My friend K at his reception. Cake and booze in the background.

This party was so happenin that the next door neighbor dog wanted in on it.

Cake cutting (with katana).

Kurt and Merlin in the trailer. Note that Merlin is laying on kurts leg.
I am really enjoying the trailer. I need to try and get it out more…

Well, I have totally failed to keep up with my postings. ;(

Last post was in mid-may, so just a bit over 2 months ago.
I just grabbed a ton of pictures off my camera, so look for some photo post updates very soon.

Other things that have been going on (in no particular order):

- The Ren faire has been going on. Have been going most every weekend down there with the pups. I have a ton of pictures.
- Camped down at the campground near faire some, and went on another short camping trip up to boyd lake. I really am enjoying my trailer.
- Ran out to Austin one weekend for a surprise birthday party for a friend. He was indeed very surprised, and it was a lovely time.
- Went down to another friends wedding reception. It was a blast, and the trailer worked great down in NM.
- Lots more that I am sure I have forgotten.

Look for some photo posts soon to catch up…

I’ve been slacking and not posting much lately… will try and catch up on news and pictures in the next few days here…

On the 6th, 7th, and 8th of April I went out for my first camping trip of the year. I wanted to go someplace nearby and just do a trial run with the trailer and see what I needed to get for it, or change or whatnot. I did manage to do some prep before that weekend. Got the microwave all secured with some of these:
Super Grip fasteners. Seemed to work pretty well. Also picked up a 12v coffee maker (I have a percolator, but it takes forever to make a pot of coffee), and some other odds and ends.

Looking around, I decided to go to St Vrain state park. It’s pretty close (about a 30min drive or so), they had recently remodeled and rebuilt things there, and they had poooooower hookups. Unfortunately, the weekend of the trip, the snow and freezing rain was kinda depressing, but I decided to go anyhow.

Getting up and getting parked was a breeze. The place was pretty desolate with all the grass still brown and/or covered in ice and snow. There was a ton of water around… lakes and ponds, and
streams and such. Not too many other campers, but a few. There were even some folks fishing at one point in the snow. There were birds. Lots and lots of birds. Pelicans, Great blue herons,
Canadian Geese, Ibis type birds, ducks, and a lot I had no idea what they were. Nash was very happy to try and eat the geese poop, so I had to watch him closely on walks. Due to the lousy weather
we pretty much would go for short walks and spent the rest of the time in the trailer hanging out. The pups seemed to have a pretty good time, although I think Nash got a bit stir crazy a few times.

The EVDO coverage was pretty good there, so I was able to keep in touch on email and such. I got some portable ipod speakers which for the most part worked really well, except for when the
furnace fan was running it was hard to hear the music. The 12v coffee pot and 12v crock pot both worked great. The converter makes a slight humm when you are running 12v appliances, but
nothing to anoying.

Here’s a few pictures:

View from the parking spot back to the other campers.

Some pelicans. I had the camera on B&W somehow. ;(

Lounging hounds in the trailer.

There were some nice trails around the ponds. Gravel and pretty flat.

Merlin was being very tolerant of Nash. “I’m squishing your head”.

There’s a Great Blue Heron taking off. It was hard to get any pictures of them. They would fly off before you could get at all close to them.

Nice shot of a little bridge over the waterway.

Loon? Something funky looking…

All in all a good shakedown trip. I have a list of things I want to get/setup before my next trip, but overall the trailer did very nicely.

Here’s a catch up of some recent photos…

Got the trailer moved into my side yard (since the city was upset that it was parked on a non paved or gravel surface in the front):

Check out how close it is on this side to the fence:

Thunderstorm season appears to have started already. Here’s Kurt in his storm defender cape:

Is it a bird? A plane? no… it’s…

…it’s a tree rat!

Kurt and Merlin are ready for the day it makes a mistake.

Nash thinks it might be good to learn how to climb.

Today was snowy, which normally is fine with me. I like snow.
However, 3 weeks or so ago, today was scheduled for the day to take my trailer into the service department. They are going to replace the front window since
there were lots of people reporting problems with them leaking (at no charge). It took me from about 7:30am to about 10am all total to get hitched up in the snow and all the way down to the service department in golden. Lots of slow going and general traffic. Nothing was all that slick until I got back up nearly home on the way back. I had to go to 4wd to get into the garage.

