Skiing fun and moving back to Boise

Hey everyone,

So in case you haven't heard, Colleen and I are moving back to Boise next month. We're not sure on the exact date, but we're trying to shoot for March 7. Pretty sweet, huh? This morning we were eating breakfast and getting ready to go to work, Colleen worked at the candlemakers today and I was going to our regular job when our boss called and said to take the day off. It sucks, but I went out and had some fun, kind of. I threw my pack together and made a sandwich and threw the skis I'm borrowing into the car and took Colleen to work and then I drove to Minekill State Park, which is a place I had been hiking to back in October. I had heard that they had groomed trails there, and on our property here there's only so many times you can go skiing before it all starts looking the same. I parked at the NY State Power Authority Station which is about 1 mile up the road from the park entrance. There's a trail that starts there, and I was planning on doing about 8 miles round trip. I park the car, grap my pack, put the ski boots on and grabbed the skis and walked to the trailhead. Then I discovered that the trails aren't groomed, and it didn't look like anybody had been skiing there for the past week or two. It hasn't snowed here since Friday, so I didn't even have old ski tracks to follow. I started to break the trail, made it the mile to the park entrance and past the Ranger Station, breaking trail the whole way. I got to the next trail that I was going on, that would take me the next 3 miles to a waterfall that I had hiked to before only from a different direction. I discovered this new trail started out going downhill on a pretty steep slope surrounded by trees, and I"m not quite good enough yet on the skis that I was afraid if I tried I'd end up wrapped around a tree. I took the skis off and walked down until it was flat. Put the skis back on once it got flat again, and went maybe 1/2 mile before the trail started to slope upwards, again with a really steep incline. I was tired, and I wanted to continue, so I took the skis off and strapped them to my pack, then continued on my way. I made it about another 1 1/2-2 miles on the trail that varied from flat to uphill, trudging through foot and a half deep snow before I threw in the towel before I had a heart attack. I stopped and took a rest, then threw my pack back on and went back the way I came, walking the whole way until I got back to the ranger station and the flat ground before I could ski again. I had alot of fun and got a great workout, but they shouldn't mark a trail as a ski trail unless you can actually ski on it. Jerks. Here are some pictures. If you go back to my posting from October 12th, you can get an idea of how much the mandscape changes in winter.

The above photo was taken from about the same point on the trail where I had taken one back in October when I was there.

This is a really big tree that had fallen over and about half of it was hanging over a stream about 20 feet down. It was pretty neat.


I don't know if you can see these that well, but all those little dark spots are turkeys. I took this as I was about to pull in our driveway, and there were hundreds of them in the field across the road. Well, that's all for now. Bye

Sledding Fun!

Hello everyone! Sorry it's been so long since my last post, but there really hasn't been too much to write about. It was really cold a couple weeks ago, with the wind chill it was getting as low as -20, so that kinda sucked. This past Friday was really warm, almost 40, but then yesterday and today it was really cold, in the single digits and the teens. We've been out cross country skiing a couple times. Our boss and his wife have some that they've let us borrow, and I had forgot how much fun it is. We were planning to go somewhere today but then we decided against it since the weather guy said it was going to be really cold. Next weekend I'm going to go to a neat place I've been hiking before that has groomed trails and spend the day out skiing. Our house-mates husband has an old pair of skis that he's going to let me borrow, so that's pretty cool. It wasn't too cold today though, so we went over to Joan's and went sledding. It was a lot of fun. Here are some photos.

Here's Joan getting ready.

This is Vera and Lane. They were probably laughing at Colleen.

Here I am shredding on kid-size snowboard. It took me about 7 tries just to stay on long enough to get to the jump, and after that, I always fell off.

This is Lane, we all hurt our a@@es pretty bad on the landing.

Colleen said I wasn't allowed to take pictures of her wearing the bright orange snowsuit. Yea right.

Hope everyone is doing well!

All I Want For Christmas is to Not Get Stitches! Oops, too late.

Hey everyone. So today for work I drove to Albany to pick up some more steel for a hammock that we're working on, and I get back to work and think to myself, "Should I get the steel out of the back of the truck first, or should I go eat lunch?" I decided I was hungry enough to eat lunch first, so I parked the truck by the studio and walked down to the house to eat. After lunch, I'm walking back up to the studio to get the steel out of the truck, looking down as I walked in case there was some ice or something I could slip on, when out of nowhere the steel decides it's going to hit me in the mouth. It hurt like hell, so I put my hand to mouth and ran my tongue along my teeth to make sure none of my teeth fell out, thankful that they were all still there. I pulled my hand away and quickly realized that almost my entire hand was covered in blood. I ran inside the studio and into Colleen, who heard the war cry the steel let out before it decided to gash my mouth open. I grabbed a towel and we headed to the family practice in Stamford where Colleen's Aunt works. Unfortunately, she wasn't in, but the other doctor was, so I got 3 stitches in my lower lip and a tetanus shot, and an order to eat soft foods for the next few days. Only soft foods?!?! Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but with Christmas in two days that's going to be really difficult. At least I get the stitches out on Friday, unless Aunt Sue looks at them before then and takes them out earlier. I was going to post a picture of the stitches, but they're pretty gross looking so I decided not to. Our friends Grace and Chris came and visited a couple weekends ago. It was pretty cool. We saw a coyote one morning when we were out for a walk and it scared Grace. It was kinda funny. Here are a couple pictures from that:




Hope everyone has a good Christmas!

