Typically I try to get this done before Christmas, but since we weren’t traveling this year I knew I would have extra time to finish.  Finally this year’s NOW That’s What Ed Calls Music is complete!

1. Grace Potter & The Nocturnals – Paris (Ooh La La)
2. Julian Velard – Joni
3. Michael Franti & Spearhead – The Sound Of Sunshine
4. Vampire Weekend – Horchata
5. John Butler Trio – One Way Road
6. Local Natives – Airplanes
7. State Radio – Calling All Crows
8. Ozomatli – 45
9. Band Of Horses – Laredo
10. Jonathan Tyler & The Northern Lights – Gypsy Woman
11. Martin Sexton – Livin The Life
12. Sara Bareilles – King of Anything
13. ALO – Big Appetite
14. Mumford & Sons – Little Lion Man
15. Ben Rector – Moving Backwards
16. Everyday Animals – Voice On A Stereo
17. Danielle Ate The Sandwich – American Dream

All tracks are available for download from this site and I’ve also added them to sendspace.com (download link toward the bottom of the page), which should be a much faster download.  Please support these artists by buying their albums and attending their live shows.  As always I hope you enjoy the compilation and happy holidays.

We ventured out on Christmas Eve in search of some holiday lights.  We first stopped by the Denver Botanic Gardens on York Street for their Blossoms of Light.  There over one million lights cover the winter plants.  However, it didn’t seem worth the nearly $10 price of admisison.  The ice sculptures were all melted messes, and the coolest part was seeing some of the more tropical plants in some of the greenhouses.  I think we would have been better off visiting the zoo, which was cheaper and full of animals in addition to the lights.

Fortunately the entire night wasn’t a bust.  We drove over to the Denver City and County Building to take some photos of the light display.  Every time I’ve driven past the building since Thanksgiving, I wish that I had brought my camera along.  Finally I was able to get some photos on a nice clear night.  The lights look wonderful close up and even from blocks away.  In addition there is a nativity scene and another display of elves of some sort.  Plus Santa Claus is even on the roof!  It’s a very bright display.

Denver on Dwellable

Well I had another bad round of fantasy football this past weekend.  As I mentioned earlier, I made it all the way to the championship in one league.  Unfortunately, though, I lost the game by less than five points.  Had I played the right players, I could have won, but I guess that is all part of fantasy football.  However I still won $80!  I also lost the final game of the consolation bracket in another league, finishing in sixth place.  So my final standings were second, fifth, and sixth places in all three of my leagues.

I did manage to finish the Jenny Challenge, though it required heading out on Christmas morning to finish up the last of the miles.  Though I doubt I’ll continue to run at that pace, I have enjoyed the extra activity and hope to keep most of it up.  It doesn’t hurt either when you shed a couple of extra pounds, as that helps keep the motivation high.  However it will take some effort to keep on running with the baby on the way soon.

To kick off the holiday weekend my wife and I headed to 8 Rivers Caribbean restaurant in LoDo.  We had a Groupon for $30 worth of food that we had to use by the end of the year.  I made reservations online, though they were not needed, as the restaurant was mostly empty upon our arrival.  We were greeted and seated by a young man who would eventually be our server as well.  I decided to start with a cocktail, the dark and stormy, which mixed rum with ginger beer.  It was good, but perhaps a little expensive at almost $10 a glass. 

Upon glancing at the food menu, I realized that expensive would be a common theme for the night.  Most entrees were well over $15.  I’m not opposed to having more expensive meals while dining out, but I expect the food to be great and a good value.  Unfortunately I don’t think the food lived up to the cost.  I had the Jerk Chicken Pasta with Festival Bread, which is one of the spiciest dishes on the menu.  The Caribbean spice is different from what I’m used to, but still I grew to really enjoy the taste.  It was definitely spicy, and I’m glad the server warns customers of this, as it could take some people by surprise. 

Jerk Chicken Pasta with Festival Bread

The serving of Jerk Chicken Pasta was also fairly large and seemed like a decent value for the $17 price tag.  However, the Jamaican Curried Chicken that my wife ordered was a much smaller portion and didn’t seem like a very good value at all.  The dish consisted of slow cooked chicken and onion in Jamaican Curry. Served traditionally with rice n’ peas, fried plantain and chef choice vegetable (green beans).  The chicken was served on the bone, which made it look like a lot more food than it really was.  To top off the smaller than expected dish were just a few of their plantain chips.  I would like to have seen a few more thrown on the plate.  Again the food was pretty good, it just seemed to be too expensive for what was received. 

Jamaican Curried Chicken

I doubt that we will return to 8 Rivers. Again the food was good, it just didn’t seem like a good value. I’m glad that we had a Groupon that helped to eat some of that excess cost. 

I’m working hard today so I can try to get out of here early.  With that said this will be a short posting.  I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas weekend.  I have both Friday and Monday off of work, which I am really looking forward to.  I may try to spend Monday out on the slopes since Kim will still be working that day.  Either way it should be a nice weekend, filled with lots of relaxing and more preparing for the baby.

I haven’t given up on my annual NOW That’s What Ed Calls Music compilation.  Without traveling for Christmas this year, I haven’t had a deadline to get it done.  I’m hoping I can still get something out by the end of this year.  So stay tuned.

