So, I was going to update my (cell) phone number and as soon as her contract is up, we're going to cancel Dana's service. We decided we don't need two cell phones, and besides, I have one that work pays for anyway (though it *is* a behemoth).
So I get on the phone with Cingular Customer Service (I downgraded my plan at the same time - I never do use the minutes/media features I pay for), and they forwarded me on to a "relocation specialist". He was special, that's for sure.
So he redirected me to Customer service. See, we get service here, but I still have a Chicago number, and Dana still has a Texas number. We want a Colorado number. But we can't do that, because they officially don't have service in this area - we're basically piggybacking on other carriers' bandwidth and they won't give me a number here.
So I did a quick search to see if my employer has any kind of arrangement with Cingular, and we do, so I contacted a dude who handles our corporate account over email. I figure, if they won't do it for a corporate customer with a quarter of a million potential clients, it really can't happen.
Well, they can't (won't?) do it. So, time to cancel my account.
So here's what I want: a VERY limited plan (we're talking MAYBE 200 minutes/month, but I'm sure that's not possible), a carrier who has coverage here, a phone that's as easy to enter text into as my current one, cameraphone and moblog functionality. And it would be great if I could get a ringtone like this (MP3). Or, of course, this (MIDI).
I know Verizon Wireless covers the area, but I'm not sure who else does. Dana loathes them, but everyone loathes their old provider - it's the natural order of things.
So: ideas? recommendations? I'd really like to NOT break the bank, so keep any suggestions sane please.
I *did* update earlier! Really!
7/30/2006 09:15:00 PM
Now I'm dead to me.
I actually posted (well, attempted to post, if you want to get technical about it) yesterday (that would be Saturday for all you Monday morning readers), but for some reason Cingular doesn't want to allow me to send emails to flickr anymore. I think they found me out. But that's another story.
As you may or may not know, Dana left on Thursday for the greener pastures (and lower altitude) of Denver for her Sports Medicine boards, which were early Friday morning. Latest reports are that she "has no idea" how she did, which means she probably aced them. After the test, she hopped on a plane to Kansas City for proof that there is a team out there actually worse than the Cubs. (Kidding! My Cubbies just swept evil St. Louis for the first time in like 30-some years. Well, the first time in that long for a four-game sweep. Anyway).
Actually, she went to visit Missy and DJ and the newest addition to their family, Edy (Edie? I never know). Because of the momentous occasion, Dana deprived me of the camera, so you don't get to see any of the cool stuff I did this weekend. Sigh.
So I've been alone here since Thursday afternoon. I know, I know, it's rough to be me.
My only REAL goal for the weekend was to finish putting Dana's green bike back together (gormerly known as TK's early-90's Fuji). I swear, the bike hadn't been serviced since TK got it new when we were Juniors in High School (that's a guess), so I literally removed everything from it, cleaned/replaced everything, and put it all back together. New bottom bracket, new cables and housing, new brake pads (they still squeak, damnit, and are the bane of my existance right now), and a new saddle for Dana's precious posterior. The thing is probably cleaner than it has been in a decade. Oh, and I took off the Kryptonite mount and put some bottle cages on there. Goal #1 complete. Unfortunately, I couldn't take pictures of it in all its pieces since Dana took the camera to KC with her - and she admitted last evening on the phone that she hasn't taken a single picture. Probably better that way, but I would have liked to have documented the bike in all its disparate parts.
I also spent some quality time with the fixie this weekend, as I ordered new parts for that as well (can you tell I buy myself birthday presents?). A new cog for the back (because 42x14 is a little tough in the mountains, I got an 18-tooth cog for the back. If you have a mountain bike, that's like riding in the middle front ring and the middle gear in the back, basically - still no cakewalk, but one has to challenge oneself from time to time). I also got a PHAT new gold chain (note: that is not my bike, but it's pretty! and I have the same chain!) for the bike, in anticipation of ordering a new frame sometime in the coming weeks (my "found" fixie frame was always a bit small).
So now Dana and I both have cruising bikes (though her brakes make so much noise I'll have to ride away from her until I can get the damned things to toe in) to head into town and play...
