Kevin's musings

Months of slacking

by nirik on Jul.17, 2007, under dogs, faire, site, trailer

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…

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turkey hunting/backpacking trip

by nirik on May.14, 2007, under photos

Then, later in April, I went down to New Mexico for some backpacking and turkey hunting.

It was a bit of a shuffle to find sitters for the dogs/house, but I did manage it finally by having 3 people come at various times. I was worried if it was going to work out right, but in the end everyone showed up at the right times and it all worked brilliantly.

The trip down was pretty uneventfull. Stopped off in Santa Fe to drop off something for my friend D and made it to ALBQ in pretty good time to meet up with friends.
We made it down to the trailhead around 7pmish, still enough light to setup the tent and get our dinner cooked.

The next day we hunted out the morning with no sign of turkles, and then packed up and hiked into our usual camp site. The trail going in is pretty easy, one uphill part and several downhill ones, along with a dozen or so stream crossings. Managed to make in in in good time. Then, the next few days we were on the hunting schedule: get up at 5:30am or so, hunt until about 10, go back to camp and relax, then hunt from about 5:30pm until around 8 or so. Good times. We heard a ton of gobblers, but couldn’t seem to get close to any. We did have a hen come in and walk about 10 feet away. She was very pretty.

One of our party did get sick a day or so in, and he went out then to go and rest up in a hotel. The last day before heading back, we decided to walk out and go camp in another area that we had seen turkeys in last year. Turns out that they were thick in there, lots of gobbling, but again, they were reluctant to come in when called. So, we returned empty handed. Still a very fun time however.

On to pictures:

The view from the viewpoint at the top of the Black Range. You can see for a long ways from there. You can see part of the very very very windy road that goes up there below.

My friend V making a call from the trailhead. This is how he got coverage…

My new trusty tent, purchased right before the trip. It’s a kelty gunnison 4. Not a bad tent. It kept the rain out nicely.
It did rain on us a lot on one of the days.

A before picture of us rogues.

Gobbles the turkey decoy and my friend B.

The tents setup at our camping site.

It was headed right for us!!!!

This was the morning of the day it rained so much. The forest was very lovely though.

Can you spot me in this picture?

My friend B. I think we were standing under a tree hoping the rain would slack off a bit so we could hike back to camp at this point.

The view up the side of the canyon from our camp.

B looking for which way to head.

The river was pretty normal when we got there, but with all the rain that one day it was pretty high by the time we left.
Very pretty though. We did spot trout in some of the bigger pools.

Another shot of the river.

Walking back to camp from a mornings hunting. Yes, thats the trail on the right there.

Lots of wild strawberries there. They were just in bloom when we were there, so of course no strawberries. ;(

On the way out there was this amazing fog in the valley below. I have never seen that sort of thing happen down there, but it was pretty cool.

I did get to use my new UV-C water purifier on this trip. Very handy. No pumping needed.
The tent did great. All my old backpacking gear worked fine.

I figure I walked around 30miles in 3 days.

All in all an excellent trip. I hope we do it again next year.

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extreme bowling with greyhounds

by nirik on May.14, 2007, under dogs, photos

On April 22nd (yes, I am still behind on posts. I went down for the extreme bowling for greyhounds.

It was a fun time as always. The place was pretty much packed. I think they got people for every lane.
There were of course tons and tons of dogs around. After pondering on it, I decided to just bring all my boys. I thought kurt would have a bad time, but he seemed to do ok, even with the fans they had running there.

I bowled pretty poorly… 135 the first game and just barely breaking 100 the second. I decided to go socialize instead of bowling the last game…

A shot down the alley…

Nash didn’t care if Lilly used him as a pillow.

Even Merlin and Kurt settled down after a while.

Nash loved all the attention.

I managed to get one “bonus” pin, and picked up some dog treats for the pups.

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Almost home for hounds visit

by nirik on May.07, 2007, under dogs, photos

On April 21st, I went up to Nunn, Colorado and helped out at Almost Home for Hounds.
Almost Home for Hounds is a facility that takes in racing greyhounds and cares for them until they can be transported out to homes
in states that do not have Greyhound racing. It was a fun time. They put me to work sweeping and mopping, but I also managed to help with turnouts and petting pups.

Here’s the girls being turned out in the near yard, and some longer term residents in the next area over. The Girls are let out first, then the boys.
There weren’t too many hounds out there the weekend I went. Probibly about 15 each boys and girls, about 10 longer term residents and about 25 or so in the isolation area.

Here’s the girls heading back in.

I didn’t get any pics of the boys or the 2 puppies they had there. ;( The boys were a bit on the rambunctious side.

Also out there was Aria the puppy. She had a growth plate problem and needed to have surgery on her leg.
She’s the sister of another puppy I know, Maisey… She was very friendly and getting around pretty well despite her cast.

It was a fun time, I should try and get back up there sometime again soon…

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CU installfest

by nirik on May.07, 2007, under linux, photos

On April 13th, I went up to CU for a Linux installfest for cs/engr types.

It was a fun time. They had a bunch of pretty modern lab machines people could install on and play around with. All of those would boot off the net and otherwise were pretty well supported hardware. A few folks brought laptops and desktops of their own to install. Almost all of those installed just fine too. There was one old dell laptop that just didn’t want to install via the net, so that guy ended up just taking a set of install cd’s home.

Hopefully the folks there learned some good Linux info. The distro of choice was Fedora, which I know quite well, so it was pretty easy to help out.

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Nash graduation

by nirik on May.07, 2007, under dogs, photos

I have been even more of a slacker than usual updating here… will try and catch up over the next week now.

On April 11th, Nash graduated from the Petsmart Basic Obediance class. He did the final test with almost no problems. He usually starts out being very focused and follows all the commands,
then gets bored after a while and stops doing them. Luckily the test was pretty short, so he did great.

A bit of pre-test playing with his friend.

Time for the test already?

The graduate.

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First camping trip of the year

by nirik on Apr.17, 2007, under dogs, photos, trailer

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.

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photo post

by nirik on Mar.24, 2007, under dogs, photos, trailer

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.

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photo post catchup

by nirik on Mar.16, 2007, under dogs, photos

Once again I have been remiss in posting pictures as they come in. Here’s a catchup post…

Nash loves to play with any of the other pups in the training class we are going to, but there’s this small black dog that he really really loves.
Oddly he treats her very gently… love nips all over her and plays as much as he can…

Lets play!

Hey! How about I hold down your head and chew on your tail some?
Other pup: OK!

We went out to the colorado Pet expo last weekend. It was quite a nice fun adventure.
Nash found out that he could lay in the way and people would stop and pet him.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get many pictures of the event…