Murder Mystery Dinner Night Out
Anthony and Jolene hosted quite a bash last night. Everyone was dressed in character for dinner and a whodunit. Tons of fun and Jolene is a great cook!


Calming a little one
Seeing this makes me wish I was a little more into rap over the last year!
Top 10 Places to Eat Ice Cream
Saw this in Flipboard yesterday, pulled in from National Geographic. I think that I have some catching up to do as I've only been to the second one on the list (Ted Drewes in St. Louis)!
Top 10 Places to Eat Ice Cream
Trip to New York this Week
I went to New York to meet with Knewton and Arizona State as part of their use of some of our products. Good meetings there, and in addition, I had an opportunity to go down to the financial district where I intended to go to the World Trade Center memorial with one of my co-workers. Turns out that I also stumbled into Occupy Wall Street as they were within a couple of blocks of one another. Pictures included!
Rugged Maniac – Denver 2011
I've never run a road race or anything like it in my life. The only thing that comes close was Jr. High track at Eastern, and the farthest that I ever cared to run was one lap around the track. I was pretty good at that at the time, but that was almost 30 years ago.
With that in mind, I'm not altogether sure what possessed me to try this, but some folks on my team at work started talking about this race that they were going to do here in town called the Rugged Maniac. They had done some similar races earlier in the summer, the Warrior Dash and the Tough Mudder, and listening to them discuss those, I was a little jealous that I hadn't signed up previously and given it a shot.
Yesterday was the day to be one of the crazy Maniacs doing the race. Thankfully, it was a nice day. About 80 degrees. That's notable because I've seen snow in mid-October here in Denver, so I was thankful that didn't happen!
To give you a sense of what the race was like, I've added a quick promo video and a few of our pictures below. Suffice to say that yesterday kicked me in the pants and I'm still feeling it, but I'm glad I did it. I might not do this particular race again, but I'm thinking that it would be great to try some of the other similar races again next year.
On to the pictures:
A little pre-race bravado:
After several mud bogs, I decided I wanted to backstroke this one...
The end of the race. Battered, bruised, and beaten:
But not without a little celebration with my friend Jose (who beat me by at least 15-20 minutes!)
And some post-race group shots in front of the port-a-johns:
5th Anniversary of Ellie’s Gotcha Day
Today is the 5th anniversary of Ellie's Gotcha Day. We're celebrating by going to the aquarium today and having a dinner out tonight. We've also been enjoying all of our Beihai Sister family pictures on Facebook today. Memories!
Speaking of memories, here are a couple of pictures of our family right after they gave Ellie to us. We've shown these pictures many times, but I've always thought that they best captured the moment. Thanks Barb for snapping those pictures for us!
New Car
We've been in a bit of a crunch with car space recently, especially when we add any baggage or extra stuff outside of six hind-ends in seats. So, we decided to go ahead with the next step and went about as big as we could. When we were in Mexico over Christmas, we were actually able to fit eight people and two weeks worth of luggage into the Suburban we rented, all at the same time. I was sold at the time, so when Gina started bringing it up recently, we just needed to figure out the right one and the budget. Long story short, below is the result. We only have the two little ones this week, but looking forward to shoe-horning the other two when we all get back home and go to the mountains next week!
Dad Life
Kevin Matthews sent this to me this morning. Hilarious...probably because it sounds so familiar.
Happy Father's Day!
Time at the park
Enjoyed hanging out at the park recently with the kids. Evan is into going down the slide head-first. This was a quick moment between slides.