Nash is sure enjoying playing in the snow:

Been a while since I posted an update. Since the last one I went on my thanksgiving travels.
It was a pretty good trip, but a lot of driving, and I am glad to be home.
From Broomfield -> Rest area just over the AZ/NM border -> Phoenix -> Prescott -> Back to Phoenix -> Los Alamos -> Broomfield.

The trailer did quite well again. I am really liking it. The dogs and I stayed in it in all of those places except Los Alamos.
The Rest Area I stopped at was nice, but had a train track running right next to it. Basically a train every 15min all through the night. ;(
Phoenix was nice. Got to visit with my family and have a fun time.
Prescott was good too. 31 of us for thanksgiving dinner. Lots of folks I hadn’t seen in years there.
Los Alamos was good too… got to catch up with my friends D and J and their kids.

For once I have a pretty easy going/lazy weekend ahead (I hope).

Some things I should do:

• wash the urban
• get gas
• fill the fresh water tank in the doggie bunker
• wash the sleeping bags and dog beds from the doggie bunker
• restock the fridge in the doggie bunker and turn on sundayish (It takes a while to get fully cooled down)
• make something to take to T’s potluck sunday afternoon
• go to T’s potluck sunday afternoon
• possibly upgrade a bunch of my computers from fc5 to fc6

Other than that, hopefully I can get some slacking in and playing with the dogs.

I now have nash (who is almost 60lbs!) trained pretty well to play fetch. It’s a great way to tire him out…

Tuesday it’s off for lovely AZ for thanksgiving. I think for once I gave myself sufficent travel time and such, so
it should be a pretty easy and low key trip.

After nukestock was over I hung out and worked from the trailer in my friend K’s front yard for the first part of the week.
Things worked out pretty well. He was off working as well, so we could get our work stuff during the day and then hang out some at night.

Tuesday night we went over to my friend C’s haunted house. Man, he sure goes all out. He said there were probibly 15-20 people that had worked on it this year. They had gotten all the neighborhood to agree to close the street, so people could walk around without getting run over. They had a live puppet show (folks in black with puppets in front of them), a table of insects and creepy crawlies, a mausoleum in the back yard, a magic mirror at the front door (very cool!), some pirate skeletons that talked and had a routine, some games (bone toss, etc). It was very well run and fun.

Thursday I packed up everything and headed up to the wilderness. My Friend V ended up being able to go with me due to some plans changing, so that was nice. We got in some visiting on the trip up. We had no problem finding the place we had decided to camp out at. There were 2 horse trailers there already, but no people, so we parked and crashed. Friday morning we moved the trailer to a slightly more level place and got a bit more setup. The generator I got was able to run the a/c there (7500ft) which was pretty cool. Of course it wasn’t hot enough to need it, but it was still nice. Friday night my friend B and his wife A showed up. Got in a bit of visiting and then turned in very early.

Saturday and Sunday and Monday morning were full on hunting days. Get up at 4:30 or 5:30am, hike out to where we wanted to hunt in the dark and be setup for dawn. Then hunt all morning, and head back to camp for lunch. Then after a bit head out for evening hunting. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to see anything we could (legally) shoot at. We did see some cool things however:

• A Big bull elk and his 6 cow elk harem. We watched them wander around for a while.
• One morning on the way back to camp we ran accross a flock of 11 wild turkeys. Amazingly we didn’t manage to spook them and watched them wander on by and roam around. Very cool. My friend B had been in the area for turkey season a while back and saw a bunch of big bucks, and now that he was out there deer hunting it figures that he saw a bunch of turkeys.
• We didn’t see very many other hunters at all. We did talk to some folks at the trailhead/campground, but only saw hunters one morning accross a valley.

There was no cell coverage there at all, which was both anoying and also kinda nice. The trailer worked wonderfully. The furnace was nice to crank on when it got cold at night. The awning worked great for a little place to hang out. Also, the area where we were had a corral for horses, and had a mesh on the inside of the fence. That allowed me to let the dogs go in there every once in a while and run around like maniacs. I’m sure nash was happy about that. Nash did also manage to chew up the book I was reading. A was watching the dogs and went to go do something, leaving Nash out in the trailer. He chewed up the last 10 pages of my book. Perhaps he was letting me know that the ending sucked or something.

