Heidi's World

February in Colorado

2009-02-16T18:02:00.003-07:00

It's been a long time since I last posted. I guess sometimes, life gets in the way. At the end of January, I enjoyed a trip to southern Illinois to visit my newest niece, Sophie, who was born on Christmas Eve.
Me with Nora & Sophie

Last week, I caught the moon setting over Pikes Peak one morning:

Finally, we had some heavy fog on Saturday morning, leaving the trees and grass with a beautiful frosting:

Thanksgiving trip continued

2008-12-22T23:23:00.001-07:00

To continue to recap my trip at Thanksgiving:
On Friday morning, my immediate family (with families) all met at the zoo. We enjoyed our time there. Nora especially enjoyed the penguins. Here are pics of Nora with the goats and Joshua & Nora together (note how close they are in size though they are 2 1/2 years apart in age):

After the zoo we met at St. Louis Bread Co (Panera everywhere else) for lunch and then back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding.
My cousin Greg married Amy in a beautiful ceremony. We all had lots of fun partying at the reception, too.
Cousins! Karen, Jill, Me & Laura

The happy couple

Laurie, Amy, Greg, Kristin & Todd

Busy season

2008-12-15T14:29:00.001-07:00

It's been so long since I posted, that I'm not sure where to start, but since I'm putting a link to this blog in my Christmas cards again, I figured I better get something up here. Welcome to those who are visiting for the first time! I do much better during hiking season with getting frequent updates.

Over the week of Thanksgiving, I travelled back to Leavenworth for a few days and then on to St. Louis for cousin Greg's wedding and finally to Illinois for a little time with the Woods. I'll start the trip in this post and finish it in the next one or two.

Since Mom & Dad were working on the Monday after I got home, I took advantage of some nice fall weather to go hiking in Missouri and finish up a series of geocaches that I had started a year and a half earlier. My nine mile hike took me all over Weston Bend State Park and into the town of Weston, MO. Here are a couple of pictures from my hike of a question mark butterfly and a view of the Missouri River:

On Thanksgiving Day, Mom & Dad and I drove to St. Louis where we had family Thanksgiving Dinner at the Mueller's church with about 50 people - all related somehow (mostly). Cousin Matt prepared all the food and it was delicious!

Mom (grandma) with the twins.

I'll get picks from the rest of the trip up soon!

Daddy's little girl

2008-11-06T21:48:00.000-07:00

Watching a baby gorilla grow up in its family group is very exciting and entertaining, but one of the best things has been watching Tumani's relationship with her father, Rafiki. This guy weighs about 475 pounds and has the strength of at least 6 men, but he can play with Tumani with such gentleness. It may not always look gentle when he's flipping her around and "wrestling" with her in such a way that she probably thinks she's winning, but it is. His powerful jaws that can easily crack nuts and chew up tough vegetation can playfully mouth her tiny belly, tickling her and sending her into gales of gorilla laughter. Yes, gorillas do laugh, orangutans, too, actually, but gorillas laugh audibly. You have to be really close to hear it, but it is one of the coolest sounds in the world.

These pictures will also appear soon in CMZ's new blog (link on the lower right on my blog page)

Last hike?

2008-11-05T21:42:00.000-07:00

The thing about hiking in Colorado this time of year is you never know when it's going to be the last mountain hike of the season. Sure, there are plenty of places in town where you can do a winter hike without much snow, but when it comes to hiking on a mountain, once the snows come there will be places where it won't melt until spring (or even summer). So with temperatures last Monday close to 70°, I planned a hike with some altitude. There are several geocaches on top of Blodgett Peak which is on the northwest edge of Colorado Springs. I've been wanting to get up there for years, so on Monday that's just what Sherrie and I attempted.

We went up over 1000 feet in elevation in almost 2 1/2 hours of hiking and were within 450ft of the next geocache, but I had to be somewhere by 6pm, so we had to head back down. That 450 feet was also across a boulder field that would have taken a long time to cross. The "trail" we were on was probably at least a 45° incline. Here's a pic of Sherrie coming up part of that slope:

The really bad part about that slope was that we had to come back down. My knee is still recovering. We met a guy with two dogs coming up just as we turned back. He had been to the top before on the real trail. He described how to get there, so next time we'll go that way.
We still found 6 geocaches and enjoyed some very nice views. The weather must have been perfect for flying, because there were plenty Air Force Academy training gliders in the sky.
Here is the view toward the south, including Cheyenne Mountain way in the distance from one of the caches:

Here is a pic of an AFA glider in tow and then 2 pics of the glider overhead:

So, I don't know how many more hikes I'll get in this year, but it's supposed to be in the 30s and maybe snowy next Monday.

Poor Dog! (+ some other stuff)

2008-10-20T15:43:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, while I was scratching Logan's incredibly soft ears, I noticed that one of them was swollen. He had a hematoma on his ear. I called Em to see what I needed to do, and she advised me to take him in to the vet today, and that he'd probably need minor surgery to fix it. He didn't need surgery, at least not yet. They drained the hematoma, bandaged the ear and fitted him with an Elizabethen collar. He is quite miserable with the collar on and needs to wear it for a week. Draining it was about $400 cheaper than the surgery, so hopefully it will work! Here's Logan in his collar:

We've had some cold weather and winter can't be far away, so very soon I won't have any insects to photograph. Is it wrong that I'm already looking forward to spring? I did get a good photo of a Painted Lady this week (and a fly):

One last photo is of the pumpkin that I carved for Boo at the Zoo:

Bee mine

2008-10-07T23:38:00.000-06:00

I just wanted to make a quick post to show off this picture of a bee that I took yesterday while caching in Monument Valley Park.

It's a female long-horned bee (Svastra obliqua). I only got this one shot before it took off, so I was pleased to see how clear a shot I got, and I love the color of the flower and the bee.

Fall Colors

2008-10-05T22:34:00.000-06:00

Last Monday, Sherrie and I and Pastor Doug went on a hike to the Crags to check out the aspens. The timing was pretty much perfect. There were still some green leaves in some areas, but the majority of the aspens were in full yellow and some were already losing leaves. There were even some red aspens. With a winter storm blowing through some parts of the high country tomorrow, most of the leaves will probably come down.
This was the first time I'd hiked the Crags. I'm not sure why, I've just never gotten there. It's certainly a trail I'll be back to. I'm sure the wild flowers there in the spring and summer must be awesome.
When we got to the top, these gray jays were posing nicely for us:

Here are a few pictures of the aspens:

Since I haven't posted in quite some time, here's a picture of a bee fly that I took in Waldo Canyon a few weeks ago. It's one of my favorites of the summer.

