I made some delicious chicken enchiladas last night, loosely following this recipe. Typically I just take a can of enchilada sauce, combine it with some chicken and cheese and call it a meal. This time I wanted to find something to add to the sauce to make it even better. This recipe definitely did the trick.

Instead of using ground chicken, I baked a chicken breast and then shredded it. I didn’t have any jalapeños, but I did have the diced tomatoes with green chile peppers. I’m not sure it was exactly 10 ounces, as I had used one cup from a 14.5 ounce can earlier in the week for an Indian dish. Other than that I tried to stick to the recipe, although I did add extra onion, both to the inside mixture and on top of the enchiladas once they were rolled into the dish. Once they were done I topped them with some hot sauce and sour cream and they were fantastic! I’ll definitely be making these again.

The Monkees won another hockey game last night, despite only having seven skaters. Sure the game was tiring, but we played really well with the guys that we had. Personally, I had one goal and two assists, along with one broken stick. This takes me to six goals and eleven assists in fourteen games. Our team is 12-6 and pretty firmly in third place. The team we beat is still in second place, but we are slowly gaining on them. Currently they are ahead of us by three points. With only three games left in the season, we’ll have to really work on catching them. Anyone have an extra stick they want to send me?

Normally I would apologize for all of the downtime recently, but believe me when I say that it frustrated me more than it did you. For the first time since we moved to Denver, my IP address from Comcast changed. Normally I wouldn’t expect this to cause a huge amount of downtime, but this case was different. Just like I typically would, I updated my nameserves at zoneedit.com first. In the past this was all I ever had to do and the site would be working again within a few minutes. This time I was not so lucky. After making the changes, everyone on the outside world was probably still without access to my sites for hours. Inside my network, I could access my router admin page, but that was it. In fact anytime I tried to go to any of my sites, I was redirected to the stupid admin page. Perhaps this should have clued me in to the problem, but it didn’t. Instead I spent the vast majority of the day making changes to my apache configuration, trying to get another IP address, uninstalling software, and anything else I could think of. I got nowhere.

Finally I decided that I would try making changes to my router configuration since the admin page seemed to be the first problem. After a couple of hours of banging my head on the desk, I finally clicked this little button on one of the admin pages that says, “DHCP Renew.” At first I was a little concerned, because after I hit the button the page tried to refresh but never came back. Later I would realize that this was a good sign, since I was actually edit the router config while my address bar still said edpaffjr.com. After a hard refresh on the page, VIOLA!, everything was back to normal. The bad part is that I changed so many things throughout the day, I now have to make sure I didn’t break anything else. Don’t you just love computers?

We had more visitors out this past weekend. This time it was three of Kim’s brothers: Jason, Chris, and Chip. After hanging around Denver on Friday night, we headed toward Keystone early on Saturday morning. Since Keystone is the only resort in Colorado (that I know of) that has night skiing, this was perfect for them. We were able to stay as late as we wanted, especially since we were staying right across the street from the resort. We found time to hit up the terrain park, take a snowcat ride out to fresh powder, and even conquer the very same trail that injured my ankle around a year ago.

After a great day at Keystone Saturday, we decided to mix it up and head to Breckenridge for Sunday. Since we were staying so close, we were able to be one of the first out on the slopes. So we immediately headed for my favorite area at Breck, Peak 7. The entire peak is mostly blue, and full of natural rolling terrain. The options are endless in this area, so we stayed here for the better part of day. As it normally does, Peak 7 got more and more crowded as the day went on, so eventually we made our way over to the terrain park once again. And once we beat ourselves up pretty good, we did a few more runs and then headed back for Denver.

It was a great weekend trip, and Kim took lots of pictures and videos. If the videos are slow here on my site, I’ve also uploaded them to YouTube. Enjoy!

Peak 7 on Dwellable

I just bought a couple more nemo’s to add to my tank. If you recall, the previous one didn’t last too long, but I’m already predicting much better luck this time around. Unlike the first, these guys are tank raised clownfish, which means that they should be much hardier than wild caught and disease free. The store I went to, Aquamart, had tons of these little guys in a tank of their own. They were all really active and healthy. I thought they were so perfect, and at a great price, that I couldn’t buy just one. So I bought two and with luck I could end up with a mated pair after they mature. I can’t wait to watch these guys grow!

