My friend Lauren and I spent a couple hours last Sunday planting seeds for some winter vegetables, and the broccoli and radish seeds are already sprouting!  So exciting!

What a day!  Quick summary of Saturday's accomplishments:

• Weeded, shoveled up, and de-rocked a significant section of the strip.
• Removed the insane briar roots (they feel like wire!) in this same area.
• Planted four hydrangeas, one mountain laurel,  two azaleas, and fifty bulbs.  
• Composted all leaves/vines/etc., and swept gutter.
• Spent three hours at the Huntsville Botanical Garden for their Dog Days of Winter event.  Nacho chased the ball so many times at one point we thought he might have had a stroke.
• Chainsawed down some trees.  

She's a beast!

Puppy love at the Huntsville Botanical Garden and in the sunroom at home.

Sunday evening cookout!

We had friends over a couple weeks ago and made slow roasted lamb and moroccan vegetable stew from Neil Roake's fun cookbook Shiny Happy People.  The food was fabulous and the book is really fun to look through!  I recommend you check it out if you have the opportunity.  

Michael and I are usually total snobs about southern sunsets; they just aren't that great compared to the New Mexico and Utah skies we grew up with.  However, this past Tuesday left even us in total awe.  We both agree it was the most beautiful sunset we've seen since moving to the southeast (12 years ago for me, 7 years ago for Michael).  The entire week was actually full of really beautiful skies - so refreshing!

We had an awesome run this afternoon on the Monte Sano State Park South Plateau Loop and McKay Hallow trails!  The weather was 60 degrees and perfect.  Nacho had a particularly good time.

Just got back from Glenn Research Center after several days of test planning meetings.  The photos above were taken in a lab I walked around during one of our breaks.  The top image is of the end of a large (~22' diameter) vacuum chamber, and the bottom two images are of solar thermal hardware.  

We (well...mostly Michael) spent some time this afternoon starting where we'd left off on picking up litter on the unfinished portion of our yard, or as we call it, "the strip" (it's a narrow strip of land between two heavily trafficked roads).  This was our fist trash collection effort of 2011, and we have high hopes of getting the bulk of it done this year!  Last year Michael took over 1500 pounds of garbage out of the strip to the city dump (including the entire front end of a car!).  Lucky for us, two of those garbage carts provided by the city were among the items dumped on the strip recently, so getting rid of all the garbage we pick up has become three times as easy!  We were concerned about where these garbage carts had come from and whether or not we had an ethical obligation to call the city to come pick them up.  However, after discussing the issue with the mayor (our across-the-street neighbor) and getting his endorsement to keep the carts, we are moving forward with a clear conscience!  This week we have three full carts sitting next to the curb, containing everything from old steel beer cans to long, dirt-filled lengths of tubing previously used for city signage!

Back to Alabama...

Whoa - it's cold!  My eyeballs felt like they were about to just give up functioning.  My dear cousin Katie and I toured houses/condos all day.  We didn't come across anything super impressive except for a condominium in River Rock Commons, a co-housing community about a quarter mile away from downtown Fort Collins.  I had never heard of co-housing before, but the concept seems like a really good idea from both a community and a resource management perspective!  I'm back to Huntsville tomorrow; I can't wait to see Michael and the pups!