Flood.

So I'm sure there's a million and a half blog posts about the 2013 flood in Colorado, and here's one more!  I wish I would have been a little more with it and kept better track of the amount of rain that we got, but unfortunately I didn't.  I'm sure I was like lots of other people and didn't realize that our week of rainy weather was going to turn into this!  I'm not quite sure of all the rainfall totals - and it's hard to get an accurate count, but I think at MY house, we got somewhere in the 7" range.  I believe places around Boulder got in the range for 16-18" of rainfall.  For a girl who grew up on a dry land farm in Montana, and lived in arid Colorado for the past 12 years these numbers are shocking!

Our home fared very well, we didn't have any damage and no flooding, which was very fortunate.  We count ourselves very lucky under the circumstances.  There are many folks that have had catastrophic damages to their property.  I wish them the very best and pray that things will work out for the best for them.

So, essentially, the rain started Monday late afternoon/evening.  We were able to work and take kids to day care Tuesday and Wednesday.  By Thursday though, day care was closed, and we were hearing of flooding.  My in-laws came to watch the girls as they have been every Thursday this summer, and they said that it was getting serious out there - lots of water on roads.  I came to Boulder, saw some major flooding happening near the office park, went and got my computer and turned around and went home.  It continued to rain Thursday, and Friday morning, and we got some dry sunny weather Friday afternoon.  I believe we even had dry weather for the most part Saturday morning.  Baby girl had been playing with a plastic container outside, and by Sunday morning at 9:30 am it looked like this:

Using a crayon as my dip stick - this measure to be 5/8" of rain.  I decided to put it back outside and put a new container out to start measuring rainfall.  At 1:30 pm my new container looked like this:

This container after 4 hours of rain contained 1 3/8" of rain.  I then dumped this one, and put it back outside.

At 5:30 pm I brought the original container back inside and took another measurement - I believe this measurement is the 24 hour total from Saturday night to Sunday.  And it's reading just about 2.5 inches.  Wow!

By Tuesday, it was time to go back to work, I was excited to see the flooding around the office park.  Needless to say it was impressive!  This first picture is of a sidewalk that has turned into a river, on the east edge of the office park. 

This picture is on the south-east corner of the office park where the path makes a 90ish degree turn to the north.  A good reference with the bench sitting there - looks to be about 2 feet of flooding there.

This next picture is an underpass;  the boulder creek path normally goes under the railroad.  I would say that this tunnel is 7-8 feet tall?  Completely flooded.

I walked around and got on top of the tunnel and looked down - and was very surprised to see this, the tunnel actually has very little water on it - it's mostly filled with mud!!

And finally, just a picture of what was a parking lot and there's the Boulder Creek Path out there somewhere!!

As a reference - here's an overview map of where I took the pictures:

Image via Google Maps

It's Thursday and it doesn't seem like the water levels have changed any, maybe an inch or two, it's hard to tell.  The part that always amazes me when I walk over there is the sound - it's always surprising to me for some reason that it SOUNDS like a loud river...which duh, it is a river right now, it's just an unexpected sound coming from those areas.  I don't think I'll be out walking on the path for a while!

Let me clear my throat.

I have something that I want to get off my chest today.

First of all, back in 2011 Colorado passed a Bike Safety statute - or something to that effect - that requires/allows cars to pass bikes with a 3 foot bubble on all sides of the biker.  Fine.  It also states that: 

• CRS 42-4-1005 Limitations of overtaking on the left ...an overtaking motorist is allowed to cross over a double yellow line in order to pass a cyclist with a minimum 3 foot passing distance.

You know what?  Great.  That's awesome.  It does NOT say that you can SWERVE INTO ON-COMING TRAFFIC TO CROSS THE DOUBLE YELLOW TO PASS A BIKER!!!!  Is that enough exclamation points for you Boulder?  Seriously.  Some common sense people.  Take a frickin' downer and slow down if you can't pass at that exact moment.

Ok, thanks for that.  I needed it.  

Tea Party.

