Author: admin (Page 52 of 67)

Tomorrow (Sunday)  I will be heading up to our mountain property for a week of work. The backhoe I rented will be delivered Monday morning, and that will kick off the season’s main project, extending the driveway. I hope I can re-master the operation of a backhoe; I have not operated one for a couple decades. Hopefully a week will be long enough for me to complete the driveway extension – which will be around 600 – 700 feet long and built into the side of a hill. Other items on the agenda include leveling two flat spots in the saddle area, one for the RV and the other for our shed. Once this is done I can arrange for the delivery of the shed and will re-set the trailer on it’s new location.

Pam will be coming up with the dogs and will be there part of the week. She will have to return home mid-week and come back up again toward the end of the week. It is going to be a hectic schedule. The fuel companies will love us.

This trip will require opening  the trailer and getting it ready for habitation. I will need to get water, fire up the furnace, install the new solar panels, and generally get the trailer re-stocked. Pam has a list of food and clothing we will need to take and I plan to go shopping a bit later this morning to get the food items we need. Since we did not leave any liquids or freezable items in the RV there are quite a few items we need to restock. And, it may be too early yet to leave fluids in the RV anyway, so many items we take up and don’t use will need to come back this trip.  Good thing we are taking two vehicles!

I  picked up a culvert from a shop in Grand Junction. It is 20 feet long and 12 inches in diameter. The culvert will be installed in a low spot that the driveway will cross. In the 3 years we have been visiting this lot we have never seen water in this location but better be safe than sorry. Culvert cost  $215.00 with taxes. The backhoe rental, with delivery and pick up, came to just under $1,900.00. With fuel and other expenses this project should come in at around $2,500.00.

Our driveway culvert ready to take to lot

We bought a couple Diesel fuel cans and I will need to stop and fill them, probably in Breckenridge as I go through. The backhoe burns about 2 gallons per hour and should arrive fully fueled (37 gallons, by the spec sheet) so I should not have to worry about fuel for a couple days.

On the down side, the weather is going to be poor for the next week. Highs in the upper 30s and lows below freezing, and a chance of rain or snow most days. Not the best conditions, but who knew this would happen when asking for vacation time and making the rental reservation? We will make the best of it.

I will probably miss next week’s post as I will not be home until Monday the 5th and it will take me some time to look though the photos and video footage I plan to take.

Pam won’t be adding her usual Two Cents Worth, but asked that I update the status of the kittens born on our back deck on Easter. All three are dead, unfortunately, the last one dying late last night. De Beque is a “mean streets” kinda place for wild kittens, and even with human intervention the fatality rate is quite high.

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Happy Easter, everyone.

Here is our Easter card compliments of Jacquie Lawson:

We hope everyone has a good day.

Yesterday we did a lot of yard work. Pam cleaned up around all the fence edges and I mowed the lawn and weed-whacked around the edges. It is nice to have everything tidy and to smell the fresh-cut grass. Along with grocery shopping and other routine chores the day was quite full of activity.

In the past I created my Galleries page so I could keep track of various photo collections including photos I had posted in this blog. The last week  I  created a different type of page, one with links to video clips. This lets me access various video clips from a single page. It makes it easier to take another look at these clips without having to find the blog post that contained them. Take a look and let me know what you think. The new page is Video and there is a link to it from our home page as well.

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

It has been a week of death – and birth.

Isadora, AKA Izzy

Isadora, one of the moms that had kittens in our master bathroom last Summer, had to be euthanized this week as she was in acute kidney failure.  Only three years old and tame as can be, Izzy had at least two litters we know of (maybe more) in her short life. Someone had domesticated and dumped her.  Izzy’s story is everything that is wrong with animal rescue challenges in De Beque.  A gentle soul, Izzy was a quiet addition to our garage colony this Winter and will be missed.

This Easter morning I found one of the feral cats had given birth to a litter of kittens in the Dogloo on our back deck.  This particular cat has resisted trapping in the past, and I think it best to just leave her be.  No doubt she will move her kittens somewhere else in the next few days.

And so it goes…

Happy Trails.

This time of year is a transition period; we are not working the Sanderling lot and little else of note is going on. This makes it “interesting” to come up with a weekly post but I keep trying to generate some content.

