is this thing on?

We just got back from our final camping trip for the summer and it kind of felt like the death of summer. Is that being overdramatic? I’m really trying hard to not get ahead of myself but I’m feeling depressed that it’s getting darker earlier and that I need to turn on the kitchen light in the morning now. I’m hoping we can enjoy the fall and that snow holds off for a bit so I don’t start uncontrollably bawling. We camped at Chalk Lake outside of Buena Vista. We had assumed we could kayak on Chalk Lake but it turns out that lake is more like a pond and we would be the bane of every fisherman’s existence if we put our boat in the lake. We hadn’t done any research on hiking trails and we were so tired from a sleepless week of nightly 2am thunderstorms and raccoons hulk-smashing our trashcans at 4am* that we took the opportunity to relax and take naps. We did drive up the road to see the ghost town of St. Elmo and that was worth the trip. St. Elmo Ghost Town St. Elmo Ghost ...

Whelp, we officially bit off more than we could chew this summer... A. I signed up to take a three-credit class on Colorado History for the summer. It sounded like a good idea at the time because I've found myself interested in the topic lately and for some reason "summer school" makes me feel like I'll automatically have more time for it; however, I forgot about that other little thing called a full-time job.  Plus, this class is just writing, writing, writing and I resent it so much even though I am learning a lot. I opted to take it pass/fail, foolishly thinking that would relieve the pressure. It turns out I don't know how to purposefully write C work and I've found myself trying to get a 100% in the class. I'm an idiot. B. We decided to start growing vegetable seedlings but by the time they really took off, we were busy with the house painting project and we no longer had the energy to learn how to be farmers. We ended up quickly building and in...

I received this text the other day and I refuse to disappoint my reader! My one, lowly reader. JK, Alicia isn't lowly. We are still plugging along with painting our house. It feels dumb to use the word 'painting' in that sentence because it currently doesn't feel like that's ever going to happen. The weather has been crappy and our house is old. Suddenly all that 'charm' just translates to 'stupid menial tasks we don't want to do'. While we're at it, we decided to replace the door of our attached garage as well as the rain gutters. The garage door is going to go bust any second and so far, when people find out which house we bought they tend to say, "Oh, the house with the crazy gutters". We would like to move away from that infamy. We also want to remove all the weird fake stone from the chimney. We tore a piece off to see what we're dealing with underneath. So far we've found painted brick. Brian submi...