From the week before thanksgiving 2016 to now, January 2017, Chelsea and I have focused primarily on visiting with family and close friends, socializing, and helping around the house (whichever one we happen to be in). But we've also had a few cool little excursions and taken some neat photos. None of these really justify a post of their own, but together they are impressive and interesting! Right? Like a CDO manager wrapping a bunch of sub-prime mortages together and smearing it with lipstick and glitter to take to market, I'm packaging these little moments on the road together for extra coolness. Here's some stuff we did recently, in kind of chronological order.
We made time for a few hikes with friends while in Colorado. Here are some shots from our hikes in Boulder, CO and Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Park, CO. We went to RMNP on Black Friday to rep the REI Opt Outside movement, which promotes playing outside instead of trampling your neighbors to death down at the WalMart. We're happy to report that the park was completely packed with likeminded hikers and we didn't spend a dime, or crush anyone underfoot.
It wouldn't be a Colorado visit without some climbing. Luckily there are warm sunny crags even in November, so we got to climb outdoors at Horestooth Reservior, as well as inside at Ascent, the brand spanking new gym in FoCo, and Boulder Rock Club.
Though we've crossed the great plains many times from Indiana to Colorado, we usually never stop. Sorry Kansas, you just don't have anything worth stopping for (we thought). But it turns out we're just ill informed. In fact, Kansas has some incredible stuff to see right off the highway. This is Rock City, in Minneapolis, Kansas. We had the place to ourselves all morning and had a bushel of fun playing on the calcite-cemented concretions, AKA bigass round boulders.
Here we are in Indiana, doing the family Christmas thing. Keeping up with traditions and such. One such tradition is going to the Kapitan's Christmas Tree Farm, which is run by old family friends of ours, whose kids I went to school with. Oh, and decorating the tree with mom.
Another ancient tradition is a family gathering at Pokagon State Park. My mom and her siblings went when they were kids, and the family's been going back ever since. Of course it wouldn't be Christmas without the traditional birthday ribs for Jesus, on which we have planted 2017 candles. Aunt Elaine got to blow them out this year.
Just kiddling, it's her brithday too. And thats not ribs, it's a cake. A pineapple rightsideup cake, which is what happens when you throw a pineapple upside-down on the floor and scrape it up witha spatula. Good times.
No trip to "The Region" as our dirty little corner of Indiana is dubbed, would be complete without a trip to The Bone Dry to shoot some pool with my dad. It may look like he's winning but that's all part of the plan. I let him get ahead at the start to make room on the table for my vigorous and far reaching style of play.
Another longstanding tradition of mine is to make my presents the ugliest and hardest to open under the tree. But they still need to have a little character to them, otherwise they're not fun, just aggravating. This duct tape monstrosity is a rabbit! Ya get it? Christmas rabbit? no...? Doesn't matter. It's for my own amusement.
In Southern Indiana, we had the pleasure of working outside. Here's Chelsea hauling firewood at her aunt & uncle's property, and some shots of my grandparent's home away from home in Brown County. It might sound silly but I find real enjoyment in making firewood, moving leaves, and standing at the ugly end of a shovel, and I know Chelsea feels the same way, although in her case, she's the pretty end of the shovel.
We've also been itching for years to visit our Alma Mater, Indiana University, but we've never had the time before now. This trip, we spent a week bouncing in and out of Bloomington searching for nostalgia and creeping around our old hangout spots and meeting up with the old friends who still live in town. For some reason we never take photos of the people we love so much, i guess because we're too busy being chummy to stop for a kodak moment. But luckily statues hold real still and don't have much to say so we end up with plenty of photographic evidence of our visits with them. Funny story, visiting with the miniature bronze Adam and Eve is one of my very first memories of being on the IU campus. Both of my parents are IU Alums and I guess they hit it off pretty well with these statues because we used to come visit them about once a year when I was a kid. So, their friendship with inanimate objects has passed on to me. I gave Eve a hug and shook Adam's hand with a "Nice to see you guys, take er' easy dude" and we headed on to other stops. I am inordinately frustrated that we missed out on seeing the Jordan Hall Greenhouses. Chelsea has never been inside and they are full of the most extrordinary botanical weirdness you've ever seen. At the time, it didn't seem like a big deal to put off again or miss out on but now that I'm a thousand miles away in Florida, it's a real bummer we didn't try harder to get in there. On the bright side, there's a whole swampy jungle here full of the same kind of greenery as we would see in the hothouse, so that's pretty alright.
