I forgot how much work getting Calvin ready to go in the morning was, especially on a family expedition into the wilderness where we needed to carry not only all of our equipment but also enough clothing to keep warm in the cold. We did manage to remember Calvin's mittens (though Kiesa briefly panicked when she couldn't find them because Calvin had put them, himself, in the trunk; he spent all day correcting us when either of us would refer to his "gloves" because, clearly, they were "mittens") and all of the rest of our gear. We stopped briefly by my office to handshake with the rest of the group (which turned out to comprise solely of the expedition leader and one other guy), then headed up Boulder Canyon, through Nederland and Rollinsville, to the end of the road at the East Portal. The parking lot was filling up with those intent on enjoying the winter trails, including several groups with serious backcountry skis. It was windy out in the open at the parking lot, pushing the cold air well into frigid. We donned our gear (and I wished, ever so briefly, for a larger vehicle that could support such an exercise) and convinced Calvin that he really did want to ride in the backpack while Kiesa and I snowshoed in. He wasn't especially happy about the wind, or the exhaust fan at the tunnel, or not being able to see Kiesa as she tried to walk behind me so she could catch Calvin's boots if they fell. (He did like seeing the trains queuing up at the portal.)

About a quarter-mile from the trailhead, not far inside the formal boundary of the James Peak Wilderness, our expedition leader veered off the packed trail into soft snow and stopped a hundred meters off the trail in a small space screened by trees from the trail. We packed a circle to form the igloo's base, then began building blocks for the igloo walls. The igloo-building tool was designed to build the blocks in exactly the right place using a pole attached to a central pivot, changing the distance from the pivot to the wall on a precise pattern to build just the right catenary shape for maximum stability. Once we'd filled one block with snow, we'd pack it down, wait for it to stabilize, then move to the next block in the circle.

Building an igloo near the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel

While I worked digging snow to fill the mold, Calvin tried to amuse himself in the snow but soon grew cold and bored. Kiesa carried him in the backpack back to the car, where they stayed for long enough for me to build two complete rings and start working on the third. She brought a large wool blanket to set out over the snow, and I abandoned the igloo under construction to try to heat water for lunch. I couldn't get enough pressure in the camp stove to get it to light, and it wasn't immediately clear whether there was actually very much fuel in the stove (I hadn't refilled it before leaving, thinking I probably had enough fuel), or whether the below-freezing temperature had caused other problems in the stove.

We did have backup energy bars for lunch, but Calvin wasn't especially interested in the bars and was starting to get cold, so we decided to scrub and return to civilization. We stopped for lunch at Black Pepper Pho in Boulder and continued home. I declared the expedition, our first serious winter expedition with Calvin, to be a success on the basis that we did not require the assistance of any emergency services at any point.

Well, this was a family outing. Ya know, one of those occasions where four people try to get together for an evening, and it's considered a success if no one has been murdered by the time it's over.

- Bitscape (original citation lost to time)

My other major accomplishment for the weekend was finishing the stain on the deck railing. I stripped the stain and the poorly-applied wood putty the previous weekend, and asked Kiesa to wash the wood on a warm day in the middle of the week, so the railing was waiting for me to stain. (I justified taking Saturday off from the deck because the weather forecast called for an even warmer Sunday.) I applied two coats of stain and ended up with a nice-looking deck railing. If I look carefully I can still see some of the wood putty I couldn't quite scrape away but it looks much better than it did when I started.

Stripped deck railing prior to being stained

Deck railing after being stained

Kiesa has been painting trim throughout the house and acquiring soap dispensers and other things to make the house look better. I still need to finish organizing my stuff in the basement and take a bunch of stuff to CHaRM (cleaning up the garage in the process), but I did at least manage to spend some time this week cleaning off two old hard drives and wiping them for safe disposal. It's not unreasonable that we might finish in a few weeks and start thinking seriously about putting our house on the market.

The first was easy enough: replace the picket boards on the garden gate. The ground and the gate had shifted since we bought the house, and the bottom of the boards rubbed against the ground and eventually broke off, creating an ugly toddler-sized hole in the gate. (Kiesa had been worried that Calvin might exploit that hole to gain access to the front yard, but these days Calvin can simply unlatch the gate and walk out anyway.)

Kiesa did the leg work to discover that they are French Gothic pickets and picked up eight boards at a fencing store somewhere in the greater Longmont area. (When she identified the specific style of the pickets the fencers asked if she was from Wolf Creek, because apparently our subdivision is the only subdivision in the area using this style.) Not all of the boards on the gate were really beyond repair, but I wanted to replace all of the boards to make it look somewhat consistent.

