Millards In The Mountains

I am failing miserably at keeping up with the things in my life that need to be done. Some of this is not my fault, but most of it is. For example, blogging, keeping the house AT least picked up if not clean, staying on top of my school lectures...these are things that I can control but am doing bad at. The good thing is that Matt is working this weekend, so I will have plenty of time for all of that. I am averaging about 6 hours of sleep per night since Sunday night, so by the time I have run and taken the dogs out and gotten dinner, I am pretty much worthless. :) The one thing that I tried to stay on top of was laundry. I didn't do any this weekend because Jake was here and I had much better things to do. However, I got my act together on Monday and put a load in, only to come back an hour later and find that the washer is no longer spinning or draining. It had already been leaking water out of the bottom, but I was making due with putting towels underneath it because it wasn...

It's time for a celebratory picture post. We got the laptop back yesterday! After 10 days in the shop and I won't say how much money, it is charging again like a dream. Since I didn't have any luck getting pictures up on Matt's computer, I am going to change my long streak of boring wordy posts with some pictures of our weekend with Jake. The funny thing about when Jake comes out, there is always "bad" weather, as in rain, cold or dreariness. He came out last August and it was the first weekend we had experienced two days straight of rain since we moved in early July. Our intention on Saturday morning was to head down to Colorado Springs and take the cog railway up Pike's Peak. However, my breakfast making and taking the dogs to day care on the way down spoiled that and caused us to be late for the 10:40 train. Since we were going to the Rockies game that night and couldn't wait for the next one at 1:40, we didn't get to go up Pike's Peak. We w...

Don't really have much to say tonight, which means this will probably be a long post. :) I'm pretty much blogged out after all of my debating of global warming on my cousin Andrew's blog. (See the "Back to Basics" link under my blog list to the right if you are interested. School is winding down. I am almost finished with my first Master's class! Now, only 9 more to go. I just submitted my term project and second to last homework assignment today. All in all, I sent about 20 pages worth of calculations and statistical analysis to Purdue today. Whew! Glad that's all over. I really wanted to do that picture post tonight that I have been promising, especially since I am using Matt's computer until we get the laptop back on Monday. It would be really easy to put some of his wonderful pictures up, but the ones I wanted are not uploaded yet. (hint, hint, Matt!) I will be picking up our friend Jake tomorrow from the airport. He is in town for his second visit...

We arrived home last night from our quick Kingman trip safely and at a respectable time. (9:30 pm) I’m really glad we left Kingman when we did though…we got home just before the rain started to turn to slush. All in all, we completed 13 hours of driving over a 24 hour time period. That left us 2.5 hours to sleep (we arrived at Grandpa’s farm at 6 am Kansas time, just as the sun was rising) and 8.5 hours to spend with family. Despite the circumstances for our trip, it was great to see so many immediate and extended family members. It was also nice to spend so much time with my husband, even though we spent it driving. Hey, I’ll take whatever I can get these days! We also discovered that the Highlander converts to a pretty nice makeshift camper! (We were too tired to carry everything inside the house, so we just slept in the car with all the seats folded down.) Today, we have a pure white winter storm raging outside. We are supposed to get 17 inches of snow in Centennial! I don’t really ...

The Mountain Millards are about to embark on a crazy few days! Tonight when Matt gets off work, we are headed out for a late night drive to Kingman, KS. Unfortunately, it is not for happy reasons. We will be attending the funeral of Isabel Govert, my Grandpa’s second wife and my grandma for the past 14 years or so. The trip will be quick, as Matt and I both need to be back in Denver for work on Friday. But I am glad it worked out for us to be able to go and help celebrate Isabel’s life. I remember back in early June 2006 when my Grandpa Walter died. It was a really hard time and it meant so much to me that Grandpa Govert and Isabel came to the funeral. I hope I will be able to offer that same support for my grandpa by being at Isabel’s funeral. It is strange to think that Isabel is no longer with us. I can still hear her telling me stories about snakes, armadillos and other animals that regularly showed up on their farm. She loved to talk about the different ways my grandpa would kill ...

I finally have my computer back up and running! Last weekend, I was doing a few things on Sunday evening on the computer and it shocked me pretty bad. Apparently, the AC adapter got fried when this occurred because my computer stopped charging completely. So it has been dead all week and I finally got a new power cord to "juice it up" again! We have had a pretty amazing week. I am happy to be reduced to 40 hours a week for a while at work as we wait for some projects to come through the door. This also allowed me to work four 10 hour days this week and take Thursday off to go on one last ski trip with Matt. We hit Keystone again, and I am definitely NOT a fan of spring skiing. It was pretty icy and there was no fresh powder. But it was cool because snow storms were coming through during the morning, so it was fun to ski in the snow and watch them pass. The storms only lasted for a few minutes each. Matt did Wild Irishman, which is the ski slope I mentioned in one of my previo...

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I guess I just don’t really have much of interest to say or share as of late. Life has been pretty routine and mundane...work, dog park, school, sleep. Matt worked last weekend, so we didn’t really do much of note. We did manage to watch the movie “Marley and Me” Saturday morning. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much in a movie before! Just a warning to dog/animal lovers: it is a great movie, but evokes some strong emotions! Last week, I took the dogs to the dog park in between snow storms. One day, I had just started walking our normal trail when this woman started following me and chatting about her beagle (that died 20 years ago) that had a liver problem. Usually, I don’t mind dog talk at the dog park. But this lady was strange…she was wandering back and forth across the trail and I wasn’t sure how long she was going to follow me. (Usually people just stop for a brief exchange of greetings or questions/comments about each other’s dogs). Another w...