Month: May 2011

We had a great time at Peter’s birthday celebration at Urban Park (Happy Birthday!). I tried to snap photos, here are the good ones with Carrie and Aven.

It was perfect for kite flying:

Overall, it was a very fun birthday party, and a great day to spend some time in the park! Torsten first played some tennis, then we kicked the soccer ball and found a water gun. He was moving to fast for any photos…

after work,bike to the park, meet the fam! What a good start to the weekend!

Torsten (he’s done with first grade today!) is over playing tennis with a friend.

Secular Chaos and the Production of Hot Jupiters. I want to have a new national holiday called “Secular Chaos.” Or maybe just the best band name ever? The groupies could be the “Hot Jupiters”? Anyway, this is up high on the list of my favorite titles for scientific papers.

I was reading a nice article in Nature (“Hot Jupiters from secular planet–planet interactions”) and this reference completely caught my eye. I recommend 1) the arxiv paper, 2) the nature paper, 3) the holiday, 4) the band! 🙂

I attempted to do the Jemez Mountain Trail Run 50 mile.
Cerro Grande was too Grande for me this year. I bailed out at the Pajarito aid station and did 28.7 miles (with 7,900 ft up and 7,445 ft down). At least distance wise, I like metric — 45.9 km!

It was a perfect, beautiful, fantastic day for a run:

Last week of school, so a special lunch time puppet show and desert potluck.

Two of Torsten’s art pieces were part of an exhibition at Fuller Lodge.

He’s had a great first grade experience! It is hard to believe he’s almost finished with first grade though..

out to the end of Baranca Mesa

at the moment, we’re enjoying glass blowing at Jackalope. Torsten is fascinated and Aven is a little nervous of the fire and heat. next? probably skatepark. the dinner & margs?

Tom and Matt took the kids (Torsten, Waylon, Aven, and Johnny) up to the East Fork Jemez trail. We made it all of 50 meters down the trail then played in the water and “helped” some folks fishing.. Water, rocks, sticks, and fish — what else is there?

Tom played lifeguard for Johnny and Aven.

Aven tromped up and down the river (she couldn’t decide between the big kids and Johnny’s nice mellow pool)

Waylon hid under his hat (from the sun–we slathered on the sunscreen as well!). Waylon and Torsten had the water, sticks, rocks, and bridges to engineer. They met another boy with a fishing pole, and got a few casts in. A total of 8 trout were caught.

For those who need more photos — here’s the gallery with more photos.

Two young kids are keeping us busy and facebook makes it very easy to share the day to day. But right now, it isn’t easy to look back into the past via facebook. This morning I started looking through our ginormous tupperware of old pictures (with the fantasty of starting to scan and organize them…) — but the memories are all there to be refreshed!! So I’m going to try and capture day-to-day (and it pushes to fb.. there may be some redundancy). Anyway… Back to blogging!

Torsten has 11 more days of first grade! Aven is definitely out of toddler-hood (and practicing away for terrible twos). She is very good at “no!” Just this week she’s gotten “dog” and is close to “Torsten”.

Today is my Friday off, so we got Torsten off to school, had an almost leisurely morning, went off to a nice hike with two lovely ladies (Carrie and Aven) — my most used trails behind the golf course (part of my regular bike or run commute to work). But today it was industrial city as a few crews were extending power lines and driving in more poles — my hope is this is an upgrade for the counties plan to put gigabit fiber to every house.

Today is especially sunny (two layers of sunscreen may not be enough!) and blue sky, high country feeling. More sunshine than my Juneau phone/camera can take…