Catching Up (Balloons & beautiful babies)

2008-09-14T23:03:00.000-06:00

I haven't posted for a couple of weeks, so I figured I'd catch you up before I get any further behind.

Labor Day weekend in Colorado Springs means hot air balloons. I headed over to Memorial Park before church on Sunday to watch the balloons take off. The weather was perfect with almost no wind. The balloons went up and hung around. The lead balloon even came back around and did a second "splash & dash". Prospect Lake is just south of the takeoff field and the balloons try to skim the top of the water and take off again. This is called splash & dash, and it makes for some great picture opportunities.
Here are a few of my favorite balloon pics:

Last weekend, I drove to Amarillo for the twins' baptisms. I went down on Saturday and came back on Wednesday. Everybody else from out-of-town left on Monday, so I had a couple more days to spend time with Joy and Jacob (and Joshua, Laura & Jeff). I only wish I lived a little closer, so I could spend more time down there! Here's a few pics from the visit:
Jacob with his blanket and puppy.
Joy with her blanket and lamb.
Me with Jacob and Joy.
Joshua :-)

Butterfly survey

2008-08-25T23:34:00.000-06:00

I spent today helping the U.S. Forest Service survey sections of National Forest for the threatened Pawnee Montane Skipper. This skipper is a very small (1 cm wings) butterfly found only in the South Platte River drainage area in the mountains of Colorado. It is considered a threatened species and much of its habitat was burned in the Hayman fire of 2002. Our zoo has selected several conservation projects to devote time and money to this year, and one of those is butterfly conservation for native Colorado butterflies. Helping with this survey is a way for us to do some hands-on field work. I rode up to the site with another keeper early this morning and we met the Forest Service employees and the researcher doing the study at a park near Trumbull, CO.
After an orientation to go over what exactly we'd be looking for and recording and safety, we divided into 3 teams and headed off to our transects. Each team had 5 transects to survey. Each transect was 400m long and 10m wide. We walked each transect and counted skippers (both the Pawnee and the more common Comma), blooming Liatris stems (a favorite flower of the skipper) and in the case of our team, we also counted dead trees. Every 50m we stopped to record the number of flower stems and dead trees in the last 50m and to note the presence of blue gramma grass, which is the grass the skippers lay their eggs in.
Gayfeather (Liatris punctata)
We also noted the presence of other species of butterflies, mainly to show that the conditions were good for butterflies to be flying. Temperature, wind and cloud cover were also recorded periodically. The hiking was a bit tougher than what I usually do, since we had to follow straight lines up and down ridges.
This photo is looking back down one of the transects - not many ridges showing in this one, but they were there!
As we headed to our last transect, we got a radio call from one of the other teams that their car was stuck. In case you were wondering, Honda Fits probably are not good off-road vehicles. We hiked back to the park to head over in one of the Forest Service trucks to help. He had tried to turn around and got the front end high-centered on some soft sand. The front end was being lifted up enough that the front wheels had no traction whatsoever. They had been digging with sticks, but we had shovels. It still took quite a bit of digging before we could push them out.

We went back and surveyed our last transect before heading into town for some ice cream. I have a day of professional leave next week to go back up for another day of surveying. Next week's surveys are on more rugged terrain in the burn area. Hopefully, next week I'll see some Pawnee skippers.

Fountain Creek

2008-08-19T00:04:00.000-06:00

With weather forecasts still somewhat unsettled, Sherrie and I decided to stay close to town for our caching/hiking today. We did a couple of caches along the Fountain Creek Regional trail and did 5+ miles. Bugs were plentiful and I got decent shots of several species. I think I submitted more than 10 pictures to bugguide.com today. This adorable whitetail fawn was about 20 yards away from us, across a drainage ditch. It kept bolting off in a little circle and then would come back and look at us, almost daring us into a game of chase. Very cute!

These juvenile barn swallows were peering down at us from their nest inside one of the observation shelters.

Here are a couple of bug pictures:
First of all is an ambush bug. Ambush bugs wait motionless on a flower for another insect to come along. Then they pounce on them, often catching and eating species much larger than themselves.
This is a milkweed beetle. It was on a ... yeah, you guessed it, a milkweed plant.

Family and Fundraising

2008-08-11T20:49:00.000-06:00

I took a couple of days off this past week to spend time with my cousin, Karen, and her family, who were in Colorado on vacation. They got into town Wednesday night and spent part of a cloudy, dreary day on the Pikes Peak Cog Railway while I was working Thursday. They came over to my house Thursday evening for spaghetti.

On Friday, we went to the zoo. It was cloudy and drizzly all morning, but the clouds lifted enough in the early afternoon, that we took a ride on the new Mountaineer sky ride before leaving the zoo. Next we went to Seven Falls where we climbed the 240 stairs to the top of the falls.

We did a little hiking at the top of the falls before heading back down the stairs. Then we took the elevator inside the mountain up to an observation area where we could see the falls in their entirety.

After Seven Falls, we stopped by church to look around and then headed to Solo's restaurant for supper, where we opted for in plane seating. I tried to include an active link to Solo's website here, but can't get it to work. Cut-and-paste http://coloradoeats.com/solos/ to see it. After dinner we headed to a Sky Sox baseball game. We had a few sprinkles, but overall it was a nice, cool night for a ball game.

Saturday morning started out nice and clear, so it was decided to drive up Pikes Peak to see it without the clouds that marred the view on Thursday. By the time we got to the bottom of the toll road, clouds were starting to build, so the folks at the gate recommended we drive straight to the top and make any stops on the way down. The views on the way up were great. There were clouds at the top that blocked any views toward the east, but there were still great views to be had toward the west.

We had some heavy rain on the way down, so our timing was good, but we didn't make any stops on the way down. Unfortunately, we didn't see the herd of bighorn sheep on the way down that we passed on the way up. Next we headed to Garden of the Gods. It was pouring down rain when we got there, but we planned to eat lunch first anyway. We found a dry table under the covered patio at the Trading Post cafe. By the time we finished eating, the rain had stopped and we had sun shining. We drove to the main parking lot and hiked around the central garden and up one side trail. The dark skies made for some dramatic photos.

