March Madness, Dean's Office Style!

 

 Everyone is very excited about their March Madness brackets and tried to get me to join in. I told them that a) I have NO interest in basketball, professional or college; and b) because of this lack of basic knowledge about the teams, I would be at a severe disadvantage in the pool and would inevitably lose money that I'd rather spend on things like tacos. Now, football play-off pools...that's a different story. ;)

Nikki Post: Friendship is Magic

For Christmas last year, I gave my niece a My Little Pony "doll" (Rainbow Dash, because my brother can be homophobic, and I like being "gay-friendly, feminist Aunt Nikki"). She basically lost her shit because a) she LOVES MLP, and b) I had managed to buy her favorite pony. (SCORE!) Nostalgic for my own childhood when I had an insane amount of ponies (and according to my mom, mine are still in the attic), I bought one for the white elephant gift exchange at Audra's party. As you may remember though, I wanted to keep the pony all to myself, and by threatening the lives of the other guests, I was able to keep Lyra Heartstrings (not one of the main ponies, apparently). She currently lives behind the business cards and Frida the philodendron on the main part of my desk.

Being badass in the skull (Dia de los muertos) bracelet Agnes gave me

Many people in the office laughed at my pony, and yet they enjoy playing with her hair and moving her around. As a front desk person, many people consider "my stuff" to be "everyone's stuff," since it's so out in the open. So I'm a bit sensitive about items on my desk being moved around/messed with. After a VERY stressful week, I went to pick up Lyra and comb her hair to calm down (because I'm a child, apparently). That was the first time all week that I had noticed she was missing.

I. Lost. My. Mind.

I flipped out on Tracy, demanding to know where the pony was. She said she didn't know. I asked if she knew who took it. She said yes, looking more and more terrified by the second as my eyes began to glow red with bloodlust and a deep river of rage that lives deep inside of me and that most people don't see. Then I started angry-crying, and she told me that Marshall had taken Lyra on his vacation as a joke because he thought I'd get a kick out of him treating her like I did Claire. Under normal circumstances, I would have LOVED this opportunity to update the blog with something silly that someone else did as an homage to my country-traveling armadillo. But the stressful week, the bubbling rage, the crying, and my sensitivity about my possessions made me angrier than amused. Had Marshall asked or, wanting to keep it a surprise, someone had mentioned it BEFORE Friday when I discovered it on my own, things would have been better. There were some apologetic emails that got sent around that weekend between Marshall, Tracy, and me, and eventually everything was settled and forgiven.

On Monday, Marshall brought in a stack of pictures that he and his wife Kelly had taken while on their vacation with the pony. He said that they had a lot of fun taking the pictures in different locations. Marshall especially liked it because the pony was just the right side to put in his coat pocket while skiing. He had gone old-school and taken pictures with a film camera and went through great lengths to make sure that he had everything printed before he came into work on Monday. So I apologize for the quality of the pictures; I can only do so much editing.

I'm sure that I'm compressing the actual time line a LOT. After all, Marshall was out for a whole week of mountain fun times. But since I didn't go with him, I don't really know what his itinerary was, and he's a busy guy, so sitting down for an "interview" isn't a possibility.

Everyone's favorite picture - Lyra makes her escape!

Marshall made sure that Lyra got to watch my team WIN THE SUPER BOWL!

 En route to Copper Mountain Ski Resort; this shot was taken on Freemont Pass between Copper and Leadville

The amenities at the condo in Frisco where they all stayed were pretty sweet:

A romantic fire place...

...festive Native American decorations...

...a large backyard area for playing in the snow...

...a hot tub!!!...

...and game night!

But the real reason why Marshall, Kelly, and Lyra drove up to the mountains was to ski. It's Marshall's favorite activity, but unfortunately, due to a recent knee injury, he's out for the rest of the season. It's really sad panda times. He said that Lyra was a real champ about having her picture taken in the cold temperatures and that she was easy to put in his ski jacket's pocket and take from place to place.

On the way to the ski slopes!

Behold, the majesty of the Colorado Rockies. (She's on Marshall's ski pole in this picture.)

At the top of Spaulding Bowl. Be careful, Lyra!