...which is exactly what I did on Saturday morning. As usual, the sun woke me up a little after eight (it does pretty well at about 6:45 on weekdays), so I got a bag packed, had a CLIF bar and some Coke Zero for breakfast, and rode down to Howeleson Hill (aka Mt. Emerald). Then I hiked up it. All the way. Two hours up, one hour down (click the above image for my notes on the GPS route). I also got a profile up here, and there is a Google Earth KMZ if anyone is interested. Which means Pablo. :) Rather than uploading it and linking to it, I'll just email it to whoever might be interested...
Taking Dana's bike apart and putting it back together was really good for me (but it ate up almost all of my Simple Green, sadly; not to mention a ton of time) - I wasn't too worried about ruining it (it now has more money in new parts than we paid for it initially) - and everything came together very well. I'm pretty happy that it was so (relatively) simple. And I don't have too many extra pieces left over either, which is always a plus! :)
I also got a professional-grade wheelbuilding/truing stand for my birthday from my parents (thanks, mom and dad!) - I'm really excited about this. Wheelbuilding is so very zen. Very meditative. Very slow going, but once you're done, you've got this beautiful thing that is much greater than the sum of its parts. To get myself psyched up I'm reading all about the physics of wheelbuilding right now. Sounds totally geeky, no? I love it. Now I need to build a workbench, so I can mount the damn thing (and get about the only tool I don't have that I need to complete my garage-based bike shop: a vice grip).
OK, enough bike geekiness. I was also determined to clean this place up before Dana got back. Lucky for me, she doesn't get home until Monday evening, so I have a couples hours after work tomorrow to get things in order. Sigh. After I do a lot of housework I always just want to escape the house, but I know that after her trip she'll just want to hang out at home. Marriage is compromise, I guess. Maybe we can hang out in the driveway.
Oh, and the garage is a mess (though not quite THAT bad - but there are tools everywhere). Maybe I need to dedicate lunch and my after-work time to cleaning. Bummer.
Have a great week, everyone. No pot rack still, so no house pictures yet. But I did sneak up some pics on my picasaweb page of our new bed. So there. Maybe that counts as a blog update?
Sadly, no pictures of the house. I know, I know - I'm such a tease. But we ended up not having our friends over for dinner on Friday (we just weren't ready for them), so the pot rack was not hung, so the pictures don't come yet. Suck it up and wait. :)
So Friday night, we had a couple drinks here with D's coworker who we were supposed to feed, and then actually went over to her place and ate there. (We're tricky like that)
Saturday was spent watching the tour, then working on D's bike (TK's old bike, which I need to take pictures of so TK can cry - it's in all its various pieces right now), then ordering the parts and tools I need to make it whole again. That was fun.
Then we went to lunch at a cute little place in town, walked around a little, BOUGHT A NEW BED, which should be here THURSDAY!!!!, and went back into town again to get a birthday present for the other child of Pediatrics of Steamboat (if you recall, last weekend was the 1-year-old's birthday - this weekend it was the two-year-old's birthday), and delivered that.
Sunday we woke up and watched the last stage of the tour, then Dana studied while I snoozed and we listened to the Cubs game. We could have watched, and actually started out by watching, but Bob Brenly and Len Kasper have this incredibly well developed skill at annoying the crap out of me, so we streamed the WGN Radio broadcast of the game (which, even without Santo, was better than Bob and Len). Then we hopped in the car and went for a hike, kind of an evaluative hike to see if it would be any good for my parents when they come visit in a couple weeks (it wouldn't - way too steep and rocky, but we loved it). Unfortunately, we got a late start and had evening plans, so we had to turn around after only about a mile and a half (keep your eye on flickr for the GPS map and profile I will shortly upload). We headed home and I broke in the downstairs shower, and Dana and I discovered the limits of our hot-water-heater.
Then she headed to church and dropped me off at Sheila and Wes' (again!) so I could hook up their new Dell and transfer files over from their old one. I believe I mentioned it before: Wes and I are trading services - I get their computer set up, and he helps me hang the pot rack.
So, there you have it! Dana's been kind of stressing about her Sports Medicine Boards which come up this Friday, but I know she'll do fine, and then she heads out to KC to visit Missy and DJ and their new little one, Edy (or Edie, I'm not sure).