After Garden of the Gods, we stopped by the Olympic Training Center. We missed the last tour, but enjoyed the interactive exhibit, the gift shop full of Beijing merchandise and walking around the grounds. They have an Olympic flame that they lit at the same time as the one in Beijing and will remain burning during the Games.

We came back to my house, where Karen made sloppy joes for supper. They had to leave early the next morning, so we said good-bye Saturday night.

Sunday evening, our chapter of the American Association of ZooKeepers (AAZK) held our annual Art on the Hoof fundraiser. I'm co-chair for this event, which always brings plenty of stress. I was worried about ticket sales, but some last minute sales made the event a success. We raised over $5500, and I didn't have to bring home much unclaimed art.

The continuing story of the caching injury...

2008-08-02T23:20:00.000-06:00

A little update on my finger (and a chance to see how many people I can gross out):
My finger injured last Monday (see last post) was really sore and swollen by Tuesday. Tuesday night, I used a red-hot paperclip to try and burn holes through the nail to relieve the pressure. I was really sure I got all the way through, but I was unable to get anything out. Wednesday morning, I went to my doctor hoping they could help and concerned about the fact that the purple color had spread to the skin around the nail. I was only able to see a PA and she said they didn't have the tool needed to cut through the nail. She gave me a referral to an orthopedic hand surgeon who should be able to help me. I tried all afternoon to get an appointment with them, but the referral hadn't gone through. Here's a couple pics of my finger on Wednesday. You can see how swollen it was.

I tried the orthopedic office again Thursday morning. This time they had the referral, but it was going to be three weeks before the doctor had an appointment. By this point, I was about ready to go to an urgent care center and fork over the $75 copay to get relief. I showed my injury to our EMT at work. His advise was to get the smallest drill bit I could find (1/16" or smaller) and use my fingers to turn it and drill through the nail He thought that if I did get through with the hot paperclip, it may have cauterized the hole. Unfortunately, he could not legally drill the hole for me. So over my lunch hour, I went to Home Depot and bought a 1/16" bit. When I got back to work, I tried using it. It took a little time, but it did drill through. I had to apply a little pressure after the hole was drilled, but I got lots of blood out and my finger quickly felt better. Now I just have to keep a band-aid on it and wait for the nail to fall off.
Fun times! Are you really grossed out yet? Are you even still reading? :)

Caching injury

2008-07-30T21:51:00.000-06:00

On Monday, Sherrie and I headed back up to Green Mountain Falls to finish a cache along the Catamount Trail that we started 2 weeks ago and also do a couple other caches. We were close to the first cache last time, before being chased down by a storm. With the owner's assurance that we were in the right place, we started searching again. The cache was hidden in a rock crevice. We climbed up into the crevice about 10 feet, and then I climbed up onto a 4'x4' ledge that had an nice "window" to the outside, letting in lots of light. I found the cache tucked into a crace by that ledge, hidden by some smaller rocks. I was replacing the cache, when one of those rocks (about 6" diameter) started falling out. This part happened really fast, but I believe I tried to catch it and instead it smashed my finger against the rock wall. It continued down the crevice, luckily missing Sherrie, who was below me. We climbed back out of the crevice, and I took this picture of my finger:

I decided I wanted to continue on our hike and we did so. The valley we were in is called "Garden of Eden" and is aptly named. It's gotta be the prettiest place I've ever hiked. The trail goes up the valley, following a stream all the way to South Catamount Reservoir on the side of Pikes Peak. Here are some other (prettier) pictures from the hike:
A fritillary butterfly

A buck in velvet

Fireweed

South Catamount Reservoir with Pikes Peak in the background.

I was going to write more details of the hike, but my finger's making it tedious to type.

S is for Saturday...

2008-07-19T23:01:00.000-06:00

...and spider, sunflower, and sunset.

This immature orb weaver was busy wrapping her prey in silk, that's why some of her legs are really blurry while some are perfectly clear.

This was a wild sunflower and the center is only about 1 inch across (taken with a macro lens).

Finally, tonight's sunset at Quail Lake:

Life in Macro

2008-07-14T22:39:00.000-06:00

I got some macro lenses for my camera this week, so most of the photos in this post are my experimenting with those. Warning for any arachniphobes (Alissa) - there is a spider pic (I like them and this one gives me a slight case of the heebee jeebees). I'll put that pic last.

Sherrie and I went hiking and caching up on the Catamount Falls trail in Green Mountain Falls today. Our hike was cut a little short by some rain and thunder, but we still did about 5 miles. Here's a picture of the falls near the start of the trail:

Now on to the macro shots...
The reproductive parts of a petunia in my garden:

A flower longhorn beetle on some cow parsnip:

Black widow spider in my back yard:

Happy Independence Day!

2008-07-05T20:51:00.000-06:00

I had to work during the day, but my evening on the Fourth was spent at the ballpark.

Our choir was invited to sing the National Anthem for the Colorado Springs Sky Sox (Triple A farm team of the Rockies) - quite an honor, since it's typically their best attended game of the year. Here's a link to a youtube video of our performance: National Anthem
Sox the Fox was decked out in holiday attire:

The Sox battled the Las Vegas 51's
and lost 10-6. Ok, battled might be too strong a term for the way they played, but oh well. After the game was a great fireworks display:

Pics from the week

2008-06-30T23:10:00.000-06:00

Our baby gorilla, Tumani, is about 17 months old now. She still rides on mom's back when traveling, but is also quite independent. Here she is out in the outside exhibit:

I was over at Sherrie's house Saturday night, working on the baptism outfit I'm making for Boy Twin Geske. These lilies (I think tiger) were blooming in front of her house:

Today, Sherrie and I did a 4-mile hike in Sondermann Park and Open Space and found a few caches. The prickly pears were blooming all over the place:

There were lots of these damselflies along the trail. I found a dead one, which Sherrie was holding for me to photograph when this live one landed on her hand:

While we couldn't find one of the caches, this Western Tiger Swallowtail landed nearby:

Blooms, Butterflies, & Birds

2008-06-23T22:44:00.000-06:00

Today I went on an Audubon Society field trip hike. The name of the field trip was the same as the title of this post (Blooms, Butterflies, and Birds) and we headed off to a place called Emerald Valley to look for those things. One of the priorities of the hike was to look for and do a rough census on orchids. This part was certainly intriguing to me, since I didn't even know we had wild orchids here. We also were looking for butterflies and, of course, birds. The group tally for bird species seen or heard was 28. Without the help of the experience birders in the group, I probably would have ID'd about 5! It's so much fun to go on a field trip like this and just absorb the knowledge of the others on the trip. Well, enough with the set-up, here's the pictures:
Colorado Blue Columbine (Colorado State flower)

Paintbrush

Yellow Lady's Slipper Orchid

Two more Yellow Lady's Slippers

Field Crescent

Western Tiger Swallowtails

"Puddling" butterflies - some species of "blue". I'll edit when I find out the species.

