Friday, December 22, 2006

From 33 Inches to Fargo

Candy: My mom graduated from Minnesota State University-Moorhead today with a B.A. in English/Mass Communications. Oh, and she was summa cum laude, too, the highest honors reserved for those with a 3.80 GPA or better. We're so proud of her.

We drove through the afternoon and throughout the night last night to be here in Fargo-Moorhead for her special day. If you haven't already heard, Denver got hammered with a major upslope blizzard on Wednesday, dropping 33 inches of snow combined with 35 mph winds. Both our Enterprise offices closed early that day, and it took me 2 hours to drive the 4 miles home that afternoon, while it took Tim 4 hours to drive 12 miles. Crazy.
There were hundreds of cars that were stranded and abandoned on Wednesday afternoon and evening. I've never seen anything quite like it. I wasn't sure I was actually going to be able to make it home on Wednesday afternoon, and avoided getting stuck several times before finally succumbing to the drifting in our apartment complex. I had to abandon the Element in the road inside our complex and hike across the parking lot to get out of the storm.
On Thursday, after hearing that both our offices would be closed for the day, we decided to venture out around 11am to assess the damage and to see whether we would, in fact, be able to leave Denver to drive to Fargo. This is what we saw when we rounded the corner of the garages in front of our building.
We don't own a snow shovel, so we took some plastic bowls with us to hopefully help scoop some of the snow away. You can see how much fun Tim was having with that!
Fortunately, two guys from another apartment offered to help shovel away the drift behind the El, and with their help pushing while I drove, we eventually came unstuck. After a quick check of the internet to see whether I-25 was still closed, we decided to venture north and take our chances getting out of Denver.
Fortunately, the roads were open, and except for a bad stretch for about 100 miles north of Cheyenne, Wyoming, we had great roads and ended up driving across the western part of South Dakota & North Dakota before reaching I-94 and heading east to Fargo. We arrived in Fargo around 7am and slept for a couple hours in a mall parking lot before checking in early into our hotel.
The commencement ceremony went pretty quickly, despite the large number of graduates. My younger brother Clint and 2 of his sons also showed up, and then my older brother and his family joined all of us at Clint's house for a reception/supper, after which we gave our nephews their gifts.
I would have had more photos to post from this trip except that in my hurry to pack up and get out of Denver I forgot to make sure I had the battery charger for my camera, so when we arrived in Fargo I realized I had low batteries and no way to use the camera today.
We are heading back to Denver tomorrow afternoon, planning first to spend some more time with my mom and Clint & his family. It'll be nice to have a couple days away from work to spend together, and of course the captive time in the El is always a treat.
Enjoy the holidays. I'll leave you with this photo of Chase in our hotel this morning. He's fast asleep now, having been worn out by 5 little boys under the age of 7.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Our Place

Candy: We finally hung some photos in our apartment today today, and are getting close to beind fully unpacked. I'm hoping that by the end of this week we'll be all set up.
We were able to sell several of our extra IKEA furniture pieces online at craigslist, which helped both in having extra cash as well as helping us be rid of stuff we don't need.
I took a few quick snaps of some of our rooms so that you can get a sense of what our living spaces are like. The photo above is obviously our living room, with a huge vertical blind covering our patio door. This is a closeup of our media center and photos. Notice the baby picture of Tim next to the lamp on the left.
I began working with Enterprise last Monday. After three days of classroom training I spent two days at my branch in Broomfield. I have been driving around town like crazy, but it makes the time go by quickly, which is great. I'm not sure where this career path will lead as of yet, but I'm interested in exploring the several different directions Enterprise has to offer.
We were snowed on last week (10 inches) and it's been pretty cold, setting record lows for Denver in fact. I had to drive from Broomfield to south Denver for training, and after it snowed all evening and overnight on Monday, my commute (normally 45 minutes with rush hour traffic) lasted two and a half hours. I actually clocked one of the many sllllooooooowwwwwww miles at one mile in 12 minutes. Crazy. However, I arrived safe and sound to training, albeit an hour late, and all was fine.
Tim and I are working the same hours, usually 7am to 6:30pm, which are long and early. You know neither of us is an early bird, but Tim has already adjusted after six weeks with Enterprise and he assures me that I will, too. For now, I'm taking his word on it! Not sure I'll ever adjust to the early mornings. I may have to learn to drink coffee.
One good thing about being up and about so early in the morning is that I've seen some really incredible sunrises this past week. That helps. This place is so incredibly beautiful. I need to get a pocket camera and just take it with me all the time.
Chase seems to have adapted easily to being home alone again, and I think he's actually kind of happy to have such uninterrupted sleeping time. He's such a great dog, and we're really fortunate he's so easygoing.
Tim is still enjoying his job very much and has nearly convinced me that I will enjoy it too, simply because it doesn't have to consume our lives like our previous professions have. I'm having a little withdrawal from managing 16 people and having 15 projects going simultaneously all the time. When it's slow in the branch I think I'm going to go stir-crazy, but fortunately so far it hasn't been slow for more than three hours at a time. Still. It's been a little rough for me that way.
This is a shot of our kitchen. As you can see, it's all white and a bit of a mess right now. You can also see from this photo and from the photos of our master bathroom that the apartment is wheelchair accessible, which provided us with a great apartment for a great price.
Here are photos of our bedroom and master bath. We especially love the painting of the Coliseum we bought in Italy last summer, along with the photos of our two favorite beaches in France.

We also have a second bedroom and bathroom, as well as a dining room, but they're not even close to being set up, so no photos for now. I'll take some when they're done, and include them in a future post.

We bought some frames this year and have finally printed and framed some of our favorite photos from Europe and from our Pause on Purpose Tour. It's so awesome to see the places we love every day.

Not much else is new these days. We're working and learning to have fun in our off hours. It's actually kind of nice to have time outside of work to spend time doing things we like that are unrelated to our jobs. Kind of a novel experience for us. The reinvention that we've undertaken seems to move both quickly and slowly all at once. Some things are quick to change, and others not so quick. That's life, though, and we're embracing it all, even the frustrations, because we know that we'll be better people as a result.

Please write or call when you can and let us know how you're doing. We'd love to hear from you.

Enjoy your week.