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A bunch of friends helped celebrate Ben’s birthday yesterday. Dinner was fun, and dessert ended up tasting pretty good, I think!

Thanks for all the nice comments, but my evening just got worse …

We lost our soccer game. It wasn’t muddy — in fact, it looked like the field hadn’t gotten any rain at all. The gusty winds picked up the dirt and blew it in our faces. When I got home, I started baking the cake for Ben’s birthday party. Earlier, on my way home from school, I picked up a necessary roll of large, heavy-duty tin foil from the grocery store. I guess it fell out of my shopping bag on my way home (I was on my bike) because it was nowhere to be found. I also discovered that we had no sugar. I had to go back to the store. Then I came home actually started baking and the eggs wouldn’t peak. (Luckily, my second attempt seemed to work better. This website helped a lot.)

:( Tuesday better be Terrific.

I got to class today to find that for the third term in a row, nobody is available/willing to teach an entire term of Ge10x. First term, Paul Asimow was on a ship in the South Pacific for the first three weeks of class. Second term, we changed lecturers after two weeks, and the remainder of the class was split between two professors. This term, the guy who was supposed to teach it suddenly cannot, so they’re team teaching: a half-dozen professors are each going to talk for a week or two. That doesn’t work so well! There’s no continuity, the problem sets are inconsistent and there’s no obvious person to talk to if there’s a problem with it, and most of all, inevitably each professor considers HIS (duh, of course they’re all men) two weeks’ material the most important, so they always go into too much detail and run over and mess the schedule up. But I only pay $30,000 a year to take these classes; what am I complaining about?

There was a big earthquake in Sumatra and I tried to go to the press conference but there was no room, so I’m stuck here reading CNN instead. I wanted to make a lot of progress on my dunes paper today, but because of the aftershock there’s a lot of commotion and I’m still stuck with the desk by the door and even if I close the door it opens like a million times an hour and I can’t concentrate! Plus, I lost my Banff film festival tickets (though they kindly agreed to replace them) and forgot to return my movie to Blockbuster. AND I rode my bike to school and now it’s raining and my seat will be all wet so either I’ll have a cold wet butt or I have to walk home. And soccer’s probably cancelled. Or, if it’s not, it’ll be really cold and muddy.

This morning, we took Chaco to his favorite swimming hole along the Brown Mountain trail. The recent rains have made the valley very green — it was gorgeous! Sunny, green, and 70 degrees. Can’t ask for much more than that!

The second picture is an edited version of this:

I downloaded some PS Actions from atncentral.com today and started playing with them. Of the half dozen or so I’ve tried so far, half are duds and half are pretty neat. What do you think of this one?

It’s Ben’s birthday! We celebrated by … moving the furniture around! Again! Ha ha. The carpet guys are coming tomorrow, so today we’ve been moving all the stuff from the office downstairs, re-installing the webserver in the dining room, and disassembling our big desks. In a fit of productivity, I also went to OSH and purchased and potted some plants for our front patio. I also scrubbed the walls of the patio. Now I’m tired :)

We’re still giving up dessert for Lent (a new thing for me!), so instead of a cake I cooked dinner (chicken parmesan a la Sam Feakins). It actually tasted pretty good, if I do say so myself! Then Ben got to open his presents …

Chaco likes to help unwrap presents:

A duffel that nobody at the airport will accidentally mistake for theirs:

Every nerd needs an iPod:

Even Chaco thought it was kind of cool. But the white earbuds just don’t work for him.

Happy birthday Ben! I love you!

We spent most of our last day in Colorado doing realtor stuff, but we managed to find some time to drive a couple miles up Peak-to-Peak Highway and go for a short (very short — the road to the trailhead was closed) hike. We walked out onto Red Rock Lake, which is frozen solid. Only certain parts of Nederland have a view of the “back range”, aka the Continental Divide, the high country, or the “really big mountains”, but you can drive to them in about 15 minutes. Red Rock Lake is just a mile or two from the continental divide.

Then we came home and took a nap. I think we need a vacation from house shopping, and I’m not sure that installing new carpet counts!

That’s the code name for the house we’re going to make an offer on tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

The first two times we visited this house, the selling agent gave us the wrong lockbox combination. We almost gave up on trying to get in, but decided to give it one last shot today. We had exhausted ALL the suitable listings in Nederland and Boulder, but hadn’t found anything we really liked in our price range … until this one! We appreciate it even more after having seen ALL the other options.

What do you think???

This is the outside of the house:

The kitchen (a really nice one!):

The great room:

The view off the deck:

The loft, which we would use as our office:

I don’t want to jinx us — there are a million things that could cause them to reject our offer, or cause the contract to fall through. Cross your fingers for us!