Rocky Mountain High

Husband, Daughter and I spent a week in Montrose, Colorado visiting Husband's family and celebrating his 40th birthday.

Shortly after arriving at In-Laws' house Daughter snuck my camera and snapped a few pictures of the birds in the back yard.

This is fairly representative of the 37 photos she took. Mixed in with the birds, she also managed to get a couple of pictures of Nephew smiling.

He's almost 5, and he's a great little guy, but he doesn't quite trust me. He was quite serious for most of the time we spent with him. He has recently mastered both tying shoes and putting on belts. He likes to practice these skills on everyone in the vicinity. If you're wearing lace-up shoes and aren't paying attention you'll have your shoes retied and quadruple knotted in no time.

One of the disadvantages my Colorado family has to deal with is the horrible scenery around their homes. This, for instance, is the view looking down the street from In-Laws' house.

Go ahead and click on that to make it bigger. Those would be the San Juan mountains. Imagine having to look at that kind of nastiness all year long. One of the days we were there we visited one of Brother-In-Law's friends who has an annual pit barbeque. This is Bill's house:

He made it himself. Seriously. His own two hands. Sweat of his brow. Here's the view from the front deck.

Again, who would want to live with that? Who would want to be able to walk outside in a bathrobe before taking their shower in the morning knowing full well that no one can see them? Who would want to be able to shoot skeet from the yard and not worry about hitting anyone?

Those two on the left side of the picture are boys aged somewhere in the area of 11 and 13. They were shooting every bit as well as the adults were. It was both impressive and a bit humbling.

One of our other side trips was a visit out to Uncle's house. While we were there he got out his bow and arrows, and we spent a good bit of the afternoon shooting. Even me, though I don't think I've had my hands on a bow in around 30 years.

I remembered many of the things that I learned long ago: Arrow goes on the inside, odd colored fletching faces you, stand sideways. I did forget one thing, but I don't think I will again. Don't turn your wrist in. This is why I won't forget...

I've had that for a week now. It's a little smaller, but has turned some really interesting colors.

While some of us were peppering the target with arrows (or losing them in the bushes) Daughter and Nephew were having fun on "The Red Tractor."



Colorado. It's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. Well, actually if my family wasn't all in Michigan I'd move out there in no time flat.

While we were visiting I came to realize that some of the people who read the blog don't really care about knitting at all. So in order to make it easier for them, I will now set the knitting content apart from the family news. So...

*** Knitting Content ***
During the odd moments in between family functions I made a pair of socks. They're plain vanilla socks made from Deborah Norville Serenity Sock weight.

They should look good with jeans. Which I won't be wearing in the mountains because I live in the flat, flat Midwest.