My Cousin David Bradley, Red Rocks,

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.

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

Desert Museum tree is down!

The size when first planted 4 years ago.

We planted a desert museum tree in the backyard when we landscaped. We’ve seen them in center islands and all around town, and they are a nice shady tree.

We didn’t cut it back much, but did do it twice in the 4 years. It got REALLY big, and really heavy.

About a month ago it bloomed, and the yellow flowers it produced really made the tree heavy. It even started listing to the left, and kind of covered up the humming bird feeder that was on a hook.

The grand kids came over on Tuesday and were here till last night. On Wednesday afternoon, while they were all asleep (and not playing in the backyard as they had just an hour earlier, the tree fell down. It crashed into the windows (luckily not breaking them).

We saw that it was listing on Tuesday so we called a tree service to have them come out and trim it back on Thursday, but instead they totally removed it.

Valley of Fire State Park.

Valley of Fire State Park

Went to a A beautiful State Park about 60 miles North of Las Vegas.

Cancun trip in November, 2015

Had a great time in Cancun, Mexico in November. First time visiting

Monument Valley, Utah

One of the great things about my job is being able to travel around Colorado. I had to do a few tests and was in Cortez, CO. One of the places that I really wanted to see was Monument Valley, Utah. It is 135 miles from Cortez, so I received permission from work to take my own vehicle on this trip, and took an extra day off of work on vacation. It is a LONG drive and pretty boring until you get close to Monument Valley.

Travels around Colorado - 12/5/13

In driving around Colorado for work, there was some nice scenery.

Bridge outside Gunnison, CO

December 12, 2012; One of the perks of my job is being able to see some incredible scenery. Coming from Otero, CO in the South East, I had to go straight to Grand Junction CO for a test the next day.

Mt. Sneffles photo

One of the things I love about my job working at Colorado POST is being able to travel all over the state and being able to shoot some photos. Here’s one of the favorite area of the state, Dollar Divide in the Southern Mountains. Mt. Sneffles. iautumn, but unfortunately I was probably a week too late to see all of the fall colors.

Crested Butte

Aug 10, 2014, We went to Crested Butte, one of our bucket list places in Colorado.  The flowers for the most part were already spent, but was still an awesome place to be. Here are some photos of the flowers that were there. 

After the Storm

We had a great thunderstorm yesterday, pretty much all day.  Had a tornado watch for about an hour, a LOT of hail (most that I've ever seen)  and great storm clouds.

Here's a few photos I took after the strorms stopped (in our area)

and a video of the hailstorm during the tornado watch.

Rocky Mtn National Park - Elk and Foliage oh my!

Went up to Rocky Mountain National Park today to shoot some Elk - unfortunately there weren't a lot of elk to TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS of.   (All of you hunters shame on you for thinking I meant a gun!)

I did meet up with Scott Steinbook, who was fishing in the Big Thompson River.  I had to take a photo of him as I thought it will be a great cover for Field and Stream Magazine!!

I did get a few elk photos and some good foliage photos too

Hanging out in Lake Estes

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I took this one while laying down in the middle of the road.

Its amazing what a good filter can do!  No photoshop here!

This is the other side of the Big Thompson River from where Scott was fishing.

Colorado Foliage

Janis had been sick for the past week, since we've gotten back from Vegas, and we're leaving on Saturday for Los Angeles, so we were running out of time to go shoot foliage before it left us.   We drove west to RIFLE, which is about 230 miles from home, and stopped at the Rifle Falls State Park, which has 3 waterfalls cascading down a cliff.

then we stopped over by Eagle River and took some photos near Eagle, CO

The Eagle River

Same scene with the infrared camera.

Janis found a squirrel that was hanging precariously on a branch and while I was trying to change lenses to get

a good photo of it, the squirrel moved down the branch to basically try to conceal itself from me.

The foliage was better this year than last year when we went to Aspen, but that was later in the year.  Next year

we're going to have to do more than a 1 day trip, that was a lot of driving today!

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Rockport, MA

After the wedding in Cape Cod, we went up to Rockport and Gloucester for the day.   Took a picture with the infrared camera of the famous Motif #1 in Rockport. and a lobster boat just heading out to sea.

Big Thompson River panorama

Janis’ friend Di came out for a visit, so of course we had to go to Estes Park.

Janis and Di

Panorama settings are 2.5 seconds @ F32, ISO 100.. I shot 4 pictures and stiched em together to get this nice panorama of the Big Thompson River.

 Bighorn sheep a plenty!

Lake Dillon

Today the tour bus went to Lake Dillon.   Nice day, drove around the lake, got a few pictures, etc..

This is six photos that I took and merged together to make a pano..

Rocky Mtn National Park

Went up to the RMNP today with Janis' parents - got snowed on a bit, saw a lot of elk and sheep.. had a good day!  Here's a couple of pictures

Aleuvial Fan water falls

Sheep Lake area - snowing up in the mtns

Nice blue bird taken with my 500mm lens (HANDHELD) forgot my tripod!  In fact did the waterfall blurring handheld too with a 500mm lens and at 1/30th sec.. 

More foliage photos - Maroon Bells, Aspen

Went up to Aspen area on Monday and took some photos of the Maroon Bells.  Awesome! 

Foliage has arrived!

We were in Los Angeles for a week, and then Vegas for five days, and since being gone, Autumn has arrived!  The weather has gone cool, and foliage has arrived in the mtns!  We went up to Estes Park and Rocky Mtn National Park and saw some nice foliage, but it will be perfect in about a week.

Total Lunar eclipse!

Last nites total lunar eclipse was awesome! It was raining all evening and when I went to bed at 1:30 and it was still cloudy.  Janis woke up about 3:30 A.M., and I got up and we were up until 630 am.  It was so cool!!