It’s raining in the high desert today, which means snow in the high country above 8,000 feet. Our mountain property could pick up 6 – 12 inches of new snow out of this storm. The rest of the week, past Monday, looks good though, and we hope the snow melts off the mountain lot by the last week in April. Tonight (Sunday) and tomorrow have forecast lows below freezing; Pam is planning to cover some flowers but the rest will just have to survive on their own. Tulips are beginning to bloom and I see some daffodils blooming around town. Our daffodils don’t look like they will bloom this year – the bulbs may be spent.

In “lot” news, I’ve put in a reservation for a backhoe and applied for vacation for the week between April 28th and May 5th. We are going to get the driveway extension done that week (one way or another). Should be an interesting endeavor! I went through United Rentals as they will deliver and pick up the backhoe to the lot, for a fee of course, but I don’t have the Big Boy Toys to haul such equipment over two mountain passes. We will have to pick up a couple of diesel fuel cans to bring fuel out to the lot. Nearest fuel station is about 25 mile away in Fairplay.

Closer to home, I took the ATV out for a ride yesterday. I wanted to ride through the area that was burned a couple years ago and see how, or if, the recovery was going.

Much of the area has developed a covering of grass but little else. The photo below is typical of this:

Burn area – spring 2014

The little patches of white, seen on the right side of this photo, are flowers.

Wildflowers #1

Throughout the ride I was struck by the number and varieties of wildflowers already in bloom. This makes sense as the high desert receives only about 8 inches of rain per year, and the flowers use the spring moisture to good advantage. Here are a couple more photos of flowers I saw during this outing.  (Our mountain flower identification book is in the high country, can’t specifically identify the flowers in the following photos.)

Paintbrush?

Wildflowers #3

So, even though I have ridden these areas before, there is always something new or different to see and I always enjoy getting out on the ATV.

As a follow-up to a note in my last post, friends Mary and Jeff are sending us photos from their trip to England. It looks like they’re having a good time, with a super-packed itinerary!

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

Sis Becky tells me the Chicago relatives have been clued in to this post location, so here’s a shout out to Nancy, Bobby and Uncle Norm!  They should get in contact with Bro Larry, who can give them a guided tour of the MyHeritage site – lots of family photos and genealogy content has been catalogued by Larry at that site over the past few years.

Daughter Felicity is in Spokane, Washington at the annual Sweet Adeline competition this weekend.  Upon her return to Oregon, she closes her apartment in Beaverton and, a few days after Easter, begins her life as a “digital nomad.”  Felic has developed a blog to chronicle the next nine months as she travels, house sits, and attempts to make a living entirely on-line.  For those who wish to travel along, Felicity’s blog location can be found here:  http://www.blog.felicityfields.com/.

Happy Trails.

The Wisconsin Badger men’s basketball team made it to the final 4 but lost to Kentucky last night by 1 point. For all our Badger friends we would like to say it was a good season in spite of this loss.

Birds are building a nest in our Cottonwood tree again. I saw one of the pair flying into the hole while carrying a feather to line the nest. The cats in the house can see these birds from the front window and it provides quite a source of entertainment for them.

I mowed part of the lawn yesterday. Mostly this area grows weeds rather than grass and is used as parking space for the Ford 8N, the aluminum trailer, and the ’76 Scout. I retrieved the Toro mower from the storage shed, did spring maintenance on it, and fired it up. It was nice to smell fresh-cut greenery again, even though this heralds the start of  Summer maintenance chores.

The solar panels for the RV (The Box) have arrived and will be installed on the next trip to the lot. I also ordered a carrying/storage case for the chain saw as hauling it around inside a garbage bag was getting old. We are getting “real uptown” now. 🙂

Pam has added a couple plaques to our walls. I like this one in particular.  Since I was born in the mountains Pam says the first part of the sentence is for her and  the second part is for me:

Our friends Mary and Jeff are traveling in Great Britain right now and we hope they are having a great time.

Daughter Felicity is planning a working vacation trip to Wales, starting in April. Given that most of her work is done via computer, she’s not restricted to any one geographic area to make a living. Certainly a change from my generation.

Just for hoots (like, when we win the lottery) we have been looking at real estate listings in Sooke, British Columbia. (Water and mountain views.) One million can get you a very nice house overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. “Sweet dreams are made of these…”  Hey, we’d have plenty of room for visitors!

Strait of Juan de Fuca from dream house. Pam loves the water views. Jerry has mountain views. (Realtor photo.)