Seems like everybody's having babies! Congrats to all our readers now "in a delicate condition" - and those who don't read (I'm sure Lapp isn't a regular). Between everyone we know who's pregnant and those who have had kids within the last 6 months, we're talking about more than half a dozen new people in the world. Crazy stuff!
(Oh, and the pic at the top of this post is from our hike this weekend, in case that wasn't clear).
I know we're behind on our status updates, and that you're all just dying to know how life is in Colorado.
Earlier this week, we went to get our new CO licenses (yay!!) - they gave us temp ones on paper and are mailing the real ones. I have a good feeling that my picture is going to be completely ridiculous. But what can one do.
It's been a struggle this week to catch up with the Tour on Tivo after work and avoiding the results of the stage, as people tend to email me as soon as it's over. It's been a really exciting week in the tour, though - I can't help but think that all the mountain stages are really what make the race worth watching. Personally, I've always liked Levi Leipheimer more than Landis, but it's exciting all the back-and-forth going on with Landis lately.
Today, I don't feel like I'm missing much, but tomorrow's time trial will be tour-deciding, that's for sure. Good thing it's Saturday! I guess Dana and I will have to put off our planned hike until after the stage is over.
So, tonight we're having our first guests (and their 2-year old), and there's a lot of work to be done before we're ready for them (cleaning and straightening up). Dana has a half-day today (well, she's scheduled until 2pm, so she'll probably get home about 3-ish if I'm lucky), and I still have no idea what I'm going to make for dinner. I think I mentioned it before, but the real reason behind their coming over today is because we're trading services - Wes is going to help me hang our pot rack (got chains to hang it yesterday and painted them to match the pot rack), and I'm going to help them with computer stuff (they bought a new one and need files transferred).
OK, I really should get back to work now, but thought you all deserved a little update for being such good blog-checkers.
Oh, and I pretty much "finished" the garage (still needs a little organizing), and disassembled Dana's green bike (previously TK's bike) yesterday. As in, completely disassembled it. I was halfway through and realized that all my maintenance books are for ROAD bikes. Oh well. Still got everything off! Except for the non-drive side half of the bottom bracket cup. Needs a new bottom bracket (and headset!) anyway. The bike must be 20 years old.
I totally remember doing this in college (remember? at the crack house maybe?) and thought it was neat - not mind-bendingly cool like some people. Perhaps it was the absense of drugs that accounts for the difference.
Either way, some helpful soul has put a version of The Wizard of Oz synched up with Dark Side of the Moon on Google Video. How it got past their copyright screeners is beyond me, but watching it this way sure beats trying to synch up the CD with the movie and not being sure if you got it right. Plus, I can have it on in the background while I work. Bonus.
I realized I had to pay some bills today on the computer upstairs, so I ran up there real quick, and when I tried to get the nighttime pics off the camera this time, it worked fine.. So I took a couple teaser pictures of the garage for you all (and one of my entryway artistry as well).
OK, I know I promised pictures, but I have a decent excuse - I was messing around on Friday night with taking long-exposure pictures of the night sky (and they said the stars were big and bright in Texas! Ha!), and they got corrupted or something, so I have to try and recover them before taking any more. So there.
Of course, the house is still in a sad state, but it's getting much better, and yesterday D and I spent the afternoon and evening working on it (I spent a couple hours in the morning hanging things as well). A trip to Ace was in the cards as well, which is always fun (no, really!).
I probably spent 4 hours in the garage getting that set up. So far, it's about half done. See, we still have a ton of boxes (really, we have a TON), and the painters are using part of our garage for storage (if they don't pick the stuff up by the end of the week, it's going outside), so I only spent the time cleaning what will become my half of the garage.
I made a sweet new bike rack and worked out some sweet snowboard storage as well, and really WANT to show you pictures of those. I'm sure we'll have the place nice and cleaned up by Friday, as we are having our first guests (no, no - in-town guests) - Dana's coworker Sheila and her husband Wes are coming by. Wes and I are trading services - he's going to help me hang our new pot rack (um, yes, I can hang a potrack, but not on our 15-foot vaulted ceiling), and I'm going to help him get files from his old computer to their new one. We'll probably also have dinner for them, I think. Dana will be working out the details.