Monday after a full morning hunting, I packed up and headed back home. I did stop on the way back for a nap, but mostly just kept going. Got home tuesday morning around 5-6am. 300ish emails and several phone messages. Not too bad for the amount of time I was off line.

I’m looking forward to more camping in the trailer. it sure is nice and cooshy.

The Night of October 24th had me packing and trying to get everything loaded into the trailer and truck. I really should have done more packing in advance, but oh well. I ended up doing some more packing/loading Wed morning before I left, and finally hit the road at about 9am. The weather forecast had some wind in store and I did in fact hit that between raton and las vegas. Pulling the trailer in a 30+mph headwind wasn’t much fun, and boy did it kill my already abysmal gas millage, but I made it down to Las Cruces just fine around 9pm (a 12 hour drive).

$1.999 gas when I fueled up before leaving town!

Amusingly, the pump was also running IE, and it’s DNS was borked.

A picture from a rest area on the way down.

Got the trailer all parked in front of Nukestock HQ and setup. Got power hooked up and called it a pretty early night. Thursday we did a bunch of walks in the park for the dogs, a trip over to my friend V’s place to let the dogs run around in his gigantic back yard, and some assorted errands and setup of decorations. Thursday night was the beer tasting event. We had a pretty gigantic pile of beers to try. There wasn’t much of a crowd for most of the event, but people came and tried a few beers and wandered on. There were some real nice beers and some really yucky ones.

Kurt wasted no time in V’s yard finding a pool to lay in.

My friend K and a few more pups.

Here’s the bar before we went and stocked it up for the weekend.

A few of the decorations.

A view out to the trailer.

Friday was more setup and mexican food. Go-Burger has delightfull breakfast Borittos. The party went into full swing friday night. Lots of folks and drinking and having a good time. There were people I haven’t seen in years there, and it was nice to catch up with them and also the folks I hadn’t seen since last years party. There was a friday night trivia game this year at around 11pm. There was one group of questions that was “what’s in this disgusting drink”. Some of those were real stomach turners.

Saturday started out with more mexican food and a trip by V’s to let the pups run in the big yard and also to pick up more firewood. Then, it was time for the road rally. It was really pretty fun this year. I like the way V had it setup. You get a photo of a place somewhere in Las Cruces. You can try and find it based on just the picture, or you can open up to 3 clues. The first 2 clues are more pictures with more clues in them, and the last one is a GPS coordinate. Once you find a site there is a bag with some tokens in it, the first team to a site gets the token worth the most points, etc. It was nice. We took a long detour at one point because I am an idiot and missed a turn, but otherwise we did well. We only had to open one second clue. I really liked the format this year.

Saturday night was the full on party. Lots more drinking and K was grilling things for dinner. Lots of food, lots of drink. Big trivia game was as silly as it ever is.
There was a obnoxious neighbor that stopped by, but my friend B manning the bar just gave him lots of booze and finally he wandered off to pass out.
Things finally winded down around 4 or 5 am.

Sunday was the after party brunch. It was nice to not have to look forward to the long drive home after the brunch this year, since I was going to stay and work from the trailer parked in front of K’s house monday, tuesday and wed. Got back after brunch and helped clean things up. Lots of trash was generated this year. I guess it’s not too surprising.

Trash pile was most impressive.

The trailer worked wonderfully. The pups got pretty used to hanging out in it and having the a/c and such was handy.
The bed was pretty comfy. Parking and driving and backing were all pretty easy too.

All in all another excellent nukestock.

… to be continued in park 2: hunting in the Gila soon.

I got home this morning around 5-6am. I had a wonderfull time, and the trailer worked great!

It’s nice to be home too however… especially for the yard. I have new respect for people with greyhounds/puppies that always leash walk them.

I’ll try and write up some more detailed posts about the travel, but in a nutshell: Nukestock was great. Working from the trailer in cruces worked fine. Hunting in the Gila was excellent, even tho we didn’t spot anything we could legally hunt.

Slowly digging through the 250+ emails, mailing lists, journal posts and other fun that happened since I had net on thursday…