Renaissance Festival 2009

We had a great time. Celtic Legacy and Cast in Bronze were fantastic. David and I had a blast. I hope he has leave next deployment over the summer, I'll make us costumes. Lol.

Off Road Trip

I had SO MUCH FUN. I got to meet people, and everyone was so nice. I wasn't expecting to walk, but it was great. We hiked 1.5 miles to the reservoir, and it was beautiful the whole way. The wet weather has brought a plethora of wildflowers into bloom, and I'm going to go back up tomorrow or Friday and pick a bunch to press for art projects. And the reservoir was great, I can't wait to go back with David and a couple of fishing poles. It's even big enough for a boat, though the wind was so strong when we were there that I couldn't imagine going out in anything without an anchor. We stopped at a bunch of great views and everyone took a lot of pictures. None of these were taken by me, I only have a small, kinda crappy camera and my phone, so I didn't even bother when I knew other people would be taking much better pictures with their much better cameras. We stopped in a meadow for lunch, and almost everything was put in a communal pot. Someone brought smoked salmon (that he made), cheese, and crackers and passed the platter around. Mmmmm.....yum. The conversation was great and the mood light-hearted. Everyone was having fun. I had two other people in the Jeep with me. On our way to Woodland Park for margaritas we stopped and gawked as a herd of 55 elk, to my count, ran across the road in front of us. It was so cool. Some of the pictures are incredibly high def and close too. We stopped and got margaritas, I was the only one who got strawberry or sugar. Then we went back, dropped riders off at their cars and went home. I had a little bit of a sunburn, but it was totally worth it. What a great day.

Florissant Fossil Beds

Karen and I had a great time today. We drove to the Florissant Fossil Beds and hiked around for the better part of 6 hours. In all, we covered a little over 5.5 miles. She's a photographer and has a great camera, and she got some great shots, which I'll add to this post when I get them. We made friends with two of the park rangers, and they gave us their email addresses to exchange pictures and told us to call the next time we came out and they would walk with us. That should be fun.

We munched on apples, dates, nuts, and hummus with bread. It was yummy. And I used my camelbak for the first time in years, which worked out great. We have a date to go bowling this weekend, that should be a fun time too. Yay for friends. The Dragon Boat Festival is this weekend, that should be fun, especially considering we missed the Irish Festival last weekend to go camping.

I'm going to try to upload pictures off the phones and camera tonight.

Job Hunting

I applied to three jobs yesterday, had an interview, have one today, have another tomorrow, and need to write up my resume so I can apply to more. Could be promising, I'm hopeful. All I want to do is write, which requires a degree if I plan on doing anything other than writing books, which at this point I don't, and I also don't have the money to go back to school anyway. Hence the job search. I'd like to make some money and am feeling rather confident about my health for the moment. So wish me luck!

Camping Weekend

This was our very first camping trip. We rented a camper and stayed at the Lone Duck Campground, which was great. We had really nice neighbors, and everyone there was super friendly. We brought the dogs, and they did great. We went to the Florissant Fossil Beds on Saturday, which was really cool. We were only able to hike a couple of the trails, but I'll definitely go back to do the rest. For everyone back home who is curious, the fossil beds were named after Florissant, MO, because the man who discovered them was from Missouri. Pretty cool. Basically millions of years ago there was a huge lake in the area, as well as a volcano. When the volcano erupted, the flow of mud, magma, whatever it was covered the bottom 15 feets of the huge Redwood trees in the area. Everything above the flow eventually died and went away, but the bottom of the trees petrified. The ash settled on the bottom of the lake and helped preserve the plants and animals that had died and settled to the bottom, leaving a lot of fossils in the area. It was really neat. We didn't stay long because they were closing soon and we were both hungry, but I'll go back.