Western Tanager - gotta be one of the prettiest species of bird in the US!

A flower spider eating a bee on a wild rose. Luckily my friend Jenyva spotted this or I would've missed it.

Oh deer!

2008-06-14T19:15:00.000-06:00

This time of year brings babies in the wild population of deer around the zoo. This morning when I looked out the back door of my building at work, I saw a doe walking toward the wooden fence outside the orangutan yard. She didn't appear to be grazing, so I watched her to see where she would go - if she jumped over the fence, it was sure to bring an interesting reaction from the orangutans in the nearby enclosure. Instead, I watched as a tiny fawn walked shakily from a spot out of my sight and joined her. It wasn't still wet, but for sure it was born within the last 12 hours or so.

I stepped just outside the door and snapped a bunch of pictures as she licked him, nursed him and he went for a short, wobbly stroll. Too cute!
Then she started walking away and he followed out of sight around the end of the fence. Later I saw her alone, so I started looking for the fawn between where I saw them last and where she was. For those of you unfamiliar with deer behavior, does will "park" their newborn fawns under a tree or in the grass while they go off and forage for food. The little ones just can't keep up with mom yet. The fawn instinctively stay very still even if someone approaches. Their dappled coats provide excellent camouflage. I actually walked pretty close to the fawn once when looking for it, before finally spotting it the second try. Here's a pic of it curled up in the grass:

Mining for paint?

2008-06-09T23:58:00.000-06:00

Pastor Doug has been telling Sherrie and I that we needed to go hiking out at the paint mines near Calhan. It's out on the plains about 30 miles northeast of here, so we were waiting for a cooler day to go. He also said for the best lighting we should go in the morning or evening. Sherrie wasn't available until after 2pm today, so with temps in the low 70s, today was the day to head out there. The formations found in Paint Mines Interpretive Park are composed mostly of sandstone and clay eroded by water. The colorful clays were used by American Indians to color pottery, thus the name "paint mines". Narrow trails wind amongst the wonderful formations, with a new delight around every turn. I took close to 100 pictures, but here are a few of my favorites:

Overview of part of the park

There were lots of wildflowers, especially wild roses. We also found a horned lizard.

Thanks for the recommendation, Pastor Doug!

Hiking, friends, music

2008-06-02T21:31:00.000-06:00

Those 3 words describe my 3-day weekend pretty well.

I had a day off from work on Saturday, so I got some friends together that can't hike with me and Sherrie on Mondays and did a Saturday hike. Almost everyone could only hike in the morning, so we decided to hike in Palmer Park in Colorado Springs. Though it's in the middle of the city, this is a large, bluff-filled park with miles of trails. Gil, Ani, Sherrie, Alison (& Sadie)& I ended up hiking about 6 miles on a perfect morning. Here's a group shot of us where we stopped for a snack and a picture of a bumblebee on some wild iris:

On Sunday afternoon, our new associate pastor, David Hall was installed at church. It was a wonderful festival service full of music. Our choir sang 4 different pieces, handbells played several, and brass as well.

Today, Sherrie and I headed to the Mt. Herman area near Monument, CO for more hiking and geocaching. We hiked about seven miles and found 8 caches. Here are a few pictures from today - baby pinecones, a white-breasted nuthatch and an assassin bug:

Gardening on a small scale

2008-05-26T18:17:00.000-06:00

My townhouse includes a very small (~10'x10') backyard. About a third of that is cement and the rest is covered in pea gravel. I've been wanting to do something with it for some time and did some pricing of cement pavers, stones, etc. I decided I wanted to make a small garden at one end and then make a 7'x7' patio with the rest. The pavers were a bit pricey for me right now, but I decided with a little work, I could at least get the garden in before summer. That was my project for this weekend. Here's a before shot of the backyard:

I went to Home Depot yesterday and got some edging stones, a shovel and 2 40lb bags of garden soil. The first step when I got home was to mark out the edges of the garden and then remove about 2-3 inches of gravel from that spot. I decided to just put the gravel on the remaining part of the yard for now. Later, when I get to the patio part, I'll have to come up with another place to move it. Under the gravel was some old landscaping plastic, which I cut out. I turned over and broke up about 6-8" of soil that was under that and removed a bunch of roots, which I think were from the pine bush outside my fence. Here's a pic of the partly done garden:

I installed the edging stones and added the new soil on top and mixed it in with the current dirt. This is what it looked like when I finished last night:

I discovered when I took Logan (my dog) out, that the little edge stones did not mean, "stay out" to him, so I added some decorative fencing to my shopping list for today. This afternoon I went to Walmart and Home Depot and got plants, more soil, decorative fencing, seeds and bamboo poles.
When I got home, I added the two bags of dirt and then started planting. I planted 4tomato plants of 2 varieties. I may have to remove a couple if they all do well, just because of space. I planted two salvia plants in front of the tomatoes and a clematis vine behind them. The clematis has a nice bamboo rod to climb up. I also planted some larkspur and columbine seeds around the edges. We'll see what comes up! The last step was to install the decorative fencing. Here's the final result:

I'll post pictures later in the year - hopefully everything will be doing great.