The second project was somewhat more involved. Last spring I discovered that I ought to have been staining the deck every couple of years and undertook a major project to do so. My first pass involved a few missteps on the leftmost section of railing: I tried to fill the (gaping) cracks in the boards with putty, and painted only one coat of stain, which left the railing with large pink splotches of partially-stained putty. I finally decided to stop worrying and love the cracks in the wood, because there was really nothing I could realistically do about it, and left most of the rest of the cracks in the other sections of deck unfilled.

That still left the improperly-stained railing to deal with, which had the disadvantage of being quite visible as the first section of deck one sees from the dining room. I picked up a container of stain stripper at my local big-box home improvement store and set out to strip the stain and the putty it protected. This took longer than I expected, but I ended up removing most of the stain and almost all of the putty. I ran out of spring-like La Niña days before I could finish the cleaning and re-staining but the weather forecast leaves me optimistic that I'll be able to finish it off this month, especially if I can convince Kiesa to help me.

• About a dozen three-ring binders filled with notes and homework from all four years of college, plus a few from high school
• Several old calendars
• Two cordless phones that we haven't used since ditching our land line years ago
• Walla Walla College graduation program, 2006
• Fairview high school graduation robe
• High school chemistry lab notebook, 1996-1997
• Academic-year weekly planners from college
• Two years of of issues of the Collegian (2000-2002)
• A strobe light
• A bunch of jewel cases and old cdroms
• A bunch of 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch floppies
• Defiant's Borg mouse, ca 1998
• Star Trek: TNG trading card game
• Morphlix STB #10
• :cue:cat
• Solekai yo-yo
• Bolder Boulder bib number 1997
• A bunch of mostly-completed but mostly-unpainted models
• Multiconductor telecom cable, rescued from Meske Hall trash
• A kite I built as a class project in or around eighth grade

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I moved almost all of this stuff into our current house, and haven't looked at it since, but at least I'm getting rid of it now instead of moving it yet again.

(This stuff is the really-low-hanging fruit. I didn't touch anything that I put any level of creative effort into producing, so I still have a few boxes full of various notebooks, mostly from my time during high school and college, of random writings and other stuff that I didn't want to go through in detail.)

