Holiday Time!

Season's Greetings to Everyone!

This year has been busy. We took one short trip to Los Angeles at the end of May to see REM in concert at the Hollywood Bowl. It was as awesome as the trip we took there last year. The morning after the concert we decided to drive along Mullholland Drive on the top of the mountain range just north of Hollywood. It is super narrow and windy with all kinds of expensive houses in all the canyons down the sides. It was kind of like driving up to Jerome but with a lot more houses. After a while on the windy road we went down Coldwater Canyon into Beverly Hills. Most of the cars were more expensive than our house. We worked our way west and ended up at Will Rogers State Park Beach. It was nice quiet beach for a Friday morning.



In August we went on a camping trip with a couple of my co-workers and their families. We went to the Chiricahua Mountains in SE Arizona. The campground we stayed at was at about 8500 feet so it was nice and cool and we didn't get any rain. When Kelly and I first got there we went for a short hike. Here I am being goofy!

Actually we were greeted by a rattlesnake as we first set out for the hike, only about 50 feet from our campsite. He let us know he was there and we went the other way, letting him go his. Later in the afternoon we had a deer walk past near the edge of the campsite, browsing for food. She was cute and quiet and not too fazed by us. The next day we went on a hike with my co-worker and her boys. The littler one kept picking up rocks and soon was ready to head back. He was only 5 so his short legs had trouble keeping up. The older boy is 9 and kept up with Kelly and I the rest of the way. He was fascinated that we could find raspberries growing along the road in some of the older burned out areas. We found just enough so that everybody got 1 berry.

My big present last year was a spinning wheel from Kelly. It is an Ashford Traveler. I like it quite a bit although I haven't used it as much as I would like. Margi has recently gotten more interested in it when I spin. She also found that she can pull yarn off the bobbins as they sit on the bottom pegs before I ply them together.

This fall I participated in a Mystery Spin-Along. We received a big bag of fiber and then 12 clues to spin up. It was a food-themed spin-along so each clue was a recipe. Pictured below is Salmon Capricio.

I've only finished 2 of the 12 recipes so I have plenty more spinning to do!

This year I knit my first adult sweater and Kelly was the lucky recipient. It is a tweedy green and took me about 8 months to knit. Of course in that time I knit plenty of other projects. You can always check out what I'm up to at the other blog. I try to write a couple of times a month.

Work has been much the same. Kelly is thinking about going to school next semester and maybe next year we'll have some news along that line.

Hope you have a Happy Holiday and a Healthy New Year!

Alene

Happy Birthday Mom!

Just a public note to wish my mom a Happy Birthday! We won't say how many, although the count-down to retirement is in full swing.

Here is a picture of my mom in grade school, sometime in the early to mid 50's. Aww, isn't she cute!

And here's a picture of our little family sometime in 1965, somewhere around my first birthday? She looks pretty young and she was, not yet 21. I guess we all look pretty young there.

Fast forward 35+ years to our wedding and here we all were with Kelly's family. Mom still looks pretty similar although it is harder to see in the small picture.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Love, Alene

P.S. Here's a list of a few other things today is known for.

Happy New Year!

Hope everyone safely celebrated the New Year the other night. We were home by about 9:30 but there were still a few drunk crazies on the road, even at that time. We are close enough to ASU and downtown Tempe to be able to hear the fireworks whenever there was a score at the Insight.com Bowl game. We could also hear the 10 pm fireworks at the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl Block Party. The delay between when the firework explosions were showing on the news and when we could hear the noise was about 15 seconds. We did not stay up for midnight so we missed those fireworks and the accompanying gun shots in south Phoenix. That's a good thing.

To celebrate New Year's Day we changed the oil in the car and cleaned up in the back yard- raked citrus leaves and skimmed the pool. Talk about excitement, we're the poster children (sarcasm!).

Happy New Year!

Christmas Day Wrap-up

Hi there!

Hope you had a Merry and warm Christmas Day. It was beautiful and sunny here, although a little cool in the morning and breezy in the afternoon.