First mountain hike of the season

2008-05-19T18:41:00.000-06:00

With temperatures predicted to be in the mid- to upper-80s, Sherrie and I decided to do a little mountain hiking today. I looked up a few caches up in the Old Stage/Gold Camp Rd area. The first one we went for was near the top of St. Peter's Dome. The trail starts off easy enough, although we could feel the altitude (> 9000ft), since we haven't hiked up that high since last fall. We did some scrambling and took some wrong turns while trying to figure out how to get to the top. The views were spectacular once we made it up. Here's a picture of Sherrie climbing up one of the many slabs of granite on the way:

Here is a fence lizard sunning itself on top:

Pic of me with the view in the background:

After returning from St. Pete's, we drove a little ways back toward town and then hiked about a mile down the closed section of Gold Camp Rd to look for another cache. We found part of the cache, but most of it was gone, probably lost to the elements, since it hadn't been found since last fall. This giant slab of granite was along the way to the cache site:

No excuses

2008-05-18T11:25:00.000-06:00

I won't even try to make excuses for why I didn't even get one post in April. I thought about it several times, but never sat down and did it.

Rather than trying to cover lost ground, I'll just start with current stuff. Sherrie and I did some caching and hiking along Fountain Creek Regional Trail last Monday afternoon. We hadn't been on this part of the trail before. It had lots of varied habitat, and there was plenty of wildlife to be seen, including coyote, prairie dogs, and many birds. I identified what was a new species of bird for me, a Lewis' woodpecker. Here are some of my pics:
Coyote

Blue-winged teal

Killdeer

Lewis' woodpecker

Easter with family

2008-03-30T22:19:00.000-06:00

Wow, it's been more than a month! Sorry 'bout that!

Mom and Dad were able to come out for a visit over Easter weekend. They drove out on Thursday, getting to my house shortly before I got home from work. They picked up a pizza on their way into town, so we could eat a quick dinner before getting to church for Maundy Thursday service.

I had to work on Friday, so Mom & Dad came to the zoo and then did some other sight-seeing on their own in some gorgeous Colorado spring weather. I took off early from work so I could make it to church by 5pm for the first of our 2 services. Our choir director wrote choral meditations for our 2005-2007 Good Fridays and this year we repeated the one from 2005 - based on the seven words from the Cross. Mom made lasagna for dinner, and I hoped to get home quick between services to eat some, but time didn't allow it, so I had dinner around 9pm.

Saturday brought much colder weather and with gas prices what they are, we decided not to do the drive in the mountains, which usually happens when Mom & Dad are here. It was really nice to spend time relaxing together. In the evening Mom & I wanted to take Dad to experience The Golden Bee, an English Pub at the Broadmoor Hotel. When we left my house, there was snow flying and by the time we got to the Broadmoor (much higher in elevation), the snow was sticking to the streets. We got to the pub around 7:50, put our names on the list and waited...and waited. The thing about The Bee is, they have a ragtime piano player that starts at 8:30pm playing for a sing-a-long. They can only guess at how many people might leave or when, so you never know how long the wait will be. It ended up being 9:30 (at the piano player's first break) before we got seated. We got a great table, though, right behind Bud, who is the best of their two pianists. We had a good crowd, some good drinks (Mom said it's the only time she can remember going out drinking the night before Easter), and lots of good singing. We stayed through 2 sets and left at 11:30. When we got out to the car, there was about 4 inches of snow on the ground.

Easter Sunday dawned with snow on the ground. Choir sang (and brass and bells played) for 8, 9:30 and beginning of the 11:00 services. By the third time through the Hallelujah chorus, my voice was cracking quite a bit! Mom and Dad came to all the services and sang along with the Hallelujah Chorus. My friend, Julie and Laurie came over to my house in the afternoon for an Easter dinner of pot roast with all the fixings.
Here's our Easter photo taken outside to show the snow.

Mom & Dad had to leave Monday morning. We had a great visit, over too soon, as always.

An experience of a lifetime

2008-02-27T23:07:00.000-07:00

Before I get into the main reason I went back to Kansas last week, here's a great sunset picture from my drive back to Leavenworth. Kansas has much better sunsets than Colorado. I loved this one, because it looks like the trees are on fire.

The reason I went back to Kansas when I did, besides to visit Mom & Dad, was to participate in an honor choir. Kansas City was the site of the SWACDA (Southwest division of the American Choral Directors Association) convention. As part of these conventions, they have honor choirs usually chosen by audition tape. Children's, High School and Collegiate choirs are the norm, but for the first time, they had a Community/Church Honor Choir. Rather than auditions, they had an evaluation form which directors could submit for members of their choirs. My awesome director, Gregg, offered to "endorse" anyone interested, so I decided to apply and was selected. This was to be an 150-member choir under the direction of Dr. Mack Wilberg, who is the associate director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

For our part of the convention, we showed up Thursday afternoon to register and then had our first rehearsal in one of the hotel ballrooms. Music had been sent out a couple months previously, and we were to have it well learned, so rehearsal times could be focused on becoming a choir. The first rehearsal went quite well, and Dr. Wilberg was grateful that we knew the notes well. After the rehearsal, those of us that had purchased tickets went to a great concert by the King's Singers. They did a wonderful show and signed autographs afterward. There were additional concerts by a high-school show choir and the Kansas City Sweet Adelines after that, but since I had to get back to Leavenworth and it was already, 10:30pm, I headed home.

Friday morning, we had to be back for rehearsal at 9am. The weather was nasty with snow and freezing moisture of various types. Most of the KC area schools were closed. I left Mom & Dad's at 6:30 to make sure I got there on time. I got there at 7:30, so no problem there! Friday's rehearsals were in Founder's Hall at Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral (the site of the evening concert). Here's a picture of the rehearsal set-up:

Morning rehearsal was from 9-noon. This rehearsal was probably the most intense of the 3, with lots of work on dynamics, diction, rhythm and VOWELS ;-)! Dr. Wilberg was still careful to not tire us too much or use up all our voice before the concert. We had a break from noon until 2 for lunch.

At 2pm we reconvened for the afternoon rehearsal, scheduled from 2pm-5pm. We again started out in Founder's Hall. This rehearsal, Dr. Wilberg was even more careful about not wearing out our voices, so he talked us through most of the pieces before we sang them, to make sure we remembered notations he'd had us make. At 4pm, we moved into the sanctuary to practice in our concert set-up and with the brass and organ. We were pretty crowded on risers, steps, floor, even the pulpit area, but finally found a workable set-up. Here's a picture of the front of the sanctuary, taken while Dr. Wilberg was working with the brass (Dr. Wilberg is the one in the white shirt on the left):

The traditional cathedral, with its stone wall, was acoustically perfect for choral music. Hearing ourselves sing in this venue for the first time, along with a beautiful pipe organ, talented accompanists and instrumentalists, was really cool! After this rehearsal, we had another 2-hour break before coming back for the concert.

