I’m beginning to think that all it ever does in Denver is snow. Everyone we talk to says differently, but there has been snow and ice on the ground since we moved nearly a month ago. And guess what? It’s snowing again today. Residents claim that when it does snow it almost always melts within 24 hours. I don’t believe it, though, as there is still tons of ice and snow in the back alley behind the house. I know first hand because I got the Jetta stuck once again last night.

We haven’t been using the alley (although that’s where the garage and parking spaces are) since we moved in because the Jetta got stuck the very first day we tried. After we pushed it out, we decided to just park on the side streets around our home. That was until we left for our ski trip last week. I didn’t want to leave the Jetta on the street for fear of it being reported as abandoned, so I moved it shortly before I left. Fortunately, I had no problems getting it into one of the parking spots.

The problem came when I wanted to go to the grocery store last night. I attempted to back out of the spot and then both of the back tires slid into one of the trenches that currently runs down the alley. These aren’t supposed to be there, but have been carved in the ice by weeks of cars (bigger cars I guess) driving down the alley. These trenches are a couple of inches deep. Once both back wheels were in the trench, I could not get the car to move at all. The front tires tried to pull up the weight of the car, but instead they just spun on the ice underneath. I tried for hours to dig the car out and finally just waited for Kim to get home so she could drive as I pushed it out.

We ordered in for the first time in Denver. I wanted pizza, but Kim had something else in mind. I guess she had heard good things from some of the locals about a place called Spicy Basil Asian Grill. Since I wasn’t feeling too picky last night, I gave in and she ordered a couple of dishes and had them delivered. We started with the Edamame, which is essentially just soybeans. She must have forgotten that I was allergic to soybeans! I tried a few of them though, but then quickly moved on to the main dishes.

I first tried the Green Curry with chicken over some rice. It was surprisingly spicy, but oh so good. I would definitely recommend this dish, although next time I may push for the Peanut Sauce Curry. The second dish was the Thai Curry Noodles with chicken only. The description from the menu says it’s a spicy dish but next to the Green Curry it definitely was not. In fact I thought it could have used a little more spice. Perhaps we just got a mild batch.

Next time I’m hoping that we decide to head into the restaurant to eat, as the decor is supposed to be very interesting. Or better yet, maybe we’ll head to a nearby restaurant called Thai Basil so we can decide which one is better.

Well I survived the plane rides to Maine and back with no problems! The first flight on Thursday morning was from Denver to Baltimore, Maryland. This was one of the longer flights I’ve been on in awhile. My addiction to playing sodoku while on planes helped pass the time well. After a quick stop in Baltimore we finally arrived in Manchester, New Hampshire. This was the same airport we used for our trip to Killington last year.

We met up with our friend Tracey, who was flying in from Chicago, picked up the rental car and were on our way. We had a pretty good drive ahead of us, but passed the time with looking for moose and playing with the car’s Neverlost system. In case you were wondering, I still have yet to see a moose. After a few hours drive we finally arrived at Sunday River. This marked my 35th visited state!

From there we got the keys to our condo in one of the North Peak Buildings and later met up with all of the others who were driving in from Boston. After catching up for a couple of hours we all headed to bed so we could get an early start on the slopes Friday morning.

The next couple of days was spent skiing and snowboarding throughout the entire resort. Though the runs are not as long as they are out here in Colorado, the conditions were still pretty good especially when considering the lack of snow so far this year. There were some icy spots and packed surfaces that lead to some nasty bruises for some in our party. I don’t think I took any really bad falls throughout the two days, and I am in very little pain today. I must be getting better!

The one thing that was not fun was the temperature. Each morning when we woke up it was below zero! This is not taking into account the wind chill, this was the air temperature only. Also keep in mind that this is the Fahrenheit scale and not Celsius. It did warm up late morning the second day, which led to some great conditions. As we were leaving on Sunday morning, it started to snow. This seems to be a new trend for us, leaving the mountains just as it starts to snow. Perhaps we’ll have better luck this coming weekend.

Newry on Dwellable

As you are reading this, we should be on our way to Bethel, Maine for a weekend at Sunday River. If you remember our trip to Killington, Vermont last year, this trip will be with the same group and some additions. I hope to have just as much fun as last year, minus that incident on the plane. Full review to come Monday…

One of the hardest adjustments I’ve had to make involves the liquor laws here in Colorado. Back in Missouri you can buy anything you want at the grocery store, even full strength liquor. Therefore we often had various bottles on our grocery list, and thus a fully stocked bar. Since we’ve moved our bar has gone downhill quickly.

