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.

I doubt that I have to tell you this, but we have still been very busy with the house. We have made great progress in the last week and I think we have about 80 or 90 percent of the boxes emptied. One big thing left to do is get our closets and clothes organized. It will take some work, but hopefully we can get through that by the end of the week.

I ran into one very funky problem over the weekend. We were trying to replace the locks so that the same key would work for the front and back door. Unfortunately this was not the case when we moved in. In fact, we weren’t even given a key that worked for the front door at all! The problem I faced was the lock on the front door had some one way screws on it. These are the screws that go in just like normal, but cannot be removed (at least not easily). After messing with it for an hour and searching for advice from my dad along with the Internet, I stumbled upon a suggestion to use a center punch and a hammer to tap it loose. This method worked brilliantly and we now have matching locks on our doors.

Finally, a little commentary on the weather. It appears to be warming up a little bit, and I can see signs of grass for the first time since we moved to Denver. That’s right, over two weeks without a grass spotting! Just look at how much snow was still on the ground over the weekend. Despite the heat wave, we successfully built our first fire last night. I think Kim is addicted because she is already planning to build another one tonight.

We headed back to the Pepsi Center over the weekend for a Colorado Mammoth lacrosse game. The Mammoth play in an indoor lacrosse league, which combines aspects of hockey and basketball into the outdoor version of the game. The games are played in a hockey rink with the ice covered by turf. Each team plays with five men at at time plus one goalie. There is a 10 second backcourt violation and 30 second shot clock, like basketball. All of this adds up to one intense, high scoring game!

On Saturday night, the Mammoth battled the Buffalo Bandits. The last time these teams met was in last year’s championship game, which the Mammoth won. It was obviously a big game for both teams, as the physical play was abundant. I was literally on the edge of my seat for most of the game, especially towards the end.

The game was tied 10-10 at the end of regulation. For the remainder of the game I don’t think anyone used their seat anymore. The Mammoth scored first in the sudden death overtime period to win the game, 11-10. The game drew 16,523 noisy fans, which surprised me. I wasn’t expecting it to be that popular, but by the end I can understand why there are so many fans. It was well worth the $5 ticket price!

Just a quick update on the house, before I return there to wait for the cable guy. We spent most of last night organizing the kitchen and taking all of the cups, utensils, pots, pans, etc. out of the boxes and putting them into drawers and cabinets. Things are really starting to come together, at least in the kitchen. I’m sure we’ll be spending a bunch more time this weekend organizing other rooms of the house. Hopefully we can have the majority of the boxes emptied by this time next week.

You may have noticed that the photos section of the site is currently down. I won’t bore you with too many details, but usually my site is hosted on one of my computers at home. Well this particular computer is currently on a truck somewhere and for all I know it could be in Mexico someplace. During the move I am hosting my site from my buddy Aaron’s webserver. To make my long story short, I couldn’t get all of my picture data onto his server quick enough, so I decided to disable it for the move.

This situation presented a problem for me, as I wanted to share some pictures that Kim took during our 600 mile drive from Kansas City to Denver. Using my quick thinking, I decided to give flickr a try. I know tons of people who currently use flickr and it still appears to be one of the most popular choices for photo sharing. So far I must admit that the service is very easy to use. I don’t know if I could ever make the switch over from hosting my own gallery software on my server, but if I did I think flickr would be on the top of my list.

Anyway, I’ve successfully added 18 pictures from our drive for your viewing pleasure.

I finally sorted through our pictures from the Branson / Eureka Springs trip we took a couple of weekends ago and added the good ones to my site. When I first posted about our trip I forgot to mention our pit stop at the Fantastic Caverns on the way down. The fact that I forgot about it does not mean that these caves aren’t worth seeing. I though it was well worth the price we paid to take a ride through.

Even though I didn’t really care for Branson itself, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy the surrounding area. I really enjoyed the little bit of time we spent around Table Rock Lake. The water here was so clean and clear that if it wasn’t cold I might have jumped right in. In addition, the view from up on some of the nearby hills and mountains was amazing. In fact the views from our entire drive through lower Missouri and northern Arkansas were all very scenic.

And who could forget our time spent in Eureka Springs, complete with Victorian era buildings and giant statues of Jesus. Be sure to check out all of the pictures from our trip, there are some really good ones.

In addition to these pictures, I also added some pictures from the Plaza Lights ceremony and the subsequent party at our friend Todd’s apartment. It was the first time that Kim and I went down for the actual ceremony and braved the large crowd of thousands. I’d say it was worth doing, at least once, if only for the fireworks display. The lights are often better viewed from higher up than street level. Thankfully Todd’s apartment sits right above the plaza.

As I mentioned over a week ago, we attended a Big Brothers Big Sisters Halloween party with Dominique and Bianca last night. Just like the Holiday Party, it was at the Beaumont Club, which still cracks me up. How can a bar that is nasty as the Beaumont be the hosting facility for these parties? Surely there is some place a little better that could be used. Regardless of the place, the parties still seem to be a good time for both the littles and the bigs.

We all attended the party dressed in costume. Dominique did wear my pimp suit from a year or two ago, and we added some nice gold shoes and a gold cane as well. Bianca bought a cheerleader costume while shopping with her mom and twin sisters that worked out perfectly. Kim bought an old black dress from Goodwill and a witches hat from Walmart. And I borrowed a convict suit from our friend Todd. All in all I think we looked pretty good. What do you think?

I added my pictures from the American Royal to the site last night. I wish we would have taken more time to take pictures while entering the event, but we were already very late. We decided not to attempt riding the shuttles buses this year after the events of last year. Instead we opted to call a cab to take us down to the party. Well the wait for the cab was way over what the dispatcher told us. They said we would have a cab to our door in five minutes, in actuality it took about an hour and a half! So when we finally got down the Royal the last thing I wanted to do was take pictures. Hopefully Phil has some pictures to add at some point…

If you haven’t already noticed I’ve added some pictures from our recent trip to Seattle. Most of them are either from Kerry Park or the Argosy Harbor Cruise. I still have some pictures of our camping adventures that I need to sort through but this is a good start. I also have some panoramic shots that I need to “sew” together. I tried doing this over the weekend but the software was refusing to work.

Lately my blog has been overrun by posts in the Sports category. With the return of football season this sort of makes sense, but hopefully this is the last one for this week. I enjoy sports, obviously, but I also enjoy writing about other things as well.

Anyway, a quick update on my fantasy football teams. My teams won in one league and lost in the other, although both games were fairly close. My victory was by one point! My loss was by less than four points. I played almost all of the right players but they just weren’t good enough. Both of my teams have a few players that I’m still waiting to recover from injuries. Hopefully my rosters will be at 100% for week two.

One last sports related note for the week, my mom has posted all of her pictures from this weekend: Page 1 | Page 2