On the “we are getting old” front, we watched a special the other night about the Beach Boys who are celebrating their 50th anniversary as a rock-n-roll group. We are still hoping for the “…fun, fun, fun..” to come along.

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

Big news in little De Beque – the town voted to allow marijuana sales in town, the first town in the county to approve retail pot sales.  Great.  We have a cop-for-hire police force and unsophisticated town government.  This should be a fiasco.  And, De Beque is on the Fall 2014 state ballot to allow gambling in town.  Is it too much to ask that this  might actually increase our property values so we can move out of this dump?  Not likely.

Happy Trails.

Yesterday (March 29) I scheduled a high country drive to visit our lot at Sanderling Court. I wanted to see how much snow was left and use that as a gauge to determine when we could get started on the driveway extension project.

Quite a bit of snow has melted since my last visit but there is still more on the ground compared to last year at this time. Given the conditions I found I think we can plan to start the driveway work during the last week of April.

Drive extension will go along this hillside about half-way up the slope.

The saddle still had a significant amount of snow and it is deeper than it looks.

End of March snow in the saddle.

The winter view across South Park was quite nice.

Late winter view across South Park from Pavilion Point

The most noticeable sign of Spring was the livestock released into our open range.  What are they finding to eat this time of year?

Cattle on Link Road near our lot.

It was a very pleasant visit overall and I was glad to see the snow retreating. Now we can start making definite plans and schedules for late April.

In about-the-house news, last week I took up a maintenance  job I had not done before: replacing the filter elements in the swamp cooler. Supposedly this should be done annually or semiannually but I had not changed the filters in the 8 years we have been here. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

Basically one must remove the filter holders, remove the old filters, and install the new ones. Shouldn’t be such a job.  Right.

I couldn’t find filters in the size our unit takes. The filter material is shaved aspen held together by a fine nylon netting. I found filters the correct width and had to cut them to length.

Given the amount of time since the last maintenance, I had to scrape and wire bush the holders to clean them (no surprise).  Not fun, but I used my shop vac to help clean up the debris. Here’s a photo of one frame being cleaned:

Cleaning the swamp cooler filter holders

Once the old filter was removed and the frame was clean, I installed the new filter material. Repeat 3 more times for the other 3 holders. By #4 I was getting pretty good at it.

Installing new filter material

Installing the filter material holders in the filter frame

I hope it will be months before we need to use the swamp cooler and with this maintenance it should be ready for Summer cooling season.

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

At about the same time our storage shed is being built in Colorado Springs for our mountain property, my brother Craig and his wife Dianne are having their storage shed built in Bloomer, Wisconsin for their lake property.  Interesting  —  both my brother and I are at approximately the same stage in life where second home property projects occupy our time (and money).  Where our interests differ is Craig and Dianne have two married children and four grandchildren.  We have zero married children and zero grandchildren.  Each is as it should be.

Happy Trails.

The truth be told, it was a quiet week. Spring arrived with more moderate temperatures, around the home front there was not a lot going on. But…here is an update on a few of our projects.

We ordered our 10×12 shed this week from Sunset Buildings in Colorado Springs. While ours will not have the windows pictured below and will be painted tan, here is a manufacturer’s photo of the shed:

Our King model shed. (Mfg. photo.)

As noted before, this is a top-of-the-line shed and we hope it will last a long, long time. Sunset will hold it for us until we get the driveway extended to the saddle where  we want the shed to sit. Our unit will have a wider (5-foot) door to facilitate getting equipment in and out.

In other “lot” news, a local lumber yard – Sutherlands – had their annual spring sale featuring 15% off all purchases. We had taken advantage of this last year to buy railroad ties, pavers, and gates for the lot. This time around we bought fencing, personal gates, more pavers, and various odds and ends to be used on improving the Sanderling property. The fencing and gates are for a semi-permanent dog run (hopefully good for several years); Pam wants containment so the dogs have a secure place to move around [dig!] while we work. We bought enough fencing to build a (roughly) 40×20 dog run. It will take us a full day or better to get this built.  We will likely relocate the dog run in the future, once house plans start to take shape.

Stuff (mostly dog run) for The Lot

We will store the stuff in the aluminum trailer (under a tarp) until we can get it up to the mountains.

I ordered a solar panel kit (80 watts) from Northern Tool to help supplement the solar panels installed on the roof of the RV.

Solar panels for the RV. (Mfg photo.)

