked her to show us her train set in the basement, and that is something really amazing too. Seems like miles of track, and many assembled trains ready to run on many combinations of track.

Just before we left Dee's, I took Mandy over to the nearby Independence Park for a short walk. It's a nice little park, with a good sized expanse of open grass. Mandy loved getting off leash and prancing around the grass for awhile. Then I put her back on leash, and we got a little more serious about circling the park at a nice brisk walking pace.

I heard a train horn approaching, so just for fun, I moved us briskly over to the North side of the park, nearest the train tracks, and sure enough a great long freight came by. We enjoyed watching this real train, a long freight with perhaps six engines in front, as it came lumbering by on the nearby tracks, all of the engines working hard as it pulled the long stretch of cars up the hill.

Academy 3

Cold wintry day. We attended the third Citizen Academy class this evening. Fun stuff! We made casts of footprints and "dusted for prints" tonight. At the end of the evening, we were presented with a possible crime scene, and tried to locate any relevant evidence. I found the shell casing on the floor, and spotted the bullet hole in the ceiling :-o

Academy #2

Tonight was our 2nd Citizen Academy class. This session covered criminal investigation and street drugs. Even though I had exposure to some of the information over the years, I'm pretty sure I increased my knowledge by several times. Scary, dangerous, and very sad stuff going on in that world. Especially the part about meth users aging 10 years for each year they use. The term "tweakers" was new to me.

K's back on antibiotics for her right foot. It heals up for awhile, then she feels the need to walk around on it, and it deteriorates quickly again. She continues to have trouble with bouts of severe nausea almost every day.

I think I'm going to declare victory over my sore throat and coughing from that incident back in July. I still have a little cough that sneaks out every once in awhile, but I've been sleeping through the night for weeks now.

K had Mandy out on the deck yesterday, and she snuck a drink from the drip pan below one of the Meyer lemon trees out there. K got worried, since those plants had recently been fertilized, but with everything she had going on, she forgot to check in with the vet before it was too late. Not surprisingly, Mandy got me up every couple of hours last night, to take her out so she could hunt for grass to eat. The last time we went out, around 4:30am, the newspaper delivery car came by, and she took off after it, disappearing down our street around the corner. Sheesh, as if worrying about how she felt wasn't bad enough, now I'm worrying that she'll get run over, or be eaten by a local fox or coyote, on her way back home. But she came right back, after scaring that nasty old car away. I was disappointed, since she's been very good the few times I let her off leash. She seemed in great spirits after the big chase, though, so I guess it had some theraputic value. Today K took her over to the vet, who pronounced her OK, and clipped her nails and renewed her shots for good measure. She seemed fine to me tonight, while we were walking around the parking lot during a break in the class.

It's starting to get just a bit cooler around here during the nights. And I noticed on a short walk recently, that some bushes and trees are already starting to change colors. Well, I guess it's not unexpected that we'd be seeing signs of Fall in September, but it sure caught me by surprise.

Home from traveling

I got home this morning from a quick business trip to CA for a tanking test. Everything at work went well, though I didn't have much time or warning to visit with family, and they didn't have time for me either. I did get to play disc golf a couple of times, thanks to my coworker bringing an extra disk with him. I took the 6am flight to ensure I got home in plenty of time to get to the Littleton Police Citizen Academy class in the afternoon. I expected Santa Barbara airport to be deserted at 5am, but I guess all the other people were surprised too. The security line went out the door, and halfway around the block. A bunch of us would've missed our flight to Denver, if they hadn't pulled us out of line to go through security ahead of the others. Then they departed four flights at practically the same time. When I was walking out to the tarmac, and asked the first United employee I could see which of the four planes I saw ahead of me was going to Denver. "That one," he said, and pointed to the plane to my left. Then he paused, and said, "No, that one over there," and pointed to the plane slightly to the right. I didn't feel very confident at that point, so I asked the flight attendant when I got on board, just to be sure. Lucky me, on the right flight, after all.

While I was gone, one morning, K said she went to pet the dog in her bed on the floor, and Mandy was lying there very still with her eyes bugging out, and felt stiff to the touch. For a moment, K thought the dog had died right there, and she was momentarily overcome with grief. K stroked Mandy a few times gently, whereupon she started making her little happy dog grunting noises. Mandy must've just been very relaxed and just beginning to wake up. What a scare, but it ended in the best way possible.

We attended our first class of the Littleton Police Citizen Academy this evening. We got some interesting overview talks from the Chief of Police and her department heads. We're looking forward to the next 10 weeks of classes, which should familiarize us with the workings of the our local police, and give us some interesting things to learn and do.

GeoEye Launch

I had asked my coworker to support the Delta II launch of GeoEye on Saturday, but then there was a power outage at work for several hours in the early morning, and I decided I wanted to be there to make sure everything was working again. So I got to watch the launch on the monitors in the launch support room. The payload is interesting - a commercial earth imaging satellite that users including Google Earth will be using to upgrade their maps to a higher resolution in the future. Here's the writeup on SpaceFlightNow. 

Life's OK

Just a quick note to say things have been busy, but for the most part everything's fine here. K's right foot is onto one of the many uphill climbs toward being healed, but as always we're watching for a backslide, which could occur at any time. People are asking lately, "So, is the house finally finished now?" and it's always difficult to answer. A lot of the remodel work is complete, but there are still things to be done, including one or more big things that need to be reworked.

Mandy's continuing to be a happy little camper, and even she's enjoying our new basement living space. There's enough room down there to race around the couch and run herself out of breath, when the urge arises. She's still not very interested in using the dog door, but we're making a little progress each week in that direction. She reminds me a lot of the teenagers we've known, who didn't rush out to get their driver's license on their 16th birthday. The freedom's there, and I guess she'll take advantage of it when she's ready.

Dad and Adele were here from 8/7 to 8/25. We had a couple days of nice cool rainy weather, which worried them, but then it got back into the 90s which made them happy. Adele had an intestinal illness which put her in the ER and then a hospital room for a few days. That delayed their departure just a little, but they're safely home now.