New House

Hey everyone, here are some pictures of our "new" house that we're living in. Part of the house was built in the 1850's, then the rest of it was built around the 1870's. It's 3 floors, 8 rooms, two bathrooms, a living room, dining room, and a kitchen. It's pretty sweet. Colleen and I have two rooms that connect on the first floor, so we have a bedroom and our own private living room area. Our friend and "landlady" that we're living with teaches in Brooklyn for most of the week, so we pretty much have the run of the place. We're going to help her do some work on the house, our first project is helping her get one of the bathrooms ready to get the rest of the stuff installed in it. We'll be knocking a wall down to make room for a washer and dryer, and we're going to sand the floor to get that ready for some new tile to be laid. We're really excited. There's 26 acres for us to play on, plus a pond that will hopefully provide some swimming fun once it gets warm again. That's about it for now.


This is the front of the house from across the road. Some of the windows were being replaced today so didn't want to take too many photos of the front of the house just in case you all thought I was living in a house with no windows in part of it. So, as soon as the windows are done, I'll take a couple more pictures of the front.
Here's the back of the house from in front of the pond.
This is from a little ways up the hill behind the house. You can see part of the pond through the trees in the photo.
This one is looking from one edge of the pond towards the back of the house.

Nothing much

Hey all, nothing much is happening here. We're moving at the end of November in to a sweet, huge house that a friend of ours owns. It's 3 stories, quite a few bedrooms, and Colleen has gotten into the habit of telling everyone that it's haunted. It isn't, at least I don't think so, but it could be. But it is pretty big, and our friend teaches in Brooklyn for most of the week, so she's not here all that often. We're going to help her do some work on the house, and we'll get to save lots of money! I'll take a picture of it when we move in. Most of you will probably think it really is haunted, since all the trees here have no more leaves left and everything's gray and brown, so it probably won't look like the best house in the world, but it really is. We got 10-12 inches of snow a couple weeks ago, which was pretty insane. Our poor little car didn't like the snow too much, but it did fine. Funny thing though, it's almost impossible to find snow tires for our car. The Toyota dealer doesn't have them, and neither does the garage in town. So that's my fun project for this weekend while Colleen's working at the candle-makers. It hasn't got above about 45 for the past few weeks, and we've been getting a lot of rain. That's pretty much it. Nothing too exciting, but at least it's better than pneumonia, right Mel?

Lots-o-Pictures

Hi everyone. Today I went hiking by myself and had a grand old time. Only did a few miles, but it was a really pretty day, about 74, so it was nice to get out of the house.
These first 3 are from a from a trail called "Vromans Nose", that was pretty steep but not very long and it had ncie views from the top. The only issue was all the people from NYC and New Jersey, most of whom were rather loud and obnoxious. There were three people on the trail who were drinking beer while they walked. It kinda made me mad but at least they weren't littering.


The one above and below are from this place called The Old Stone Fort, which was built in 1772. They had all the really old gas powered hydraulic pumps and saws that were really neat.
The rest of the pictures are from a place called Mine Kill State park. Apparently over here "kill" is another word for creek or stream. This was the first place I went this morning, about 9:30, and there wasn't a single other person in the park that I could see. It was really quiet and peaceful compared to the Vromans Nose hike I did later in the day.

This is one of about 20 deer I saw today moving through the park. This one and 5 or 6 others weref walking about 20 feet off the trail in the same direction that the trail was moving. At one point the trail got really thick and wooded, adn there were signs everywhere saying to keep out except for the purpose of bowhunting, and I got scared and turned around. I mean, who wants to get shot by a bow on a freaking nature hike? Not me. Luckily, there were plenty of other trails around that I could go on that didn't have signs, so I felt relatively safe.


This is Mine Kill Falls. The turnoff for this is about 1/4 mile down the road from the park entrance, so this is the first place I stopped at. I went back around noon to walk down to the lower part of the falls and sit and have a snack bu there were way too many people there, so I didn't stop.






These last two are of a covered bridge that was built in the mid-1800's, I think. In case you can't read the sign says "$5.00 finr to ride or drive this bridge faster than a walk". It was pretty cool.

Some fun pictures

Hi everyone. Colleen's grandparents were last week and these are some pictures from the weekend. It was Uncle Don's birthday party on Saturday, so we all went to over to Aunt Sue's house for dinner. I worked on Sunday morning for some friends and so these first few photos are from Colleen hanging out at Joan's house on Sunday morning.


Joan and the kids have been keeping some caterpillars in a little thing in the house and a couple of them hatched on Sunday.This is Vera, Joans daughter.
Here's Joan and Don. I guess they were looking at a butterfly on the roof. But it almost looks like they're looking beyond, into space or something. That's the barn at their house behind them. It used to be the biggest barn in Schoharie County, which is saying a lot because they're are a lot of big barns around.


Here's Colleen's grandmother Nana and I looking at something. I think we were talking about trees.
If you look closely in this picture you can see Natalie and Lane waving back at me.
This is the view from Aunt Sues house.
Here we all having dinner at Sues house. It was and supposedly hats were required but not everyone followed the rule.
This is Aunt Sue, Lane, and Sue's dog Georgette.