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.
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.
After three weeks of the Jenny Challenge I have put in 66 miles. Once again I only put in eighteen miles this week. I was thinking that I would be behind the pace because of that, but I’m actually still ahead. I have 10 days left to run 34 miles. We have had something going on every night of this week, so lately all of my miles have been put in during lunch at work. My dad only has ten miles left in the challenge after running the Rocket City Marathon this past weekend. His time of 3:43:11 qualifies him for the Boston Marathon. This has been a long time goal of his, so a big congrats is in order!
I ended up missing my hockey game on Monday of this week. I was stuck at work until nearly 9pm. And the bowling league is official over, though they haven’t sent out the final results yet.
I went 2-1 in fantasy football. Last week I thought that the playoffs had started in all three leagues, but only two actually started. In the other league, I still had a shot at the wildcard spot for the playoffs. But even with a win last weekend I still finished in fifth place, so I will be hoping for a win in the consolation bracket. The loss I suffered this week was in the playoffs of one of my leagues, so I am officially in the consolation bracket in that leagues as well. In the final league I beat up on Kim’s dad to advance into the semifinals this week where I will be taking on the number one seed in the league. The college football pick’em is over and I finished in sixth place. As far as the NFL pick’em goes, I moved up one place into fifth.
Previously I had voiced my opinion on the HandleBar & Grill, which morphed into the Downing Street Bar and Grill earlier this year. Well they finally completed the bar renovation recently and we went in to check it out. I must say that it is much improved! There is now a large U-shaped bar, surrounded by a few high top tables and plenty of booths along the walls. Also they’ve really increased their TV quantity and quality. As if it couldn’t get any better, I think the food has actually improved. Not that it was bad before, I just feel that the quality may have gone up even more recently. True they are still using the old menus (even with the bicycle theme printed on them) but I guess they are of the opinion of don’t fix it if it isn’t broken.
I had the chicken chimichanga smothered with green chile, which I was very happy about. My wife had the turkey reuben, which was served on thicker marbled rye than I remembered, and stuffed high with turkey and sauerkraut. She also had the mashed sweet potatoes, which were very tasty, with flavors familiar of this time of year. Just as I was starting to grow tired of this restaurant it seems that they have done a lot to bring people back to it. I’m sure we will be back again in the near future.
This past Saturday was a long day. Not only did I head up to Vail for a day of snowboarding with the same guys as the past couple of times, we stuck around to see O.A.R. play as part of the Vail Snow Daze event. Knowing that it was going to be a long day, I decided to drive up later in the morning than the usual 6:30 or 7 departure. I was hoping to avoid traffic by leaving at 9:30, but that didn’t go as planned. There was a little snow on the roads at higher elevations, but there were also a ton of cars on the road. The drive would normally take an hour and a half in perfect conditions, but it took three hours on Saturday.
Since we didn’t arrive out on the slopes until after 1pm, I tried to speed through as many runs as I could. I made it out to Blue Sky Basin just before closing time, but on my first good run out there a strap on one of my bindings broke. Since I was as far away from the car as possible, I decided to just do as best I could for the rest of the day. Despite my heel lifting up on my back foot during hard turns, I was able to enjoy some of the great snow that had fallen overnight. Vail reported nine inches that morning, so there was definitely some powder to be found. I just wish I could have found more of it.
As far as the concert goes, it was a rather cold event. Normally I would have expected the show to start shortly after the lifts start running, say 5pm or so. The Snow Daze event starts much later, and O.A.R. didn’t hit the stage until after 7:30. The crowd was pretty large once they finally got started and I think that helped keep everyone fairly warm. I decided to keep most of my snowboarding gear on, so I was plenty warm. I actually watched the first half of the show from fairly deep inside the general admission standing crowd. Definitely much further into the crowd that anytime recently. For the first time in a long while I actually had to deal with crowd surfers. I thought that was a thing of the past, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem so.
O.A.R. at Vail Snow Daze
The setlist was a mix of old and new popular songs for the most part, which easily appeased the vast crowd. I was hoping to hear some of the new tracks that the band has been working on for their next album, but I should have guessed that this would not be the place for any debuts. I was really happy to hear “Revisited” which I haven’t heard in a long time. Also “Anyway” was another highlight of the show for me. I taped the show but haven’t listed to it at all. It should be a fairly good recording based on the sound mix I heard while at the show. Once the show was over and it was nearing 10pm, we made the drive back to Denver. Though it was late, I was happy to be driving on clear roads with no traffic at all.
Last night Kim and I went to the Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds concert up in Broomfield at the 1STBANK Center. The show was the fortieth time that I’ve seen Dave Matthews perform, but this was only the second time seeing him perform with just Tim Reynolds, the first time being over seven years ago. Knowing that the venue was relatively small, I decided to bring my taping gear along to the show. Typically there are so many other people recording DMB shows that I rarely bother to bring along my own gear. I’m really glad I did bring it as I’m pretty sure I was the only taper there.
We had great seats on the floor just a few rows in front of the soundboard. Not only is this a great spot to tape from, but the view was pretty good as well. The crowd on the floor stood the entire show, so it was a little more difficult for Kim to see. Now that Tim Reynolds is playing with the band full time, most people are already aware of his guitar prowess. However seeing just the two of them play allows for Tim to stand out much more. Dave is no slouch on guitar either and it’s amazing how much sound the two of them can put out.
We were treated to a pretty sweet setlist that had songs from all spans of Dave’s career. Highlights for the night included Grace is Gone, #41, Kundalini Bonfire (Tim Reynolds solo), and the set ending Spoon, Tripping Billies, Dancing Nancies combination. The full setlist was:
edpaffjr.com