I plan to re-mount the 3 existing panels (total of 60 watts) as well to improve their performance, giving us more charging capacity. I hope to leave the generator home this year, at least until the shed is in place and I need more electrical power for various tools. I would have waited on this purchase but it came up on sale so I went ahead with the order.

We are going to have a bunch of “stuff” to take to the lot once the snow has melted and we can begin working on our various projects. This will still be a while; although daytime temps at 9,000 feet are above freezing, night time temps are still in the teens and twenties. The snow will not totally disappear up there this month. I hope to get over to the lot next weekend and check things out.

So, other than ordering “stuff” and going to the sale, it was a quiet week. We had some rain here but higher elevations received snow. Powderhorn Ski Area, which we can see from our back deck,  picked up 6 inches of new snow out of the same storm. The mountains around here are at about 127 percent of normal snow  (aka: snow pack) for this time of the year. Daytime temps are in the upper 50s – low 60s but it is still below freezing at night. Not yet time to break out the lawn mower. 🙂

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

Happy trails to you, until we meet again

Happy trails to you, keep smilin’ on till then

Who cares about the clouds when we’re together

Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather

Happy trails to you, till we meet again.

I guess Roy Rogers and Dale Evans had an actual “club” on TV back in the day, it stretches the beginnings of my memory to recall much more than Trigger (Roy’s horse).  I do remember the two of them singing the Happy Trails song in two-part harmony.

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. (Studio photo.)

Happy Trails.

Every place needs some art. Art to this point, for us, has consisted of  framed photos hung around the place. We’ve never invested in other types of non-photo art. Enter Bali, their artisans, and metal wall art. We decided to get this one for Valentines Day:

Wall art from Bali

Size is deceiving; the piece is about 52 inches high by 26 inches wide. It depicts a waterfall dropping off a high mountain cliff. We ordered it on-line around Valentines Day but waited a month to receive it, as the importing company delays order fulfillment until they have a full container to be shipped from Indonesia. We’ve looked at this type of thing for many years, amazingly enough the metal sculpture we ended up with is quite attractive, sturdy, and an interesting addition to the room upgrades Pam has been working on all Winter.

Small flowers are beginning to appear on our lawn. I have not taken the time to identify them but they do add a splash of yellow and purple to the wilder parts of the lawn:

Yellow flowers appearing on the lawn

Purple flowers blooming this spring

There was snow on the wind yesterday, though, and night time temps are still in the mid to upper 20’s, so Winter hangs on, even at our elevation.

We are getting ready to order a 10′ x 12′ shed to put on the Sanderling lot. A Colorado Springs company, Sunset Buildings, has a sale going through the end of March and we have decided to take advantage of sale prices. The unit we’re purchasing is a high-end mini-barn with trim and eaves. Not the cheapest at around $4k [including delivery and taxes] but we need it to “last until we die” so we’re looking at a high-end structure. Plus, delivery from anywhere to 9,000 feet has to be taken into consideration.  I requested a loft space upgrade, as well as upgrading  to a 5-foot wide door instead of the standard 4-foot door to make getting equipment (such as the ATV) in and out easier.  The company will hold the unit until we can get the driveway extended up to the saddle (where we want the storage building to sit).

Purchasing a shed would check off one of my four goals for the summer (the driveway extension is a primary goal) — the other two being the installation of a septic system and drilling a well. (Well would have to come first according to Park County rules.) This is an ambitious plan but it’s nice to dream. Of course there’s always lot clean-up to fill our high country days.

Next year’s goals would be to put in an off-grid electrical system, get a large propane tank on the property, and finish the lot clean-up in the immediate building area. After that we could start house planning in earnest.

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

Goals – all it takes is money.  And lots of it.  Forget expenses in hundreds of dollars, try thousands.

Happy Trails.

I had mentioned, a few posts back, that I would not be out snowmobiling this year. I am, however, still on our club’s e-mail list. When I received a note that Arctic Cat would be hosting a spring demo event featuring their 2015 models I signed up for a 12:00 noon ride.

Arctic Cat and Yamaha are the two major players in this area that put on these demo sessions every few years. It is a good time to see (and ride) the factory-fresh models. This years’ demo was held at a lodge overlooking Vega Reservoir, part of Vega State Park, about an hour drive for me.

I am not in the market for a new sled but thought I would get out for at least one ride this season. In addition the demo rides were to be lead by Amber Holt who is well-known through the snowmobile industry as a premier back-country rider and instructor. Amber’s web page is  http://www.backcountrybasics.com and she offers classes to individuals and groups with the aim of improving rider skills.

