uncontacted indigenous tribe found

There has been a new tribe found in the Amazon rain forest which has absolutely no contact with the rest of the world. It would be so interesting to meet a person who has never seen a TV, the internet, a car, Elmo, never had junk food, never listen to a song on the radio, never been in a town or city, doesn't know what country they are in, never met someone outside their small tribe.

Metro-Existentialism

I recently came across a list of the metropolitan areas of the US broken down by size. After a recent trip to Boulder, CO we realized how skewed our perception of urban reality is (meaning understanding the size of the city you live in relative to other cities). We currently live in the 4th largest metro area in the US after having just moved from the 1st largest metro area in the US.

Its an interesting list to check out, you may find some surprises.

Zoe is dabbling in abstract expressionism

Colorado Video

Towards the end of the video, when we are looking out over the valley you can hear Zoe say "Whoa".

Colorado

We just got back today from Colorado. We had a great time, Colorado is a beautiful place.

We arrived on Tuesday and stayed in Louisville, just outside of Boulder. That night we had pizza with Skip's cousin Eric while Zoe played with her 2nd cousins Eva and Fiona.

On Wednesday we visited the Butterfly Pavilion, Zoe had a great time checking out all the different butterflies. We walked Pearl Street in Boulder and had dinner at a swanky Indian restaurant. That day Nikki lost her cell phone (either in the restaurant or stolen in the hotel room-not sure which).

On Thursday we headed up to the Rocky Mountains. We stayed at a great cabin in Estes Park beside the Big Thompson River (it was about 40 feet from our door). We didn't realize hummingbirds sound kind of like crickets until we tried to figure out what the cricket like noises were all around the cabin (there were a lot of hummingbirds there)! We went into Rocky Mountain National park and came across a whole heard of elk in Moraine Valley. For about 15 minutes we were the only ones in the valley we could see, just us and about 100 elk. It was a great experience.

On Friday we went back to the park and went up to Bear Lake. We didn't know Bear Lake was still frozen and the whole area was covered in snow. Zoe had a great time playing on the snow. We went down from the 9475 feet altitude to an area with hardly no snow at all, Sprague Lake. We walked around the beautiful lake for a couple of hours. A chipmunk came up very close to Zoe, we think they wanted to be friends.

On Saturday we went back to the park and went to Alberta Falls, we hiked as far as we could but the snow stopped us eventually, it became too think and icy and we had to turn around. Zoe had a great time with the snow again. We realized that we were not wearing the correct shoes, Nikki with her flat soled, vegetarian boots and me with my hemp and rubber shoes didn't mixed well with all the rocks and snow. We did realize we truly enjoy hiking and plan to make it a serious hobby, (but next time we will have better shoes). We drove on Trail Ridge road for a bit, checked out some views and then went to find some big horn sheep. We hear these guys are hard to spot. We went to Sheep Lake, one of the better places to view them, but they weren't there. We decided to go and drove out of the park. About 2 miles outside the park a little crowd of people were looking up a rocky hillside and there were a bunch of big horn sheep! After Zoe's nap we went into the town of Estes for dinner and a big ice cream cone.

The best way to see the photos we took is by going to our online gallery here and viewing the slideshow.

Some photos of us

West Virginia video

This is a video from when we visited my grandmother in West Virginia last month. You can see part of the creek and watch Zoe play with the same yard decorations I played with when I was a kid.

Burning Down the (Apartment) House

We woke up to the sounds of helicopters and firetrucks. The main office building of our apartments burnt down this morning. You can read about it here. Too bad this didn't happen a couple of days before the first of the month, we could have told them our rent check was in there.

Best photo of a snail we have ever taken

Happy Birthday to Bubbie!

Miro

On Saturday afternoon we had our back door open, it was nice and sunny outside. We were cleaning up our place and keeping an eye on Miro at the same time. Miro has a tendency to jump over the patio railing and go exploring (both our cats are indoor cats).

So we had the door open for a while and noticed Miro wasn't around, we started looking for her inside, couldn't find her. Then we started looking outside, all around the apartments, we drove down the street, opened cans of cat food, ect. We looked for almost 4 hours straight. Nikki was going to swap her sandals for sneakers and went to get her socks out of the sock drawer and found Miro sound asleep inside it!

We think that Miro had jumped in the sock drawer and Zoe closed the drawer. Zoe was helping us clean up the place.

Snapdragons go 'snap'..and fountains are pretty

Zoe on a toy zebra in the Dallas Galleria