In Colorado you cannot buy liquor in the grocery, you must go to a liquor store to get it. Even tougher, you can only buy 3.2% beer in the grocery store. I’m not sure about gas stations, I’ve yet to go into one looking for beer. There are lots of liquor stores around, but I still wish I could make one stop to get everything. Now we need two weekly stops, one for food an done for drink. And to further complicate matters, the liquor stores are closed on Sunday, which is the day that we typically do our grocery trip.

If you want to give us a housewarming gift, liquor will gladly be accepted!

I haven’t written anything for the cooking category in a long time. That will likely change as working from home has given me the opportunity to plan out and spend more time cooking. Last night I made some homemade spaghetti sauce. I’ve done this a few times before, but this time I found and used a more complex recipe. The only thing I did not have in the house was the lemon juice. I also added extra tomato paste, since I didn’t want to waste almost an entire can. We ate it over some ziti pasta and the results were great! I cannot wait to have some more of it for lunch.

We had our first visitors to Denver this past weekend, our good friends Mike and Christie, who both used to work with Kim in Kansas City. On Friday evening, they came over to our house along with our a few others for a couple of drinks and tours. We later headed up the street to The Hornet for some dinner, which I must say tasted really good despite the long wait for a table. From there we called it an early night.

We woke up early on Saturday, assembled the troops, and headed up to Breckenridge. Mike and Christie wanted to give snowboarding a try, so Kim and I, along with Andrea (our real estate agent and Christie’s friend from college) and her boyfriend Shane, were going to try our best to give them some guidance. The conditions were alright at the beginning but toward the end of the day the lack of snow was really showing as there was no powder and the snow was all packed solid. This led to painful falls and early quit times for many in the group.

Fortunately Andrea found and reserved a condo for all of us so we were able to stay in the mountains on Saturday night. We enjoyed some time out on the town after the boarding was complete, but before too long the days events sent us all crawling for a bed. It was a great weekend, and just as we were leaving town the snow started! If only it would have come a day earlier.

My site is back to being hosted from one of my home PCs. This means that the gallery is working once again! Now that brings me to a new dilemma, and I am going to rely on all of you to help me decide on the future of the site.

I’ve really enjoyed my experience with Flickr, but I’ve often heard complaints of slowness and have actually experienced them myself. Another thing to consider is that I would probably have to upgrade to Pro account to host everything.

I probably don’t have much room to complain about speed, since my site is hosted locally via cable modem service. However, I do think the site is faster than it was when I was using Time Warner. The 8 Mbps package from Comcast appears to be working very well so far (although my download speed is not nearly as fast as I was hoping).

FYI, I’m leaning towards going back to Gallery, since that is what I am most familiar with.

We went to our second Colorado Avalanche game last night, in just as many weeks. One of Kim’s co-workers shares a season ticket package and they weren’t going to be able to use the tickets, so guess who got the tickets? And not only were these free tickets, they were free 11th row tickets right at center ice! I’ve only been to a few NHL games now, but this is going to be hard to top in the future. A huge thanks goes out to Patti!

The Avs faced off with the Phoenix Coyotes last night. That’s right, we also got to see Wayne Gretzky act as head coach. Oh yeah, I also got to watch one of my favorite players growing up, Jeremy Roenick. He didn’t appear to be nearly as good as I remember him being back then, but it was still cool to see him play.

Maybe my new years resolution should be to follow the NHL a little closer. I feel so unfamiliar with who is playing where. One things for certain, when I attend a game the Avalanche are going to win. With a 4-3 victory last night, they are now 2-0 when I am in the stands. Perhaps I should go to more games.

Be sure to check out my flickr page. I added a few pictures from last night’s game.

Over the weekend we also did some snowboarding at Breckenridge. Prior to this trip, I’d been to Breck once before but it was during the fall. Though there was no snow, we still were able to check out the town and do a little hiking. I really enjoyed that trip, and just as before I really enjoyed our trip over the weekend.

Once again we woke up early on Saturday morning and were on the road around 7am. Without traffic and snow the drive should take about an hour and a half, but we’ve been finding out that this isn’t going to happen. The morning drive was actually one of the easiest, that is until the evening drive. We arrived around 9am (the time the lifts open) and quickly grabbed our gear and headed toward the new Breck Connect gondola. I guess prior to the gondola being built, you had to catch a bus from the parking lots to one of the bases. That sounds like a big pain to me, so I’m glad that the gondola is now open.

We spent about four hours on the slopes. We are both quickly getting back into the swing of things and we even found ourselves in the terrain park at one point. We tried the little half pipe but neither of us had any idea of what to do. We then found a couple of “small” jumps. These are labeled small on the maps, but they are definitely big enough for me! I got my back leg real good one time and I’m not sure I’ll be back on the jumps anytime soon.

Learning our lesson from the weekend prior, we left between two and three to make the drive back to Denver. This was the easiest drive to date and we made it back in exactly one and a half hours, just in time to catch the Mammoth game.