Friday, February 27, 2009

Apartment dweller

I found an apartment that I could afford and will be moving in on Monday. It's a really small place but it will do for now. This will be the first time I have lived in an apartment since the early 70's. This place is only 12 blocks from Karen's house so walking back and forth or riding my bike when it's warm enough will be the best means of transportation.

It's clear, sunny and quite cold this morning. It was around 16° when I walked Karen to work and when I came back I was walking against the wind and you talk about cold! This was the coldest morning I have been out walking yet. If it's this cold tomorrow and we walk to work I'll have to wear a few more clothes and a hood. I actually saw 2 people on bikes today and they had to be suffering from the wind chill. Ahhhh, the joys of winter!

Monday, February 23, 2009

Jackson Hole, Wyoming!

Yesterday Karen and I drove over to Jackson Wyoming. Everyone calls it Jackson Hole and as you can see in this first picture, it's plastered all over town like that too, but the actual name of the town is just Jackson. Anyway, it isn't that far from Idaho Falls so it doesn't take all that long to get there and the drive is through some beautiful country and with Karen by my side it was a great day. The local park has these arches made from shed elk antlers and the Jackson Hole sign is from some moose antlers. We saw some huge herds of elk and also a few moose along the way. The novelty of all this is a nice change for me from the usual animals I used to see in the Susanville area. But then the best part about yesterday was being with Karen and the fact that she didn't have to work and we could spend the whole day together.

We walked around town and checked out this old bar she told me about that had the coolest motif, a wood decor made from trees that had burls all over them. The bar top had silver dollars embedded in it and they were the old silver dollars, which was way cool. This town is very trendy and we went through some of the shops and checked out what they were selling there but there were very few people which seemed odd for a Sunday. The ski slopes above town had no skiers so I'm not sure if they were open or not. We parked at the small visitor center and Karen was trying to show me something when I took this picture of her.

Along the way to Jackson we had to go by Pallisades Reservoir and it was ice covered but her jeep made a nice contrast to all the white.

We took quite a few pictures of the elk and moose but I didn't want to post all of them here.

All in all, we had a wonderful day out together seeing what were some new sights for me but the truth was it was all about the company.