Happy Monday!

Only great minds can read this...

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too

Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

Blizzard Pictures

We were able to measure the snow with a 12 inch ruler at first (picture shows 7 inches at the time, taken around noon Thursday)

The snow was very high up against our sliding glass door on our patio, making our house cold.

14 inches of snow almost fell in the house when we opened our sliding door.

The sun is coming out right now (taken 10am Friday), but this is the snow that is left over from yesterday's blizzard.

You can't see this during the storm, but we usually have 3 steps going up to our front door and a side-walk right infront of that.

Lots of snow!

This was taken at 7 pm last night, and it snowed well past midnight. Needless to say, cars were burried and stuck this morning.

~ Thomas playing in the storm ~

~ It was almost up to my knees ~

We ended this blizzard with 15 inches of snow on our patio (the foot ruler wasn't big enough anymore). The news says we could have had more snow fall, but 15 inches is what stuck and didn't blow away in the wind. Like I said, it is sunny now, but the roads are icey so we are "snowed in" for one more day off work. We have classes and birthday parties this weekend we are planning on running. However, we are excepting more snow on Monday so we will see how that turns out. For today, though, we are taking is slow, relxing, and will probably go play in over a foot of snow later on. Enjoy your weather!!

11 Mile Bike Ride!

Before this snow storm we are having today, the weather was nice over the weekend. Saturday, we went on an 11-mile bike ride(I was impressed with myself)!!! It took us 1.5 hours from start to finish, including a few stops to take pictures. Thomas put the bikes on our bike-rack and we drove to downtown Denver. We went on a bike path that followed a creek. Surprisingly, I was actually more sore the night of the bike ride than the next day. Here are some pictures from the 70 degree day:

Bikes on the bike-rack

The path - we started where the red circle is and went all the way down. Next time we might try the path up (it looks shorter).

The creek the path followed

We got off the path to find this street and say we were "near Flordida"

Home Sweet Home!

THIS is what a blizzard looks like...

Just last week, I posted about us not getting a lot of snow this season. Well, we are making up for our loss. Today a blizzard hit us, and we are snowed in. It started snowing at 8am and we still have a 90% chance of snow until 1am tonight. We went to work thinking it was going to be a few inches, but when schools were closing and nobody was showing up for our gym classes, we decided to close our business the rest of the day. The 2.8 mile drive home was the longest and most frightening thing! Our car got stuck so many times and couldn't make it up the hill. All the cars around us were either stuck, too, or where spinning and driving sideways. I thought we were going to get slammed into! We are home safely now with over 1 foot of snow pushed up against our sliding-glass door from the wind (the weather man just said that our city has had 11 inces of snow fall so far, as of just 1:30pm). We will see how the roads are tomorrow with up to 12 more hours of snow action...

Watch the video below to see what a blizzard is! I'll post pictures later on when I'm done taking them throughout the storm. Don't you wish you were here with us?

Location: looking out My Gym's back door - Arvada, Colorado

No Snow

Since some of you have been asking me "how's the weather?" I thought I would tell you why I haven't mentioned anything big on here.... we don't have snow!!! It apparently is the driest winter Colorado has had since the 1880s. It has been nice for us to get used to the snow slowly (and it has only rained once since we moved here), but now a lot of fires are happening. Here are the numbers the news just did a story about for Denver:

• Current snow fall from Sept. 2008 - March 2009 = 18.8 inches
• Arverage snow fall in past years from Sept-March = 51.3 inches

Sept. '08 = zero inches

Oct. '08 = zero inches

Nov. '08 = 1.7 inches

Dec. '08 = 10.3 inches

Jan. '09 = 4.9 inches

Feb. '09 = zero inches

March '09 = 1.9 inches (so far)

These numbers show that it's amazing that Margaret, Sherry, Angela, and Micah were able to see snow (even if it was just on the ground) when they visited over November, December, and January. The weather lately has been in the 60's or 70's during the day - beautiful! However, sometimes it seems a lot colder because of the wind. We have this coming Sunday off, and we are looking forward to being outside either hiking or bike riding. We hope the weather stays this way, but with the snow season going all the way through May, I'm a little worried we might get a down pour sometime (how many inches of snow fall does it take to call it a blizard?). I'll let you know if anything changes. In the meantime, enjoy the funky Florida weather for us!

120 kids!!

We achieved a personal goal! When we took over our My Gym in October, there were around 80 kids enrolled. We made a thermometer to look at and track our progress everyday (of how many more kids we could sign up). With 80 kids enrolled at the time, we made 80 the lowest number on the thermometer. In October, we set our goal to have 120 kids enrolled (this would pay the gym's bills and our loan payment). For weeks and months, we stayed in the 80's with equaling out how many sign ups and cancels we received each week. Well, our Open House was a break through for us because ever since, we have enrolled more children than the amount of cancelations. Our thermometer finally reached the top last week... 120 kids! For the past few weeks, we have taken a picture of our lovely drawn thermometer to show our progress. Our next break-even goal is 170 (this would pay personal bills, too), so I guess we will have to keep the thermometer going on the ceiling.

Five weeks ago - 81 kids

Four weeks ago - 96 kids

Three weeks ago - 105 kids

Two weeks ago - 110 kids

Last week - 120 kids

Hiking - Part 3

Lookout Mountain - Sights

This road is a "U"

The viedo below is a pan of the view we saw. Again, you must visit to truly know how beautiful (and high) this was! This post ends the story of our hiking adventrue. I don't know when our next day off is, but we hope to take a bike ride somewhere to see more of Colorado.

Hiking - Part 2

Lookout Mountain Hiking

I was a little cold and had to wear Thomas' jacket

On the way up the mountain, I had to pull a tree down...

Ok, sorry! I'll put it back up.

Taking a break to sip some water from our Camelbacks

We made it to the top!

These pictures don't even do it justice. The sights we saw from the top of this mountain were undescribable! We were litteraly on the edge of the mountain to take these photos. Please come visit sometime so we can take you to this beautiful view!!

Where the Buffalos Roam

On our way up the mountains, one of the brown signs said 'Buffalo Herd Overlook'. When we pulled off, we didn't know why we never saw these animals before. Buffalo were litterally right by the highway! There was a barbed-wire fence keeping them together, but we were able to stand as close as 5 feet away from these big animals. It was amazing! The video below will show you how close they were to the highway and hopefully show you how big they were. Just be glad I didn't post the picture of their really, really, really big poop!!!