• Kiesa, Calvin, and I flew from Denver to Portland on Boxing Day. I still can't tell whether declining the full-body scanners is a denial-of-service attack I'm perpetrating on the TSA, or whether they're just messing with me and don't care. I keep on thinking I ought to write an irate letter to my congressmen but I somehow doubt it'd make much difference.
• While shopping for Christmas I discovered I could order online from Powell's Book's website and have my order delivered to the bookstore in the airport for easy pickup on arrival. This ended up working perfectly, but it wasn't entirely clear when my order was going to be fulfilled; I placed my order late in the week before Christmas and the order didn't actually arrive (at the airport) until we were waiting for our plane in Denver.
• Kiesa's mother picked us up at the airport in Portland. We drove across the river into Vancouver to eat at The Olive Garden with Kiesa's extended Stone family. I learned that one of her aunts does contract transcriptions for my employer.
• Kiesa's mother had made candy for Christmas. I ate only the almond toffee, which was absent from Kiesa's Christmas preparations.
• Kiesa's mother pulled out Tristan's old toys for Calvin to play with, including a large (two feet long) tin fire engine, and a large Tonka crane that I remember having (in somewhat worse condition) in my childhood. When it came time to put Calvin to bed, he exclaimed "I want the earth to go around!" so the sun will rise and he could keep playing with the exciting toys at Grandma's. (We've explained that he has to go to bed because the sun has gone down because the earth has turned away from the sun.)
• I did something unfortunate to my lower back between the flight to Portland, lugging my luggage around, and sleeping on the dreadful pillow-top guest mattress. My back got worse until I started getting serious with ibuprofen on Thursday night.
• I ran a lap and a half around Lake Sacajawea in Longview on Tuesday morning, then stopped by Starbucks for coffee on my way back home.
• Calvin got a bunch of Duplos from his grandparents for Christmas, including a Toy Story set with a Buzz Lightyear minifig, and a large fire station with matching fire engines.
• We visited the Kelso public library inside the local indoor shopping mall on Tuesday afternoon. I took a few quick notes from Washington Off the Beaten Path.
• On Wednesday, we drove down to Vancouver to visit the small Pearson Air Museum at Fort Vancouver. Calvin seemed amused by the small collection of planes on display, and was especially fascinated by the cut-away Pratt & Whitney R-4360 radial piston engine.
• I picked up a signed copy of Live Bait in the museum gift shop. Willy and I drove into Tillamook this summer to see the author, a Second World War fighter pilot, speak at the library.
• After the museum we headed back to Longview and failed to do anything interesting for most of the rest of the day.
• We finally mustered a short trip to the Longview library a few minutes before closing (at 17:00).
• Calvin started insisting that he wanted to go home ("to Colorado"). It wasn't entirely clear what exactly he wanted to do at home but I could sympathize.
• On Thursday morning, Kiesa and I left Calvin with Grandma and drove up to Seattle for a few days by ourselves. (We had originally intended to visit Seattle in the summer but never quite got around to it.)
• I spotted an exit labeled Sleater-Kinney in Olympia and wondered about its connection to the band. I later learned the band was named after the exit.
• We drove through Seattle and headed for lunch in Everett. Kiesa wanted to visit the Mermaid Market Cafe, but they were closed for the Christmas-New Year's interregnum, so I consulted the Yelp app on my phone and found The Sisters a few blocks away. It turned out to be a bohemian sandwich shop adjacent to the local food coop, and was exactly what we were looking for in lunch.
• We made it to the Boeing Factory Tour just in time for our scheduled 14:00 tour of Boeing's widebody jet factory. We watched a short video (which included a half-second clip of a Sonic Cruiser flying by at the end without any further explanation) and boarded a bus to ride around the north end of the main runway at Paine Field past a bunch of widebody jets waiting to be picked up by their new owners. We walked into the pedestrian tunnel between two bays used to build 747s, took a cargo elevator to the observation deck, and looked out to trace the path taken by the wings (built up from the spars in that very room) and the front section (including the cockpit) through assembly. (Most of the company had the Christmas-New Year's interregnum off, so not much was happening in the factory, but we did see a bunch of planes in various stages of assembly.) Most of the 777 and 787 are built elsewhere and merely assembled in Everett, but the 747 is still substantially built from its constituent components in Everett (reflecting the state of manufacturing circa 1969 before the 747 itself helped create globalized manufacturing with just-in-time delivery used by the 777 and 787 lines).
• We returned to the bus to visit another part of the massive construction hangar, this one overlooking the 777 and 787 production lines. Substantial sections of the 777 are produced elsewhere and assembled in Everett, and virtually all of the 787 is. I saw a 787 destined for launch customer ANA and a 787 destined for United on the production line, and a number of 777s not specifically identified by customer.
• Like many tours, it helped to know a great deal about what I was seeing to get the greater context and why certain things were important. I did not know, though, that the trim and balance on the rudder are so important that they are installed, pre-balanced, with the tail portion of the airline's livery already painted, which makes the unpainted plane look as if an older rudder had been reused for a new plane (and provides some identification for the unpainted plane, if one can read airline liveries by the rudder section alone).
• I presume I visited the building used for the 777 static wing test. I try not to think of that video when I happen to glance out the window during flight and see the plane's wing bobbing up and down.
• The unpainted 787s looked substantially different from the unpainted 747s and 777s. The earlier, aluminum-bodied planes were coated in a pale green protective plastic, power-washed away before painting, but the 787 simply displayed the outer white layer of the composite hull sections.