Matt's sister just got married on the 6th of July, but back in June, I offered to throw a bridal shower for her at our house.  We decided to go fairly simple and just have it be a tea/coffee type deal, so I decided our theme would be a tea party.  I made 4 types of tea sandwiches to go with our coffee and tea, and then decided to also make a cake, of course!  I've been reading this blog lately: http://sweetapolita.com/.  She has tons of fabulous sounding cakes and excellent directions on cake assembly and mixing instructions.  She has a recipe on there for a whipped vanilla frosting, that even has mixing times and speeds for a kitchen aid mixer - which I love - it's essentially fool proof!

So anyways, on her blog she has a recipe for a Vanilla Blackberry Mascarpone cake.  It sounded AMAZING, and she also has a great video tutorial on how do to an 'ombre' type swirl frosting...which I thought sounded fun, so I went for it.

What you can't really see in the pic is that it was supposed to go purple, white, yellow - but the yellow kinda smeared into the white...no big deal.  I have to say this cake was DELICIOUS.  In fact, I normally just use boxed cakes for my cakes and they turn out fine...but this one was very good.  The frosting was so creamy and almost light, which made it very easy to work with.  It also seemed like it didn't crust as quickly as my normal butter cream recipe, which I also LOVED, since there was ample time to go back and fiddle however I needed to.  I think that's a definite MUST for Colorado, with it being SO dry here.  I will definitely be using this recipe again.  I wish I would have taken a pic of the insides, because the blackberry compote was so beautiful!  Yum.

The 4 year old.

It's amazing to me how time flies.  At the moment it seems to be going very slowly, but then all of a sudden it's been 3 months and I can't figure out what I've been doing the whole time!  My oldest had her 4th birthday in May.  I can not BELIEVE that she's four.  She continually blows my mind daily; whether it be something she learned at school, or something sweet and kind that she does for her baby sister.

Last year for her 3rd birthday, I was still in the "4th trimester" with the baby, and we had a hard time getting anything done for her birthday.  I did make her a cake, but it wasn't the greatest or the cutest.  It was a giant cupcake...which I didn't really like how it turned out.  This year we told her we could have a party somewhere and she chose Monkey Bizness.  It's a giant indoor play area for kids, and they have  couple of rooms that they can have parties in.  For mothers day Matt got me a book on cakepops, so we decided that for this birthday party that Miss Muffet could pick out a couple cake pops that we would take as the treat at the party.  Wouldn't you know it, she picked out aliens, butterflies, flowers.  She thought the aliens were super spooky so they were a must.

I have to say though, they were once again a PAIN to make.  The aliens weren't as bad as the butterflies and the flowers.  I was 'gluing' (with chocolate) cake confetti to the flowers and butterflies to decorate them, and was sorta hating every second of it.  I think it took me 7 hours from start to finish...bleh.  They were delicious though - I just used white cake and white frosting, and the kids gobbled them up.  So, I just need to pick something easier next time.

For her actual birthday, which was on a Wednesday, I let her pick out a cake from my cake book.  She has had her eye on the princess castle cake for nearly a year, so I decided we could make it.  The tricky part with this cake was that it is made out of swiss rolls, which was odd, because nowhere in the book was there a recipe for swiss rolls, so I assumed I could buy them somewhere.  WRONG.  After Matt and I both searched in multiple grocery stores, we found those little cake roll things (gross), but that's all we could find.  So for the smaller thinner towers I did use the small ones that we bought, but had to experiment with making a swiss roll from scratch.  It was harder than I thought it would be - and after burning 2, I just peeled off the burnt parts and rolled it up with some whipped cream, cut and froze them.  Come time to cover them in fondant, I thought they were going to be SUPER soggy and gross, so I was very very worried how everything was going to turn out.  When it came time to cut and eat, shockingly it was all pretty good.  I was surprised.

The other one annoying part about this cake was those marshmallows!  The picture in the book had these beautiful well formed perfect looking marshmallows - mine however were NOT so beautiful, so I think the marshmallows look a little crap-tastic, but the Munch didn't mind - she just gasped and said "it's beautiful, mama!"  That's all I needed.

Ladybug.

I just posted about my baby girl being born, and shockingly enough it's already been a year.  My sweetie had her first birthday and to celebrate we threw her a little birthday party with few of our friends who also have little ones around her age.  I decided since we really went big for my older daughters 1st birthday that we needed to do something great for baby girl too.  Enter the lady bug.  I decided a while back that I wanted to make her a lady bug cake that I had seen in my cake book.  After a little internet research to decide whether to make cake pops or cupcakes, I decided to go with a lady bug cake and lady bug cake pops.  In addition to the 'theme' we also got some lady bug birthday hats, with some cute lady bug napkins and plates.  To top it all off we got a pile of red balloons, which all the kids loved!