At 7pm, we met back at the cathedral, in another room, for warm-up, during which we ran through parts of most of the pieces. The concert started at 8pm. Words really cannot describe how it felt to be a part of something like this. We performed 10 pieces, and it was just a totally wonderful experience (see, I told you words can't do it justice). Afterward, as we walked back to the warm-up room, Dr. Wilberg was waiting to shake everybody's hand and thank us each personally. Mom and Dad were able to come down to KC for the concert, and were in awe (I think!). They did professional recordings, both audio and video, which I have ordered and can't wait to get.

After our concert, I walked over to the Music Hall for the collegiate honor choir. It was nice to bask in choral music for a little longer, before heading home. My brain continued to bask, as all of the pieces continued to run through my head and my dreams! I would love to do something like this again, but if I don't, I'll certainly never forget this one!

Better late than never!

2008-02-18T10:46:00.000-07:00

As I was reminded at church yesterday, it's been a long time since I've updated this blog. I'm on vacation this week, so I'll try to get a few new posts up.

Mahal left for the Milwaukee Zoo about a week and a half ago. His new adoptive mom really likes him and he seems to be adapting well to his new home and new mom. I don't have any pictures of him at Milwaukee, but here's a picture of him from his "Going Away" party at our zoo:

A preschool class painted the banner with handprints and then Mahal got to play with it while the paint was still quite wet!

The following sunset was shot about 2 weeks ago from my spare bedroom window. My view is not quite that perfect. I had to open the window, remove the screen and lean out a bit, but still not too bad.

Well, that's all for now, but I promise to post more soon about why I'm on vacation in Kansas right now.

More developments in our orangutan saga...

2008-01-15T22:45:00.000-07:00

It had been almost a month since Sandra died, and Hadiah and Mahal seemed to be doing well together, but that all changed on Sunday and Monday. For some reason, Hadiah seemed to "snap" and began to abuse Mahal. By Monday it had escalated enough that the decision had to be made to separate him from her for his safety. We tried introducing him this morning to the other female we have. She has a five-year-old of her own that she raised. She made it clear that she was not interested in having him live with her. So for now we are once again raising him. It should be very short-term, as we and the Orangutan SSP (Species Survival Plan) are already working on where he will go. Hopefully within the next week to two weeks he will have a new home and a new mom. It's been a rough time for the little guy, and we will be really sad to see him leave, but he needs a mom to love him.

Happy New Year!

2008-01-05T20:43:00.000-07:00

I hope you all had a very special Christmas and a great New Year!

My trip home was great. My car survived the trip with no lingering otter odor. The drive to Leavenworth was pretty sloppy, with wet or slushy roads most of the way. It was really nice to spend extended time in Leavenworth, since it seems I'm usually just passing through lately.

On the 29th of December, we took a drive up to Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge near Mound City, MO. With most of the water frozen over, we knew that most of the waterfowl would be gone, but I was hoping to see some eagles and was not disappointed. We probably saw a couple dozen bald eagles, several deer, lots of pheasants, trumpeter swans, a few straggler snow geese and my favorite sighting: a barred owl that was perched on a hollow log just feet from the road. Here are some pictures:

Ring-neck pheasant

A pair of bald eagles with their nest

A white-tail doe

A few trumpeter swans coming in for a landing

A mature and immature bald eagle performing some aerobatics

A barred owl

My drive back to Colorado included a detour to the zoo in Garden City to pick up a skink (lizard) for my zoo. It added quite a few miles, but I got to see parts of Kansas I'd never been in before.

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

A big welcome to those visiting my blog for the first time and a Merry Christmas to all!

If you didn't know, the moon and Mars were very close tonight and tracking across the sky together. Here's a picture I took (the best I could do with my equipment):

Tomorrow afternoon begins a marathon of worship services, which I'm really looking forward to. My handbell choir is playing at the 4pm and 6pm services. Choir is singing at 8pm and 10pm, plus I'm filling in with the other bell choir (also playing at 8 & 10). We just had a new organ installed at church this week, and I'm really looking forward to hearing all the Christmas music on it.

We are also singing and ringing for church on Christmas morning. I have an invitation to spend part of Christmas Day at a friend's house, and I'm looking forward to that. I also need to pack to leave for Kansas the next morning. I'm watching the forecast carefully, and so far it looks like I can get out of town in between storms. It should be an interesting drive. I'm taking an otter from our zoo and dropping it off at the zoo in Manhattan, KS on my way east. I'll have my dog in the front seat and the otter in a kennel in the back seat, so we'll see how that goes! For those not animal-savvy, otters are in the Mustelidae family, which includes ferrets & skunks, so they're pretty smelly. Here's a pic of Mulan that I took last night:

Lastly, here's a better picture of Hadiah and Mahal. They're still doing well together.

Hadiah & Mahal

2007-12-19T21:27:00.000-07:00

To continue from my last post...

Hadiah and Mahal are still together. Today brought many huge steps forward in their relationship. Hadiah started off the day still acting afraid of Mahal. Then, mid-morning, while she was getting some treats from a keeper, Mahal climbed onto her and she did not freak out. After that point, there was more and more contact between the two and they started playing together. This afternoon, he took a nap sleeping in her lap and she carried him a little bit (she's still trying to figure that out). He had several temper tantrums today (I'm not sure why, but I think he was just tired), and Hadiah remained calm and even calmed him down.
I got a couple cute videos, but the pictures aren't great. Here's one of them from the end of the day:

Sad day in Primate World

2007-12-18T00:38:00.000-07:00

Sometime early this morning our orangutan Sandra passed away. For those of you not keeping track of the orangutan saga, she's the one who adopted the baby (Mahal) about 2 1/2 weeks ago. She was very old (born in 1956), and with Mahal in her life, was much more active. It's possible that caring for him shortened her life a little, but it also greatly enriched it. We are confident that she died happy and with a purpose to her life. Now of course that left Mahal without a mommy yet again. We had introduced Hadiah to the 2 of them 6 days ago, so she'd been in with them during the day. We put her in with Mahal today. He was remarkably calm, but not too keen on hanging close to her. He actually seems to be dominant over her, threatening her if she got too close. He did apparently follow her some and she was close during feedings to get treats. They were left together overnight, and we're hopeful that within a few days they may bond.
Here's a picture of Mahal and Sandra that I took last week:

I'll keep you posted how things go!