• We returned to the visitor's center and were deposited in the gift shop. We purchased a plush 787 for Calvin as compensation for ditching him with Grandma.
• We drove south into Seattle and got stuck in rush-hour traffic in a light rain, which may have been exacerbated by the advent of tolling on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge that very day, which freaked out cost-adverse Seattle drivers and cut traffic on the bridge by half. The satellite navigation on the Prius we borrowed from Kiesa's mother steadfastly refused to update its estimated trip time based on actual conditions on the ground, apparently assuming we'd magically pick up speed just around the next corner.
• We stayed in a small Best Western in Denny Triangle.
• We walked to the nearby Tutta Bella Neapolitan Pizzeria, which proudly imported all of its ingredients from Naples and was certified by some organization that certifies Neapolitan pizza. It was located immediately above a Whole Foods where we picked up dessert.
• I sat in the hotel's hot tub to try to soothe my back. The ibuprofen was probably more effective.
• On Friday morning, we ate at the hotel's free breakfast, which was roughly all I could ask for in a free breakfast. (This counts as "damning with faint praise", in case you're keeping score at home.)
• I could actually see some blue sky, so we walked to the Space Needle and visited the observation deck. I visited the Space Needle in 2007, but Kiesa hadn't actually visited it, despite living in Washington most of her life. (Her parents are not especially interested in tourist things.) I could see some of the snow-covered Olympic mountains across the sound, though I didn't know enough to identify specific mountains.
• Back on the ground, we visited the adjacent Experience Music Project, seeking out the science fictiony pieces of the museum, which were interesting but small. (Kiesa skipped the Nirvana exhibit, which included a handful of smashed guitars, the victims of Kurt Cobain's stage shows.) We saw artifacts from both versions of Battlestar Galactica, some stuff from Avatar (including a display that looked a lot like Microsoft's Surface), and I breezed through the horror movie exhibit, which included a facehugger and full-sized xenomorph from Alien.
• We played tourists and took the monorail to Westlake Center as if it were a legitimate form of mass transit.
• We ate lunch in the food court at Westlake Center. I spotted a bowl of udon noodle soup as we entered and decided to hunt that down before I spotted an Indian restaurant (in the food court) serving dosas. Kiesa decided to get a dosa and I got udon noodle soup.
• We hunted down Seattle's legitimate mass transit in the bus tunnel under downtown and purchased stored-value ORCA cards.
• We took the light rail one stop south and visited the Seattle Central Library. (On the sidewalk in front of the library a young woman asked if we knew where "the courthouse" was. Kiesa was about to say we were tourists when I said I knew there was a [Federal] courthouse in the block immediately on the other side of the library. This seemed to satisfy our interlocutor, who thanked us and headed off in that direction.)
• We walked the spiral stacks from 0 to 999, stopping in a few key sections for further examination. The Chinese history section seemed especially old, but the Indian history section seemed more up-to-date.
• We took the bus up to Capitol Hill and visited the Elliott Bay Book Company, newly moved from it downtown location. We were underwhelmed; we'd been led to expect a northern (grunge-infused?) version of Powell's Books but the reality on the ground was somewhat different.
• We had time to kill before eating supper, so we got tea at the bookstore cafe and played a game of Carcassone.
• We walked a few blocks to Annapurna Cafe. When we climbed down the stairs into the basement restaurant and I smelled the Himalayan flavors wafting up the stairs I felt like I was back in India, and immediately began scanning the patrons for white faces, as if to reject any establishment with too many tourists. Our meal was excellent; I had a Nepali curry with more naan than I could eat.
• We took the #8 bus back to our hotel. I sat in the hot tub.
• On Saturday morning, neither of us were especially interested in eating the free breakfast again, so Kiesa found the Macrina Bakery & Cafe. I discovered it'd be faster to walk there than take the bus, and neither of us wanted to try parking in Seattle, so we walked. (The Google Maps app on our phones provided excellent walking and transit directions, but I typically find Yelp's reviews far more enlightening.) The place was packed, the wait short, and the food excellent.
• We walked a few blocks to the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park, which featured a handful of inscrutable pieces of sculpture.
• Kiesa headed downtown to look at art galleries (in a desperate attempt at finding something worth hanging on our walls), and I walked back to the hotel, picked up our car, and drove to the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park, located in the original 1930s art deco Seattle Art Museum building. I liked the Buddhist and Hindu sculptures in the atrium, and the woodblock prints by Yoshida Hiroshi.
• Kiesa met me in front of the museum and we drove to an all-vegetarian Thai place she found, In The Bowl Vegetarian Noodle Bistro, which featured more Hindu idols than I'd seen at the museum jumbled together with a few pictures of the Buddha on the wall, a picture of Jesus, and some Native American art. My peanut sauce udon noodle bowl was fantastic.
• On our way out of Seattle, we took a drive through West Seattle (one of the city's major residential neighborhoods), which Kiesa had never visited. The clouds parted as we drove, and by the time we reached an overlook with a great view of downtown across Elliott Bay, Mount Rainier was visible to the south-east in all of its snow-covered glory.
• We headed back to Longview, arriving around 18:00. Calvin was very glad to see us, and was also happy to see the plush 787 we got him.
• We flew back to Denver on Sunday (New Year's Day). Driving down to the airport I got a good look at Mount St. Helens, and in Portland we saw Mount Hood, completing our tour of active stratovolcanos overlooking major Pacific Northwest metropolitan areas.