Riding on the ski lift to the top of the mountain, the only thing about skiing that I like. :p

Perfect powder for a day of skiing in the sunshine

Whew!! Ready to go back to the condo to warm up and relax!

What better way to relax than to head over to an old-time saloon, eat some good food, and drink some good beer? The family headed over to the Blue Spruce Saloon and Bar for dinner. Marshall and Kelly were joined by Kelly's nieces Charlie and Penny and Penny's friend. (Obviously the young girls did NOT partake of the saloon's fine spirits.)

Waiting for a table

Marshall said that Lyra got all of her drinks for free that day because she flirted heavily with all of the guys at the bar. And here I thought she was such a sweet, innocent little pony!

Finally got a table! Time to settle down and order some food to go along with all that beer.

Everyone thought it was great that Charlie's outfit matched Lyra's coloring! I've circled the pony for you so you can find her more easily on top of Charlie's hat.

Penny and her friend were also pretty stoked to have Lyra joining them for dinner. I mean, who doesn't like My Little Ponies?!

Don't do it, Lyra!! Nothing good can come from that much Jager!

Another day, the crazy party went to Woodward at Copper, a gym with all kinds of "extreme" sports type of things to do. Frankly, I'm mad jealous, as I've always wanted to do these sorts of things. Unfortunately, I'm terribly clumsy with an equilibrium problem, so doing things like skate boarding and leaping off of things into a giant box of foam might not be a good idea for me.

The foam bricks

This half pipe was at Copper, and according to Marshall, Lyra had a great time going down it and being all EXTREME!

A beautiful night in the mountains calls for a beautiful night...

...spending time in front of an outdoor fire. Don't get too close, Lyra! Remember, you're made of plastic and can melt! Ponies are pretty flammable.

Lyra returned to me in one piece, and I gave Marshall official permission to take her on his next vacation, wherever that may be. He said everyone had fun finding photo-ops for her and it was a good way for the group to have fun together. Perhaps Lyra will get to see as many places as Claire someday!

Spring has Sprung!

The dean's office is so happy that Spring is finally here! Unfortunately, the weather hasn't figured out what Spring is supposed to feel like. Denver AND Baltimore (and other places) have been COVERED in snow. Many people are mad at Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog scapegoat who predicted an early spring this year. I, however, am of the belief that Groundhog Day is stupid (the holiday, not the awesome movie with Bill Murray). A rodent doesn't care about its shadow, much less predict the weather by staring at it. That's why I celebrated Prairie Dog Day this year at PCC. It's the "Groundhog Day of the West." So don't blame Phil for the late spring; blame climate change. :p

Autumn in the Rockies, PART TWO!

Finally!! I can post SOME of the pictures that Mom, Grandma, and Aunt Charlene took when they visited us in September! This entry will be similar to the first one I wrote about their trip, but Nikki didn't take these photos, and I wanted to show off what the ladies considered really interesting/pretty. Hopefully this'll satisfy your hunger for an entry until we can get the rest of them sorted out and edited. :) NOTE!!! I have NO IDEA who took what pictures. I think most of them are Grandma's, but it's hard to say. Just enjoy them and don't worry about it. ;)

The day started off wonderfully with a beautiful sunrise over the trees by the ladies' hotel room. Obviously, Nikki and I were asleep, but because Mom, Grandma, and Aunt Charlene were two hours ahead of us mentally (time zone stuff), they were up bright and early.

The rest of the day was cloudy/hazy and chillier the higher up we went into the mountains. Good thing Nikki told everyone to bring some warm clothes for when we visit the Rockies!

Do you remember this little park in Lyons? What a nice place to have a picnic...maybe with some barbecue...and french fries...mmmmmm....

Nikki, probably tweeting or Facebooking or some other social media thing the kids are into these days.

Besties!

This is TOTALLY my new user picture. Isn't it a great picture of me?!

Everyone - but especially Grandma - was in total awe of how big and beautiful and dramatic the mountains are. You can see them from almost any place in Denver and the surrounding area, and the closer you get, the bigger they are, and the smaller you feel. This view is from Estes Park. (I'm pretty sure.) You should click on it to see a larger size; it's a pretty cool picture.

Mom was a lot gutsier than I was when it came to getting close to the Elk at Lake Estes. Call me crazy, but I just don't trust an animal that carries weapons on its head!

