Colorado

My Cousin David Bradley, Red Rocks,

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My cousin David Bradley came to visit. He was in Fresno, and stopped on the way to Mesa Arizona, where he is now going to live. His father died in March and left David his car and house (fully paid off), and David has had 30 years of Chicago winters and that is enough for him.

I haven’t seen him since he was 12, and I was 19. He got hooked on genealogy after I told him about doing my research for 5 years. He is a much better researcher than I am. For the first 1/2 of the day we had the laptop out and were doing Ancestry.com Dueling.

We then went to Red Rocks National Conservatory area. It still requires reservations, which I wasn’t aware of, but as long as you had internet connection, you can do it online.

We then went to Silverton so he could watch Janis and I play Pai Gow, and he could learn the game, and learn that it is hard to win at Pai Gow. We ate dinner at Mi Casa, and Juan our waiter again took great care of us. David loved the food and the chips/salsa, but apparently woke up at 230 am with heartburn. The hot salsa was a little too hot for him.

He left today and it was a short, nice visit, but now that he lives in Mesa, close to Dodgers spring Training camp, I’m sure we’ll see a lot of each other.

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This is a spider sac, hundreds of spiders are in this thing. They come out at night. .

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Robins in the backyard

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A lot of Robins in our backyard in Commerce City lately. Janis put some oranges out to try to get the birds closer.

Colorado Skies

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You have to love those Colorado Skies. Looking over some old photos on Facebook and the crazy weather/skies we got there. Sure do miss that about Colorado. Jon Chandler got it right when he wrote this great song.

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Auntie Em..

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From our office window at the Attorney General’s Office

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This is really what Jon was singing about..

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from our office

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The Spanish Peaks

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One of my favorite drives when I worked for Colorado POST was west on Highway 50 past the Spanish Peaks Mountains West of Walsenburg.. I always crank up my buddy Joh Chandler’s song of the same title while I’m driving past here. Jon and Pat have some land out here, and his ancestors are from this area. He wrote an awesome song and book about this area. The link is for the book on Amazon. com, I highly recommend it.

Jon Chandle'r’s THE SPANISH PEAKS at AMAZON

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Road trip! Durango, CO

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Drive to Durango, stay overnight, do a test, drive home, welcome to my world! 400 miles in 2 days. The college that I give the test at is right across the street from Mesa Verde National Park. Here’s a photo of the park.

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The Silverton/Durango Steam Engine.

Silverton/Durango railroad

Silverton/Durango railroad

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On the way home I went thru Delores River Vally, past Dallas Divide, and over to Telluride, where I had lunch. Unfortunately I was about 2 weeks too late for foliage. Some times you hit it right but it’s a crap shoot whether you are going to see foliage or not.

I love my new job!

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love my new job and haven't even started working there yet! The boss yesterday invited Janis and I to a pizza party today that they were having after work. The Deputy Atty General paid for the dinner, which was actually just a going away party for 2 temporary employees that had left, but they thought it would be a way for me to meet everyone. I start on the 16th.

Michael Dougherty is a really nice guy. Deputy Attorney General for the state in the Criminal Justice division. Very laid back.

 Michael served for twelve years as a prosecutor at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Michael handled all types of serious felony cases, including sex crimes, hate crimes and homicides. He quickly rose to supervisory positions, including Deputy Chief of the Sex Crimes Unit, and ultimately was promoted and became responsible for the management, budget, and personnel of the District Attorney’s Office (an agency with over 1,200 employees), while continuing to prosecute serious cases.

In 2009, Michael was recruited by the Colorado Attorney General to head up the Colorado DNA Justice Review Project, an effort that led to the exoneration of an innocent man wrongly convicted of murder. Just months after arriving in Colorado, Michael was promoted to serve as the head of the Criminal Justice Section for the Attorney General.

But the best part, was when I went to eat today with him, and I rolled my pizza up to eat it right at the same time that he did it with his.pizza. We just smiled and knew we’d get along!

Huge Hailstorm

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May 26 2010 Big hail storm with 2" hail hit our neighborhood. We got about 1" size hail, the real bad stuff was about 1/4 mi from us there was a huge hailstorm.

I was marshalling in Parker at PGA Senior championship practice round today, nice day, got pretty windy about noon, nothing like what it was like at the home front. Janis got some great hail, I drove home from Parker and took some photos of the golf ball size hail about 1/4 mi from my house.

We had just gotten back home from burying my mother in CA and went to clean out her assisted living apartment in Northglenn. All the furniture that she had we put in 1/2 of the 2 car garage, which means Janis’ car was parked on the street for the first time since we lived here. It got so much hail damage, Not as bad as other cars in the area, which had broken windshields, etc. Janis’ car suffered about $1500.00 damage.

I guess its spring!

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Flowers in the yard are sprouting already.  We've got flowers that we planted 18 months ago resprouting already.   I think this means that the summer will be awfully hot, we've had no rain/snow to speak of, I think we shoveled the driveway 3x this year.  This photo was from Thanksgiving and I think that was the biggest snow we got. 

Its nice that we didn't have a blizzard or anything, but the winter has been so wierd here.   Last year it was not bad either.  Two years ago when the house was being built they had the 2 blizzards back to back, and it snowed every weekend from Christmas till February 20th, as every weekend I tried coming out to see the house progression and it was snowing so I didn't come out.

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this was taken 1/15/07 when the house was being built.  We've never had snow this bad.

Its really windy today.  One thing they have here is wind!  Janis was out watering the grass yesterday and today as its in high 60s.  The grass is dormant but we want it dormant not "dead"  The sprinklers don't even get turned on until April 11th or something.

A great day - January 20, 2009

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A new president elected, nice weather for the inauguration, and it was beautiful here, a balmy 65 degrees out here, so we went up to the Rocky Mtns to see what we could see - 

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A bighorn sheep grazing in the grass -

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a Magpie singing for us

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about 15 or 20 bull elk hanging out -and a few wanting to fight

On the drive I told my 86 year old mom that it was reported that out of 8 years in office George Bush spent 3 full years either at Camp David or on his ranch in Crawford Texas on 'vacation'.  She replied "Good, imagine what more he could have done if he was working all that time"  Gotta love her! Here's a picture taken last year in Redondo Beach.

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