Sisterly Love

Well, we had lots of fun this week with Melanie out to visit.  Monica sure liked having Melanie here since I had to work a bunch.  It helped Monica to not be bored.  It also made for fun nights playing board games.  Such as:

 Gubs

 Rampage

 Roborally

Just to name a few.  We had a lot of fun.  We played board games most nights during the week when I got home from work.  Melanie was also super great and kept doing the dishes and stuff!  How nice!

On Saturday we finally had a little more time to do things.  Saturday morning started off with running the SEAKR 5k.  The race was fun, but my leg was still gimpy.  On the plus side Monica couldn't run very well either, so we just stuck together through the race.  The race is used to raise money for the SEAKR foundation, which is a charity the company started to help wounded veterans who got disabled serving in the military.

Pre-race!  Check the smiles, that's how you know it's still PRErace. 

After we got home from the race I mowed the lawn real quick and headed into downtown Denver to do some sight seeing with Melanie.  We went to Hopdoddy for lunch and then walked around in the city.  We found a herd of buffalo:

And a public piano!

All the keys on the piano were stuck down though.  It's probably been hammered on a whole bunch.  But please, only 1 hour per person!

There were a couple of these pianos scattered around that I saw.  The other ones worked better, but this was the first one we ran into.  We also went up to the Capitol building and to a Cathedral that's across the street.  Unfortunately my phone was dead by the end.  I have some pictures on Monica's phone, but I haven't gotten them yet.

When we got home Saturday we were all pretty beat from being out in the sun all day!  We still managed to play a couple games before heading off to bed.

Sunday after church we went up to visit Tyson and Tina.  Spencer and his family were driving through Denver and stopped for the day at their house.  We came up and all had dinner together.  It was a lot of people, and a lot of fun!

I think those are the highlights from this week.  Hope everyone reading this is doing great!

Ragnar 2015

Well, the start of this week flew by.  I worked 13 hour days Monday through Wednesday... how joyous!  I didn't have much time outside of work to do anything other then work out in the morning.  I was also able to pull together this:

Behold! My Psych board game!!

The base of the game board. 

It's a quad-fold board game, so it folds up nice and small.

Sometime last year I started to enjoy working on creating my own board games.  This is the second one I've worked on.  It's based on the TV show Psych.  In the game you drive around to various locations in the show and try to collect evidence to solve crimes.  I wanted to have a quality copy of it before I showed it to my family.  Since we were heading out to visit/run Ragnar at the end of the week I decided I'd try to get a board together before we left.  It turned out pretty well, and I learned some valuable lessons of things to do different next time.

Unfortunately the night I intended to debut the game everyone decided to go home and go to bed quite early, so I played with Mom.  Monica joined in about half way through.  My mom ended up champion... at least for now.

Wednesday night we went to Tyson and Tina's house to spend the night because we were planning to leave quite early the next day.  Thursday we spent the morning in the car driving out to Utah.  We left around 6 am, and it was super nice leaving so early in the morning.  We stopped in Laramie to get some breakfast.  Then Monica and I were going to drive to Rawlins to get gas, which was about 100 miles away.  We got approximately exactly 2 minutes out of town when BOOM! a bird flew up right in front of the car and into the windshield!

It was pretty... interesting, and gross.  It hit the window right in front of my face!  Well, the reason I point out that it was 2 minutes out of town is because the bird didn't quite clean off the windshield... and we were only just 100 miles from our next stop... great...

We also stopped in little America because that's Tyson and Tina's designated stopping point.  Monica and I took advantage:

It took some serious lassoing, but I eventually tamed 'im!  I wanted to ride the dinosaur the rest of the way to Utah, but Monica told me sometimes when you really love something you have to set it free... sigh :(.  So we just took the bird-smasher instead...

As mentioned above, Thursday night I tried to get a group together to play my game, but to no avail!

Friday was the big day of the race.  I successfully tapered for 5 weeks in preparation.  Not really.  In reality I got a super bad shin splint or something and I couldn't run or else it was gonna get even worse.  So I was resting my leg in hopes that it would be better for Ragnar.  It wasn't, but that's life sometimes.

My first run was 8.1 miles downhill.  The downhill was nice, and by the end my leg loosened up and I thought I might have run through my injury.  That was not quite the case as I found out when I tried to start my second run.  Here's a picture from my first run:

It looked very nice running down the hill.  I apparently made it a habit to take a picture while running, because I took one on each run.

In the end I survived and ran about 20 miles!  It was fun, but it was really hot this year!

The team medals this year were matching sets.  When you put them together on the back they said Ragnar Wasatch Back (not show in the picture), Together we ran 200-ish Miles. We made it back pretty late Saturday night and we were all pooped!  What a day.

Sunday we got to go to church with all the family.  Before church started Johnathan wanted a turn holding Matthew:

He kept trying to hide behind Matthew when I tried to take a picture.  So cute.  After church we drove back to CO, and brought Monica's sister with us!!  That should make for a fun week!  We got pretty late, and I was really tired, so I decided to wait till today to post!  Hope everyone is doing great!

Alex

Little Catching Up

Well... It's been a while, and I have a little catching up to do.  Firstly, I don't think I'll end up doing part 2 of my new house tour... that's just really old news (3 years old), so I think I'll spare you too many details.  It was in that house, however, that I started dating Monica Blood.  If you're reading this post, you're probably familiar enough with my life to know that we are now married.  If you're not that familiar, SURPRISE! I married her!  Here's us at Snowbird right after I proposed!

We got married 6 weeks laster on August 17th, and promptly left on a cruise to Alaska to escape the summer heat.  It was a lot of fun!  Once we got back from that it was off to our last year of school, mine for a Masters, and Monica for her Bachelorettes.  We rented out a basement to live in and it was a pretty great first place.  The people above who owned the house were great!  Just a little older than us and had a little baby, so cute.  They also kept there air on, and it kept it nice and cool for us :).  The house unfortunately sprung a leak...



During my final semester of classes I traveled a whole bunch interviewing for jobs.  I went to FL, CO, TX, AZ, and UT!  I interviewed at 5 companies, and I got 5 offers.  We accepted the job in **SPOILER ALERT** Colorado **END SPOILER**.  I had to enroll in Spring semester to finish writing my thesis, and we moved in with Monica's parents for a month while I was working on it.

With my thesis complete (and my Masters degree as well) we were ready to move out to Colorado where I started working for SEAKR Engineering.  Here's my picture by the fireplace on my first day of work!

Things have been going good at work so far!  I just passed 1 year working at the company and we're getting ready to deliver hardware for the first project I've been on.  It might be a crazy next couple of months while we try to get everything integrated and out the door, but things are going great so far.

When we moved out to CO we first moved into an apartment.  We were there for about 6 months while we were house hunting and eventually we found the one!  Funnily enough, we bought the house from one of Monica's childhood friends!  Small world!  Here's a picture of our house:

We moved in in November, so we've been here just over 7 months!  Time sure is flying.  We've undertaken various projects since we moved in, such as replacing all the blinds, and planting a garden.

Our most recent item of note, as you probably all know, is that MONICA IS PREGNANT!

So exciting!  She is due toward November 28th, so just a little after a year in the house.

Well, I think that is a very brief recap of the last ~3 years.  There are obviously things I missed, but I think might return to some past stories in their separate/own posts (this is really just me covering for when Monica and I are boring for a week).

I am hoping to start posting each week, and to include at least 1 picture each time, so feel free to come back and read more!

I hope everyone is doing great! and hopefully we see you here again soon!

Alex, and to a lesser extent, Monica (Monica approved me saying that)