Because it is warm in January

We have been experiencing a mild winter so far this year with the afternoon highs being near 70 for the last two weeks or so. Therefore we decided to take advantage of the weather to hike up “A” Mountain on the campus of ASU to watch the sunset. We are planning a lot of hikes over the next several months.

I have also added photos to the ASU photo album since this weekend’s hike was on campus (normally it would have gone in the AZ fun album). In addition, I have added a Family album with some pictures from the weekend as well. Over the next several weeks I will be reorganizing the albums.

Strange week kept getting stranger

Short weeks can be such a pain in the neck. Tuesday was the first day of classes at ASU and everything started off quiet enough. There were no surprises or faculty panicking about stuff not working.

Then there was Wednesday...

The State of Arizona is suffering a major budget deficit and supposedly will run out of money in April or maybe even March. Also, we had a new governor sworn in since Gov. Napolitano is new Secretary of Homeland Security. On Wednesday morning the faculty and staff receive a dire email from President Crow (see email and report at AZCentral). So morale was pretty low and stayed that way the rest of the week. There have been a lot of protests and more details of how bad things could be emerged on Friday at AZCentral.

So on the way home I decided to take a different way home. Usually I bike down a road with a real nice bike lane, but on Friday I decided to go a little further south and bike along the canal. I had never taken this route to go home, but I have ridden it before. There was rain in the area, so what made the ride especially nice was the fact that I was chasing a rainbow all the way home. I felt that everything was going be okay and that hope was still alive.

Until I got to the last street to cross...

As I approached the street I was going to turn on to head home, I found it blocked. Two cars had an accident and somehow both of them ended up in the canal as pictured above. I think that everyone walked away from the accident since I was saw one woman climb a ladder out of the canal and did not see rescue personnel with anyone else. It took them at least five hours to clear that accident. But at least I was able to move on and finish chasing the rainbow home.

Oops... been busy

Oops, it has been too long since I have updated the blog, so I will try to catch things up here and now.

Christmas was a very nice time here, but we missed seeing our friends and family back east. It just so happens that this was the first time since 1994 that it rained on Christmas Day. The good news is that most of the rain came down while we were at the movies, but it stopped right after we got home and was nice enough for the girls to play outside with their presents.

The following weekend was the grand opening of the new light rail. It was the coldest weekend we have experienced here with overnight lows at freezing and high in the upper 40s. However, we still volunteered for the light rail opening. We helped with distributing commemorative t-shirts and directing pedestrian traffic and bypassed riding the light rail since the lines were over three hours long for a lot of the time.

New Year’s Eve was a nice quiet affair at home. It was neat to see that the Times Square broadcast was tape delayed for our time zone.

One of the things that made the holidays interesting was the fact that I worked during the holidays. I am used to getting the entire time off from work between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day, but that also means that I do not get the other holidays during the year. However, at ASU we do not get that long break, but we do get the other holidays throughout the year. I took advantage of the quiet campus to get things done.

The last big thing is that Dawn’s mother was visiting with us for the last two weeks. It was nice to have her in town and Dawn and the girls really enjoyed spending time with her.

We have a lot planned for the year and we look forward to posting all of our adventures here,