As an aside, I have no idea how we shoehorned all this stuff into our old place. Really. We're busting at the seams here and we have about twice as much room as we used to. Go figure. I guess it will help once we get more organized. But jeez!
OK. On to the weekend.
Dana woke up Saturday and had to go round at the hospital, so I woke up and went on a nice ride (26 miles, 2500ft. of climbing). I totally didn't end up going the direction I had intended (missed a hidden turn), but it didn't matter - I inadvertantly found the way back from our other route, so now I can make the course a nice loop (with probably even more climbing). Overall, a great ride.
I got home and showered, then D got home, we had some lunch and watched the tour until the owner of our place came by to check out what the contractor had (not) completed during the week. There are a lot of small fix-em-ups that still need to get done - nothing major - so he did a walk-thru with the contractor. We chatted for a while and he headed out.
Then D and I headed out as well to go to her boss' son's 1st birthday party. We had a blast, re-met some of their friends that we met at parties on the 4th of July, and got out of there probably around 8:00ish. We came home and I chilled while Dana studied (Sports Medicine Boards are starting to loom, and therefore beginning to freak her out), and eventually went to bed, lamenting how old we are, at 10:30.
Woke up Sunday, and Dana headed to church and then rounds again, while I got up, drank lots of coffee, and watched the morning's tour stage. Then I hung pictures (which is much more involving than it might sound, since I measure everything twice and everything has to be perfect), Dana came home, and we had a little lunch.
Then my trip to Ace Hardware, and the garage-cleaning bonanza. I love it. Basically, our two-car garage is now a one-car garage, and the other half of it is my personal workshop. Currently it's primarily a bike shop, but eventually we'll work out storage for winter gear (snowshoes, X-country skis, various other toys) and soon enough we'll have to reserve some space for brewing (since D is getting me a home-brewing kit for my birthday). What I really need (again, I'll be talking with Wes - who is a carpenter - about this) is a nice, big workbench. I'm sure we'll have one built in no time.
That's all I've got for now. We were excited about the Cubs win on Saturday (actually caught all the Cubbies runs before the party), but I was too distracted to notice their disastrous collapse yesterday.
OK, for real. Longest post award goes to....
(and if Hutch has at least one post this week, he shall no longer be dead to me. He sounds busy, doesn't he?)
So, the M-Fers at Mattress Expo (or wherever the heck it was) called yesterday (the day before delivery, natch) to tell us they couldn't get the bed we selected to their warehouse in Denver, and could they choose a suitable alternative for us (Um, NO! Nimrods). So they're going to refund us (of course, the charge already went through) and we'll find a new bed out here somewhere. Total bummer.
(click image above for larger view in new window) In other news, last evening I was playing around with time-lapse photography (take a picture every 5-10 seconds, assemble all the pictures into a movie) and caught this freaking awesome image of a lightning strike. Unfortunately, the time-lapse movie kind of blew. So I decided to get one of the sunset (linked below to the YouTube version. Google Video version not yet approved).
The YouTube version, of course, doesn't really do the sequence justice - it was originally encoded at 1600x700 (recorded still images at 1600xwhatever, and cropped out the houses under construction at the bottom of the frame). I bet it would look freaking awesome in HD. From now on, I'll try to do my time-lapse stuff so that it conforms with typical HD aspect ratios.
I also put up a lot of stuff from our hike up the mountain on Saturday. For whatever reason, my janky GPS logger didn't log the trek down (or at least, I can't tell from the images that it did). You can see those on Flickr here.
So thanks to all the well-wishers on my first day of work today! And a special thank you to my parents for the beautiful flowers--don't even have a computer on my desk yet, but it's nice to have some flowers on it!
It was a pretty good day, overall. Lisa came over this morning to install the connection to the office electronic medical records, and I spent most of the rest of the morning playing around with the system. Went into the office around noon, had my picture taken with Ron and Sheila for the upcoming newspaper ad, did some paperwork, and unpacked the box of books I took over there. My computer was supposed to have come in today, but it didn't, so I went home for a couple hours and then met up with Ron at the hospital again to go over some things. All in all, busy day, but very exciting!
