Howdy!

Hey guys! We're back (at least for now)! We've been busy since our last post on here, but that means we have lots to share, too. When we last met up, we were just married, and coming off a wonderful weekend spent with many of you. 

Since then, we were lucky enough to take a wonderful honeymoon together through California and Oregon...

Spend another wonderful year in the West, exploring our beautiful surroundings while digging in on graduate studies...

And move across Laramie to a new place with a bit more room for gardening, projects, and an office.

However, one of our biggest bits of news from this past year concerns the arrival of a new four-legged friend. Meet Shay, our new family member. She spent 9 months in a shelter in Missouri before it was closed by the state, and was brought to a rescue shelter in Fort Collins, CO. We met her the day after she arrived in Colorado, and brought her with us to Wyoming two days later. Here she is on the day she finally put her shelter life behind her!

 Shay has adjusted happily to the life of a free dog! It's been amazing to watch her learn new skills and commands-she didn't even know her name when we adopted her! She's also gotten much healthier-she couldn't even walk around the block without getting winded when we first got her, and now runs multiple miles on days when she's not busy hiking or helping Charlotte with fieldwork. She's also gained a tremendous amount of confidence in new settings (not too shabby for a dog who spent more than half her life in a small concrete kennel)!

Through it all, she's taught us a lot about patience, persistence, love, and just how much one dog can make us laugh!  

In future posts, I'm guessing we'll have a lot of training and outing updates to share with you as Shay continues to learn and explore, but in the meantime we should share one skill that she didn't need any training for, whatsoever.

Nighty night!

Morfar

Before returning to our usual blog updates, we have sad news to share. Bent Gabrielsen, Charlotte's Morfar, has passed away in Denmark at the age of 86. 

Do yourself a favor, and quickly perform a Google Image search for "Bent Gabrielsen." The resulting photos will tell you more about Morfar's amazing career as a goldsmith and silversmith, and the impact that he had on Danish design, than I ever could. 

Beyond evoking warmth, motion and beauty from metal, Morfar (along with Charlotte's Mormor) played an elemental role in shaping Charlotte into the incredible person she is today. Charlotte's artistic skills, love of the outdoors, and appreciation of nature's subtle beauty mirror so much of what her grandparents saw in the world. 

This August, Morfar traveled to New York to attend our wedding. I was touched by his enthusiasm, support, and happiness to join his family at the celebration. 

Most of all, I found it incredible that even in his last visit to America, Morfar was exactly as he was the day I met him: engaged, razor-sharp, intensely curious about the details and projects surrounding him, and fiercely proud of his family. 

Please join me in sending your thoughts to Charlotte and her family as they remember Morfar-and celebrate a life lived to its fullest. 

Oh by the way...

We got married!!!! More posts to follow soon (I know, I know, this isn't the first time we've made that promise), but we wanted to extend a November greeting to all of you.

We're Back With a Bang!

Hi all! After some technical difficulties here in blog headquarters, we're back at it from our Rocky Mountain outpost. As many (probably all) of you reading this are aware, Charlotte and I took care of some business since we last met. We: (a) got a new car, (b) started our third year of graduate school (aka "PhD School"), and, oh yeah, (c) got married!!! We're happy about it all, but since you can find our wedding photos elsewhere, we won't dwell on that occasion. Nope, this isn't a post about our wedding. It's a post about guns. And not our stance on gun laws and gun regulations (spoiler alert: we're pretty doggone liberal, so we'll let you do the math), but a simple reality:

Guns are fun.

Well, at least that's true when you're extremely cautious, surrounded by knowledgeable folks, and in a beautiful setting. And that's exactly where we found ourselves the day before we departed Laramie to fly eastward and get married. As a wedding gift, our very gun-savvy neighbors invited us to their family homestead about 30 minutes outside of Laramie for some shooting lessons and target practice under close supervision. It was absolutely gorgeous there, and well worth the drive just for the scenery.

That said, we soon found that an impromptu target range had materialized amidst the straight-out-of-a-Western setting.

Business time! First, a nice straightforward 0.22 rifle, to warm up the trigger fingers.

Next, we got to try our hands with a few semi-automatic handguns. These let you fire off a few rounds at a time, so in addition to target shooting, we were able to pull off that (surprisingly!) satisfying pow! pow! pow! effect that you see in cop dramas. 

However, our time at the ranch was short (we had to pack for a wedding!!!), and there were 8 guns to try. So, after dialing our aim in a bit, we transitioned over to fun tasks, like testing out an awesome 6-shooter (just like you'd see in Western movies!)

 And obliterating one of the worst books ever written (Martin Hollis' The Philosophy of Social Science, if you were curious).

And using a massive .30-06 rifle (something you might employ to take down an elk, if you were so inclined) to dispense with a couple cans of shaving cream!

 All in all, we had a lot of fun living a morning in true Western fashion, and are very grateful to our neighbors for their hospitality, generosity (bullets aren't cheap!), and expertise. While we won't be acquiring an arsenal any time soon, our morning on the ranch was proof that it's fun to step out of your comfort zone and embrace your surroundings, whatever that may entail! Anyway, until our next adventure made possible by Stella the Subaru, we hope you have a great week!

Canyonlands National Park

Hey everyone! In today's post, we finish sharing our Spring Break photos, and prepare to get more current here. However, before leaving Moab and Utah, we were also treated to some amazing sights in Canyonlands National Park. We snagged another nice campsite, this time within the national park, and set our tent up in the middle. The one side made parking easy... 

...while the other made it extremely painful to crawl out of the tent for a 2AM bathroom run. Yowzah!

In addition to being surrounded by lots of cacti (which, don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not complaining about!), we also found ourselves in the midst of some amazing scenery. It was incredible how different Canyonlands and Arches felt, despite only being about 30 miles apart.

All this open space at Canyonlands left us pretty exposed to the elements. The rangers spoke of a coming windstorm. Despite the gorgeous blue skies, they were definitely right! As we embarked on our "big" hike for the day (to a place called "Upheaval Dome," thought to be an impact crater caused by a large meteor), we felt the winds begin to pick up. 

By the time we reached the Upheaval Dome, the winds were blowing at about 50 miles an hour!

The wind kicked up tons of dust, and pretty soon we could see very little. Before we lost visibility, we took these two photos of the dust storm moving up through the canyons. 

Shortly afterwards, all that dust and wind began finding its way (RELENTLESSLY!) inside our tent, and we shifted from picture-taking mode to hold-the-tent-together mode. Accordingly, we'll end this post (and our Moab recap) here, and wish you a great week. We'll catch you soon, hopefully with some more current photos to share!