Some more views of Lake Estes. Pretty sure these two were taken by Grandma.

Can you find Mom in this picture? ;)

Mom and Aunt Charlene in RMNP. (Go Ravens! Beat the Steelers!)

Nikki wanted to crop Mom's hand out of this picture, but I told her not to because it kinda looks cool this way! I think it reflects the casual nature of our trip and also that it was still warm enough to have the windows down at this point!

I was having an AWESOME time "surfing" the dashboard until Nikki got all "mom" on me and made me sit with Mom. "It's not safe up there! What if I have a sharp turn, and you fly out the open window and fall down a cliff or get hit by another car?!" I mean...she had a point, but what a total kill joy!

These next four pictures are from when we were up at the tundra, where it was TOTALLY cold and really sparse as far as plants and animals were concerned. The air was thin and cold, so I don't blame things for not wanting to live up there!

Grandma and I in a super cute family photo

So this is a glacier, or I guess, USED to be a glacier. I mean, it's still there, but MUCH smaller than it used to be. Global warming sucks! It takes away all the cool stuff like glaciers and polar bears. I bet it used to be AWESOME to walk around up there when it was almost all snow. Now people are probably like, "*yawn* More rocks. Yay. Oh, look. Snow. Hrmm." :(

The ladies wanted to know why there were tall branches sticking out of the ground on either side of the road for miles and miles. Nikki told them that they were used to let snow plow operators know where the road was so they wouldn't plow the wrong area. Everyone was so surprised that the sticks would have to be that tall, but Nikki said that the Rockies get a TON of snow dumped on them in the wintertime. (See below)

From the source article: "A snowplow faces 23 feet of snow on Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado on May 13 [2011]." (emphasis mine) (National Park Service via AP) They probably couldn't even see the sticks at that point!!

The Alpine Visitor Center also needs to have sticks tell people where it is when it snows a lot! (Nikki said the logs on the roof are built that way so it doesn't cave the roof in, but I can't find out WHY that keeps the snow from caving in the roof, so who knows if she's right or not.)

View of Eagle River from the back "porch" of the Alpine Visitor Center

Now, I KNOW that Grandma took this picture because she showed it to me right after she took it. She thought it was so neat how the sign was captured in the photo as we zipped along the highway down the mountains.

We drove down I-70 on the way back to the hotel and passed Sports Authority (formerly Invesco) Field at Mile High, which really, everyone just calls Mile High Stadium. As you probably know, this is the new home of my dreamy Peyton Manning, who is steadily leading the Broncos to victory.

So that was Day One with the family. The next day they abandoned Nikki to a life of office drudgery [Nikki Note: *SIGH*] and drove down to Garden of the Gods to check out some of the coolest natural architecture I've ever seen in my short armadillo life.

[Nikki Note: Looking through the many, many, MANY pictures my family members took, I noticed that they weren't sorted chronologically; they were sorted by photographer and THEN chronologically. So all of the above photos were taken by Grandma, and there are STILL MORE pictures from Day One that I have to look for, file, and edit. Before we get to Garden of the Gods, I'll have Claire write another post about our first day, if there are any photos that warrant posting. We might just throw the pictures up here for you to enjoy.]

Camping in the Cold

During the second weekend of September, Nikki, Steve, Eva, and I all piled into Steve's over-packed car and drove two-and-a-half hours south of Denver to Spruce Grove Campground, which is at a higher altitude than Denver, as it's in the Rocky Mountains, near Pike's Peak. It was a tiring but pretty drive, with some of the aspen leaves already transitioning into their autumn yellow, but it would've been A MILLION times better if Eva hadn't whined and whimpered THE ENTIRE WAY DOWN. Seriously. I thought Nikki was gonna leap into the back of the car and strangle the dog!! I don't know when Eva developed a dislike of riding in cars, but she was quiet for only maybe fifteen minutes the whole time.

A rare quiet moment. Note the crazy eyes.

When we finally arrived to the campsite, we discovered that, while it was idyllic, it was also a walk-in site, which meant we had to park the car and carry all our stuff over a bridge to the site.

View from a little hiding spot behind the campsite
that Nikki had to go to because she was having an anxiety attack
and needed quiet.