Tomorrow starts with a 7 am meeting at the hospital, following by rounding on patients with Ron, so I can figure out how to chart here and do the billing and stuff that you never worry about in residency. I looked at my patient schedule for Thursday and it looks like they were nice enough to take it easy on me--and even better, my first patient is a 6 month old well child visit--I've missed little kids so much! The rest of the day looks like a bunch more well baby visits, a couple toddlers, a pre-Kindergarten visit, and a teenager with shoulder pain. Good times!
Oh--and here's how I know I finally "made it". When I was at the office today, I had to fax my marriage certificate to the national American Medical Association offices so they have my correct info on file. I asked the front desk girl/soon-to-be assistant office manager how I send a fax, and she just laughs at me and says, "Dana, you say "hey Steph, fax this for me, will ya?", as she's taking my paperwork. I love this office.
I know I promised house pictures after this weekend, but we were so busy we didn't spend much time unpacking. I PROMISE them this week, regardless of the state of the house.
We had a banner weekend. Woke up Saturday to the Balloon Rodeo (didn't bother going to the mountain - figured if we really wanted to, we could go on Sunday), and watched the 30 balloons launch from our bedroom window (well, I did. Dana opted to sleep).
Had some breakfast, watched the Tour (which, I realize, I haven't been blogging about at all - lots of other stuff going on, I guess), and headed to the mountain. I decided to be anal and packed rain jackets and warmer layers, two bottles of water, a CLIF bar and some trail mix. We got to the base and just started walking up (we weren't sure if we were going to hike down or take the gondola down, but the plan was to get to the top of the gondola and eat, then decide.
We hiked up the Thunderhead trail (maps and info here), a 3-mile hike with about 2200ft of vertical gain (we had the GPS, I'll get some Google Earth files up eventually). It took forever. And about 2/3rds of the way up, it got really windy and started to rain.
At lunch, we decided to hike down (our decision helped along by the fact that the Gondola wasn't running), which ended up taking about half as much time as the hike up (but twice the toll on our knees).
Home, D showered, I took a BATH (I fit in our tub! And it's clean!), then a shower (baths are great for relaxation, not so much for cleaning), and we napped for a while before getting some grub.
Sunday, Dana woke up and ran a 10k (I have a few pictures but haven't uploaded them) - she came in 7th in her division - we hopped in the car and headed home. Some tour watching (and cat napping), and I worked on cleaning up the kitchen area more. Went grocery shopping, came home and made some great hummus (mmm, homemade hummus), and we chilled for a while. We hopped in the car last-minute to go see Superman, which turned out to be not such a good idea as our theater in town has about 50 seats and they had sold out a long, LONG time before we got there. So we turned around, D put in Fellowship of the Rings, and about halfway through I started working on dinner (my first REAL cooked meal since we got here, the roasted tomato mac and cheese recipe from cooking light. DELISH!).
We also caught some of the Cubbies in there at some point.
Today I'll probably make my homemade pesto chicken salad, though I never seem to have all the ingredients (the grocery was out of walnuts - when I asked, the produce guy told me "We just can't get them", as if there's a walnut shortage). No walnuts, but they have tahini? Go figure.
Anyway, the obvious highlight of the weekend was the hike up (and down!) the mountain. We're pretty sore, and I have no idea how D ran 6 miles the next day, but we're really becoming champs out here. Thank god for that. A couple more years in Houston and I would have had to change my name to Jabba.
Since Mark is threatening to change the blog name, I think that's his subtle hint I should check in. Vacation has been great, and I've been able to finish the crossword in the Steamboat paper for the last two days, which I'm pretty excited about. The last couple days I really have been treating a lot like vacation--not getting up until 9 or 9:30, relaxing around the house (and unpacking a few boxes), and I'll admit it, catching Touched By An Angel reruns at 10 am on the Hallmark Channel. (Missy and I were, um, religious watchers of that show back in the day. It brings back good memories.) Like I said, good vacation stuff.
I've also been kicking my studying into high gear, as I take my Sports Medicine Boards three weeks from today in Denver. I should finish my review book today, and then spend the next 3 weeks doing practice questions. I'm a little freaked out about this test, just because I don't feel as prepared for it as I did for the Pediatric Boards last year. Hopefully after a ton of review questions under my belt I'll be feeling much better.
