The only shows I’ve seen recently have all been provided by SoundRabbit. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing at all, as I love their music, but I just haven’t been getting around to as many shows as I once did. And that’s pretty surprising to me since the music scene out here is nearly as good as it gets. Hopefully I’ll start getting out more with the warmer weather and abundance of summertime shows.

Anyway, I’ve uploaded a few recordings of recent SoundRabbit shows to archive.org. The first one available is the show from the Mercury Cafe, which I wrote about previously. Second is a short but sweet set from Herman’s Hideaway just a couple of weeks ago, available here. Both of these have a great cover of Life During Wartime by the Talking Heads.

In completely unrelated music news, the first single from O.A.R.’s upcoming release All Sides can be heard here.

Over the weekend I also took my first trip to Garden of the Gods and Pike’s Peak. We met up with our family friends, the Hemmelgarns, who’s daughter Amy just recently moved to Colorado Springs with her husband Corey. After checking out some of the various rock formations in the Garden of the Gods, we took a drive over to the base of Pike’s Peak. We paid a discounted rate to get through the gates, since the trail to the top was only open 13 of the 19 miles. Though we didn’t get very high, very close to the tree line, there were still some great views along the way. I’ve added some pictures to my site, and my mom has a ton more on her flickr page.

I’m sure we are all relieved to see the site is back up. My IP address changed once again and I really had a battle getting everything working again. I swear the new IP address was bad, as I wasn’t able to open any webpages. Finally, I was able to get yet another IP address and things appear to be normal again. Here’s to hoping that this IP stays around for awhile.

To make up for all the downtime, I’ve added some pictures to the site. The first batch come from a hike we had over the weekend with Kim’s parents. We headed up toward Boulder early on Saturday morning straight for the Flatirons. Though we weren’t going to actually climb up any of the Flatirons, we walked around them for a few miles and enjoyed all the nice scenery.

On our way back toward the car, we actually got snowed on! It’s crazy that the white stuff is still occasionally falling on us this far into spring. Speaking of spring, I snapped a few quick photos of our flowers in the backyard. Some of them are already fading while others are just starting to bloom. Our yard is also really starting to green up. I’ll probably have to get out the mower for the first time in the next day or so.

I had my first experience with the game Rock Band over the weekend, and I am addicted. If I had a copy of the game at home I don’t think I’d do anything else, so maybe it’s a good thing that I don’t. My brother hosted a leap day party featuring the game and encouraged everyone to dress in their favorite rock attire. He had a killer Bret Michaels (of Poison fame) costume, complete with eyeliner. Fortunately my mom was there with her camera to capture pictures of the night and a couple from a disco party the next night.

Two weeks ago I added a couple of clownfish to my saltwater tank. Well I have good news, they are both still alive and both doing really well. These guys are pigs and eat most of the food before anything else can get to it. They are very active and swim all over the tank. They like playing tag, or establishing dominance, depending on what way you look at it. I think this is all a part of growing up, and I’m still hoping that I’ll end up with a mating pair when it’s all said and done. I finally took the camera out and spent a few minutes taking some pictures. They really seemed to like posing for me, so I’ll be sure to take more as they grow older. All of the pictures can be found in this photo album.

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!

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.

Our first trip to Steamboat was a huge success! I’m convinced that it never stops snowing there, although we did see some blue skies as we drove away yesterday morning. Not that constant snow is necessarily a bad thing at all. According to the snow reports, they had 10+ inches of snow over the two days we were out on the slopes. That’s in addition to the over 250 inches they’ve already had this season. Needless to say, the conditions were great!

We stayed in the Scandinavian Lodge, which was nicely furnished and really close to the slopes. It is sometimes advertised as ski-out, but that’s only true if you count the narrow trail from the parking lot that weaves between other condos and lots of trees, not to mention the street that you must cross. However, one of the lifts is less than 200 yards away and an easy walk to/from the condo.

With my ankle feeling better with each passing day, and the awesome conditions, I finally felt comfortable doing a few jumps here and there. Here’s a quick video that Kim captured of my adventures. As you can tell, she was a little surprised by how close I got to her.

Kim also took some pictures from our trip, which can be viewed here.

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.

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…