Since Kelly only had one day off for the holiday we stayed close to home. Instead of buying a ton of things that we don't really need we opted for going on a hike. We went with our friends and their dog. We all had a great time. I hiked in about 2.5 miles and then hiked back out. The others did the full loop which came out to just over 9 miles. Here are a few pictures from the hike.

Surprisingly there was quite a bit of water flowing along the way. It has been quite a while since the Superstition Mountains have seen this much water.

The views and vistas were amazing. The entire area is a collapsed volcanic caldera from about 20 million years ago. The rocks have weathered into some incredible shapes.

The picture below is of Weaver's Needle. If you are anywhere near it with Kelly he will tell you the story of how he and Dan climbed it and ended up having to come back down as the sun set.

Next up: New Year's Day, we're thinking either a short hike or a bike ride. Check back for pictures

Merry Day After Christmas,

Alene

Merry Christmas from Tempe!

Season's Greetings!

Since I am proverbially late (again) at sending out Christmas greetings I thought I'd copy my friend Cindy and write a blog about it.

Again this year Kelly and I have both changed jobs. At the start of the year I moved from the Water Quality section to the Water Resources section of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. What does that mean? In my old position I looked at wells around State and Federal Superfund sites to determine if the construction would minimize contaminant transfer down the well. It involved a lot of GIS and database work. I was in that group from March 2006 through the first week of this year.

In my new position I evaluate how much the water table will be drawn down by pumping in large production wells for cities or developments. Arizona has a requirement that these large wells (typically ones that pump over 35 gallons per minute) cannot cause undue harm to anyone else's well. When the agency was created in the early 1980's it was decided that they could not reduce the water table at nearby wells by more than 10 feet. I look at the construction of the well and the aquifer materials to help determine how much water is available. I use a simple computer model to determine what the water table will look like after 5 years of pumping at the requested rate. In addition I also look at wells that will be used to "recover" water that has been artificially recharged or that will be used for certain industrial uses.

Kelly worked at Maricopa County Department of Health-Emergency Management for about three quarters of the year before moving to the Arizona Department of Economic Security. It is the largest state agency. He now works as a report coordinator for the MIS section of the Unemployment Insurance group. They work with budgeting for all the IT related projects for the group. One of his big tasks each week is a report on Monday morning detailing the different ways that people reported in for their weekly claim, i.e. phone, internet etc.

In June this year I started to learn how to spin wool by taking a class as the Fiber Factory in Mesa. In conjunction with this I write a blog with my friend Cindy. It is named Knit-N-Spinnin' Kitten after my cat Margaret. She adores yarn and all fiber related things. She makes a great model for all things knitting related. She also loves to spin after dental floss tied on her tail. She comes running when she hears the medicine cabinet open and will present her tail to have it tied on. She spins on the floor and the bed and all over the house. But her favorite two places are on the back of the couch and in the bath tub.

Margaret was new to our house last year and is now nearly 2 years old. Teddy and Abigail are both still with us and both turned 10 this year. Teddy hit that mark on March 1 and Abby celebrated on July 4. Since we don't know exactly when the were born we pick easy dates to remember. We've chosen Margi's birthday to be the same as Kelly's.

Teddy was starting to act like an old cat before Margi came into the house, he was getting grumpy and liked to sleep a lot. Since she's joined the family Teddy plays with her and they love chasing and wrestling games. Here Teddy is modeling a cat sweater I knit earlier this year for an on-line contest. I didn't win but it was a lot of fun.

With Kelly changing jobs both last year and this year we didn't really have a change to take a big vacation. Instead we made long weekend trip to Hollywood to see one of our favorite bands, the Decemberists, play at the Hollywood Bowl. It was great fun. We stayed just a couple of blocks from the Bowl, just up the street from Hollywood and Highland and the Kodak theater. While we were there they had the Premiere of Harry Potter. We didn't see the movie or even hang around for the arrival of the stars. Instead we walked around Hollywood and played tourists, gawking at all the stars on the sidewalk.

With that I will close this and email it off to everyone. I'm hoping that I can write a few entries over the course of the year, perhaps as holidays roll around, so that next year's Christmas greetings will be easier to write.

Have a safe and happy holiday season.

Stay Warm! Alene