I arrived a bit early and found the rides were running a few minutes behind schedule. That was OK as it gave me a chance to talk to the AC folks about their new sleds, and particularly the models that are using a Yamaha engine. From these discussions I decided to demo ride a M 7000 Sno Pro. This upper-end unit (not top of the line) is designed for a combination of on and off-trail riding. It features a fuel-injected, 135 hp,  Yamaha 3 cylinder 4-stroke engine.

Jerry on his demo-ride Arctic Cat (Photo by A. Holt)

The day was perfect, almost too warm as the snow was fairly packy. Due to some participants changing their ride times there was only myself and one other rider, along with the ride leader, on this particular run. (Each outing was scheduled to last about 2 hours.) This gave us some flexibility to ride to more remote  destinations that a larger group may not have visited. After a dealer-provided lunch of Sloppy Joes and home-made cookies we headed out.

It was good to be out on the trail again. After a 15 minute trail ride we arrived at a large meadow area with some interesting side trails to explore. Given the small size of this group I approached  Amber and asked if she could give me some tips on improving my cornering technique, allowing me to “carve” a corner instead of going around “flat.” She agreed to do so, and for the next half-hour she demonstrated her advanced cornering techniques. While I sort-of got the hang of it, trying to implement these tips on a new and unfamiliar sled proved difficult and I am a long way from being proficient. Still, it was a lot of fun and I learned quite a bit.

After the training and playing in the snow for a couple hours we headed back to the staging area. I filled out a survey giving my impressions of the sled I rode, headed back to my truck, and drove home. It had been a very good day. I may have to renew my snowmobile registration for next winter.

Changing the subject, in a previous post I mentioned the “snow line” we often see as we commute to work. This is the point at which snow turns to rain. Here is a photo, taken near De Beque,  showing a snow line on  the Roan Plateau:

Snow LIne on Roan Plateau

It was raining in De Beque and snowing on the upper portions and top of the Roan. (Photo was taken on my way to work this past Friday.) It happens quite often that the weather conditions at home area quite different  than conditions at work due to the 700 – 800 feet change in elevation. We have acclimatized to these changes, they are now normal for us, but these elevation changes are not common to most of our friends and family. This is just one of the differences that characterize living in Colorado from living in the Midwest.

The last of the ice has disappeared from our lawn. Grass is greening up. Today we will take the mulch off the flower beds and rake up some leaves that hit the ground after last fall’s final raking. I guess Spring is really here even though it is still below freezing at night.

Taking mulch out of the front flower bed.( Photo by P. Fields.)

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

While Spring may be “here” in the  high desert, it has not arrived in the high country.  We’re discussing when we can return food items, cosmetics, water etc. to The Box up at Sanderling without being concerned liquids will freeze in overnight temps when we’re not up there.  We can’t move forward on machine rental for the driveway extension until such time as it’s feasible for us to RV overnight.  Maybe late April is a target date this year?

Happy Trails.

Today we are enjoying (?) intermittent rain showers. Iris plants are poking up through the remaining snow and mulch. Birds are flying in and out of the hole in the Cottonwood tree. Snow is gone from the roof and nearly gone from the yard. (A layer of ice persists in the most shaded areas.) Grassy areas are turning green.

It looks like Spring is here. However, looks are deceptive. The high country is getting hit with snow and as we commute to and from work we can see the snow line [on the bluffs of the Mamm Range and Roan Plateau] only a few hundred feet higher in elevation than De Beque. This morning the deck was slick from the below-freezing temperatures we had last night. So, while we are enjoying the Spring-like conditions (forecast high for Thursday is 60 degrees), we know Winter isn’t over yet. The only question is when will we get hit again?

Yesterday (Saturday) was nice enough that I moved the cars and several of my toys out of the garage and did some cleaning. I swept and shop-vac’d dirt, old leaves, cat hair, and other assorted stuff along the edges of the garage and under the counters. This time was not a full Spring cleaning, but it was good to get the Winter’s accumulation of dirt cleaned out.

In other news, our good friends Hank and Elinor, who live in Casa Grande, Arizona, celebrated birthdays in the last couple weeks. Eli is in her early 90’s and Hank is in his late 80’s. They’ve been good friends since we bought our first house in Colorado in ’79 or so — they were the closest neighbors. Our kids’ middle names come from this couple. We hope Eli and Hank are around for many more years.

