FALL!

Does anyone else see the face/eyeball sockets in the gold tree?

9/27/17 The Start of the Outside House Makeover

Above taken in the morning, below this afternoon after Joey's Tree Service cleaned up our Silver Maple. And, my neighbor (his tree seen at right), came out and asked Joey if he had time to do his front yard tree, so that one is cleaned up below as well.

Next up: once the HRCA approves our colors, that sad, boring gray is history. 

On my walks in the morning, I kept admiring one house's color that I decided was what I wanted for mine. 

The HRCA keeps paint colors on file, so we were able to find out this blue is Benjamin William's "Van Duesen Blue" (??) and the white was "true white"

Except, our house painter only uses Sherwin Williams. So online I went to try and color match. 

I went one shade darker and chose Indigo Batik: 

See how tricky this is? The block next to Indigo Batik looks like it matches better, right?

Not so much side by side:

But the blue match was nothing to the challenge of the white. 

Type in "white paint" and you get 3592 results with Sherwin Williams, and of those, it helpfully tells you only 1863 of those are "colors."  

Who knew there are thousands of shade of white and none of them look particularly white?

Seriously, this was nuts.

    

   

Finally, at the top of page 2, I got as close as I was going to get. Sherwin William's "White Flour" it is.  And side by side, it still doesn't look terribly close. But it's white. Against dark blue. It'll look fine. 

So now we're in a holding pattern until the next HRCA meeting on the first Wednesday of Oct. at which time they will review our submission, handily paired with the approved 1182 house's colors, and hope no one feels particularly cranky and approves it. At that point, we can set the date with the painters. 

9/23/17 Cloudy Day in Victor

Amber and I set out Saturday morning to drive up to Mom and Dad's cabin and see the aspens in all their glory ahead of snow expected this week in the high country. 

Aspen weekends always make me terribly grateful I get to live here. This weekend turned off cold and cloudy, so very little of the Colorado bluebird skies to speak of, but still breathtaking.

After lunch with Mom and Dad, we set out towards Cripple Creek and stopped in a the new lookout tower over the gold mine. They've used one of the mining dump trucks at the viewing platform, and you really can't appreciate the size of these things until you're standing next to it. Note the comparable size of the handicapped parking space to the left.

These last shots were taken one handed while driving, just shooting through the windshield.