Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Half way through our Colorado summer

We're now entering our sixth week living in Boulder. My family is getting more accustomed to apartment living. It's ironic though how we thought we were escaping the Arkansas heat only to live in an apartment lacking air conditioning! At least the temperature drops each night.

We had a little scare a few weeks ago. Becky had developed a large lump on her thyroid, and after meeting with a surgeon, she was strongly encouraged to have it removed in case it was cancerous. My sister (who is now eligible for sainthood) flew out here from Chicago so she could watch the kids while Becky recovered from surgery. The surgery went well, and praise God the lump was not cancerous! Becky is still healing from the surgery, but she is doing really well. The kids were pretty oblivious to the whole thing since Aunt Sass kept them busy with swimming and museums and making pizza. Have I mentioned how awesome my sister is?

Since the surgery, Becky and the kids have been occupying themselves with all kinds of activities like tennis lessons, swimming lessons, and now karate classes while I toil away at Flatirons each day. wink When I arrive home in the evenings we often eat and go out to a park or discover some new part of Boulder. On the weekends we have visited Red Rocks, Estes Park, and a few other places. In the photo below we hiked around Bear Lake at the Rocky Mountain National Park. As you can tell from our Chacos, we were not expecting to see snow!

We've gotten to see a number of old Colorado friends which has made our time out here very meaningful. Some of our best friends from Searcy also stopped by to visit for a couple of days, and we were able to dine at Casa Bonita and see a Rockies game with them.

Next week my brother and his wife will be visiting from Texas, and some more good friends from Searcy will be coming up July 4th weekend. Becky has some college friends coming up to visit the last week of July. Lots to look forward to!

I'll conclude with a note of thankfulness for the Boulder Valley Church of Christ. They have really taken us in, and we are so thankful for the many ways they supported us during Becky's surgery. One of the ladies watched the kids for us before Aunt Sara arrived, and one of the elders came to the hospital to pray with us immediately before the surgery. These are people who truly love the Lord.

I'm also thankful for the incredible VBS they put on. You would not believe how much effort they expended to entertain and teach about 50 children about God's love for a full week. Ethan and Braden absolutely loved going to VBS each day. I think it's really great that the body of Christ can be found nearly everywhere you go.

Sunday, June 01, 2014

Week 2: Finally making some contributions

Last week at Flatirons was admittedly difficult. I really like to learn new stuff, but if I'm not contributing much and all I'm doing is trying to take in lots of information, time can pass by very slowly.

This week I finally was able to write some code and fix some lingering bugs in our web application. We are using AngularJS which is new to me, and our code base is quite large, so I was a little on the slow side. By the end of the week I felt like I finally had a good idea how the application was designed and where to go to modify the app's functionality. My speed should start improving.

It really felt good to write code again. I really enjoy teaching, but I seldom have time to contribute to software that others are using. It's amazing to me how quickly time goes when I am programming and getting things to work right. Each bug fix makes me say "YES!" inside (and sometimes outside!).