Snowy Sunday morning

2007-12-09T15:54:00.001-07:00

We've finally had quite a bit of winter weather over the past few days, with sleet, snow and everything in between falling at some point. The sun came out while I was in church this morning and this was the view from the parking lot when I came out:

I graduated!

2007-12-02T21:46:00.001-07:00

Just a quick post...We had our last class of Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University tonight. This class is changing my life, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone. Even if you don't have debt, you'll learn plenty.

A New Mom for Mahal

2007-12-01T20:27:00.000-07:00

It's been almost a month since my last post. My apologies for that, especially to those who have actually been checking it (you know who you are).

I've been really busy with work and projects leading up to the holidays. My life at work got a lot easier this week, though.

On Thursday, we introduced Mahal (the baby orangutan we've been raising) to Sandra, one of our female orangutans. Sandra is 51-years-old, which is probably equivalent to a 100-year-old human. She also has arthritis (and only 4 teeth, but that doesn't really matter in this situation). Initially, we hadn't really considered her for a surrogate, due to her age and mobility. But she had raised 9 babies of her own, and seemed the most interested in him during our observations.

So on Thursday morning, we left him in an exhibit and walked out for the last time. Within 20 seconds of being let in with him, Sandra was picking him up. We had really been encouraging Mahal to be much more independent than a baby orangutan normally would be at eight months. Not knowing how good a job the surrogate would do at carrying him, we had to make sure he was able to move around the exhibit on his own and get to us at the bars for bottles. As such, we never really held on to Mahal or restrained him. So when Sandra was grabbing him and not letting go, he did not like it. For the first couple hours, she held onto him and he cried and screamed. Sandra knows that a baby his age should be carried, so that's what she was trying todo. When she finally let him go, and he calmed down, she seemed to realize that he did better that way.

It's now been 3 days and they're still together. Sandra still occasionally grabs him to pick him up and he gets upset, but he's adjusting. He sleeps on her when he's sleeping, and he's doing a great job of drinking his bottles through the mesh.

Here's a couple of pictures of the 2 of them:
This one was taken during the first 2 hours, so Mahal isn't real happy, but it's cute!
This one was take today, when he was hanging out with her by his choice.

More hiking, work & lack of sleep

2007-11-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was much better weather-wise than the one before. This time of year you never know when that snow is going to come that might make mountain trails icy for months. So with temperatures around 70° last Monday, Sherrie and I decided to do some hiking and caching. We started off on a trail we'd never been on and found a couple caches. After the second cache, the trail pretty much ended in a couple of primitive campsites. We could either hike back out the way we came in and then hike up another trail, or just head up from where we were toward the ridge where the next cache was. Being our usual adventurous (foolish) selves we chose the latter.

This view was a nice bonus on our "shortcut".
This mountain chickadee was also along the way.

About 900 vertical feet later, with our leg muscles burning we reached the trail on the ridge. We had been on this trail before and from here it was a pretty easy stroll to the next cache. There were more great views from here, St. Patty's Overlook.
The vertical rock formation in this picture is called a hoodoo. The haziness in the air was smoke from the California wildfires. It actually smelled smoky that day. What was bad air for us was good news for California, since it meant that the winds were now blowing west to east.
Here's a picture of me at St. Patty's overlook.

From this cache we headed down the mountain on a different trail.

Friday night, I worked the James Taylor concert at my 2nd job at the World Arena. It was a great concert, but it didn't end until 10:20 and we were short-handed. It was 2:15am by the time I got off of work, and I had to work at 8:00am Saturday at the zoo. Needless to say, Saturday was a long day on 3 hours of sleep. I took advantage of the extra hour of sleep last night, went to bed at 9 and got 10 hours of sleep, even though I had to be at church at 7:30.

First Snow

2007-10-22T19:30:00.000-06:00

It's been a couple weeks since my last post. I've been too busy cheering on the World Series bound Rockies to post!

Saturday we had record high temperatures in the mid-70s, and yesterday we had our first snow. It snowed and the winds blew all morning. Most of the snow just blew around, at least at my house. I did have about an inch of snow on my car when I got out of church. The north end of town and the foothills got more. Here's a picture out my back door when I got home from church.

This morning Sherrie and I went out and did a few geocaches and walked about 3.5-4 miles. It was still chilly today, but it was sunny and the snow-covered mountains were just gorgeous.

Extreme Makeover back in town

2007-10-07T23:18:00.000-06:00

Over 2 1/2 years ago, the very popular TV show, Extreme Makeover:Home Edition, did a build about 15 miles east of here. I spent some time out at the site in the spectator section observing and had a great time. This past Monday night, a co-worker of mine called me to let me know they were back in town helping out another family. She had gone out and volunteered. Unfortunately, with my work schedule, that didn't work out for me. I did have some very cool experiences again as a spectator.

Here's the back story of the family (well as much as I know): The Woodhouses are a family of 4. The dad is a Baptist minister. They have 2 kids a boy and a girl. Ten-year-old Kayla has a very rare genetic disorder which prevents her from feeling pain. I'm not sure if it's part of the disease or a separate condition, but she also can't really regulate her temperature and has to have a room temperature of 62°. This severely limits her life and where she can go, etc.

Friday night, they had a fundraiser/benefit concert at a local venue. The mom's favorite singer is David Phelps (a great Christian singer). He came and did a short concert. The concert was supposed to start at 7pm and I got there at 6pm. We stood in line for almost 2 hours and finally got to go into the event hall at 8pm. I think the concert finally started about 8:30. As they told us, "welcome to the reality of reality TV". He ended up doing 3 songs, one of them twice to get another take. I was definitely on camera, but odds are I'll end up on the cutting room floor. Here's a shot of the design team from the concert:
Left to right: Rib (new guy), Eduardo, Tanya, & Ed

They're doing 2 builds this week (the other in Oregon), so Ty was flying back and forth and was not at the concert.

Saturday night after work I went out to the home site. I got some pictures of the house, talked to some folks who had volunteered, and watched Rib working on the son's room (from across the street, through the window). I saw Tanya, Rib and Ty briefly.

