KeishoZil

This is how it looks outside today. School was canceled. This isn't our first storm this winter either. I don't know if I'm ready for this kind of weather yet!



Later in the day:



Trying to make snow angels:

Nadia decided that she wanted to ride the bus home from school. There is not a bus to take her to school in the afternoon, but she is able to ride the bus home. It's a long story why I haven't had her ride the bus sooner, and I may post that another time, but for now I just wanted to post some pictures of little Nadia getting on and off of the bus.



I'm really pretty nervous about her riding. Both the other kids got on the wrong bus at one point in first grade and it was pretty frightening. But, she really seems to like it so I guess we'll keep trying it. Some very nice volunteers get the kids all grouped by which bus they ride. (Each bus is assigned an animal. Nadia rides the swan bus.) Then they walk them down in a group and make sure they get on. So they do try very hard to make this safe. Still, I rode my bike to the school to make sure she got on the bus and then rode to the bus stop to pick her up. Silly, but it made me feel better.

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This weekend Andrea, her friend Shandre and I hiked up to Carpenter's Peak in Roxborough State Park. It's about a 6.5 mile hike with I think about 1000 ft elevation climb. At the top you can see from Castle Rock to Boulder. It's worth the climb. At the bottom we snapped some pictures of some fearless deer. We also saw yet another ladybug swarm. (Not sure what's up the with the ladybugs this year.)



Anyway, every time I go to Roxbourough I always feel very lucky to be able to live so close to such a beautiful place. I mean this is just a couple of miles from our house!

Oh and yes, I decided to start wearing a hat when I hike. I know it makes me look like an old lady, but hopefully it will prevent further sun damage to my skin. You know you're getting older when you start thinking that way. :)

I promise all of my posts will not be about bugs...but this one was pretty cool. We went for a cookout this weekend at Mt. Falcon park. It's a high-altitude county open space park near Dave and Sandy's place - just up the canyon a few miles. Dave, Sandy, Marisa, Max, Avy and Andrea's friend Shandre all joined us. It was freezing cold and a little rainy, but we still had a lot of fun.

Anyway, Sophia found this tree that was just completely swarming with ladybugs. It was pretty amazing looking. Unfortunately I only had my cellphone camera with me, but I think you can still sort of see what it looked like. Very cool and weird looking. Turns out that all of the trees/bushes of this kind in the near area were covered like this.

KFC Double Down Sandwich

I think my arteries are clogging just by looking at this thing. Notice a complete absence of any vegetable matter (other than the flour used to make the breading). Now I'm not a nutrition freak by any means, but wow. I'm not sure I could even finish one of these.

One thing I like about living where we do is we get to see lots of wildlife. The other day I caught a picture of our friend the fox taking a nap in our backyard:



For some reason foxes love this spot in our backyard for napping in the afternoon and I have lots of boring video of foxes napping to prove it. I can't tell for sure if it's always the same fox, but I don't think it is.

One day one of the foxes had a dead prairie dog in its mouth and it brought it into our backyard to enjoy its lunch. Well, I didn't want to have prairie dog pieces scattered around our yard so I opened the back door to try to scare it away. It did run away but it left the gross prairie dog! Yuck! Luckily it did come back for it though.

Our neighborhood also has deer, tons of bunnies, prairie dogs, salamanders, frogs and coyotes. There are lots of big horn sheep that live up in the canyon not too far away. Dave and I are also fairly sure we've seen some bear scat scattered around the neighborhood - especially near the grocery store.

Here's the not so nice side of the wildlife here:



We have these giant sized wolf spiders that end up in our house and garage at times. They're not really dangerous but they are very, very creepy. Notice in the picture that you can see its eyes shining and the other normal sized dead spider next to it (victim of the bigger spider?). That was behind my desk. Lovely. Try to ignore the dust bunnies. The cable is a network cable and that's one of those little bouncy balls for scale comparison. This was actually a mid-sized version of those giant wolf spiders. We had one in our living room which I would say was twice the size of this one. Not exaggerating.

I have seen this in real life on the way home from school.



A bunch of kids had turned over a rock and found one of these monster spiders with egg sac attached and they had coaxed it out of its burrow and somehow got it into a water bottle. The kid said he was going to bring it home to show his mother. What a lucky mom!

Now I think if I ever see one at this condition in or around our house I might never recover:

Last week was busy!!!

Andrea started high school. Here she is getting ready to go on her first day:



She was nervous but soon realized that it's not that much different than Junior high. I wouldn't say we've settled into our school schedule yet. It's been an adjustment for us all to start waking up early again. 5:30 am now. :( Andrea has to catch the bus about a mile away at 6:55 am! I think we're starting to get used to the school routine again though.

On Friday we left early in the morning to drive out to Salt Lake City for our niece's wedding. Luckily our trusty old van got us there and back with no troubles. It was nice to visit with everyone. Crystelle looked really pretty. We got to meet our new nephew Hugo and our grand-niece Eden. It was fun to see all of the cute babies!

We drove home on Sunday. It's hard to get back in the car after only being there one day, but we had to get back to school and work. Here are some pictures from the trip. Yes, we saw the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

Nadia is enjoying her spotlight on the blog. She said she wanted to make another video. So she wrote this story and had me film her telling it.