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:
Hannah’s Baptism
Hannah was baptized recently. It was great to be able to be there to help baptize her. Really proud to be a Dad in this moment! Here is the video that our friend Dave Mershon took for us that afternoon:
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.
International Snow Sculpture Championships
Speaking of Breckenridge, we actually went up there a couple of weeks ago to see the International Snow Sculpture Championships. Each year, there is an event with snow sculptures being built and judged for their artistry. The snow sculptures were pretty unbelievable. Below are some of the pictures that we took, but we thought it was interesting to learn about some of the history of the event and the process that the artists go through to create their sculptures.
This one was called Constant Motion. We thought it was appropriate to take Ellie's picture in front of it!
Skiing in Breckenridge
We've enjoyed getting into the Colorado lifestyle with a little time in mountains every now and then. I took Hannah and Ellie out skiing today and we had a really good time. Spent a few runs on the bunny hill and then made our way up the mountain so they could get a few runs in on the green hills and try out the real thing. Ellie really had to learn that you have to go across the hill to prevent going too fast. In fact, on our first run higher up on the mountain, Hannah had fallen and while I was trying to help her up, Ellie took off down the hill because she was so excited. She made it over a ridge to the next green while I was still working with Hannah and a couple of seconds later I decided I had to chase her. By that time, she was already at the bottom of that first hill with a ski patrol guy having caught a crying Ellie. So that was a bit of a lesson for her, but once we got all of that straightened out (after waiting for 5 or 10 minutes, I had to walk back up the hill to find Hannah), we worked out the back-and-forth, nice-and-slow approach and they started to figure that out. Here is a little bit of video of the girls working out their new skills as they made their way down the mountain.
We also made a couple of stops for pictures along the way and caught a quick shot of them while we were chowing down on hot dogs and hamburgers for lunch at the Vista Haus up on the mountain.
The Known Universe
I love this kind of illustration for something so huge. A bit mind-blowing. I would suggest clicking the full-screen icon in the bottom-right and watching it that way!