Ted continues to work as a software engineer at Qualcomm in Boulder. This spring he was promoted to Staff Engineer and moved into a window office with a mountain view. In the fall he took on a lead role in a small device driver team, which he finds both challenging and interesting, often at the same time.

Personally, 2011 felt more like a retrenchment: I didn't do anything fantastically new and exciting but kept doing the things I did the previous year. I continued to study India, shifted my focus eastward to China, and got a community borrowing card at Colorado State University's library. I climbed more mountains but kept coming face-to-face with reminders that I can't do everything I want: I have to pick roughly three things and run with that.

2012 looks like it'll be a big year: Our plans call for selling our house and moving to Gunbarrel; starting Calvin in preschool; and visiting Hong Kong around Christmas. Professionally I need to take my new team lead role and run with it as far as I can. There are mountains climbing my name that won't climb themselves, and foreign countries (and special administrative regions) that won't visit themselves.

Here's to 2011. And 2012.

• My sister Bethany talked my mother into coming out to Colorado for Christmas, so I didn't have to travel; all I had to do was clean the house and figure out where everyone was going to sleep.
• This included cleaning the carpets on the main level of the house, which I've resolved to do at least quarterly.
• My father and brother Willy drove out to Colorado, arriving on the afternoon of Tuesday, 20 December. My mother flew out on the same day.
• We put Calvin in our room and let Willy sleep in Calvin's room. This mostly worked.
• I went to work on Wednesday and managed to wrap up my end-of-the-year development project for a big customer you've heard of.
• I took Thursday off as a vacation day, which proved convenient, since I woke up Thursday morning to eight inches of snow on the ground.
• Willy built a reproduction of the Buddha of Bamiyan in the snow, and he and I dug a tunnel under a snowbank to connect two sections of roads sized for Calvin's dump truck, which he was pushing through the snow.
• I drove Willy, my father, and Calvin to REI in Boulder, once the roads had cleared somewhat, in the afternoon on Thursday so Willy could look at backpacks. I showed off the current version of my favorite 3100-cubic-inch Kelty soft-frame daypack and managed to avoid buying anything. Calvin fell asleep on the drive into Boulder and didn't wake up until Willy and I finished at REI. (My father watched him in the car.) I carried him into the Bookworm, where he snacked and tried to wake up from his nap.
• Willy noted I'm the only person he knows who reads academic monographs for fun. (He reads academic monographs for grad school.) I quizzed him on the appropriate level of academic snobbishness I ought to evoke with respect to works of popular history.
• I drove to the airport on Thursday night to pick up Bethany and her husband Josh. I-25 and E-480 were fairly clear, but CO-119 was icy; I was a few miles from home on my return trip when I started drifting into the left lane but managed to regain control before I ran out of lane to drift into.
• On Friday, I took Bethany and Josh to REI (my second trip in two days) for their annual pilgrimage. I managed to avoid actually buying anything, again.
• Willy cooked an impressive Indian meal for supper on Friday.
• I went running Saturday morning, while the rest of my family went to church, and ended up with ice coating my beard:

  

• I drove into Boulder and took Bethany, Josh, Willy, Kiesa, and Calvin to my favorite tea shop in Boulder, Atlas Purveyors, and ordered three pots of tea to share: the newly-arrived coconut puchong (an oolong infused with coconut milk), a gen mai cha, and a Darjeeling. Calvin got a small glass of milk.
• On Saturday afternoon, we drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park, looked out from Many Parks Curve (the winter closure gate on Trail Ridge Road, where I managed to bloody my knuckles scrambling up the rocks), and hiked a little ways up the Cub Lake Trail in the fading light before heading back home.
• We ate cheese fondue for Christmas Eve. Willy ate humus.
• On Christmas morning, we opened stockings before breakfast. Calvin got into Christmas this year; he had the motor skills to open presents and quickly figured out that the wrapped presents (which began appearing under the tree for weeks ahead of Christmas) contained exciting things for him.
• For breakfast, I cooked potatoes o'brien with locally-grown garden rosemary. (The rosemary is not organic, and hadn't been loved, but rather treaded with a sort of benign neglect, and seems to do well indoors, even in the winter.)
• My father dressed up as Santa (though without the beard and wig, which had fallen out of shape, and looked pretty funny) in the Santa suit my Logan grandparents sent me that had been used in family Christmas gatherings in my childhood. We're not especially enthusiastic about letting Calvin believe in Santa. Calvin wasn't quite sure what to make of Santa until we pointed out it was (his) Grandpa dressed up as Santa. (I believe there is only one Santa, but he has many avatars.)
• Shortly before opening presents, Calvin was scrambling up the piano bench from under the piano and slipped and hit his head on the sharp edge of the box holding the base of the pedals under the piano. I was within arm's reach when he fell, and knew he'd need some level of comfort, and quickly realized he was bleeding. I applied pressure and called to Kiesa for assistance. We couldn't easily apply a proper adhesive bandage, since the wound was in his hair, so we held a paper towel to stop the bleeding. He ended up with a centimeter-long scab on the back of the top of his head.
• Calvin got a lot of toys from everyone, including a car-carrying tractor trailer and four race cars from his Great Grandpa Logan, a hand-made wheeled elephant from Willy, and a balance bike from me. (One condition with my getting the balance bike was clearing out the other lesser wheeled vehicles from the inside of the garage that have been accumulating over the past two-and-a-half years.) I had him open the balance bike last, and we took him out for a lap around the block:

  

  He seemed to get the hang of the bike quickly, though he wasn't especially interested in more than one lap.
• Christmas dinner was large, and tasty.
• We left on Boxing Day for Portland, for Christmas with the other half of the family.
• Hosting Christmas for my family seemed to work at least as well as I could have expected.

