Finish what you start....

Well, about a week ago I got started on a bowl from some beautiful Apricot wood Scott Simmons gave me from a tree they had to cut to make room for a garage at their renovation project in Durango. This wood is really something special, incredible color and fun to work with. I got pretty far into it but had to stop for dinner. I didn't get back down to the basement until recently and found that the wet wood had split as it dried while still on the lathe. I was so sad to have wasted such a precious piece of wood that I quickly cranked out another bowl out of some scrap Aspen wood. I've wanted to try woodburning the sides of some plainer wood for a while so this was the result of taking a soldering iron to it.

Wicked cool !!!!

Take THAT

Don't call me an infestation!

Sawyer jumping

Roof video

Roof Jumpers

I had to shovel some snow and ice off the roof this morning. The boys "Reeeeealy" wanted to come up and check it out. When we were done, to my suprise, they jumped off. Sawyer without any hesitation..... Of course they had to come back up and do it a couple more times too.

Amazing contrast

Check out this map of two stops on our trip. Point "A" is in the lava beds outside Carrizozo. Point "B" it in the heart of White Sands National Monument. The contrast between the black of the lava and the white of the Gypsum sand is amazing! The two points are less than 100 miles apart by road. You can zoom in or out using the small "+" or "-" buttons on the left side.

View Larger Map

The Mystery Destination

So we had a long 3 day weekend looming on the horizon with no plans made. On Thursday I started thinking about going someplace a little warmer and out of town. I asked Sara what she thought about taking the kids on a trip back to White Sands Nat. Monument and she thought it would be fun. We decided not to tell them where we were going except to say that it was a "Mystery Destination". I took a 1/2 day off from work on Friday and we headed to Albuquerque for the night. Saturday morning we went to the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History to catch the "Tombs and Treasures" exhibit of Egyptian artifacts from the British Museum's collection. The kids were super-excited to see things related to mummies (even though there weren't actually mummies in the exhibit). No photographs were allowed in the exhibit hall, so sorry to disappoint.
We headed for Alamagordo and stopped at the lava beds outside Carrizozo and the petroglyphs at Three Rivers Canyon.... amazing, both.
Sunday we got up and had a little meeting and then headed to White Sands. It was 39º when we arrived at the Park entrance and headed in. We drove to the end of the road, 8 miles in and the temperature was 29º...... so much for going someplace warmer. We spent most of the day hiking around, having sand clod fights (the whole family was involved), and carving into the giant pillar of packed sand we found. By the time we left it was 57º and very nice. We drove back to Albuquerque for the night and took our time shopping and eating out today and got home in the late afternoon.
Here's the pix:

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Drive home

On the way home from work on Friday night.
 

Snow in the pass

From our drive this morning.

A walk around town

Here's some pictures from this afternoon. We hiked around town to see the sights.

The snow keeps falling

Outside our house tonight.
 

A happy ending

Hopefully this link works, (click on the title of the post).
Big news in town for the past couple days. All found safe!
Here are some other stories about it.

It's been snowing.....

We are at 193% of average and it is still snowing hard. We've had several feet in the past couple days and it keeps coming down. I got up on the roof today to shovel. Our town hall had part of the roof collapse under the weight of snow and I wanted to avoid that.

A mixed bag

of pictures.... here are some odds & ends from the last couple weeks.

New carpet

We decided it was going to be too hard to refinish the soft pine flooring in the back room so to eliminate splinters we covered it all with carpet. Sara found a nice remnant in Pagosa Springs and went up and brought it home in the van.