RoddaPalooza

Well, my Mom busted us.  Yes it's true, Shawn downloaded the picture of the Maroon Bells from the internet.  But it's only because my picture didn't come out quite as nice.  It's because we were there later in the day and the lighting wasn't as good.  It doesn't mean that the mountains weren't as pretty as the other picture.  It was just harder to capture it on film.  The Maroon Bells are two 14er's and are the most photographed mountains in Colorado.  The were photographed by Ansel Adams in a famous photograph that can be seen here.

It was a beautiful site.  I also uploaded a few shots of Lid plus a nice picture of Shawn and her cousin Stacy who lives in DC.  It was really nice to see Stacy.  She's an awesome gal and we get to see her again next week when she's in town for the convention!

Well, it kind of is a blog for her.  I mean, nobody really cares what Shawn and I are doing.  For those of you who are sick of seeing pictures of Lidya, I appologize.  We had lots of company this past week starting with our friend from college, Beth (Shawn's roommate) and her husband Rich (also our friend of course!) and thier daughter Mia (our new friend!).  They stayed with us for a couple of days before going to Colorado Springs to visit family.  Then Shawn's parents visited again after a long cross country drive for their summer vacation.  We had a great time with all and these are just a few of the pictures we took.  Hopefully we can post some more soon.

Lidya continues to do well and can now stand on her own with someone there to keep her from falling over.  Her legs are getting stronger but she still hasn't figured out how to crawl yet.  But like Shawn says, that might be a good thing because the sooner she begins to crawl the more trouble she'll be able to get into.  Either way, we're looking forward to it and hope that it happens soon!

We went camping at Pearl Lake this weekend which is about 21 miles north of Steamboat Springs.  Beautiful country but most importantly it was Lidya's first camping trip.  She did pretty well and we all enjoyed the weekend.  We rented a yurt since it was her first time and we weren't sure how she'd do but she did pretty well.  She started making this funny face during the past week so we thought we'd share that face with you.  Shawn dubbed it her scrunchy face.  I'm not sure where she picked it up and it's not a very flattering face but it's still cute to see her make it.  Shawn will post more pictures from our trip tomorrow.

Shawn and I have lived here in Colorado for almost two years already. So far things have gone well here for us and we are very happy that we moved here. I have to be honest, there are many things I miss about the different places we have lived but Colorado, and specifically Boulder, have enough of the good things we like in life that I can't imagine us living anywhere else ( unless we hit the lottery, then I can imagine us living in Hawaii ;-) One of the things I really enjoy about Colorado is the wild life. Oregon was a much more beautiful state however Colorado's wild life takes the cake. I've put together some clips I've taken of some of the wild life we've seen. I haven't been able to video all of it yet, like the skunk I saw this week, the white mountain goats we saw today and the fox from last week, but here is a few clips I've taken so far. I realize the video quality is horrible (degraded by web streaming) and my ability to hold a camera steady is miserable but it's still cool to see the animals. My hope is that I can get some video of some of the black bears we see and maybe someday I'll get to see a mountain lion. But until then, enjoy.

Shawn and I want to know how you can get flooding in your basement when you live in the desert!  Actually, we already know how.  We had a water main break that was leaking into our neighbors sub-basement causing their basement sump pump to run continuously.  The continuously running sump pump was dumping water into their front yard which super saturated their front yard causing seepage into our basement.  It's funny how that works.  Anyway, we had our carpet torn out today and they are hopefully comming tomorrow to do the work on the water line.  What a pain in the arse.  Oh well!

And for you Lidya fans out there we don't have any new pictures of her but I thought I would post an oldie but cutie!