Excellent news, I made the super bowl in one of my fantasy football leagues!  This past weekend I knocked off the number one seed rather handily in the semifinals to advance to this coming weekends championship.  I also won games in my other two leagues.  In one league my play is over and I finished in fifth place overall out of eight.  I was the number four seed, so I did finish a little below but still not too bad.  In the other league, I am now in the final game of the consolation bracket, duking it out for fifth place once again.

With less than four days left in the Jenny Challenge I am starting to fall behind.  I still plan to run after work today, but so far this week I only have twelve miles.  I am sitting at 78 total miles, so I still have 22 miles left.  That means nearly six miles per day, which isn’t out of the question, I will just have to really make time to do it.  I’m not throwing in the towel yet.  However, my dad has finished the challenge already.  Kim is a little more behind than I am, but she does have a slight disadvantage since she is carrying some extra weight.  She should still end up with more miles than many others in the challenge, which is a great accomplishment!

This past Sunday is going to be hard to top.  I spent the morning and early afternoon at Breckenridge, which reported eleven inches of fresh snow!  The same group that I’ve been going to the mountains with decided to once again head up on Sunday, and we even added another to our group.  The drive up was pretty easy and we arrived at the Breck gondola parking lot around eight.  This allowed for us to be on the lifts just after the 8:30 opening.  I spent the day with Rob, as I have done recently.  We knew that we wanted to go up into the high elevations to find powder, but had to wait for those lifts to open.  While waiting we did a few quick runs through Mach 1.  The first time we arrived, they had just opened the trail so we were able to enjoy nearly a foot of untouched snow!

Eventually the higher elevation lifts were open and we enjoyed some more great runs through Horseshoe Bowl, Whale’s Tail, and North Bowl areas.  It wasn’t as easy to find untouched snow, but we were successful on a few different runs.  I managed to ride the T-Bar three more times without falling off.  That takes my record with the lift to 5-0.  Eventually we decided to go check out the recently opened Peak 10 after the lines got bad on the other lifts we were using.  Unfortunately we never found much snow like there was over on Peaks 7 and 8.  From there we called it a day and started the long drive back to Denver.  Not only did the snow create great conditions on the mountain, it also jammed up the roads pretty well.  It was well worth it though.  The snow has continued to fall since then, so I may have to get another day in over the holiday weekend.

Late last week I finally made it to Freshcraft, a restaurant that has been on radar since it’s recent opening.  My wife and some of her friends had a baby shower there and all raved about the food.  I was happy to hear that the food was as good as I knew their rotating beer selection was.  When my wife and I arrived on this visit, one of the owners stopped by to say hello to her, as he remembered her from the shower.  That was the first thint that impressed me.

The next thing that impressed me was obviously their beer selection.  They don’t list their offerings online, but I had already heard great things about the menu.  There were a number of beers I wanted to try, some served in small snifters, but since it was happy hour I stuck with the reduced priced pints.  My first choice was the Seeyoulator Doppelbock from Boulevard Brewing.  This beer wasn’t overly sweet, and had some nice spice character at the end that I really enjoyed.  As far as food goes, we started with the Ale and Cheese soup, which was a great choice.

For dinner I decided to have the Fresh Pretzel Turkey Baja: freshly sliced slow roasted turkey layered on a fresh pretzel bun with avocado pulp, tomato slices and jack cheese.  My wife chose the Whiskey BBQ Chicken Sandwich: grilled chicken breast tossed with a delicious whiskey BBQ sauce and packed in a baguette with house slaw and cheddar.  Both choices were very good.  The sauce on my sandwich was a spicy mustard that complimented the sandwich very well.  And the BBQ sauce and slaw mix on my wife’s sandwich is always a favorite of ours.

Top: Whiskey BBQ Chicken Sandwich. Bottom: Fresh Pretzel Turkey Baja.

On the side of each sandwich was our choice of hand cut fries, house slaw or for one dollar substitute handmade spudpuppies or seasonal roasted veggie.  I chose the spudpuppies which were just like hushpuppies but made with potatoes instead.  They were very good!  I washed all of this food down with a pint of Avery Brewing’s Old Jubilation, which paired well with the food and let the flavors all stand out on their own.  I was very happy with my first visit to Freshcraft and can’t wait to go back soon.

I finished up my recording from the Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds show that I attended a week ago.  It can be downloaded from either dreamingtree.org or antsmarching.org using BigTorrent.  If you aren’t familiar with this technology, the show can also be streamed online at dmbstream.com.  Let me know what you think.  I’m very pleased with how it turned out.  I’d say most of the credit should be given to the excellent sound system and rather good acoustics of the 1st Bank Center.  Also the seats that I got from my buddy weren’t too bad either.  Thanks again fighty!

Last night I saw the Blue Man Group for the first time.  Kim has season tickets to a series of plays with a group of girls and one of them couldn’t make it last night, so I gladly took her place.  Having never seen them before I only really expected to see them play their PVC pipe style instruments for an hour and a half.  And while they did do plenty of that, there was so much comedy mixed in to the act.  That was the surprising thing for me.  I actually laughed way more than I expected.

Since the blue men do not speak, they rely on great visual effects and the occasional voiceover to provide the comedy.  Whether it be Twinkie filling shooting out of their chest, or paint flying from their mouths and drums, the visual effects are wonderful.  There is also a fair amount of audience participation, some of which has to be staged, at least a little bit.  Regardless having members of the audience up on stage helps add to the humor and really captures everyones attention.

I believe that this national tour just started, so be on the lookout for when they come to your town.  I would highly recommend it.  Check out the video above for brief clips from the show.