I just got back from taking a lunch trip downtown to watch the National Western Stock Show Parade. I’m assuming that the series of events are similar to the American Royal in Kansas City, which I’ve experienced different parts of in the past. However, I have never seen a parade quite like this. It actually starts with a big group of cowboys driving somewhere between fifty and one hundred (by my estimation) longhorn cattle down 17th Street. Then they have a band or two, lots of horses, and some other standard parade fare. It isn’t very long, but was worth it alone to see the cattle up-close. I took some pictures and will get them online soon.

Edit: Pictures can now be seen here.

After weeks of waiting, we finally made it back out to the slopes over the weekend. Early Saturday morning we drove all the way out to Beaver Creek, the farthest resort on our pass. They had gotten over three feet of snow in the week prior, so conditions should have been great. And although it was much better than the previous times we had gone out early in the season, I was still thinking it was going to be better. It was still nice, but I thought with multiple feet of snow there would have been more fresh powder around. I guess all of the snow fell at the beginning of the week though.

We stayed overnight at the Sheraton Mountain Vista, which I would definitely do again. While the hotel is not slope side, it is certainly close enough. The deal breaker are the rooms though, there are very nice and are equipped like a condo, with a large fridge and other appliances. There was also a grill out on the balcony and a gas fireplace inside. Very nice! Sunday morning we took a shuttle bus to the newly opened gondola, which was really fast and we were out on the slopes in no time. Although as we discovered later in the day, it is just as easy to walk to and from the gondola, making it even easier. We may not make it back this year, but I’d definitely like to return at some point.

One of the cooler gifts we received for Christmas is a big world map from Kim’s parents that we can stick pins in to mark our travels. Last night we went through each state in the US and marked one of the best cities that we had been to in each. I think we are only missing like three states between the two of us, so this took up nearly all of the included red pins. We marked a couple spots in Mexico and Kim’s travels to Belize and Guatemala, but after that we were completely out. I’m searching now for more matching pins. The green pins in the map designate future dream travels, most of which are on the other side of the world, but you can see one in this photo.

After taking the picture of our map, I started uploading it to my computer and found a couple of other random shots from the last few weeks. The first is this shot of a snow drift on top of our shed. We got a big snow storm in Denver right after Christmas, and this cool little ski jump was part of that. Some of that snow from the storm is still on the ground today, although a few more days above freezing could take care of it.

And this little guy should look familiar to many of you. We were headed out the door on New Years Eve to grab some food and noticed that Amstel had created a bunch of confetti for us to take with us. He loves chewing on phone books and often has one in his cage, but this time he really shredded the paper. Somehow he must have known what day it was. He is a pretty smart little guy, sometimes. Let us not forget when he ate our linoleum kitchen floor…

Has anyone every hung anything on a brick wall before? As you may or may not know, our house has a number of exposed brick walls, and I’d like to hang some things on these walls. I’ve been researching my options online, and I think I will have to drill into the wall and put special hooks into the wall for this. The only question that remains is if I should put the hooks in the bricks or into the mortar. I’ve read differing opinions online, and was hoping someone had first hand experience.

Anyone up for a last minute trip? Next weekend, Jan 17th-20th, we are going to Steamboat for a few days of snowboarding and/or skiing. Currently it’s me, Kim, our friend Tracey, and her brother going. We have room in our rented condo for another one or two people. The cost is $150 per person for three nights in the condo (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday). Plus we have some free lift tickets included along with some buy one get one free coupons, so lift tickets shouldn’t cost much. Let me know if you are interested, it will be a great time!

After days and even weeks of searching, I’ve finally purchased a fish and added it to my saltwater tank. The fish is called Sphaeramia nematoptera, or more commonly known as the Spotted Cardinalfish or Pajama Cardinalfish. The selection process of what stores to buy from and what fish to get has been very hard, so I’m asking for your help. You can click on each name to see a picture of the fish.

• Clownfish
• Six Line Wrasse
• Royal Gramma
• Firefish

We found another great Denver area pizza shop over the weekend called Nicolo’s. Kim was in the mood for pizza of the thicker variety, and what better style to look for than Chicago style pie. After searching online, I found that Nicolo’s was in fact Chicago style and had good reviews, so we took a chance and placed an order for delivery. We had the ultimate veggie stuffed pizza and I must say that it was delicious! Most of the time I prefer New York style, but this pizza was loaded with tons of fresh veggies and definitely hit the spot. I wasn’t too impressed with the garlic bread we ordered, to get our purchase up to the minimum needed for delivery, but the pizza easily made up for it.

There are multi locations in the Denver area, including the one we ordered from at 1205 East 13th Avenue.

Recently I’ve begun using a couple of sites to help me with my internet addiction. These aren’t going to keep me off of the net completely, but make my browsing more efficient.

First up is mint.com, which allows you to monitor all of your various bank accounts and credit cards all in one place. “Mint connects nightly to the…[accounts]…you choose to keep your transactions and account balances automatically up-to-date. Mint even auto-balances your checkbook and auto-categorizes your transactions. Set it up once and you’re done.” The expense categorization isn’t perfect, but you can create rules to help the process in the future. The cool part is that once it’s right, you can view your expenses broken into various categories over a user defined time period, and see where all of your money is going. I haven’t figured out how mint.com will balance my checkbook yet, but I’m just staring to use the site.

The second site is spokeo.com and I just started using it today. This site allows you to monitor all of those social networking sites (myspace, facebook, etc) along with various photo sharing sites and blogs all in one place. I doubt I’ll use it to keep track on blogs, since I already use bloglines for that, but I do like the auto monitoring of the social network sites that work blocks. This allows you to keep up even if you can’t connect to the sites directly yourself. Plus, it will also find your friends on various sites that you didn’t even know they had accounts on. All you do is enter your email address and password and it does the dirty work for you. So far I’m really impressed by the site, but we’ll see how long it stays in my rotation.

I bought a wobble board a few days ago and have been using it to help strengthen my bad ankle quickly, so I can get back out on the slopes and ice very soon. Maybe what I should have bought was the Wii Fit. Although judging from how bad I am at the bowling game on the Wii, it probably was a good idea that I just got the wobble board.

Happy New Year! Here is a list of all of the places I visited last year, with at least one night spent in each place.

• Denver, CO *
• Breckenridge, CO *
• Bethel, ME
• Silverthorne, CO
• Cincinnati, OH *
• Loveland, OH *
• Kansas City, MO *
• Boulder, CO
• Salt Lake City, UT
• Midway, UT
• Monticello, UT
• Ann Arbor, MI
• Sunset Beach, NC
• Noblesville, IN
• Honolulu, HI
• Geneva, NY
• Madison, IN
• Playa del Carmen, Mexico

* Visited more than once on nonconsecutive days.

See also: the list from 2006.