Our house is still a mess, but getting better day by day. Most of the kitchen stuff is unpacked, although not necessarily put away. The builders forgot to put shelves in one of the kitchen cabinets, and despite our landlord's continual pestering of the contractor, he still hasn't been around to fix that. Hopefully soon. But all the boxes are out of the Master Bedroom, and our new king bed should get here by next week, which will be awesome. Our old mattress is on the floor in the bedroom right now, and will join the bedframe and box spring in the guest bedroom as soon as the new bed gets here.
The weekend looks like it'll be pretty fun--there's a big hot air balloon rodeo tomorrow morning that I'm sure Mark will get my lazy arse out of bed for, and then we're going to hike up the ski mountain, have lunch, and hike back down. I'm running the Mountain Madness 10K on Sunday--I was going to run the half marathon, but I'm just too out of shape and not acclimatized enough yet. But I'm doing an 8 miler straight up Howelson Hill the weekend after this one with a couple locals we met at a Fourth of July party. Good times. Steamboat is awesome--Mark and I almost feel guilty if we're NOT playing outside at some point during the day. And it's so wonderful to have the windows open all the time and to need to wear a fleece after the sun goes down! I'm a happy girl.
So I officially am on the Pediatrics of Steamboat payroll as of Monday. I'm this interesting mix of incredibly excited and so nervous I could vomit at any minute. I don't start seeing patients until next Thursday, and I know that I'm ready for this step, but that doesn't make me any less anxious about starting. I just need to take it patient by patient, and everything will be fine. It's all good.
OK, I really need to hit the books again--I think Mark and I are just chillin' tonight, probably going to order in some pizza from a local pizzeria (although for the record, we do have Domino's here if the urge should ever strike) and just relax a bit. Maybe even unpack some more boxes. Have a great weekend and start planning your trip to visit us!
OK, I must be getting really good. Remember how I said I thought that the ride was probably between 1500 and 2000ft of climbing (on a 20 mile ride)? Well, I put my little Topo program through it's paces this morning (I had to estimate, as they don't have our street, so I took the route to about where the balloon landed the other morning). As you can see if you click the picture above for more detail: 1935.7ft of climbing.
Dana and I did the ride again yesterday, but this time stopped at the bottom of the climb - as opposed to the middle of it - to catch our breath. We made it to the top without stopping again, but there were about 3 or 4 times in there when I almost pulled over. I'm just not used to the altitude yet (and definitely not in great shape either).
The fun part was the descent, of course. I hit a little over 43 mph, but then got freaked out that Dana was behind me, becuase if she wrecked the only way I could get back to her would be to climb the damn mountain again. I decided that next time, I descend second. :)
I'll probably do the route as a loop at some point - the elevation profile looks like a mirror since it's an out and back route - so we come back the same way we went out, so it's the same on the back half as it was on the front - just in reverse.
We also got a new router yesterday. The trusty old Netgear had been acting up and stunk at prioritizing my VoIP traffic, so I got a new Belkin N1. Quick review - setup was a cinch, everything works great. For some reason I had to recycle everything this morning, but I have a feeling that was more a DSL problem than a router one. We'll see if that continues.
As for the weekend - Dana registered for a race (10k?), I intend to have the kitchen completed, and I'll get back out on the bike again. The annual hot air balloon rodeo is this weekend too, so I'll probably be getting up early to get some pictures of that as well. Unfortunately, because of the extra tourists in town (due to the rodeo) and Dana's race, my plan to take the gondola up the mountain, have lunch, and hike down will be put off for a couple weeks.
We have to go see Superman as well.
That's all for now! It's fun to be back on the bike, and especially fun to be on the bike in a place like this.
It seems no amount of pestering by moi can convince Dana to actually post to the blog, so don't be surprised if it changes back to simply "Mr. Sideways" again.
Or maybe she's stuck in permanent vacation mode. I got up at 6:45 today, and the phone didn't wake her up until three hours later. What you gonna do? I think she's just doing it to rub it in that she doesn't start work until Monday.
That being said, we had a great Fourth. We started the day with a 20-mile ride at about 8am, joining D's boss Ron, his wife Lisa, and their (nearly) 1-year old. 20 miler, no problem, right?
