News Flash……News Flash…….

Today we finally put the finishing touches on the Dolls House and completed it. At last Amy can move the furniture in and we can move the associated junk (paints, glue, drop sheet, etc) back into the garage. If I do say so myself it looks pretty good, three storeys, stairs, attic, gable windows, shingled roof (what a job that was..), verandah and wall paper on the internal walls. No doubt Craig will have a photo of it up on the homepage soon so check out the end result of numerous hours of effort. Miss Amy was very pleased to at last being able to play with it, rather than just look at it.

Amy has now received confirmation that she has a place at Monarch K-8, and she will start attending school come September, the beginning of the school year here. Both Amy and Kyle still go to swimming lessons twice a week and just last week we were swimming in the pool looking out at snow falling, quite strange.

Other little differences:

The school bus system is wonderful here. All the buses are painted yellow so they are easy to spot. If one is stopped and the red lights are flashing all the traffic has to stop until the red lights go off, that means traffic in both directions, so it is very safe for the kids getting on and off the buses. A good idea.

I logged onto the Budweiser (Bud beer) site because you can do tours of the brewery and also they have a draught horse team that you can visit once a month. Anyway I just wanted to find out some more info and when you go to the site you have to enter your birthdate to ensure you are over 21 to be allowed to access the site. How do they know if you make up a date…..

Again re: the Broncos, it is now two weeks since they won the Super bowl and congratulations are still pouring out. The thing we don't understand is the media and the locals keep calling them the "World Champion Broncos", how can they be world champions when the rest of the world isn't involved in the competition.

Along I-70, near a town called Georgetown there is a lake that freezes over as most of them seem to do. But this lake is quite unique I believe because they actually hold car races on this lake.

The day we drove to Denver we actually saw our first clothes line in someone's backyard. It was the first one we have seen since arriving in Colorado. Miss Amy was totally perplexed as to why her mum was so amazed by the revelation.

In the spirit of celebrating, the latest consumer binge has been Valentine's Day. An unbelievable array of merchandise is available for sale, the florists and jewellers must be rubbing their hands together in glee as people spend, spend, spend. To our embarrassment we weren't prepared for Amy coming home from pre-school with a gift from everyone of her classmates (mostly candy). Again we will just have to plead ignorance because we really didn't understand the protocol associated with Valentines Day, it is so different from home.

A nine year old boy was found to have two loaded hand guns in his backpack at school last week. According to Colorado law you need to be 10 before the authorities can charge you, so they are going to determine if they can charge his mother.

We sorted out the problem of dryness in the house, we purchased two humidifiers, one for upstairs, one for downstairs. Everyone was suffering from dry skin, poor Kyle suffering the worst. The air is dry anyway and add to that the use of gas heating and the conditions were pretty terrible. The humidifiers run 24 hours per day and have helped enormously.

Easter holidays are a thing of the past while we are here. I was starting to plan our four day weekend when I discovered that Americans don't get Good Friday or Easter Monday as public holidays. What a bummer…

We get home delivery of a local newspaper and as we ordered weekend papers only we thought it would be delivered on Saturday and Sunday. In newspaper terms weekend delivery actually means Wednesday through Monday.

It seems that a lot of people are planning the delivery date for their babies in the hope that they are born on 1-1-2000. Apparently April 9 is the prime conception date for all of you out there wanting to achieve this. One couple from Texas are not taking any chances. Apparently if they haven't conceived by this date they have booked into an Artificial Insemination clinic just to make sure.