A week in photos + a dose of gratitude

All geared up for a (very successful) craft & bake sale fundraiser at church.

Trying out our bobsled formation at the Olympic Training Center.

The training center staff, upon hearing an explanation of Service Adventure and our budget limitations, generously gave us six free tickets for a tour on Saturday.

We also scored free tickets for Saturday night's Colorado Springs Switchbacks game, courtesy of a friend from church, whose company is a team sponsor. People take good care of us.

This is the only other picture I took because it snowed the whole rest of the night, but we had a blast anyway!

While you may be happily ensconced in springtime, with its warm temperatures and budding new life, we're celebrating today's snow storm.

In the Springs, we get nearly all of our yearly precipitation in March and April. While we love the 300+ days of sunshine per year, that also means that it very rarely rains, and we count on snowfall to replenish our water supply. As of mid-March, we'd barely had any snow at all this winter, and fire dangers and burn restrictions were escalating.

So this is a welcome sight.

Living in the West has given me a new appreciation for water. I never complain about rainy or snowy weather anymore. And I'm much more mindful of the novelty, even miraculousness, of the fresh, clean, abundant water that is available to me from a multitude of sources.

May you, too, experience gratitude today, in whatever form it may take.