August - Finally!!

So I just found this old post that I had been working on but never got around to posting!!  (Shame on me!)  This entry chronicles the month of August in 2011 when I was spending a lot of time with a new, good friend of mine who was working as an intern at the Broadmoor and she and I got along great!  I was really going to miss her!!

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August 2011 -

This month, my parents spent about 3 weeks in Norway! So I stayed at their house and watched both of their dogs for them, along with my "monster", Bailey. It was a long time, but it just flew by!!

Unfortunately, the start of August was also our intern Susanna’s last week with us! I had such a blast with her over the summer (see my old posts from summer 2011) and we had really bonded and I didn’t want her to go! So we checked some more things off of her Colorado “bucket list” before she left.

One of the things she and her friends wanted to do was to go out dancing downtown! Since I hadn’t been out downtown in a while (for fear of running into Psycho-Ex), I felt that I could suck it up and show them a good time. None of us wanted to worry about getting home at the end of the night, so we had a cab pick us up and take us downtown – this turned out to be an excellent idea!!  (Especially when it came time to head home!) We headed out around 11 pm- yea, 11 pm – how old am I?? I haven’t done that in years!

We had a blast at the first club, and after about an hour or so, we decided to leave and try out another place. Upon reviewing our evening the following morning, we collectively agreed that we didn’t remember much about the second place except it had cow-print booths, and it was our last stop. We definitely had a great time!!

We eventually made our way out to a cab and headed home (I still don’t even know who called the cab…one minute I’m in the bar and the next, in a cab! I’m not even positive if I paid my bar tab! I might have had a receipt somewhere…) It was a nice relief to be in a cab and heading home – until we realized that one of the girls had taken a poster of “The Who” directly off the wall at the bar and walked out!!! How she didn’t get caught, we will never know. Apparently, the poster made it back to Finland in one piece and is still there! Also, I ended up in the front seat next to the driver, since there were 4 of us, and only 3 seats in the back and I'm sure the taxi driver was very glad when he finally dropped us off.

What a crazy night – and there were pictures, but kind of like “The Hangover”, we had to look through the pictures to help ourselves piece a timeline together. I didn’t even get home until 2 am! I haven’t done that in years, and don’t see myself ever doing that again. I'm just not 21 anymore, let's just face it.  The cab driver dropped Susanna and her roomates off at their place, and then dropped me off at mine.  I had left my car and car keys at Susanna's, so at some point the following day, she drove my car back over to my place.  All in all, it was a BLAST!!! It made me that much more sad that Susanna was leaving soon and we’d not be able to have those fun times much longer!

Another item on their list to see before they left was to visit the Golden Bee, an English-pub at The Broadmoor Hotel. They have these really fun Bee stickers that they throw at you, a very yummy cheese/butter dip, amazing ale, and great fish and chips! We headed out to dinner at 5:30 pm (after a proper amount of recovery time from the night before). The fish and chips was the perfect way to end the day and it was just wonderful! We didn’t stay long, only about an hour and a half. I think we were all ready to get home and go to bed early! Also, I was going to drive them to Denver the following morning to spend the night before they flew home, so they also had to finish packing.

I picked up the girls the next morning and we headed to Denver. We arrived around lunchtime and thought it would be fun to eat at the Hard Rock Café in Denver, which ended up being another “bucket list” item for one of the girls, who wanted to visit as many Hard Rock Café’s as possible! It was really fun having a “last meal” with the girls who had become pretty good friends to me in a short amount of time, but it was also a bit bittersweet. After lunch, I took them to their hotel and then I was gone! The entire summer was over! And this was only August 7th!!

After that, August was a pretty slow month. It really died down! While it was finally nice to rest for a while, it was hard to adjust to!

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Sorry for the random, VERY late post, but it was a month I do not want to forget!

