Jackie's Blog

Saturday was exhausting but a lot of fun! However it was really cold.. Dick and I went for another careful walk, booked dinner for us all and then headed back to the house to meet the others for some snow mobiling! It was hard work but the scenery was amazing. I never thought I would go both down and up steep hills so fast!! I had lots of layers on! We went home after two hours and sat in the hot tub! But we were not done for exercise that day as we'd signed up to do a local bonfire progressive dinner. It involved cross country skiing from a trail head to four different tents and bonfires to eat and drink. We started at 6:30 Pm, so it got cold and dark pretty quickly We were very grateful for the bonfires at the end!

Friday we woke up to falling snow! It was beautiful.. I went out early and walked the streets with my camera - carefully! It was so quiet... There were lots of bicycles left out in the snow, and I took loads of photos of them. People ride bicycles in all types of weather in Crested Butte. Later in the day the girls went out for some retail therapy.. Then we all sat down and watched 'Vertigo'- which was a project for Sean's homework! Friday night we all took the bus up to the resort and went to a tapas restaurant called djangos. It was a lot of fun, and then after we sang all the way home on the bus!

Thursday was another warm day and the snow seemed to be melting fast. In the morning the girls ended up dashing to the local supermarket to buy supplies to make chili and corn bread for the Round Up progressive dinner. Between Tracy, Sean and I we made four different chilis. Whilst Tracy finished off and made the cornbread, Dick and I decided to go snow shoeing but we did not have a way of getting to a good trail, so we decided to do a little cross country skiing again. We even found a disc golf basket almost covered up with snow. After the progressive dinner, the guys did their podcast in front of the whole Round Up. It was their 300th episode and a lot of fun to listen to and watch.

Wednesday was an intense morning! To explain, part of the evening sessions at the Java Posse Round Up are five minute lightning talks by anyone who cares to sign up to talk about anything- literally anything from 'How to shave' (by Sean!) to 'How an engine works', and obviously lots of geeky ones too. So the boys signed the girls up to do one called 'What the girls do while the boys are podcasting'. However... We decided to do an alternate version. First we had to learn how to use Keynote, which is a program similar to Powerpoint on the Mac, then dig out lots of incriminating photos of the guys and put together the presentation. It took us several hours but we had a lot of fun doing it. In the afternoon Dick carried on geeking and Tracy and up went up to the ski resort to watch the end of day skiing. That evening we sat through several other lightning talks and nervously waited for ours. We wore our 'I love my geek' t-shirts and managed to make every

Every year Dick and his Java Posse friends (Carl, Joe and Tor) go to Crested Butte, CO to do a 'Un-conference'. This year, the girls (Me, Tracy and Jill) decided to go with them. Sean, Carl and Tracy's son also came with us. On Sunday morning we got up at 3 AM, (which was actually 2 AM as the clocks had just moved forward) to catch a shuttle to take seven of us to San Jose airport. As predicted we got there way too early but were on our flight to Salt Lake City at 6 AM. The airport there was very busy for a Sunday morning. Another short flight took us to Gunnison, Colorado. The boys had booked a slightly different house than normal, and it turned out to be really nice. First we went to lunch at the Ginger Cafe and had some cocktails :-) Dick had a beer but ended up with a cocktail umbrella on his glass. On Monday the boys went to geek for the entire day, so the girls decided to go and learn the basics of cross country skiing and after much laughing and falling over, we had

Dick got a new mountain last weekend- an early birthday present for his 40th birthday. That meant that I inherited his other one- a Specialized FSR XC (something that means a lot more to him than me! :-) He spent yesterday making all the necessary adjustments to fit me, so I just knew that today would be a biking day! We cycled from our house up the LONG hill to Anderson Dam, and I made it all the way to the top without getting off :-) Then, we cycled up another hill off road instead, and then went down hill, through loads of puddles, and all around the park- it was fun! The only downside was Dick got a puncture after the last hill and had to change his tyre (English spelling!) I was very muddy at the end too!