Archives for "Joel and Lauren’s Fat Posts"
Snow Cave, Yes Please!
If you haven’t noticed, I’m a pretty big fan of snow. Luckily we live somewhere with an abundance of the white stuff, and it’s good for more than skiing and snowball fights.
Saturday morning my friend Lewis McAll and I got an early start and headed towards our destination, Loch Lomond. Loch Lomond is located at the base of Mt. Bancroft which Lauren and I climbed last summer. Visiting the area in the winter proved to be a much different experience. The bustling jeep trail (Stewart Road) was sitting under feet of snow, and we only encountered two other parties (four people total).
It took under two hours to snowshoe two miles (over 1,000 ft of elevation gain). Once we were about 1/3 a mile from the lake, we started looking for the perfect snow drift. The lake is above treeline and very wind-blown. Lewis spotted a sizeable drift, and I was convinced that it was actually a small hill. The avalanche probe proved that the drift was 7+ feet deep.
We set down our packs and got to work digging. The snow was hard-packed and proved very challenging for digging. About four hours later, our snow cave was complete. The completed cave had room for us and our gear.
Around 5 PM we climbed into our snow cave. We cooked an excellent curry backpackers meal and called it a day. Despite the cold outside (probably 0 – 10 degrees), the snow cave was fairly warm. It was also very quiet and dark which made for a decent night’s sleep.
Lessons learned and/or things that proved helpful:
- Snow conditions can vary greatly. Leave plenty of time for digging. Each person should carry a shovel if possible (but you could get tendonitis…Lewis!).
- Bring extra gloves. We got really wet while digging. Even though our gloves were Gore-tex, when we took them off to let them dry, they froze stiff as boards.
- If you don’t have a winter sleeping bag, consider using two bags. Lauren and I both have 15 degree down bags. I stole hers and put ours together. I stayed nice and toasty. Also, don’t forget a sleeping mat. Staying off the snow is very important.
Anybody there?
Hello, is anybody there? Probably not, because I surely haven’t been here. Things haven’t been too interesting lately, and we haven’t taken many pictures, hence the lack of blog posts. Here is some new info for us.
1. I got a new job! I’m doing accounting at Save Our Youth, where Joel and I are mentors. It’s a great organization, and the job seems like a great fit for me, so I feel very blessed that the timing worked out perfectly.
2. We skied a lot before Christmas, and we’ve been a few times since then. I’ve improved this year, so it’s been more enjoyable. Oddly enough, we have been nearly a dozen times, and not a single day was just the two of us. We’ve had lots of skiing time with friends from in town and out of town (sadly few pictures–our camera died). Here is us with Kyle and Steph at Keystone.
3. We’ve had a few fun snowshoeing adventures. Here is a picture of Lewis and Vanessa eating lunch when we snowshoed near Loveland Ski Area. Following are pictures of us at Rocky Mountain National Park (we got a new camera!).
Christmas Trip
We had a lovely week in Nashville/Birmingham to celebrate Christmas. We spent a couple of days in Nashville, a couple in Birmingham, and then a couple more in Nashville. We spent some good time with family and friends, but we missed Joel’s brother’s family and my cousins (we can thank the job I got laid off from right before Christmas for that scheduling problem). Anyway, with friends we celebrated a new baby, and engagement, a birthday, and a new marriage. Lovely.
Here’s an action shot and a family photo at my parents’ house.
Night in a Box Followup
If you read my last post, you know that we slept in a box downtown on December 3. I am here to say that it was a great success! We heard some amazing stories from single moms about their trials in life and celebrated with them as they shared their triumphs. We heard the despair of a man who left his children fatherless when he was incarcerated. We are eternally thankful to our parents for providing us with stable, loving homes, and we hope now more than ever to share the love of Christ with families going through these difficult times.
You can see here that we are at almost $36,000 in total funds! Also, Joel and I raised $880, which you can see here. THANK YOU SO MUCH to all of you who donated and prayed for us.
We forgot our camera, but here’s a picture that Jason Powers took of most people by their boxes. We’re the ones on the far right side.
Night in a Box
Call us crazy, but this Friday night, we’re sleeping in a box downtown! We are raising money for a non-profit called Encompass that reaches out to single moms and kids who don’t have dads. These are the “hidden homeless,” as they, especially the kids, are often bounced around from place to place, maybe not knowing where they’ll stay from one night to the next.
There are so many single moms and fatherless kids in our community, and we want to provide the support they need as they deal with trials that many of us never faced. If you are able to support us at all, click this link. https://sna.etapestry.com/fundraiser/EncompassDenver/nightinabox2010/individual.do?participationRef=1339.0.9220221 Most of all, please pray for us and this ministry! By the way, Joel said he’d give you a free hug if you give more than $1.
PS – I’m doing the bookkeeping at Encompass now, in addition to volunteering, so we’re excited about it!
We won, we won! Kind of…
When I posted here about entering the Chipotle costume contest, I didn’t expect to hear anything from them. I couldn’t believe it when I got an email today saying we were “runner runner-ups!” There was 1 grand prize ($2500), 5 runners up ($1000), and 20 of us who get a burrito party for 20! I don’t know their criteria for selecting folks, but it doesn’t matter to us. 
Here’s the link showing all the winners on their website: http://www.chipotle.com/en-US/fan-antics/boorito/boorito_winners.aspx
Who are these people??
Every few months, I’ll check out the google analytics for our blog. This tells us how many visitors we’ve had, what countries people visit from, etc. Oh, and the best one is…what words people searched with in google that brought them to our site. I try to peruse these periodically, as they are sometimes hilarious. Here are the number of times people searched with the following this year and found our site:
70 Mt Bancroft
34 joelandlauren.com
23 joel and lauren
9 lauren and joel
You get the idea. There are many other permutations of our names, but here are some of the more interesting things people have used this year…
sheena mugavin (sorry sheena…4 people have looked for you!)
bathroom products “+your link” (wonder if they found what they were looking for?)
hotel-dieu filterui:color-color (I went to Hotel Dieu, but what does this even mean??)
laurenfat catz (should I be offended?)
lauren meat blog (our blog is definitely not about meat)
nashville is boring (I definitely did not post anything about that!)
www.here huge 5old year picture com (I don’t even know what to say)
If you are one of these searchers, feel free to confess. Otherwise, I will continue to check these out every once in a while and have a good laugh.
Yay for family visits
A few weeks ago, Matt, Erin, and Evie came to visit. We had a great time hanging out and showing them around town. Next time they come, Matt will be outnumbered 3 to 1!
We visited Boulder and the wonderful farmers’ market there.
We picked tomatoes at our house.
And we visited Rocky Mountain National Park, despite the yucky weather at Bear Lake.
Halloween
We were s’mores! For full disclosure, we spent quite a while painting/texturing the back of the “graham crackers.” Unfortunately, the side with the straps showed up in the pictures!
This one is at a friend’s party.
This one is at Chipotle. We participated in a big neighborhood outreach Halloween event, and we headed to Chipotle afterward. They offered $2 burritos if you dressed like processed food. S’mores definitely fit the bill. They told us they were having an online contest for people who showed up in costume, so we took a picture. I guess we didn’t win, but the $2 burritos were great!
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