AGU

I just got home from San Francisco, where I attending the American Geophysical Union's Fall meeting. On my way there, I took this picture of Boulder:


About 19,000 scientists attended the week-long conference. It was cloudy and rainy much of the time in San Francisco, and I didn't take any pictures, except for this one, a notice of the talk I gave.


After the conference ended, I went with a group of people, including Harald, Roya, Ed, and Paola, for a weekend of wine tasting. Again, it was cloudy and rainy most of the time, and I didn't take too many pictures, but here is one of the rare blue sky moments:

Thanksgiving

Two Fridays ago, I went to an Avalanche game


with John and two Canadian coworkers, Cora and Trevor:


The Avs won, thanks to some fine goaltending by Craig Anderson (see save above).

Brett came to visit me over Thanksgiving. I decided to try to make a shoo fly pie for Thanksgiving dinner. I had a recipe and all the ingredients:


It looked good going into the oven.


But half of it boiled over while it was cooking!


It was still runny when it came out of the oven, as well.

So I tried again, this time with less water.


But it still boiled out of control.


The first pie tasted OK, but it was very runny. The second was more solid, but looked worse. Either I need to make high altitude adjustments to the recipe, or my oven temperature is wrong.

Friday, I showed Brett around Boulder, starting with Flagstaff Mountain.


We then went downtown to Pearl Street, then walked back to the car along the Boulder Creek Path.


Saturday we went to Rocky Mountain National Park. First, we checked out some views.


Then we went to Bear Lake for a little hiking. This is Hallett Peak, with Bear Lake in the foreground.


I tried to recreate a picture from my youth with this picture.


I won't know if I did until I find the original!

Clouds and other stuff

Winter arrived last week with a couple of small snowstorms. It was good timing for the opening of Louisville's outdoor skating rink:


The last few days have gotten into the 60s, though, so I'm not sure how the rink is doing now.

I was able to clean up some of my leaves out back before they got wet:



Huh, judging by how much work I put into moving leaves, I thought the difference would be more striking...

Yesterday, Rebecca called down the hall to tell me about the amazing sunset. My office faces east, so I went outside to investigate. The view to the southeast:


Then I looked to the north:


I went around the corner to see more:


Then I went to the west side of the building:


I'm glad I went outside!

Today, we had some high, icy clouds which made nice prisms:

Recap of the last two weeks

In case you were wondering, the fire fizzled overnight, and was mostly contained by the next day.

The night before the fire, I took this sunset picture (with my new favorite tweaks, a gamma correction of 0.7 and a saturation of 70 to make it look more like it did through my eyes):


The day before Halloween, I spent a lot of time in downtown Louisville -- first with Sara and her family for coffee and shopping at the Hatch New Mexico chile store, featuring a chile roaster out front, which smelled great:


Then I bumped into Tara and Jason at another coffee shop, then I saw Josh finish the Monster Dash:


For Halloween, I went out to dinner with Jason, Roya, and Harald.


We walked around Pearl Street afterward to check out the costumes.


Last week, we came in third place in trivia:


For awhile, we were over the 6-person player limit, so John played by himself. He came in last place.


Last Tuesday morning after voting, I saw this picture of Louisville in the city hall:


A lot of the same features are still around today, such as Miner's Field:


The moon on my way into work that morning:


My camera is terrible at taking picture of the moon at night, but this makes a nice companion piece to the one above:

Yet Another Fire

I took the bus into work today, and when we crossed over 36, I (and everyone else on the bus) noticed the plume from a nearby fire. It's known as the Dome Fire, and fortunately hasn't burned down any structures yet.

It was windy this morning, which I'm sure helped the fire spread quickly.



By the afternoon, it was harder to see the plume from work. By evening, the fire looked pretty tame.


It looks like it will be windy again Saturday night. Hopefully, the fire crews will have contained it by then.

A full weekend

I kicked off the weekend Friday night with a sushi party at Nick's place. Cora took these pictures of

me in action:


Anne cutting a sushi roll:


Sara making tempeh:


and Nick preparing rice:


Thanks to some good pointers from Nick, I made some pretty nice looking sushi! The rolls in the center and upper left part of the plate were my creation:


Saturday morning, I met Rich and Sara at Bittersweet for our usual Saturday morning coffee.


After coffee, we checked out the grand opening of a new store in downtown Louisville, Altan Alma. They are a small little market, and we ate a free lunch as part of the festivities.


Saturday's sunset:


Sunday night, Sara, Joe, and I went to the Mountain Sun to see Josh's band, Liebermonster, play.

Morning

I woke up really early this morning and started thinking about the Phillies and work. After several failed attempts to go back to sleep, I gave up and went to work. Fortunately, I arrived just as the sun had risen, so I took some pictures.

Flatirons:


I really like that tree turning red. Too bad the power lines are in front of it.

Sun behind the trunk of the center tree:


Nice picnic area on the south side of the building: