Karen and Jeff's World

After Amanda’s graduation, John, Amanda and Johnny came over to Karen’s parents’ house for a party and to visit.

Back in May we went to Kansas for Amanda and John’s graduations from Kansas University. John decided not to go through the ceremony because his PhD advisor was out of town. Amanda had a nice ceremony. It was just the School of Journalism so there wasn’t a huge mass of graduates.

Here are Karen’s photos from our trip to Bishop Castle. Jeff’s photos are in this post.

You know if I didn’t wait so long to get the pictures posted, I might have something more interesting things to say about the photographs and trip. Sorry about the lack of information.

Back in April we took a trip down to Bishop Castle to see what’s new since the last time we were there. The main thing that’s different is the wall that’s going up around the castle. As always, the castle is a fun photographic journey. There is so much to view and it’s always new.

Back in April we took a trip up to Denver to attend the TEDx MileHigh conference. TEDx conferences are independently organized events along the same themes as the main TED. For those that don’t know TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. TED uses the tagline: “Ideas worth spreading.” TED has grown from a small invitation only event in Monterey, CA to a world-wide event and numerous independently organized events. Anyway. The event was lots of fun and very inspiring. We didn’t get many pictures, mainly because we were too busy paying attention to the speakers.

We decided to go back to the Cripple Creek Ice Festival on February 12th and stay at the  Whispering Pines Bed and Breakfast. This is a nice B&B that is on a hilltop outside of town. The location provides a very quiet atmosphere and some terrific views.

Peggy and Mark were great hosts (as usual, this was our second time), and Peggy made a very nice breakfast (Peaches and Cream French Toast).

Pictures of the Ice Festival are at: Cripple Creek Ice Festival 2011.

Here’s a link to a pano from the deck.

We had some time to kill before checking into our B&B while staying in Cripple Creek for its annual Ice Festival on February 12th, and decided to trek the 7 miles to Victor to check it out. Victor is an old mining town west of Colorado Springs (Cripple Creek is as well). Unfortunately, time and the economy have not be kind to Victor. There are about 500 residents today. Many of the homes we saw were for sale, and many store fronts were vacant. We did go into a really nice little antique shop. You can stroll around downtown Victor in about 10 minutes. There’s only about 4 blocks to downtown.

On February 12th we headed up to Cripple Creek for its annual Ice Festival. We we got there around 10 a.m. and they were still setting up to carve ice blocks into large (and some small) sculptures. It was interesting to see them getting the ice ready for carving. Some of the sculptors had drawings on display of work to come.
We wandered around taking pictures of the sculptures and sculptors, then we found a place for lunch. After lunch we took a quick drive to Victor, CO (photos are at: Victor, Colorado) to kill some time before we could check into our B&B (photos at: Whispering Pines Bed and Breakfast).

After the trip to Victor, we checked on the progress of the sculptors. We were really surprised at the increase in number of people at the festival. There was probably four times as many people as when we left. Jeff was really surprised at how fast the sculptures were taking shape. I guess ice is easy to work with chain saws and hot chisels.
We did another check on the progress after we checked into our B&B and ate dinner at a nice pizza place (the newest restaurant in Cripple Creek–or so the flyer said). Some of the sculptures were really pretty at night.

Well, I’m finally got up with blog posts and photo processing. In case you’re interested, and even if you’re not, that’s 14 blog posts with 333 photos!

I discovered a few tweaks and adjustments when doing all the posts. I also scrapped an image viewer. It took too long to load images. However, in getting rid of the viewer, I now have to go back through some of the posts to get picture captions to show up.

Hopefully, I’ll (or Karen?) will be able to stay on top of things now and it won’t be such a major production to get stuff posted.

On October 30th we took a trip to Santa Barbara, CA to visit Jeff’s family and show the area to Karen. Karen wanted to visit the area and Jeff’s Mom’s 80th birthday was on November 1st.

The weather was perfect, if a little hot. It was in the upper 80′s a couple of days and we rearranged our sight-seeing because of the heat. With the perfect weather we rented a tandem bicycle and rode along the beach front between the Bird Refuge and Shoreline Park. It was a fun experience, neither of us had ridden a tandem before. We even discussed getting a tandem cruiser to ride around town for errands or go to out to dinner or breakfast.