The best summer yet

I have to say that this is my best summer yet here in Buena Vista. I've finally met some great friends with similar interests which helps this town finally feel like my home. It was a hard transition for me to uproot my life from Denver and put a distance of 125 miles between the friends and family I have known all my life. Kirk has always felt at home here since this is where he grew up, but I on the other hand didn't really know what to expect. I just knew that I was willing to give it a go because I felt like the Denver city life thing was old hat and I was ready to try on the "mountain life" that has been Kirk's dream ever since I've known him. I'm not going to lie and say it was an easy adjustment for me. I think part of the problem was living in the tepee. We were somewhat isolated up in them there hills which impeded us from having much of a social life. We did meet a few people in town that we became friends with, but I have to say that I continued struggling with feeling confident that this was the right place for us. The other part of that was the continuance of living in a temporary situation. We had moved around and traveled for so long before settling here that I was couldn't help feeling like a small potted plant. It wasn't until we bought a permanent structure of a home last October where I was able to break out, dig in and expand my roots. Living in town has opened up a whole new group of friends to us. I can't explain how good it feels to walk around town recognizing faces, waving to friends and having the sense that we really do belong here.

I recently met a great group of women who are all active outdoors people too. We decided to start mountain biking together and it's been a blast! Last year I was really into running and was able to check off running a marathon from my life list. I've been looking for a different activity since my back still aggrevates me when I run and I think mountain biking is the ticket. It's low impact on the joints and it's a great balance of adrenaline, technical thinking and good ol' heart pumping aerobic exercise. I never thought I'd be a mountain biker much less pick it up at 36 years of age, but isn't it the darndest thing that life can still suprise you.

So lately our lives look like this: wake up between 7 and 8am (alarm clocks are only used when absolutely necessary), have a liesure coffee and breakfast on the couch, walk to our office which is 5 minutes from our house, get some work done, leave around 5pm, walk 5 minutes back to our house, grab our gear and go down to the river park which is another 5 minutes away. Right now Kirk is really into kayaking because the water is so high, but occassionally he's off on a mountain bike ride. I usually ride down to the bridge to meet a couple of the gals for a mountain bike ride and then Kirk and I meet back at the house at dark to eat dinner and go to bed. Then we do it all over again the next day. It's pretty awesome to be so close to the activities that we love. We always think back to our Denver days when it took us between 30-60 minutes to drive home after work and then another 45-60 minutes of driving to get to a place where you could kayak or mountain bike so your actual activity time was pretty limited. We feel very fortunate to have carved out the life we now have, but we did make quite a few sacrifices to get here...so essentially we feel like we earned it.

Stepping up in the world

Today has been a long awaited day for us. We worked on our bathroom after work last night until 11pm and it was soooo worth it! We now have a working shower and a functioning toilet! Woohoo!

We've been showering at the local gym now for the last 14 months. When we lived at the tepee last summer we would come to town to work out and have a hot shower. I remember looking forward to indoor plumbing as we were buying our house in town last September. However since we moved in we were not brave enough to shower in the existing avocado green tub that was coated in a thickness of mold. We finally got around to ripping out the tub a few months ago and have been living with a construction zone in the bathroom ever since. We bought a corner shower and Kirk worked very hard to finish installing it two weekends ago. He's now a master plumber and carpenter. :) It felt like it took forever but it was time to call in the drywaller who came last week to put up some new walls and finish them off for us. We had to take out the avocado green toilet (boohoo) so the drywaller could refinish the walls behind it because the bathroom was in such a bad state of disrepair from the previous owner. She never took the time to deal with the leaks or the mold or anything else. So we set up the good ol' camp toilet from the tepee days in our shed outside and have been using that for the past 10 days. It didn't feel like too big of a deal since we had lived like that for so long before. Overall though we have been pretty anxious to get our bathroom up and running.

Kirk got up yesterday morning and laid the new linoleum that he had been cutting to size the previous evening. It turned out really nice for a first timer! After work yesterday we went home and Kirk installed the new shiny white toilet while I finished painting and then he worked on installing the shower doors. It looks like a totally different space now which is so exciting because it was pretty gross before! It really is the nicest room in the house now. We woke up this morning and tried out the shower. Ahhhh! I can't even put it words how lovely it is to shower in my own house. I'm so tired of public showers and the nastiness others leave behind...hair, band aids, dirty washcloths, athlete's foot, etc. Ack! I've been thinking back on how long we've had to deal with public showers. South Pole for 2 years, traveling for 5 months and living here for 2+ years. I think we've earned a private bathroom. :)