Beer and Beautiful Views

On Friday, Sarah took off again leaving me home alone. This time she headed to Mississippi for her cousin Brian's wedding before heading back to the work site in Texas. That left me to plan my own private weekend, so rest assure it didn't involve house work or personal hygiene.

Since purchasing our bikes, Bella has discovered her new favorite form of exercise. She loves to sprint next to me while I ride on the open-space trails next to our house. At first, I figured that I could outrun her and really tire her out, so on a nice long straight away I put it in high gear, stood up on the pedals and started pumping like mad. After about 30 seconds I look down next to my bike and there is Bella, loping along like, "no big deal." Then she sees a town of prairie dogs and takes off after them. I think, "this is my chance to get a good lead," and I keep going as fast as I can. After she plays an overly-large game of whack-a-mole, she catches back up no problem. Now I'm starting to realize that even with the aid of machinery, I have no chance in hell of outrunning this dog. I'm also realizing that when I take her jogging with me she is probably bored out of her skull. I took her out riding a few times on Saturday and she never seems to get bored with it.

On Sunday I decided to get out of the house since it was such a beautiful day in Denver, so I packed up the dog and my snow clothes and headed up to the 4th of July Trailhead. Or attempted to anyways. The trail head is west of the town of Eldora but the road was snowed in for the season. I ended up parking as far as I could along the road and just started snowshoeing up the old mining road with Bella. I definitely hope to come back to this trail come summer time because it was a beautiful day. Plus at the end of the trail is an abandoned mining town from the 1800's which I think would be a great place to take pictures.

Bella of course had a great time playing in the snow and I think I ended up taking more pictures of her than the actual scenery.

Sunday I also brewed my first batch of beer in over a year. Now that I'm down to about one 6-pack of my own beer, I decided that it's time to start up again. For my most recent batch, I decided to brew an American Hefeweizen styled after Bell's Oberon. Right now it's sitting in the closet bubbling away like a child motor-boating his milk. Smells great!

Flickr

Arrrrrrrr, I be a captain!

So technically I got promoted to Captain on December 25th, because that is my Date of Rank with the Air Force.  Of course, as is tradition in the AF, you are suppose to have a promotion ceremony where a higher ranking office administers the oath and pins you on.  My commander, LtCol Grafelman asked if I wanted to do a ceremony, and I told him only if we could do it when Sarah could come.  We decided that we'd do it at our holiday party, which was held at the Wynkoop Brewery in downtown Denver on January 9th.

My boss, Major Eder and the Colonel pulled me up in front of the 120 guests and said a little blurb about my career so far, and then gave me the oath. I must say that it was pretty weird doing it in front of so many people, especially considering I don't know most of them yet.  I was just happy that Sarah got to be there.

And as you can tell, all sensible Air Force officers where light blue shirts.  It's just how we do it.

Here are the pics.

Yeah Wife!

So Sarah is finally home for a significant amount of time (which means she may have to leave again within a few weeks, but not until then!)  So far we've spent the weekend doing nothing much in particular.  Yesterday we tested out our new bikes and rode to the west side of Denver and back.  We both have realized that we haven't ridden bikes in years and now our butts hurt quite a bit.  We either need cushier seats or cushier butts.  We're both pretty excited about the prospects of biking this summer.  We'll have to see if we can find some novice mountain bike trails that we can hit on the weekends.

Stock Picks

For years now, I've been an avid reader of financial web sites and other areas that dispense free investing tips.  A few months ago I decided to try my hand at stock picking since I had some disposable income sitting around in a savings account.  I started picking stocks at the Motley Fool (one of the most popular investment sites) and I was astonished today when I logged on to see that I'm in the 99.21 percentile of investors in terms of picking stocks that beat the S&P 500. 

Now if only I had enough money to actually follow up with my 60 stock picks...  All in good time I guess.  Now if I could get you all to send me your money to invest, I can start my own Ponzi scheme and make myself rich!

If anyone wants to risk their own riches on the whims of myself, you can see my picks here.