So here are the cake pops - pardon the picture - I took it at night, and my kitchen is very yellow at night:

They turned out really cute although were a pain to make.  I had never made cakepops before, so this was all an experiment.  I followed the directions on the Wilton website.  I had a few decide to come off of the stick and take a swim in the candy melts, which was frustrating.  And getting the dots on the lady bugs was also a bit tricky.  I decided to pipe the chocolate on the pops since I couldn't quite decide how i was going to get it on there, and so I was having trouble getting nice little dots - instead got nice little points.  I called them dinosaur lady bugs.

Next came the cake.  I first made baked the cake in a bowl and then put it in the freezer, which was mistake #1, because the cake came out a little rounded on top, so when I got it out and decided to cut that round part off, well - it was frozen and was tricky.  Not to mention my recipe was flawed - the cake had good flavor, but was nearly cooked to smithereens by the time I got it done - so it was very dry and hard.  Moving on.  I decided to put a nice heavy layer of butter cream on the cake instead of just a crumb coat, for those who don't like the taste of fondant.  That way they'd have some frosting there and could pick off the fondant.  

After that it was just the red fondant to cover the cake, and rolling out dots, eyes, and head.  I tried to make some curved antenna for it, but they broke when I tried to put them on the head, so I just colored a cakepop stick black and cut it in half, and stuck the black balls on the ends for antenna.  I wanted something like grass to be at the bottom, but I ran out of powdered sugar, and my buttercream was a little loose - so that's what I ended up with.  Overall I love the cake - even though it didn't taste the greatest!

The birthday was a success, all seemed to enjoy the cake, or well...were polite about it!

Shiny and new.

As of 12/30/2012 I was 'eligible' for a new phone upgrade with Verizon - which means absolutely nothing other than the fact that I get to renew a 2 year contract and pay an additional $30 on top of buying a new phone from Verizon at a discounted price...*sigh*.  Anyways, I was able to 'upgrade' my phone, to a new 4g phone, while losing my unlimited data plan..again, some upgrade.  This year I was torn between getting a new Samsung phone, and an iPhone 5.  I've resisted getting an iPhone in the past, mostly because I'm not a mac user, and I am a heavy google/picasa user.  I decided to go with an iPhone this time because they 'just' (this fall) released the iPhone 5 with 4g, and there are enough apps out there to make picasa and google readily accessible, so I ordered up a shiny new iPhone and it was delivered shortly after the new year.

So far I love it - it's smaller than my old phone, but I don't mind the size - it fits nicely in my hand.  I love how snappy and fast it is, and I love the speed of 4G - it's lightning quick - faster than our wireless connection at home.  We have an iPod Touch at home so the operating system was nothing new to me.

A couple drawbacks to the iPhone that I've noticed thus far:
1.  No widgets.  On my android phone I downloaded an app called "Beautiful Widgets", that let me put a 4x2 widget up on my home screen that always showed me the current weather and time.  It isn't apparent to me that iOS allows that, at least google hasn't revealed anything
2.  Custom Ringtones/Sounds.  It sounds like this is possible, but it doesn't sound as though it's as easy as texting a sound to my phone and being able to set it as a ringtone.  I admit that I haven't looked too hard at this, but from what I have looked at I haven't found anything that looks super easy.  My favorite ringtone is a .mp3, and I haven't found a way to use it yet.
3.  Memory - everything that was on my other phone was on a sim card and if I filled it up I could buy a new one or even get a bigger one.  I bought this phone with 16GB of memory, but that's it - once I use it up I have to start deleting, cause there's no option to change out memory options.
4.  Nagging text messages - if I get a text message, and my phone is locked, the phone will keep nagging me every couple of minutes that I have a message...which I think is annoying.  I don't mind one notification of a new message, but I don't like getting CONSTANT reminders that I have a message.  I'm sure there's some way of turning this off, I just need to figure out how.

Other than that I really like the phone.  Everything seems very fast right now, and I haven't had it lockup or do anything weird yet.  Yay!