Recuperation

No one can imagine how much walking I did this weekend. I simply can not walk today; my legs are so sore. Not to mention my abs, and my arms, and I’m pretty sure I konked my head getting in or out of a car on Saturday and it still hurts. While it was nice to park the car at the hotel and not having to worry about driving anywhere, I definitely underestimated how much walking we would do. Then add in the fact that none of us really knew where we were going, and then add in some drinks (hey – we’re all adults) and it makes it just a little bit fuzzier to get around a strange town. When you walk 6 blocks in one direction, only to realize you meant to go 6 in the OTHER direction, you end up walking about 12 blocks extra to get back where you wanted to be in the first place. That’s an extra 12 blocks too many. And that eventually adds up, especially over a 24 hour period. Thank goodness for BlackBerrys with GPS and cabs!

Justin also has a friend from high school who lives in Denver, and that guy’s brother also lives there, so of course we walked from Coors Field to see their apartments downtown after the game. That added some unaccounted for walking. But it was pretty swanky!

However, I wouldn’t trade this weekend for anything! I did a lot of things I wouldn’t normally get to do on my own, and I laughed the entire time! It’s almost like I wonder how different it would have been if Justin’s friend hadn’t traveled down, or if it was a girls only weekend or something. Definitely still fun, but it would probably be a whole different experience.
So check out some of the awesome pictures below, and you’ll notice how I’m not in most of them, since I was in charge of the camera!

Go Phillies (and Rockies?)

The Rockies Home Opener is next Friday, April 10th, and they play the Philadelphia Phillies! I was never really into baseball until I watched the World Series 2008 with Justin. He’s from South New Jersey, so he’s a diehard Phillies fan. And when I say diehard, I mean even worse that my love for the Stars and Avalanche over the past 10 years combined into every game he watches.



So needless to say, I watched every minute of every single game, and I got into it. He also bought an MLB game for Wii that he now plays all the time (whenever I’m not playing Lego Star Wars) and now I’m familiar with all the players and their names. And I really enjoy it!

We really wanted to go see the Phillies play, and I’m a Rockies fan as well. And hey – it’s opening weekend! He mostly wanted to go because how often to you get to see your home team play in person when you live in another state? We were unable to get tickets to the actual opening day (those things are expensive!) but got tickets to Saturdays game, so we could spend Saturday morning to drive up to Denver. Since it’s a night game, and we’d be in Denver, we thought it would also be fun to stay in a nice hotel overnight to avoid driving back so late, and got a SUPER great deal! That way, after the game, we can go out in Downtown Denver and then we just walk a block or two and that’s it.

And then – one of Justin’s best friends, Greg, from New Hope, PA will be flying in next Friday and will be going to the game with us! He was planning on coming down to visit him in the next few months anyway, and Justin encouraged him to come sooner and to go with us to the game! (Even though he can see the Phillies whenever, because he lives up there, this is still a good excuse to visit). Greg hopped online last night and bought tickets, and will be arriving in Colorado Springs Friday afternoon (which is GREAT – because I already drove all the way to Denver to pick up Justin, so it’s nice that I only have to take a 10 minute drive to the COS airport). Justin wanted to get a Phillies shirt, as do I, and since he knew that we lived in “Rockies-town” and that would be hard to find, Greg offered to pick up some shirts and bring them down here for us! Justin was able to get a half day off from work and I was able to get the whole day off to go pick him up together and show him around town before the game starts at 2:15.

And if that wasn’t enough (oh yea, there’s more) – he was so pumped to be coming out here to visit Justin AND go to the game, that he bought us 3 more tickets for the game on Sunday too!!! So we’ll be sitting club level on Saturday thanks to my bank, Wells Fargo, who sell the tickets half price, and we’ll be sitting club level on Sunday thanks to Greg! It works out perfectly because the game on Sunday is at 1 pm, and Greg’s flight back home is going out of Denver around 7 pm, so we’ll either make it perfectly or early to the airport since we’re right there.

I’m pretty siked!!! But…I still can’t find my camera cord, and I’m definitely going to want some pictures. So if I can’t find it by Saturday, my weekend will be spent at electronics stores to find one!