Stay Home Lego Stop Motion

This year for Global Day of Design Ellie and Molly’s district encouraged students and parents to choose a project from a plethora of options that had been assembled for us to pick from. Of course, we quickly decided that we would each choose a project to complete. For some reason stop motion animation caught my […]

Read More Stay Home Lego Stop Motion

Plan For Vacation Day

I’m usually happy to jump on board celebrating made up holidays. Especially the lesser known ones like today’s “National Plan For Vacation Day”. Like most of these holidays, plan for vacation day is an invention of people with a vested interest in separating us from our cash. Its inventor, the U.S. Travel Association, is an […]

Read More Plan For Vacation Day

The Spirit of Diggins

Happy Holiday! It’s been another year full of adventure, fun, tears, hiking, arguing, drinking, love, driving, dining, and more for us. #RTXIX is in the books (or more literally on this website). We jumped into our dream of some day living in SW Colorado with both feet after finding the perfect property there. We’ve all […]

Read More The Spirit of Diggins

President’s Day Weekend

I’ve been working on updating the website for the past couple weeks. One thing that stood out to me was how little any of us write when we’re not out west. We started this project, and mostly continue it, for us to record or own memories. Both girls, but particularly Zoe, regularly go back and […]

Read More President’s Day Weekend

SBXVIII, with Guac

Last year we agreed that spring breaks would could as “vacation” and not “trips”. We also agreed that vacations didn’t require daily or even sporadic blog posts so I’ll keep this as brief as possible. We left Chicago right after school last Friday and drove an uneventful four hours to Seymore, Indiana. I think we […]

Read More SBXVIII, with Guac

Ellie’s First Concert

Ellie had her first ever band concert last night and she was super excited for it. Since she’s a percussionist she really stood out as they were performing both since she stood about a foot taller than everyone else and was playing the high notes on the glockenspiel! Since their songs were all quite short […]

Read More Ellie’s First Concert

IKEA Couch

We’ve written several times on this blog about our excursions to IKEA, but I think the experience we had putting together our new couch this past weekend is worth yet another. As I’m sure we’ve written about, we only actually shop at IKEA when they have an “eat free” weekend. I’m sure they didn’t intend […]

Read More IKEA Couch

NRA Show 2016

Although we’re now only 15 days from #RTXVI we still have a ton of fun things planned here in Chicago over the next couple weeks. Fortunatly I feel like we’re at the point in the preparation now where we really could leave at any time. There are some loose ends to tie up, but nothing […]

Read More NRA Show 2016

Maps are Beautiful

I’ve been looking at a lot of maps lately, and my favorites by far are the USGS topographic quad maps. In addition to being amazing for better understanding an area they are stunningly beautiful. You can explore them yourself here: http://ngmdb.usgs.gov/maps/TopoView. I was excited to see this article in the New York Times this morning gushing over the […]

Read More Maps are Beautiful

Father’s Day at Sequoia NP

It’s interesting how different Molly and my mother’s/father’s days are from each other. She has a very set routine for hers: Prasino in the morning, the Garfield Park Conservatory, and finally Margie’s Candies before relaxing at home in the afternoon. I’m pretty sure that I haven’t ever done the same thing on father’s day twice, […]

Read More Father’s Day at Sequoia NP