Day 51: Boulder, CO

Hi friends,

My computer is working again (for now), so I can update the blog. Woohoo! Yesterday was day 51. I can't believe I've been gone for that long. Looking back at my blog entries, however, I can't believe I haven't been gone longer.

I woke up yesterday morning around 9:00ish and the first order of business was cleaning out my trunk. On Tuesday night, when I arrived at my Uncle's place outside of Denver, a bag fell out of my trunk. It sounded like something broke, but I knew that there wasn't any glass inside the bag, so I figured it was nothing. Yesterday, when I went to get something out of my trunk, I found everything covered in laundry detergent. I forgot - plastic can break too. At least laundry detergent smells good, right? My initial approach to dealing with the mess was to ignore it and see if it would just go away. That works better with bees and whiny children than it does with laundry detergent spills, FYI. Fortunately my Uncle has a wet vac, so I got to work cleaning up the spill. It actually didn't take too long.

After that, I had to repack all of my clothes because of the significant drop in temperature. The flip flops had to be put away and the boots, sweatshirts, scarves, and puffy jacket had to come out. It was very sad. The whole time I was repacking, I was thinking about just turning around and going back to Southern California, where everything is sunny and perfect.

Once I was all packed, I took a couple photos of Patch, my Uncle's adorable, sweet dog. She was a very cooperative model too. Here are the photos:

Patch and I really bonded while I was there. We had similar struggles this year. She had a tumor in her nose and had to have surgery and radiation to get rid of it. She's okay now. Patch is extremely affectionate and quite spoiled, so we also have those things in common.

Then my Uncle Bruce and I went to lunch at The Egg & I right by his house in Highland Ranch. I couldn't decide between the Huevos Rancheros and the French Toast, so I just got the Huevos Rancheros, didn't eat the potatoes, and ordered a single piece of French Toast. The Huevos Rancheros was SO good. The best I've ever had, no doubt. But then the waitress came out with my french toast and it had a massive scoop of butter on it. Gross! There was absolutely no indication on the menu that there it was going to be covered in butter, so I didn't feel bad asking the waitress if I could have a new piece of french toast. The problem is that she came back with the same piece of french toast with the scoop of butter removed, but the butter had been on there long enough that it completely saturated the area of toast under it, so it had a huge, flat, soggy, nasty, buttery crater in the middle. She obviously tried to hide it by covering it with powdered sugar, but she wasn't fooling me. I was really not happy about this. I ate around the butter crater and left the soggy mess on the plate to let her know she didn't fool me. My Uncle shook his head in disapproval as I made a big fuss over something trivial. I know it's trivial, but it's a problem that could be solved easily, so it seems worthwhile to make a fuss over it. I'm not going to make a fuss about real problems that require complex solutions, like the ailing economy, or the war, or political corruption, because that'll just make me upset. I think that people sometimes have to make a big deal of little things just so they don't have to think about the real problems in the world.

That story was supposed to be funny, not depressing. What happened?

Anyway, after lunch I headed to Boulder. I had an appointment at the Genius Bar at the Apple store on 29th Street in Boulder at 3:45 to figure out what the heck is wrong with my computer. I spent an hour on the phone with Apple yesterday trying to fix the problem, but had no luck. They didn't have any luck at the store either, but my computer is working right now, so I'll just deal with the problem later.

When I arrived in Boulder, it was full-on snowing. Not like a couple flakes here and there - legitimate snow. Then I went to Sara's work to hang out while she finished her stuff. She sells tight ropes. Sort of. She works for a company called Gibbon, that sells slacklines and jiblines. They're basically tight ropes for climbers. Sara is my best friend from college. We've been BFF for twelve years now. Sara moved out to Boulder in January and loves it here. She's trying to convince me to move out here. We'll see. I love her and I miss her a lot.

Sara and I met on the first day of freshman orientation in college. I was moving my stuff into my room and Sara came by to introduce herself and said she liked my Grateful Dead poster. She lived in the study next door. Studies were large rooms that were meant to be used as places to study - that's where they came up with the creative name - but there weren't enough rooms for all of the students, so the college turned the studies into four person rooms. Studies were crazy. I'm SO glad I didn't live in one. Since twice as many people lived in them and they were twice as big as regular dorm rooms, they attracted about ten times as many visitors as regular dorm rooms. It was really just a constant party.

Sara and I became roommates our sophomore year. We had the funnest dorm room in America, in the funnest hall in America, at the funnest college in America. We lived apart for the first half of junior year, but were reunited for the second half.

Before my arrival, Sara had already researched yogurt shops in the area. How cute is that?! There are no Pinkberries or Red Mangoes, but there's some sort of tart yogurt shop that we'll probably go to on Tuesday, when it's not freezing.

We had a pretty laid back night last night. I was not up for anything festive because I hardly got any sleep the night before. I never thought I'd complain about too little humidity, but I have to do it. The air here is SO dry! I woke up in the middle of the night and could barely breathe because the air was too dry and then I couldn't fall back asleep. Ugh.

After she finished at work, we had dinner at Pei Wei (my favorite!), went back to her house, baked chocolate chip cookies (mmm...), and watched Jim and Pam's wedding on The Office.

While it's freezing today, it's also beautiful and sunny, so I think I'm going to go for a bike ride. Not a miserable uphill bike ride, a nice leisurely one. Tonight we're going to see a bluegrass band, Hot Buttered Rum, with some of Sara's friends.

ttyl