The one problem with our home network was our use of the cheap ActionTec modem/wireless router. It sort of worked, but its network services were not really up to my specifications, so I set up my DHCP and DNS services on a spare Linux machine in my basement. This worked pretty well until that Linux machine decided to die earlier this year, when my vague future plans to migrate off the spare Linux machine onto a lower-power Linux-based router suddenly gained urgency. I picked up an Asus RT-N16 in the summer and spent the Fourth of July configuring it as my new router. My first mission was to install the newest version of DD-WRT, then figure out how to use PPPoE to log into the DSL account, demoting the ActionTec modem/wireless router to a simple DSL-to-Ethernet bridge. This worked perfectly, and I set up the router and didn't look back. (I continued to amuse myself by setting up buildroot to create my own uclibc toolchain and try to compile and install the newest version of dnsmasq to configure my DHCP server to allow assigning multiple hardware addresses to the same IP address so I could hot-swap between my wired and wireless networks without changing IP addresses, but I haven't quite gotten that working yet.)

We did have one lingering problem after the Great Router Migration: Our network connection would occasionally slow to a crawl from our wireless-connected notebooks on the main level. (I put the base station itself in the basement, where the wiring is easier to maintain, at the center of the wired network.) I suspected wireless interference, especially because the reported connection strength often dropped, but didn't take the time to figure out what was going on.

This afternoon, it got worse, and I finally decided to do something about it. I parsed the output of iwlist with a tiny Perl script and discovered the identities of the networks in the neighborhood:

I found a useful Q-and-A on Slashdot and learned that there are only three non-overlapping channels: 1, 6, and 11. My wireless network, WFESTNET, shared its channel 1 with only two other networks, of the twelve visible from my dining room, but two other networks occupied the overlapping channels 2 and 3. Short of knocking on my neighbors' doors and asking them to change the channels of their wireless networks (after war-driving to figure out exactly which neighbors own which network, though I can reasonably surmise that "JesusLives" belongs to the pastor next door), I changed my channel to 11, which is not only sparsely populated but also doesn't overlap with other channels. In my non-exhaustive survey so far, the new channel seems to be working famously.

Our current plan calls for selling our house in Longmont and moving to Gunbarrel next spring, with the precise timing to depend on the liquidity of the housing market. It's not yet clear what our longer-term (three to five to ten years) plan is, which impacts the rent-or-buy decision almost as much as the condition of the housing market three or five or ten years hence. (I have a complicated spreadsheet calculating our variable and fixed costs of home ownership and estimates the equivalent rental cost (that is, the money we spend that we don't cash out of the house at the end) taking into consideration the purchase price, mortgage terms, sale price, duration, mortgage interest tax deduction, and ongoing maintenance. Building this spreadsheet led me to two new financial functions I hadn't previously known about, cumipmt (cumulative interest payment) and cumprinc (cumulative principle payment).) Given the spread in fixed-rate mortgage rates versus variable-rate mortgages (since no one expects wild economic growth or higher interest rates in the next several years) and our relatively limited time horizon, I may have almost talked Kiesa into a 5/1 ARM, but I expect she'll want to run all of the numbers all over again next spring.

This means we've been looking at preschools for Calvin in the greater Gunbarrel area. Boulder seems to have a paucity of daycares for infants and toddlers but a good selection of preschools (though three of the four preschools we looked at do take toddlers, and two of the four take infants). From research online, Kiesa picked four candidates: Mountain Shadows Montessori School, Boulder Country Day School, Miss Catherine’s Creative Learning Center and Infant Center, and Boulder Journey School. These preschools represented a fairly broad spectrum of educational philosophies, but she decided to skip the nearby Waldorf school. (The application asked questions like, "How was the pregnancy?" and "How long did you breast-feed?") She scheduled tours at each of these facilities and I joined her for three of them.

We visited the Montessori school first and sat in on the preschool class, where a bunch of kids were sprawled out over the room doing various learning projects. I had only the vaguest idea what I was looking at, but I eventually figured out what they were doing. One kid had a thousand-element string of beads spread out most of the length of the classroom and was counting off the beads in units of 10 and labeling each one with a printed label. At first glance the kids seemed to be playing quietly, but on closer inspection they were supposed to be playing in a very specific way, according to the rules on which the manipulative was designed. This school was very proud that it was an AMI-certified school, which I quickly labeled the "orthodox" Montessori, as opposed to the "reform" or "heterodox" AMS certification. I was happy to accept Dr. Montessori as a visionary in her time but I had trouble imagining that a hundred years of research in child development and psychology could be easily dismissed as irrelevant.