For the past couple of months I’ve been working on fixing up the garage. Once we had the roof redone on the house and the garage, I finally felt like I could put a little extra work into it. So first, I remounted the garage door opener so it was more sturdy and Kim would no longer feel like it was going to fall on top of the Jetta. From there, I patched multiple holes in the garage floor. I tried one type of patch first but found it really hard to work with. So after visiting the local hardware store again, one of the very helpful salesmen directed me toward a much better product. This time I was able to smooth the patch out and fill in the holes very easily. After a couple of weeks, all of the holes were filled and I could finally start using the garage again.

That was until the other night when I left for hockey. I pressed the opener and the garage door attempted to open, but the rubber weatherstripping on the bottom of the door was apparently frozen to the concrete floor. The door still tried opening anyway, until I stopped it, but the damage was done. The weatherstripping was completely ripped from the bottom of the door except for a small piece on each end. And during the struggle, part of the door was actually bent. Fortunately the dent is pretty hard to notice, but I tried bending it back anyway. After another visit to the hardware store I returned with some very powerful adhesive that I used to put the weatherstripping back in place and put the door back together. I haven’t tried opening the door yet, but I’m hoping the next time I do all will be well. Mental note to myself: when shoveling snow don’t forget to open the garage door and shovel there as well.

Yet another hockey game last night, and once again another win for the Monkees. We are currently in third place and we faced off with the fourth place team, Callahan Auto. This team is the most physical team in our league, and I don’t mean that in a good way. I don’t think I’ve seen a fight during a game since moving to Denver, but there was almost one last night. Fortunately we were able to get three quick goals toward the end of the third period, all of which were assisted by yours truly. I don’t think I’ve had a playmaker (three assists in one game) in quite some time. These three goals allowed us to hang on for the 4-2 win!

Happy Super Fat Tuesday! Super Tuesday is a big voting day that I’ve never really been a part of, and that tradition will continue. Prior to this years presidential election, I’ve always been a registered voter of Ohio, which holds primaries much later. The problem with this year is that when I got my Colorado drivers license and also registered to vote I did so as an independent. But in order to vote in the Colorado caucuses, you have to be affiliated with the appropriate political party. Oh well, maybe I’ll get my chance in four more years. If you are in state that is holding elections today, and you qualify, don’t forget to get out and vote!

As I mentioned at the end of last week, my friends Ken and Jon were in town visiting through yesterday. After hitting up all of the Denver area sights for a few days, we headed up into the mountains for some skiing and snowboarding. As luck would have it, friends of ours were staying in a huge cabin north of Winter Park and invited all of us to stay with them. So we headed up Thursday night so we could get some sleep and get up early to spend a long day at Winter Park. About halfway into our drive, the snow started falling and it never really seemed to stop.

The never ending snow left some great conditions for my first ever visit to Winter Park. And since it was Friday, the crowds were not bad at all. We hit the mountain with some of our friends from the cabin, along with Kim and I on snowboards and Ken and Jon on skis. We spent the majority of our time on the Mary Jane side of things, especially in Parsenn Bowl which was by far my favorite part. These runs started above the tree line and were very windy, but once we got down just a bit and into the trees, the powder was super thick and the terrain wasn’t too steep. It was “epic” as many would say.

After staying in the cabin again on Friday night, we woke up early on Saturday to head to Vail for another day on the slopes. Despite Vail being on our season passes, we had only been one time before. If it were a little closer to Denver we would probably be there all the time. Anyway, after experiencing Parsenn Bowl the previous day we wanted to finally get out to the legendary back bowls of Vail. The lines were much longer than before, but we finally made it out to Blue Sky Basin. I must say that this area really is amazing! Incredibly long runs full of trees, deep powder, and more fun than imaginable. Check out pictures from both days here.

Winter Park on Dwellable

Vail on Dwellable