Thanksgiving at the Page House

Just wanted to drop a note for Thanksgiving. Hopefully everyone had a great time with friends and family. Dana and I had our first real dinner party at the new house since moving in over two years ago. She has all of her dining room furniture and finally got a chance to use it along with all of the great flatware and china that people were gracious enough to get us for wedding gifts.

We had seven guests over (Roger was also supposed to come but hit a deer on his way south through Utah, fortunately he's ok!) and went all out on the cooking. I deep fried a 14 lb turkey and Dana made a honey ham. Our friends were gracious enough to bring many of the sides and Renee made fantastic pies for desert.

The night was really relaxing and enjoyable and we wrapped things up watching Shrek The Third and a quick peek at Transformers in high definition on my monster TV.

The rest of the photos can be found at this link.

Happy Halloween

Well, ya, it's way past Halloween, but that's the update and the title goes with the picture of Dexter and Dana. Dexter is sporting his chicken costume and Dana is dressed as a Dentist. I made a deal with Dana that she can dress Dexter up one day a year and that day is Halloween. This year he's a chicken, who knows what she will come up with next year? He didn't like the chicken costume very much and shook the hat off after about 30 seconds. We had about 30-40 trick-or-treaters this year, including a 50 year old hispanic woman who was missing some teeth. Now that's scary!

Grand Lake Vacation

Well, we just got back a couple of days ago from our one real vacation taken this year, a trip to Grand Lake and Shadow Mountain Lake near the Rocky Mountain National Forest just outside of Estes Park.

We rented a vacation home for three nights and had a good time. The weather on the first night was pretty miserable with rain and thunderstorms, but luckily the weather improved after that and we really had a lot of fun.

We took a Dexter out on a motorboat one day and went kayaking later on in the week. Sadly a kayaking mishap resulted in the loss of my compact camera. I overturned my kayak and the camera, in its waterproof housing, disappeared into the lake (even though it's supposed to float). What a bummer. Guess its time to shop for a new compact camera. The pictures shown here were taken with my SLR. A few more shots are in the gallery.

Estes Park in July

Well, I'm not sure what happened to our last blog entry as it looks like it's "gone". I'll have to see if a draft of it was saved and it just needs to be republished.

We've had a pretty quiet summer and have been trying to beat the summer heat wave any way we can. Monday, July 9th we headed up to Rocky Mountain National Forest in Estes and I snapped this pic of Dana and Dex near the Alpine Center. The other pictures we took can be seen our our Gallery

We came back through Grand Lake and really enjoyed it, although it was pretty sad to see how bad the damage to the trees is from the pine beetle epidemic that has been striking the forests.

One of the things we have been talking about doing is when we have our "real" vacation to celebrate our 1-year wedding anniversary is to rent a cabin on Grand Lake and spend a few nights there, do some boating and some fishing. Hopefully it works out!

Landscaping sure is fun!

It's been a couple of months since an update so I wanted to take the opportunity to catch everyone up on what's been going on as well as show off some of our handy work. A few weeks ago I got the bug to start to redo the landscaping in the front of the house. The original landscaping job was done on the cheap and our place hasn't been quite up to snuff for the neighborhood (most of our neighbors have nice brick retaining walls, large mulch beds with lots of plants, etc).

It all started when I was out of town for work and came home to find that Dana had bought two nice flower boxes we had seen a week earlier at Target. I installed the flower boxes for her and just sort of kept going with it, I ripped all of the mulch out of the corner by our lonely little pine tree and extended that area down to the lawn by ripping out about a ton of rock. We then had about TWO TONS of moss covered boulders delivered and placed in the corner and by the tree ont he other side of the house. After all of that we planted a bunch of new plants including columbines, sage and a beatiful new Crimson King Maple tree (the new maple will eventually be 40 feet high which should really accent the house and balance things out). The new tree is a "super" tree which means that they grow it in a special plastic shell with air holes in it that naturally prune the roots and keep them growing straight.

I've also fixed our drainage problem by running an ABS extension off of our sump pump outlet all the way to the street. It might not be very pretty, but it's a lot better than having water pooling up in the corner of our lot.

All of the work took two weekends and several nights after work but we are happy with the results. There's more to do too, but that's for a later project.

March update

Just a quick March update as Dana and I are getting ready to go have an early lunch and then catch the movie "Musics and Lyrics" in an hour. Unfortunately there has not been a lot to report here, other than lots of cold, snowy weather followed by brief bursts of good temperatures which has facilitated a little bit of melt off of all the snow pack in front of our house.

Last weekend we attempted to spend the day up in Evergreen but it was around 30 degrees and the wind was gusting at 20-30 MPH which really put a damper on having a family outting up there with the puppy dog.

Right now I'm in the process of getting the parts together to build a new PC. The old one is about 3.5 years old, which for me is an eternity. The real motivation though for the rebuild is that the old one has suffered several parts failures in the last few months (motherboard, hard drive, memory) and I'm just getting a little bit nervous about it. The good news is that the old one will be going to my brother, who is dying to get a PC.


The new one is going to be quite the monster, so I'll be posting some pictures soon.

Here Dexter, snip snip!

Well, Dustmop Dexter had a veterinarian visit today and got neutered as well as having a dew claw removed that didn't get removed when he was a baby. You can see how thrilled he was about the whole thing, at least he was a big hit with everyone at the Vet's office, they thought he was great. Our weekend will be spent taking care of him, he's not allowed to get his bandages wet which means we will need to take him outside for potty breaks and so on.