The Incline!!

Hello to all you good people!  This past week just flew by!  i finally got my FPGA design closed and it's all ready to go!  So that's very exciting.  Just one more to go and then it's on to hardware testing!

On Friday night we had some friends in the ward over for dinner and games.  It was a lot of fun!  Around 9:45 they confessed it was 15 minutes past their bedtime and they probably needed to head home cause they were getting really tired!  Little did they know it was also 15 minutes past ours! So that worked out perfectly.  It was also nice because I had to wake up early on Saturday because we took the young men in the ward to the Manitou Incline.  It's a pretty intense hike.

Basically you hike straight up the side of a mountain.  They've put in a whole bunch of wooden beams to prevent erosion and to give you steps to climb up on.  Here's what it looks like down the mountain from part of the way up.

And here is a picture at the top!

And I also grabbed a photo sphere.  I'm hoping if you click on it it'll open up to provide the real effect.

We hiked down the back way which is a lot less steep.  The hike up is just about a mile, but the hike down was 3.  In spite of the difference in length it took about as long to get up as it did to get back down.

On the way down there were some nice views from the trail.

It was a lot of fun and everybody made it back safely.  That night we went to a dinner group.  The ward organizes them about once a year and families sign up and then get put in groups for dinner.  It was a lot of fun to get out with some other families in the ward.

It of course wouldn't be a week without a picture of Brooke.  We went to Target this past week and she insisted on trying on sunglasses... sigh.

They're still a little too big for her head, so she didn't insist on buying them.

Well, I think that's all I've got for this week.  Hope everyone is doing fantastic!

Snowed In

Well, the big highlight of this week was probably the huge snow storm that came in on Saturday.  Monica's sister, Michelle, came out to visit and was supposed to head home Saturday, but almost all flights got cancelled... fortunately they were able to get a flight today (Sunday), so they didn't have to live out of suit cases too much longer than they planned!

Earlier this week we finally got Brooke's Easter picture.

So there's that :).  Work was pretty good this week.  I got a lot of stuff done, and things were pretty busy.  For mutual on Tuesday night we did a Duty to God night.  We invited the parents of all the boys and we went over the Duty to God program, and what you have to do for it and stuff.  It was great, and I hope the boys enjoyed it and got excited.

Brooke got to spend some quality time with Andy this week.  They started off a little distanced.

But soon Andy was ready to read to Brooke!!

And then they were best buds.

Monica was grateful to have someone here to spend time with while I was gone all day.  While here they went to the park and the zoo, and probably many other things I didn't hear about.  But then on Saturday came the snow!!  We were stuck inside most all day.  Brooke enjoyed riding on dad's shoulders for the first time!

We borrowed child sized snow clothes from the next door neighbors.  They were a little large for Andy, but he was thrilled to get the chance to go out in the snow...

After some playing in the snow Brooke was just soooo tired! So we let her take a little nap.

Here is some aftermath from the snow storm.  There was about a foot of snow on top of the fence.

This weekend was also Stake Conference.  Our visiting authority got stuck in Vail on Friday night and the roads were closed... Fortunately they were able to get in by Saturday night.  The snow was bad enough that they broadcast the conference online, so we watched from home.

Today Michelle was able to get a flight out that wasn't cancelled, and I got her out to the airport safely.  Brooke was very playful today and was enjoying quality time with her giraffe, Sir Jeffers.

I think that's most of the significant stuff that occurred this week.  Things are going well here and it should be back into the 70's later this week, so the snow won't last long.  Hope everyone is doing great!!

Double Feature

Sorry I missed last week, I just wasn't home enough to blog what with General Conference and all... ;)

Over the last two weeks Brooke has become quite the great sitter!  She enjoys sitting up even.  Since she should be starting solids in the next few months we've also started giving her spoons to play with.  She loves to put them in her mouth, but we have to be careful to watch her cause if she grabs them too far down she'll shove them all the way in and gag herself.

As per our General Conference tradition, Monica made cinnamon rolls for breakfast Saturday morning.  It was a great breakfast after a 12 mile run!

And here's Brooke chewing on a spoon.  She was quite... squirmy and not content throughout conference which was quite the distraction.

Also, as it's starting to warm up we've gotten our popsicle molds back out.  We made some from orange juice:

and a smoothie!

Monica and I headed out for a date this last Saturday.  We went to the local bowling ally!  Neither of us has been in a very long time, and it was fun to get back out there.  We took a bowling class together in college, and had a lot of fun there.  We enjoyed it so much we think we'll have to go back again soon!

Brooke even got into the bowling spirit (though her ball has a few more holes in it...)!!!

In other, non-picture worthy news, work has been super crazy the last two weeks.  An FPGA I was working on needed to be done quite suddenly.  I'd been working away on updates without a real deadline to finish everything up by.  Well, on Monday I was given that deadline... and it was Monday (luckily that's the Monday a week later, as I have 2 Mondays included in this post).  Well there were a whole slew of issues to work through, but in the end I got it figured out... just in time to find a bug in the code, which basically meant I had to restart my last week of work.  Fortunately, things went faster the second time around and the design is good to go.

There's still plenty of other work to do between now and flight testing of our deliverable hardware, but I'd say this FPGA build was my last big challenge between now and then.  It's my only remaining task I currently have that putting time into does not necessarily mean progress, so I'm glad to have it out of the way.

Also, this past Saturday I called up Jarom, an old friend who served in my mission, and we chatted in Mongolian for about an hour.  I had some resolutions to work on Mongolian this year, and I finally got around to the call I was supposed to be doing at least monthly...  It was a lot of fun and he got to meet Brooke digitally.

Home has also been very busy lately.  We've been doing a lot of spring cleaning.  Once we put up the shelves in the garage it was time to sort through stuff before loading up the shelves.  I went through all my stuff and was able to consolidate into a few less boxes.  We've also been tidying up in the house and fixing various things.

We went over to Home Depot's spring black friday sale and got an extendable 22 foot ladder.  They're usually $240, but were on sale for 100, what a steal!  With that we were finally able to fix our light way up above the stairs!

I also spent time chopping wood in the back yard trying to clear our wood pile.  We'd been saving wood to burn in our little fire pit, but we don't use it enough for the amount of wood we accumulated, and we think something might have started living in the pile over the winter... so it was time to chop it up and get ride of what we didn't need.  I definitely didn't finish as there was a LOT of wood out there.

I think that's most of what's been going on around here as of late.  Brooke is doing great and growing up so fast!  We're all doing wonderful and hope you are too!