WRONG. They were taking it way easy on us (Ron was even trailing the baby behind him on the bike), and they destroyed us. Of course, we are in Colorado, so they were hardly flat roads. The first 8 miles were hilly but not too bad, but the last two miles was a steady ascent, until the last 500 yards or so which kick up even higher. Yikes. Add to our being out of shape (and not knowing how to pace our effort, having never been on this ride before) the fact that we're still getting acclimated to the altitude, and you have the most embarassing short ride EVER. I literally can't remember the last time I went on a ride that SHORT - but it was truly punishing.
Sadly, I didn't have the camera OR the GPS. D and I plan on riding it again today so I can bring the GPS and see if we're really just sissies or if it was really as bad as I remember. I'm GUESSING that we climbed between 1500-2000 ft in the short 20 miles, so we'll see about that. Add to everything else the fact that neither of our computers are unpacked yet, and we had no real way to gauge what we were doing other than by feel. Yikes.
The 2-mile descent, however, was pretty freaking cool. Avoiding the cow pies in the road added an additional challenge.
Immediately after the ride, we got a couple cups of coffee to go and watched the parade. I can't remember the last parade I went to that wasn't Chicago's St. Patty's Day parade, so it was pretty fun. Picture small town Americana parade extraordinaire, and you've got it. We rode home on sore butts afterwards (oh, yeah - the ride home is a half mile up a huge hill too, by the way, so that was fun), had some lunch, and took a nap.
After napping, we went to a couple of parties with D's coworkers and met all kinds of people - we really had a great time. We followed that up by heading to D's coworker's house to chill and watch the fireworks, then headed home.
All-in-all, it was a great day (even the sufferfest was great). Actually, the ride was great until we were a mile and a half into that hill and realized it kept going up, up, UP!
Like I said, I'll bring the GPS and then get an elevation profile posted up so you can all see what we're putting ourselves through up here. Colorado living can be really tough. ;)
I can't really complain today, though - D ran five miles yesterday in these hills. Yikes.
Oh, and please note that Hutch is now dead to me, as tomorrow will mark the one-month-no-post mark.
Here's a long, boring video of the balloon that landed in my backyard deflating. If I could, I'd speed it up double-time and throw in some background music. I'm thinking, of course, of the Benny Hill music (which I now see has a name, "Yakety Sax") where he runs around chasing the ladies.
I'll have a real post later. Met lots and lots of folks at a couple 4th parties yesterday. Fas would be excited to know I now am acquainted with the owners of Backcountry Provisions, probably the best sandwich place in the world. Booya! (really, more later. But I gotta get some work done here folks).
...we're just REALLY busy unpacking. Holy hell, we have a lot of stuff.
I got the office set up so I can at least work on Tuesday. The kitchen is still coming along, and the living room is mostly put together (if not wholly unpacked). Computers and stereos are set up (natch), and yesterday I spent a LONG time organizing the garage, only to realize I have to redo it later (half of the garage will be Mark's playplace, the other half Dana's parking place). I got the halves wrong. No worries, though, I have to take everything out anyway and borrow our neighbor's power washer to get all the crap off the floor.
What else?
We bought patio furniture (or, as we like to say, "Paddy O'Furniture"). Yes, we really are that clever.
We're also exhausted.
Pictures after some of the boxes are cleared away.
We also played a fun game today that I like to call "Find the blender and tequila". I got the tequila on my first guess (yes, I know I'm not supposed to pack liquids, I was a bad boy), and D looked for the box that said "blender". Cheater.
Like I said, pics later.
Hope everyone's having a great weekend!
Oh, and we had beer brats as the first meal on the grill in Steamboat. They were most excellent. Divine, even.
I know we're behind on our status updates, and that you're all just dying to know how life is in Colorado.
It seems no amount of pestering by moi can convince Dana to actually post to the blog, so don't be surprised if it changes back to simply "Mr. Sideways" again. 
Immediately after the ride, we got a couple cups of coffee to go and watched the parade. I can't remember the last parade I went to that wasn't Chicago's St. Patty's Day parade, so it was pretty fun. Picture small town Americana parade extraordinaire, and you've got it. We rode home on sore butts afterwards (oh, yeah - the ride home is a half mile up a huge hill too, by the way, so that was fun), had some lunch, and took a nap. 
steamboat weather
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