Guess what I found at Sunflower...

While I was shopping at Sunflower Market on Sunday, I was surprised to see a whole stack of bright red Ski Queen brand gjetost! This is the first time I've ever seen the cheese at a grocery store in Albuquerque. I've even looked for it at specialty stores, but haven't found it. It was always a tradition for my family to have this cheese at Christmas, so I felt very indulgent as I bought myself a package on a non-holiday. But I really don't know if they will continue to carry gjetost.

I realize that I haven't posted in a while and the most exciting news I have to report is finding my favorite cheese at the grocery store. Sometimes that is just the way it is.

Some blog news: I finally figured out why the little archive list to the right was using Albanian month names, and fixed it. I also now have a ClustrMap which lets me see where the people are who are reading the blog. At this point I can pretty well guess who the dots in Germany, the East Coast, and Oklahoma are. The Texans and New Mexicans could be any number of people. Of course, you could also leave comments so I know who's reading.

Labor Day

As a break from "work", we celebrated Labor Day weekend by climbing mountains in Colorado. Specifically, we tackled three 14ers near Lake City. We drove up to the trailhead for Sunshine and Red Cloud on Friday (it took about seven hours, so we had to deal with the rough dirt road at night). On Saturday, we started hiking around 6:30am to summit Red Cloud, then we traversed the ridge to Sunshine. Then we had to hike back over Red Cloud to get back down. So we actually climbed three 14ers in a day if you count Red Cloud twice. It was 11 miles round-trip, and such a beautiful day that we spent quite a bit of time on the summits. We didn't make it back to the camper until 4pm.

Troy and Wiley approaching Red Cloud.

Sitting atop Sunshine with the ridge to Red Cloud behind us.

On Sunday, we climbed Handies Peak from the American Basin trailhead. This was a relatively easy hike compared to the day before. Only 5 miles roundtrip, but the view was gorgeous!

Baby samplers

I feel compelled to write about the cross-stitch project that I'm working on right now. It is a baby-sampler. I pieced together a pattern from purchased patterns and a design of my own. However, to keep it a surprise for the recipient of this project, that's all I'm going to say about it. It's been fun working on it, and as it is a design in progress, I'm excited to see how it turns out.

Here are some other baby samplers that I've done in the past. I think I have done more baby-related projects than anything else. At this point I don't have any completed cross-stitch projects in my own house... they have all been given away. And in the past, I did not take pictures of my work before sending them off. I think it would be fun to go visit all of my cross-stitches because they all belong to people that are very important to me. These two cross-stitches now reside in Chicago where I visited a few weeks ago.

Chicago

I visited this little cutie in Chicago a couple weeks ago. He had just learned to crawl a couple days before. Obviously, he still likes to keep plenty of toys within reach so he doesn't have to crawl to them.

On the flight home from Chicago, I had the pleasure of sitting on the tarmac for an hour... twice. This has not been a very good summer for flying. During the last hour-long tarmac drive, my overhead reading light did not work (and it was night) so I could neither read or use my laptop for an hour. As an apology for the broken reading light, the airline gave me some travel vouchers... which are already expired.

I'm back!

Right off the top, I'm giving all of my excuses for the lag in posts: not enough time due to traveling, adjusting to a new computer, no good photos to blog (actually I just don't have a good way to get photos to the blog). That's only three excuses, not too much. But to fight those excuses, I'm posting a blog with no photos.

Classes start up again on Monday. I'm excited to have a new schedule. I spent the summer working long days at a desk and then escaping out of town quickly. Which really isn't an ideal schedule. I'd rather mix up the days a bit so I'm not sitting the whole time. And being out of town every other week makes it difficult to get anything done at home. The long hours behind the desk and in airports/planes have gotten me out of shape. Fortunately, Jenn has put me on a running schedule to train for the Duke City Marathon relay. We need to be ready to run 6 miles by October 21. This will be the longest run that Jenn has ever done. And it is really motivating me to run at least 3 times a week, which I haven't done in a year and a half (since I did the Austin Marathon). It feels great to start the day with a run!

To continue my get-in-shape kick, I signed up for a yoga class (part of my free tuition) and bought a gym locker for the year. So I'll be prepared to workout anytime. At first, I was upset that the only yoga class that still had space is at 8am, but now I'm looking forward to getting out of the house early at least a couple times a week. Don't get me wrong, 8am is not early, but I rarely get to campus before 10am. For example, this morning I ran 3 miles, read a magazine, staked the cherry tomato plants, cut back the sunflowers and played some piano before leaving for work.

Down from the mountain

After being computerless for a while, I have returned with some photos of Uncompahgre Peak. We were in Denver for a wedding, but what's a trip to Colorado without climbing a fourteener? So after the wedding weekend, we headed down to the Lake City area. The weather was nicely much cooler in the mountains than it had been in Denver. The hike started on a nice bright morning. Here's the rocky summit:

You can see that the clouds were starting to gather. They quickly turned dark and reminded us why we needed to get an earlier start to our hike. Get off the mountain by 1pm is the rule we'll stick to from now on. Wiley did not enjoy hiding out under a rock while waiting for the hail to stop on the way down the mountain. But he did make it to the top and back down again. Some people had their doubts that he could handle it.

Voila!

As promised, here is the completed wedding cross-stitch. Note that the wedding isn't for a another week, so SHHHHH.... don't tell the groom and bride about this. Actually, it won't be that big of a surprise for them anyway. And I couldn't wait to put this online, especially because I won't have much computer access after the wedding.

This lettering was done using the DMC rayon floss. It does have a certain shine to it. This design had a simple color scheme with only 4 colors, but it makes the lettering that much more striking. We were also excited to find a two-tone from and the black/red matte that highlights the colors of the cross-stitch.