I forgot to talk about the flowers in front of my yard. Here are a few, and I’ll photograph more tomorrow.
It took FOREVER for the “early spring” flowers to bloom at our elevation (6800′). This was around May 1st.
Hyacinth.
The columbine is the Colorado state flower. They bloom in the wild on mountainsides.
My backyard garden. It isn’t big, but it’s been a great time seeing what can (and what cannot) grow in Colorado. See the sprinkler in the lower right? That’s on a timer to run for 15 minutes every night. In this climate, you will never have too much water for your garden. A far departure from Florida.
This may sound strange, but now that we’re done with all of our June/early July travel, our lives will be calming down. We will still be busy, but things will be less chaotic.
I have so much to write about, I’m thinking, where to begin???
The boys’ never-ending baseball season?
The Denver Mint?
Our trip to Pennsylvania and West Virginia (with a little side trip to Penn State in there)?
My returning to work full time?
How about our travels to Durango, the Grand Canyon, and Moab?
I’m going to start with my garden, because that’s been quite the adventure in itself.
We need to go WAY back in time, to late March/early April. That’s when I started working on a seedling plan. The growing season is so short here, one has to start seeds indoors, particularly those plants that aren’t frost tolerant: tomatoes, peppers, squash. More »
Meet Ranger!
I have a solid 6 weeks worth of adventures to write about, but for now, meet Ranger, the newest member of the family (pictured here).
It’s been about 3 months since we lost our beloved Howie, and the house just isn’t the same without a four-legged friend to keep us company.
He’s a ~2 year old smooth-coat border collie, and he’s so smart! He was found as a stray in Garden City, KS and was rescued from a rural Kansas shelter in mid-June. He had been fostering with a Denver family through the Western Australian Shepherd Rescue since then.
Timmy is #2.
The first weekend of May, Timmy’s Little League baseball team did the Little League fan experience thing** with the Colorado Springs Sky Sox, the AAA Minor League Baseball team that plays right up the street from us. They’re the Colorado Rockies AAA affiliate team.
**It took me a second to sleuth around for the name of the program that Timmy participated in. It’s called the “Junior Sky Sox“.
This is very similar to what Timmy’s team did in Florida last summer with the Pensacola Blue Wahoos “Field of Dreams” experience.
This was also one the Sky Sox’s multiple Military Appreciation Nights, along with Timmy’s free ticket, the rest of us got discounted box seat tickets with our military IDs. That was nice.
Timmy’s team got to run out on the field with the Sky Sox players. It was very cute and I’m proud of how well the boys did. Alas, the Sky Sox didn’t win that night. More »
I know I’ve been scarce lately. I did a couple weeks of Air Force Reserve work in mid-May, and now we’re wrapping up the boys’ baseball seasons and their school years. I have several great places in the community to write about, and I’m looking forward to all the great places we’ll be visiting this summer, including the long-awaited trip to the Denver Mint next week!
But today, we remember.
I grew up not far from Washington, D.C. I visited several times with my family, and also took at least three school field trips up there to see numerous attractions. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall is the most emotional place I’ve visited in Washington, D.C. I’ve been there several times, with the first time probably in the mid-80s not long after it was dedicated. I think it was a middle school field trip. My feelings about this are in part because my father served in the conflict, but mostly because of how bitter it is. The pain and suffering emotion is palpable, not just from the starkness of the black marble, but from the other visitors who you will never see smiling or laughing. It’s raw silence.
The American Numismatic Association Money Museum is located on the campus of Colorado College near downtown Colorado Springs. Here, Timmy is looking closely at the “error notes”, bills with mistakes.
On a day off of school on May 1st, the boys and I took a short trip down to Colorado College near downtown Colorado Springs to visit the American Numismatic Association Money Museum. More »
The Western Museum of Mining and Industry is a fun 1/2 day trip in the Colorado Springs area. We learned so much! Here’s Timmy posing at a headframe with the Rampart Range in the background.
The boys had some days with no school in April and early May, so we did some sightseeing around the city. I have a list that I keep of things to do when the kids have no school, and this year we are working our way through the list quite nicely. It was a lovely day on April 21st, so we visited the Western Museum of Mining and Industry, which is right off I-25’s Exit 156, which is also the North Gate of the Air Force Academy.
It was a great time for Jacob to take the trip, since he is currently in the middle of his first research paper about geology. He had a chance to learn about the valuable minerals that exist in the Rockies, and what is done to extract them. More »
This is a work in progress, but I’ve been consolidating Howie photos from my Google photo albums into one location. For those photos that are already in Google, this has been quite simple. Select the group of photos, and select “Copy into New Album”. However, I didn’t start using Google photos until 2007, halfway through Howie’s life. So we’ve been going down memory lane looking for the pictures of him right around when the boys were born.
These photos are approximately in chronological order. You might find an event or two that’s backwards, but hopefully that’s the exception and not the rule. Also, some of the captions might seem odd, but that’s because they were taking from an album that was probably telling a story in its original context.
Enjoy!
June 2013, at Howie’s last family reunion in Lancaster. Jacob loved him so much.
It’s been 5 days, and I’m pleased to report that we can now write and talk about Howie without bursting into tears. But it sure was a tough 5 days…for Jacob, it was the worst first thing in the morning, when he usually kisses Howie good morning, and at bedtime, when saying “goodnight” to Howie was part of his very elaborate go-to-bed routine.
I felt like the bad guy by Monday; the boys had a day off from school, so they had an extra day to grieve, but by Monday night I had to ask the boys to do their best to get back into their normal routines. School, baseball, and music lessons weren’t going to stop.
Nonetheless, all week there have been tiny little hints of Howie’s absence. I feel it pretty profoundly when Dave is at work at the boys are at school. I’m not bursting into tears anymore, but I still think to myself, “Boy do I miss my good boy.” Here are several small examples of where I feel his absence: More »
Howie lying in the snow on our back deck, one of his favorite places to be. This was taken on April 13th. The last picture I took of him.
This past weekend was very sad for our family. We lost our beloved family dog, Howie. He had developed a liver tumor that grew incredibly quickly. We first discovered it in February while he was getting pre-dental blood work done. On Saturday morning, after 36-48 hours of not eating, he had grown so weak he needed immediate medical attention. Our vet was open on Saturday mornings, and she was able to quickly take an x-ray and determined that the tumor had completely overtaken Howie’s liver, and was pressing his lungs, stomach, and intestines up against his abdominal cavity.
It had to be so painful for him.
He seemed okay last Wednesday night, walking around, taking the stairs, and even playing with his stuffed animals with Dave and the boys. This all happened so quickly. More »
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