Since we don’t live particularly glamorous lives, there is not a lot of other news to comment on. This week we went through only 23.1 gallons of gasoline plus a couple gallons more for the ATV, one of the lower totals for an average week. This translates into about $90.00 for fuel; any time we are under $100.00 for the week we think we are doing pretty well. Regular gasoline is selling for about $3.60 per gallon at our usual station.

We have penciled out a couple of additional house plan ideas for Sanderling, but really need to get to the lot and pace off some distances to get a good feel for where a cabin will sit, measure the grade of the slope involved, and consider other factors (well and septic placement) that would affect the design of a place. Lately our rough ideas are for a 32 x 40 house-over-garage arrangement, but that is subject to change!  The Solargon and cabin from an earlier post are in the running too.

Although lot clean-up and projects ( driveway extension, well, tool shed) will take up most  of our spare time this Summer, we’re going to try to take a few trips and travel a bit more than we have in recent years. All this takes planning and a budget, which at this point includes putting a few charges on our (mostly) paid off credit cards. If we waited until we could pay everything in cash we would never go anywhere, so this may be the year we tap into that reserve.

The latest shower has passed over for now, so this is a good ending point for this post.

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

Of all the moving we’ve done in almost 40 years together ( 20+ addresses), keeping in touch with some of the friends we’ve made along the way is “the best.”

Happy Trails.

This week’s post will consist of a little of this and a little of that. No major theme.

Local weather has warmed into the mid 50 degree range the last few days, above our normal highs by 10 – 12 degrees. Snow on our lawn is almost gone except for a few piles that are in the shade all day. Robins have returned and we see some birds flying in and out of the nesting hole in the cottonwood tree in the front yard. Pam says she saw a couple of iris shoots coming up through the leaf mulch. Is spring really near?

I took the ATV out for a ride today. There’s still a lot of snow in elevations just a few hundred feet higher than De Beque. Chance of snow is in the Thursday night forecast with undoubtedly a lot of winter left, but it was very nice to get out today.

Yesterday I did some scraping of old paint on the back deck and repainted until I ran out of paint. Deck looks better from the road as I did get most of the front-facing wood covered. Also was able to hook up the hose and wash the Honda by hand, have not been able to do that for months. Even fired up the 8N Ford and ran it around the block. Pam opened the kitchen window and back door for a bit and we had fresh air in the house for a while. The dandelion plants are turning green.

I mentioned in my last post that we had cats under the trailer and had plans to remove them. That project appears to have worked and we have closed up the skirting. With the reinforcements we made we hope to avoid a repeat of the tunneling problem. Pam says she has seen all the cats she thought were under the trailer out and about at the garage and back deck feeders.

Those of you who know me well know my mother has never forgiven me for moving away from Wisconsin. In her last letter she reminded me – again – how great my brother is as a son as he stops by often and does maintenance projects around the house. I liked living in Wisconsin but the mountains are my home. Apparently my happiness is not all that important in my mother’s scheme of things…

We figured out our State and Federal taxes. We knew we would get whacked this year as I started getting a retirement annuity from the State of Wisconsin in 2013 (the annuity distribution takes out Federal but not State tax) and I had cashed in a small trust fund that wasn’t taxed. As a result we owe both Federal and Colorado state taxes this year. This was not unforeseen (Pam has been putting funds aside) but it’s irritating to see the final numbers. Since we owe money we won’t actually file until early April. This gives us a couple more months to get the money together before we write the checks.

That’s about it for this past week, and there doesn’t look to be much going on in the upcoming week. Goodbye to the Olympics coverage – have been watching some of it most evenings –  although I’m not so thrilled to see all the X-Games events added to the Olympic venues. I still prefer the standards; downhill races, male/female/pairs ice skating events, and ski jumping. Half-pipe and slope-style are not my thing. I’m just a grumpy old man, I guess!

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

Love to see those robins.  Bless them. Time to plan the year’s getaways, now that we know our additional tax liability.  Potential trips could include: Jer’s cycle getaway in June/July (this year in central Canada, likely to include a Midwest swing), 40th Anniversary trip in August (thinking about Napa Valley, CA), possible road trip in November (to Florida?).  Plus all the travel to and from Sanderling during the summer (potential development plans there start in early spring).  Busy.

Happy Trails.