The Year in Review

Where has the year gone?! It has been a very fast, but fun year for us. We have been traveling for work quite a bit this year and have been to California three times (once to see John’s dad), down to Albuquerque in March to visit my parents and so John could give a talk at the library, and to Utah in April to collect trilobites in the House Range. In early May we drove over to Denver to go to two concerts (The Dead and Fleetwood Mac) and then visited the "The Psychedelic Experience” exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. In late May we traveled to Saint George, Utah, to attend the 8th Conference on Fossil Resources. John had to leave to return to Fruita in time for the year’s first public dig at the museum, but I stayed in Saint George to attend the Advances in Late Cretaceous Paleontology and Geology in the Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument meeting that directly followed. In July we traveled down to the south rim of the Grand Canyon and hiked down the Bright Angle Trail to the Indian Garden campground. John presented at the International Conference on the Cambrian Explosion in Banff, Alberta, Canada, in August, and I enjoyed exploring Banff and Jasper National Parks while John attended the meeting. We both did some hiking after the talks. We spent our first anniversary driving from Banff and to Glacier National Park, where we spent two days relaxing. In early September we traveled to Oahu, Hawaii, where we enjoyed the warm weather. John swam for the second time in the 40th Annual Waikiki Roughwater Swim, where he beat his own best time by nearly 20 minutes. I was thrilled to finally visit the island and see my first wild Green Sea Turtle (three of them in fact)! We threw a 40th birthday party for the Woodstock Festival in August and traveled to the Las Vegas area in November to collect more trilobites and visit friends and family. We were lucky enough to host Thanksgiving this year in Grand Junction, and the Alexander Family (John’s sister) traveled over to join us (and cook the turkey!).


I spent the past year working at the museum as the paleontology collections manager, while also doing a few consulting jobs and traveling quite a bit. I finished up another paleontology report for the National Park Service (the fourth network report thus far). I traveled to New Mexico with a friend in late April to hike around the desert looking for a lost dinosaur quarry, and, while we did not find the site, we did find lots of petrified wood and a few other fossils. For my birthday this year I spent the week looking for fossils with my former boss and the Augustana College crew north of Harrison, Nebraska. Then I drove to Casper, Wyoming, to attend the 2nd Annual Fossil Preparation and Collections Symposium at the Tate Museum. On the drive home my beloved Blazer finally died while crossing Vail Pass. I was without a car for remainder of the summer and we were able to trade the Blazer in for a new Dodge Caliber using the “Cash for Clunkers” program. I really misses the 4WD and high clearance of the Blazer, but I am getting spoiled by having a car that runs well and has satellite radio. This past fall I spent most of my time learning how to can, and ended up with quite a bit of jelly, pasta sauce, and apple pie filling and sauce. On September 1st Laura Wilson and I saw Crosby, Stills and Nash at Red Rocks outside Denver and then I went back in October to see the play Wicked, also with Laura. In early December I took a great, but short, trip out to Arkansas to visit friends.


John had a very busy year! He had five, week-long public digs through the museum in the Moab, Utah, area this past summer, having fun playing tour guide for our groups and showing them how to find bones and teeth from some of the oldest dinosaurs in North America in some of the reddest rock in the world. He enjoyed all the work projects this year that involved camping in the desert. John has been doing his radio show for almost two years now and did a few theme nights in 2009, including “Woodstock” and “All Bob Marley, All The Time”. We had a big party at the house this year to celebrate John’s birthday, complete with a trilobite-shaped cake that I made for him. In August he and Pete Bucknam caught Steel Pulse and Lee Perry at Red Rocks. John also gave a talk in early November for Rock out for the Ridge, an annual Fundraiser and Silent Auction hosted by the Friends of Dinosaur Ridge in Morrison, Colorado.


All the pets are well. Kelty was sick back in February, and we had to feed her through a tube in her neck from nearly 4 weeks. She has recovered fully and seems to be back to normal. Duma continues to be our climbing cat and she loves being up above us and constantly in places she does not belong. We adopted a new kitten, Grizz, last December. He was a little fuzzy black runt we had been fostering through our local no-kill cat shelter we help with. He is a very sweet and generally mellow boy and his presence has been a welcome change to the ‘cat dynamics’ of the house. Now Duma has someone who wants to play with her; Kelty never wants to have anything to do with either of them. Tikka, the dog we adopted last November, has proven to actually be a goat in a dogs body, as he tried to eat anything that does not try to eat him first (cardboard, cans, rocks, fossils, toys…). He had his first field work experiences with us this spring and seemed to enjoy going on the trips and hanging out at camp with us all. All four of our fish have survived another year, so that is something to be happy about. Our plants have also thrived well and we have acquired a few more.


It has been a great year! We are looking forward to 2010 and whatever it brings!

Have a very Happy New Year!