We visited Boulder Country Day School next, located near the geographic center of Gunbarrel, and serving kids from preschool up to eighth grade. It was clear from the outset they were very professional and a little pretentious; two grade-school kids in their school uniforms met us on the sidewalk in front of the building and pointed us in the right direction. The school takes itself very seriously and implements a fine classical education; preschoolers learn French and gradeschoolers learn Latin. I think Kiesa bonded with the school librarian over her questions about the integration of the library materials into the school curriculum. I wasn't quite sure what to make of the pre-k kids doing worksheets tracing the letter "k"; my best understanding of the current state-of-the-art child education research is that one need not start with "real" education so young, but what makes preschool essential is the human-interaction soft skills. I saw at least one coworker in the tour, though he split off into the middle school tour and I focused on preschool.

In the entrance of the preschool building a sign read, "Unattended children will be given espresso and a puppy."

I skipped the Miss Catherine's tour (among other things, I had a hard conflict) and joined Kiesa for the final tour at Boulder Journey School. This preschool is the current incarnation of the preschool Willy attended in Boulder from 1991 to 1992, then known as Make a Mess and Make Believe. (Bethany and I would add "it's cleaned up" to the name, which seemed to suit our impression of Willy's habits of cleaning up after himself as a preschooler.) Since then it changed its name, moved to far north Boulder, and adopted a new cutting-edge educational philosophy, based on the schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy.

(Last week was an inauspicious week to think about anything coming out of Italy, as Italy suddenly became the most recent domino to wobble in the Euro debt crisis. On Wednesday -- the day before our tour at Boulder Journey School -- Italian government bond yields shot up above 7% and global markets plummeted. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi finally resigned on Saturday after parliament passed its austerity measures. Here's a look at The Economist's cover photos of Berlusconi.)

While touring the airy and somewhat scattered school, I tried to remember what I saw while Willy was in preschool and captured some vague memories of dimly-lit halls at an abandoned elementary school in south Boulder filled with art projects and exhibits and things that seemed as if they were supposed to be somewhat educational if I could only figure out what they were supposed to be. The lighting had changed but the accoutrements in the hall remained. The school had an interesting child-based philosophy: they start each day with a "meeting" in which the teachers let the preschoolers decide what they want to do that day, within the general bounds of what's available for them. This was a far cry from the "play with these manipulatives and you'll learn something" Montessori structure, or the classical-education-scaled-down-for-preschool at Boulder Country Day School, and seemed to fit what I expected in a preschool, though a nagging voice in the back of my head asked at what point I expect children to start building structure into their educational experiences and doing things they don't want to do because it'll build character.

After touring the schools, Kiesa and I went out to eat last Friday night to discuss what we had seen and decide on our course of action. (This appeared to be a bad night to waltz into downtown Boulder without a reservation, as the restaurants were full on the first night of "First Bite Boulder", a multi-course fixed-menu event. Kiesa's first choice, Leaf, was full, so we wandered through the crowds downtown before ending up at Bombay Bistro, a good (if somewhat stereotypical) implementation of northern Indian food.) We compared notes (hers typed and in detail, mine mental) and concluded that, at the very least, we were not lacking options. I worried, briefly, that I was making one decision that was going to affect the entirety of Calvin's education, but decided that wasn't worth worrying about. We eventually settled on Boulder Journey School as our tentative first choice, though we won't know until next spring if they have a preschool slot available.

We took Calvin to Scott Carpenter Park today for a little sledding, though most of the snow from Wednesday had melted.

Calvin and Kiesa climb the hill after sledding

I woke up alpine-early, drove to Wild Basin, and parked at the Sandbeach Lake Trailhead in the dark. I pulled out my headlamp for illumination and started the four-mile hike to the lake. (I've hiked to the lake itself as a destination, but today it was relegated to my approach.) After hiking a mile later I started to worry whether I had turned off the lights on my car. When I parked in the dark I needed a bit of light to see what I was doing, so I turned on my parking lights but didn't remember turning them off. (I knew my car would beep to warn me when I opened the door with the drive lights on, but I didn't remember if it would beep to warn me if I just left the parking lights on.) I debated turning back to double-check but didn't think that was necessary and pressed on.

I reached Sandbeach Lake in the early morning light a little before 08:00 and realized that I had forgotten to charge the AA batteries powering my GPS receiver, and I didn't have any spare alkaline batteries in my pack. (I also forgot my sunglasses, an easy mistake to make when I pack at night and leave early in the morning, forcing me to squint all day long.) I've grown attached to, and somewhat dependent on, the map on my GPS receiver for navigation, especially off-trail as the second significant part of my climb would be. I did have a printed map, but while I'm proud of my map-reading skills, locating my position, off-trail, on a map without any other equipment is tricky, at least at the level of detail necessary to make small navigational choices. I decided to press on, though cognizant that I was losing my margin for error, I resolved that if anything else went wrong I would abort rather than let my tiny mistakes compound.

