Kate and I went to Denver over the weekend for a family wedding. It was a glorious break from East Coast weather, and Hertz even had a convertible available. On the flight out, we got to meet the Amazing Bond-o Flight Attendant™ (pictured above).

We visited Rick and Mary, for whom Kate used to work at Pastime Software. When I met Kate, she was in charge of support for Past Perfect, Pastime’s hugely popular museum software product. They have a business model to die for: Rick is the tech guy — he has a background in telecommunications, and is a self-taught programmer — and Mary, with a background in museums, knows all the business processes. They work from their house, and charge small historical societies pennies on the dollar for complex DBA work. I remember my jaw dropping the first time I saw Kate writing complex merge/purge scripts in FoxPro — she was scrubbing the data for a West Coast indian nation, and she wasn’t charging the price of a small European sports car to do it.

The next day, we drove up into the mountains for the wedding, which was beautiful. The weather was dry, cool, and breezy, which is the most welcome alternative imaginable to Eastern seaboard humidity (I heard from my dad that English diplomatic staff used to get hazardous duty pay added to their paychecks because of the heat and humidity in Washington, DC.)

Afterwards, we met up with our friend Will Ronco. Will is trying to win enough triathalons this summer to get certified as a professional. He sometimes trains with Iron Man competitors, whom he describes as “passionately devoted to medium intensity.” Apparently, the Iron Man atheletes will pick an unexciting pace, then stick to it for hours and hours and hours. And they eat only healthy food, and watch only mild, unstimulating programs on the television. Will doesn’t like this devotion to medium, and proved it the next day when he blew away the competition and won a triathalon in Greeley the next day by, like, two minutes. [pictures of another race]

Kate, Will, Kate’s parents, and I all drove up to Estes Park to see more mountains and maybe some elk. Which we did, and smelled them, too, incidentally. Smelled like, um… elk. Finally, the next morning, we stumbled across a Model Boat Regatta in the artifical pond outside the hotel. There was a six-foot tanker, fully radio-controlled, all metal, and a tugboat with a working thruster that swiveled 360 degrees to give power in any direction (pictured on the right), and a WORKING SUBMARINE THAT SUBMERGED [more pictures]

So, all in all, I would rate this weekend as: pretty freaking great.