Today (Sunday) was reveal day. I headed out after church and got there about noon. The family was scheduled to get back about 2pm. There were already quite a few people there, but I still got a good place along the fence about 1/2 block from the house. It was pretty chilly today, but the crowd was fun and good natured. They filmed the crowd shots long before the family came back, even some of the "move that bus" shots. They also did shots of the limo arriving without the family. The house was pretty much done yesterday, but there were last minute changes/touches going on. They repainted the garage door after I got there. Apparently, the finish they put on the daughter's room's floor was still drying when the family got home. Here's some pictures!
This shot was just before the limo arrived.

I love this shot of the family getting out of the limo, with the son, Joshua, leaping into Ty's arms.

Once the family went into the house, lots of people left. Then Ed and Rib came over and did photos and autographs.
Here's a shot of me with Rib (isn't he cute?). He explained to us that his real name is Robert, but Rib has been his nickname since he was five and liked to catch frogs (it's short for Ribbit).

Here's a shot of Ed and Rib. They were goofing off a lot together - teasing and competing.

Here's the family coming back out and seeing their new vehicle for the first time.

Here's a shot of the completed house with the new car in the driveway. It's a 2009 Ford Flex - not available in the market yet.

That's the summary of my fun weekend. Just like last time, it was really interesting to see some of what goes into a show like this, and it's a whole lot!

Another hike and other stuff

2007-10-01T19:34:00.000-06:00

Wow! It's been 2 weeks since I last posted! Sorry about that. It's been busy, but not much going on if you know what I mean.

Yesterday afternoon, I went with several other people from church to see the Colorado Springs Philharmonic and The Colorado Springs Chorale perform Beethoven's 9th Symphony. They did a pretty good job. I had some issues with some of the soloists and I guess my ears are getting better at hearing bad pitch/intonation/etc. We met afterward for dinner, and my choir director had many of the same comments.

Today I went hiking with Sherrie and Laurie. The leaves turned really quickly here and with wind this weekend, I wasn't sure we'd still find yellow aspens. We found some with no leaves and some mostly green, but very few were in the brief perfect period. It was still a nice day for a hike and great scenery.

This was a waterfall along the trail. I found some rainbow trout in this little stream. They were very small trout, ranging in size from 3-6 inches.

We did find one geocache and headed toward another, but had to turn back due to time. I wanted to get back before the Rockies game tonight. Go Rocks!

Here are some bird pictures I took today:

Golden-crowned kinglet

Pygmy nuthatch

A Saturday off

2007-09-16T15:01:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I had the day off of work, so I tried to organize a hiking/geocaching expedition to include some folks I don't usually get to hike with since my normal day off is Monday. Well, everyone ended up having other things come up so it was just me and my usual hiking buddy, Sherrie.

The hike I planned first required a drive up into the mountains to get to where we could hike. Not a whole lot of elevation change on the hike itself - we started at about 9300 feet and got to around 9750 at the top of Ormes Peak. A few of the aspen have started to change, but we're still a few weeks away from peak color. We found two caches on top of Ormes Peak. If you're unfamilar with geocaching, check out this site: www.geocaching.com

This photo of Pikes Peak was taken from the summit of Ormes Peak.

We saw quite a bit of wildlife including blue grouse, mountain chickadees, mountain bluebirds and Colorado chipmunks. Oh, and a ton of ladybugs on top of the peak.
This is one of the mountain chickadees.

We ended up hiking 8.5 miles, which I think was our second longest hike this season.

Happy Trails!!

Bringing up baby

2007-09-12T20:34:00.000-06:00

I spent today caring for Mahal, our baby orangutan, so I thought I'd use today's blog space to explain what is involved with raising a baby orangutan the right way.

Raising a baby ape by hand is something we really don't want to do at all. Both Hadiah (Mahal's mom) and Kwisha (the mom of Umande the gorilla whom we raised last year) were young, inexperienced moms who were hand-raised themselves. As such, they were scared when their little ones came into the world and as a result chose the "hands off" approach. In both of these cases we tried for several days to give the babies back to mom, hoping she'd eventually want the baby back. But in both cases we had to raise the babies.

Once we decide that we have to hand-raise, our already arranged just-in-case team of hand-raisers steps in and from then on it is a 24/7 commitment to the little one. Mahal's team consists of 12 people working mostly 8-hour shifts around the clock. We have a night nursery set up in part of our kitchen which has a bed in it for the night caregiver. If his orangutan mom was raising him, he would be clinging onto her for the first several months of his life. We mimic this as much as possible, although we have to encourage him to be more independent than normal so we can reintroduce him at a younger age.

We wear scrubs when caring for Mahal and he is required to hold onto the scrubs whenever we're moving around, just as he'd cling to mom's hair. Sometimes he grabs our hair or skin, too! We spend as much time each day next to the other orangutans as we can. They can touch him through the mesh as long as they're being gentle. This helps him to know what orangutans are, so he won't be afraid of them when we put him back. When he's visible to the public or to other orangutans, he never has diapers on. We don't want the orangutans to be confused or the public to think he's make a good pet (he would not!). This lack of diapers means we often get peed or pooped on - thankfully scrubs dry quickly!

Mahal drinks human baby formula out of human baby bottles several times a day. We try to encourage him to take his bottle through the mesh of the exhibit, since that's how he'll have to drink it when he's back with the other orangutans. We also offer him some solid foods (he has 3 teeth), but food seems to repulse him right now. We spend our day playing with him, feeding him, and even sleeping with him.

Mahal was 4.4 lbs when he was born on April 4 and is now ~11.5 lbs. We hope one of our other orangutans will be interested in adopting him in a couple months.

First Entry

2007-09-09T15:06:00.000-06:00

I thought it might be fun to get in on the blogging thing, just as a way to keep in touch and let friends and family know what's going on in my life. So, in starting this, I won't go back and tell you about my month or year. I'll just start with now.

It's a lazy Sunday afternoon here in Colorado. I think fall has finally arrived after a long, hot summer. Temperatures are topping off in the 60s today, which feels great. The Chiefs lost their first game today and the Broncos pulled off a win with time expired (big frowny faces to both of those!).

I had church and Bible class this morning. Our youth group led the service and recounted their experiences at the recent National Youth Gathering in Orlando. Tonight, I have my first class of Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University. I'll keep you posted on how that goes. I'm really looking forward to it.

The picture above is of Mahal, the baby orangutan that consumes much of our time at work. We're hand-rearing him, since his mom didn't know what to do with him. He is now 5 months old.