I saw two people at Sandbeach Lake, and other evidence of camping (a bear canister on the sandy beach). I headed west around the lake and followed a sparse network of social and game trails onto the east-facing hillside forming the long ridge from Mount Orton to Chiefs Head Peak, separating the Hunters Creek drainage to the east from Lion Lakes to the west. (My topo map actually refers to this ridge as "North Ridge", as if it belongs to Mount Orton rather than Chiefs Head Peak.) I missed my GPS receiver immediately: it would have helped point me in the right direction up the forested slope.

As I climbed the ridge, I caught glimpses of the large south face of Pagoda Mountain to the north and eventually entered a meadow clinging to the side of the ridge. This, I decided, was why I climbed: the broad meadow, the crisp fall air, and the expansive view of the rocky peaks to the north. I could see the south side of Longs Peak and its major buttress peaks. The Homestretch and Narrows looked snow- and ice-free, and with my binoculars I could see a number of climbers ascending and descending the route. I studied Keplingers Couloir from its base above Hunters Creek, and saw the Palisades blocking the direct route from Keplingers to the Loft, but didn't see anyone on any other routes.

Longs Peak and Mount Meeker from North Ridge

I climbed through treeline, negotiated a spruce thicket and a boulder-strewn unnamed point on the ridge, and finally got a good view at my destination: an uninspiring talus slope at the end of a very long ridge to the north. I looked west to the Lion Lakes and the sheer east face of Mount Alice and continued slogging up the ridge. I felt my strength flagging but resolved to reach the summit. I reached the ridge between Chiefs Head Peak and Pagoda Mountain, separating Wild Basin from Glacier Gorge, and looked (carefully) into Glacier Gorge, still shadowed from the morning light. I slogged up the ridge, hopped boulders when it seemed I was reaching the top, and finally reached the summit. I was standing on the third-highest point in Rocky Mountain National Park; only Mount Meeker and Longs Peak were higher, and I had climbed them both.

North slope of Mount Alice

I looked into Glacier Gorge, looked at the other mountains in the national park and beyond, and pulled out my binoculars to study the Keyhole Route: I could now see the entire south and west aspects of Longs Peak, from the Keyhole through the shadowed-and-icy Trough to the brightly-lit and apparently snow-free Homestretch. I signed the summit register and searched (unsuccessfully) for names I recognized. I ate lunch and started my descent a little before noon.

Longs Peak, Pagoda Mountain, and Mount Meeker

I had gravity on my side for the descent, but that didn't make the long slog down the talus to North Ridge seem any shorter. I soon grew tired of the dead grass on the ridge but it stretched on for two miles before I began my descent to Sandbeach Lake. I had to guess at which point to descend, and when I caught glimpses of the lake through the trees I realized I was heading too far south. I altered my course to execute a descending traverse to my left, heading to the north, hoping to catch the lake and the trail on its north edge. I intersected the lake, bushwhacked around its western edge to the north, and caught the trail. I still had four miles to hike, but all I had to do was follow the trail downhill to the trailhead.

Even this proved easier said than done. I ran out of water and didn't want to eat the energy bars I had even though my blood sugar was crashing. I managed the first two miles down the trail ok but struggled to make the last two miles at a fraction of my normal pace. (It didn't help that my check-in deadline of 16:00 was approaching, though after my experience on Mount St. Helens I established a protocol governing the use of my emergency locator beacon to signal my safe return to the trailhead. When I was within sight of the trailhead, a few minutes after 16:00, I self-tested my beacon to signal that I was back, though the "I'm ok" e-mail and text message that I expected the self-test to generate took another forty-five minutes to reach Kiesa.) I eventually reached the trailhead, exhausted, and was relieved to see that I had, in fact, remembered to turn off my lights before leaving the car in the dark in the morning. I drove home, stopping to pick up a liter of Gatorade at a gas station in Lyons to rehydrate and refuel.

My experience bonking fourteen miles into a sixteen-mile hike reminded me of my experience on Kings Peak this summer. I resolved to rework my hydration and nutrition protocol: I need to make sure I can consume adequate calories, on the order of hundreds per hour (I think I burn roughly 500 calories per hour of aerobic hiking; I can't really expect to replenish all of those calories in real time but I can't rely entirely on my reserves), which probably means more sports drink, more energy bars that I actually want to eat, a bigger lunch, and a liter of Gatorade waiting for me in the car on my return.