Category Archives: Life

Today is our last day in the midwest for our Christmas break. Today we’ll pack everything up, and tomorrow morning we take off to head back to Colorado. It’s been a really nice trip, and I’ve put up pictures of all the fun in the gallery.

In Indiana, we played with our new toys, and had a great walk down the trail that follows the Mawmee river through Fort Wayne. It was a cloudy and cold day, but I still found a lot of pretty things to take pictures of.

Now that we’re back in St. Louis again, we’re relaxing, watching movies and playing a lot of Rock Band. I gotta say, banging on a fake drum kit is WAY more fun than I ever imagined. I’ve even almost convinced myself that I might have a little bit of rhythm. Sort of. But I can “play” Ok-go and Don’t Fear the Reaper like nobody! (More cowbell!)

Christmas has come and gone, and now Mark and I are enjoying our first round of new toys. Special thanks to all of our family that spoils us so much. Bruce especially showed his generosity this year with a wonderful investment in our happiness! Bruce bought Mark all of the inner bits of a new, awesome, gaming PC, and Mark really enjoyed putting the machine together, and now playing World in Conflict for hours on end. This is a very pretty, very cool game.

Mark and Bruce were both wonderful enough to buy me a new camera body! I’m now the proud owner of a new Nikon D80, and a 50mm f1.8 lens. These make such very pretty pictures. I’m already having so much fun, and I’m really looking forward to the next adventures!

Still writing, but it’s Christmas, and it’s hard to ignore it. Mark decorated the tree out infront of our house, and then we got a couple of inches of snow, and here we are!

I’m getting there. Slowly, slowly, working my way up the side of the mountain that is my thesis. I know why I love the physical pursuits that I spend so much time doing. They give me a tangible analogue for the mental work I do during the other half of my life. A project can be daunting. You will want to give up and go home. You may find yourself sprinting towards what turns out to be only a false summit. Short cuts cost you time. And breaks can be both helpful and hurtful.

I took a nice break this weekend. Still got a little bit done, but I think this one was helpful, and necessary. And I made up a complement to the Mountain Pose shot for a friend.

Lotus Mudra

Our family has a variety of Thanksgiving traditions that make it lots of fun to come home for the holiday. We started the morning with TJ, Mark and I running a 5k race that we’ve been running every year for the last 8 years or so. Those of you who know me know that I don’t run much, just these three miles once a year.

After the race is the famous Thayer family Thanksgiving buffet. This event sprung out of the fact that every other year the Kirkwood-Webster Turkey Day game (a 120 year old rivalry between high schools) is held at Kirkwood High-school a few minutes walk from our house. All of my parent’s friends would come over for a big buffet, park their cars and then walk to the game. This year was no exception, and we had a big houseful of happy people (more than 50 people) before the game. And this year, Kirkwood won!

Thanksgiving dinner is usually a smaller affair. This year the turkey was free range and local. Mom brined the bird over night and then Dad smoked it all day, basting it with a Kaluha mixture that was extremely tasty. While it looked a little odd on the table, being completely black and all, but it was extremely moist and good underneath.

In the evening we went through the ads for Black Friday and relaxed. A good day was had by all.

Today I got my laptop upgraded to Leopard, the new Mac operating system (OS 10.5 if you’re keeping track). It was pretty much love at first sight. I love the 3D reflective dock, the slight transparency of menu bars makes them feel slick and crisply rendered, the mail program includes notes and to-do lists, and everything just feels prettier. It’s like when the new model car comes out, and you feel like “Wow, how did that old Toyota Corolla ever look cool compared to this new one!”

So far, I’m a happy camper. I think it runs just a fraction of a second slower, in general, and the VPN client for school doesn’t work right now, which is a bummer. But I like new toys. Shiny, reflective, paradigm breaking, upgraded toys.

I took this shot from a stop-off of I-25 on my way home last night from an interview for an internship at Colorado College. What a neat school! It’s pretty much exactly the kind of place I’ve always wanted to teach at. I could see myself as a permanent part of the faculty there someday. I just wish it was closer to Vedauwoo.

Tomorrow morning I leave for an MJO workshop in Irvine, California, with a little bit of hiking in Joshua Tree in the two days before. It will be nice to have a couple days to explore the desert this weekend. I’m really looking forward to the whole trip.

You might have noticed by now, if you read regularly, but when my family comes into town, we like to put them to work! My parents and little bro, TJ, were in the Fort for a week at the beginning of September. There’s photos of the last part of the Epic in the gallery.

Now, I’ve been complaining about our bed for over a year now. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great mattress, and a very nice bed. But I’ve discovered that I definitely prefer a firm mattress to the ultra-soft pillow top we had been sleeping on. I’ve been sleeping so lightly lately that any move or jiggle by Mark or the dog would wake me up at night. We needed something firmer, we needed something more stable, and we needed something bigger.

TJ saw the platform beds I was looking at buying online. Mark and I came very close to buying one for the rock-bottom price of $900, and it would sort of match the rest of our bedroom furniture. Thank goodness TJ stepped in.

“Oh no, don’t buy that crap!” said he. “I can make that for you with about $200 in wood. Do you have any tools?”

Of course, we didn’t have any tools, but that was easily remedied by borrowing from friends. After drawing up the plans, TJ and I headed to the hardware store and managed to buy all of the materials for about $150. TJ then spent the next day and half in our garage measuring, cutting, sawing, screwing and building the bed in the “plans” he had scribbled into his notebook. The highlight of the building was when we all discovered that the king-sized platform was more than 7 feet long on all sides, and there was no way it would fit through any of our the doors in our house.

So we cut the bed inhalf, and then rebolted the middle back together after adding a few extra legs for stability. After the family left, Mark and I sanded and stained the outer boards, and were happy to find they perfectly matched the rest of our bedroom furniture this way. We moved the bed into the house a few weekends ago, and then put everything together and slept on the platform with the old queen mattress for a while. About a week later, our king-sized futon mattress and 3 inch memory foam topper had all arrived, so we put together our bed and sent the old mattress home with Doug & Liz.

We were supposed to add a shelf to the outside of the bed for a modern platform bed look. But we decided it would be easier and look just as good to put some stained chair railing around the top edge, and I love it that way. We still have work we want to do. We’d like to cut a doggie door in one side so Liv can sleep under the bed (her favorite kind of doggie den). We’d like to put the chair railing around the headboard and the vertical corners. But for now, it’s great.

The bed is fantastic. It’s everything I could have ever wanted. It matches the rest of the furniture perfectly. It’s wonderfully comfortable. I can sleep soundly without even noticing Mark or the dog in the bed with me! Thank you TJ!