This past week, we got to hang out with Rocio, my Chilean friend who took a vacation from her yearlong exchange student experience in Davis, California to visit us. First we spent time together in Kansas...

And then we brought her home with us to Boulder! Here we are at the scenic overlook on the way home from the airport.

We took Rocio to our favorite ice cream spots (of course), with Caitlin we hiked to the overlook at Mount Sanitas, we toured Pearl Street and visited Chautauqua. Then this morning we took a bike ride out to the mountains on the Boulder Creek trail. It started to sprinkle on us, but we fought off the real rain showers with sheer willpower. Here we are being all outdoorsy and healthy:

On Saturday, I had quite the honor bestowed upon me: a 2nd high school diploma. I already had one from Topeka High -- and now, after acting as the commencement speaker for THS, I also have one from the one and only... Google High!

The graduation ceremony was especially important for me since I'm the 4th generation in my family to have graduated from Topeka High. But! I'm the first one to get a Google High diploma! I couldn't have felt more proud to have been asked to speak. 322 graduates plus their families makes for quite a crowd. This photo shows the graduates and maybe 1/3 of the onlookers.

I talked about working at Google, trusting your intuition, creating your own opportunities, finding value in failure, appreciating the now, and my really hot fiance (that last bit was everyone's favorite part!).

I wore my most fabulous shoes in honor of the occasion :)

And the THS, er, GHS team had just the right robe with my Stanford cardinal waiting for me. What a special day.

Em and Ian visited us a couple weeks ago.

(Well, they had all kinds of stories about how they were here to see Colorado, look at grad schools, la dee da, but *I'm* pretty sure they came just to see us.)

Here they are looking all happy:

While they were here, we had a couple of lovely dinners together with them and I spent a Sunday in Estes Park, exploring the wild. Holy smokes there were a lot of elk!

Oh yes, and also a lot of rocks. Some of them super interesting. Fortunately we had Ian the geological engineering expert with us.