After the tiring trip, we decided that before setting up the tent, we were gonna chill on the nearby riverbed with Mandy and Camden and Mandy's friends Allison and Andrew. Allison brought her dogs Gonzo and Trixie, so there were several pups all running around and vying for our attention.

Relaxin'...like I do.

Trixie is the black dog, and Gonzo is the little one.

The gang. Andrew is in the chair in the background,
and Allison is in the blue jacket.

Eva, acting crazy as usual

A little later, Nikki and I decided to hike up the mountain (for lack of a better term) and climb on top of this giant rock formation right next to our campsite. The climb was steep, but Nikki said that the climb to Hanging Lake (check out her pictures starting with this one) was waaaaaaay worse and longer. Now, I'm not really scared of heights, but standing on top of a giant rock that towered above the whole valley was kinda making me nervous. As such, I made Nikki not take any pictures of me; I didn't want my fans to see me freaking out. :p

View to the right of where we stood on the giant rock.
We couldn't find a way to get to the lake from the campground.

View from the backish part of where we stood.
The space inside the red box is our campsite!

View to the left of where we stood. This is the rest of the campground.
I think Pike's Peak is one of those mountains, but I don't know.

For a while, Nikki laid down on the rock and just looked at the sky and listened to the Christian youth group down below perform slam poetry about Jesus and finding their future wives. (I'm not joking. We couldn't hear all of it, but it was hilariously awesome and very earnest.) Nikki wanted to take some "selfies" (formerly called "MySpace photos," but that site barely exists anymore, so someone made up this new name, which is a shortened version of "self-portraits"), but it's REALLY hard to do with a fancy camera like her Nikon D3000. These are the best out of the ten or so she took:

Steve's favorite. He thought it was hilarious.

Nikki's favorite. At least you can see the mountains in the background.

Obviously, Nikki's arms are too short to do a selfie properly, and she won't let me touch her camera, since I have the tendency to break her things by accident. :p

Eventually we climbed down and joined everyone else. Cam and Steve had gone snake-hunting in the river, and Camden actually found a snake!! Nikki didn't get a picture of it, unfortunately, but Andrew did. If he ever sends the pictures to Mandy, I'll add them here. It was a garter snake and kinda big too. The other kids playing in the water were SUPER excited, and Cam was proud to show Steve that he had found a snake.

On the hunt with his trusty net

The rest of the night went pretty typically. We set up a campfire, cooked hamburgers (except for Andrew, who keeps kosher, so he brought some "boil in a bag" Indian food), and Nikki read a zombie story that she had started during the last camping trip. Camden LOVES ghost stories but gets scared easily since, you know, he's 6 years old. Mandy likes listening to Nikki tell the stories because Nikki does voices for every character. We stayed up chatting then went to bed.

Like the first time we went camping with Eva at West Chicago Creek,she and Steve took up most of the room on the air mattress. Only this time, THEY STOLE ALL THE COVERS TOO!! We had our usual set-up of two flannel sleeping bags, the comforter, and two extra blankets, and Nikki and I got a sliver of one of the sleeping bags and that's it. I woke up at one point and noticed that Eva was actually under the blanket Nikki had been using!!

Somehow, we survived the night and spent the morning packing up the campsite. (Well, Nikki and Steve cleaned up the campsite. I don't do manual labor.) Eva was shivering, as it was still about 40* outside, so Nikki tied her hoodie around Eva, as no one could find Eva's dog sweater before we left to go camping. Eva would've appreciated it, I'm sure, were she not super uncomfortable in it. Camden, however, kept Eva calm by petting her and talking quietly to her.

The Dog Whisperer

Nikki offered to drive home, since Steve had driven all the way down. Eva still whined, but much less than she had on the way to the campsite. We stopped at a Safeway in a small town to pick up some breakfast food. Nikki got a burrito for herself and a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich for Eva. After having such a heavy meal, Eva DEFINITELY calmed down.

While we were driving back, Nikki pulled over to take a picture of a sign she had seen the day before. It was a "point of interest," as the sign said, but the part that stood out to Nikki was a bunch of white rocks that spelled out a giant "YOLO." YOLO stands for "You Only Live Once," and according to Nikki, it's only used by "idiots on the internet and teenagers." [Nikki Note: The link takes you to UrbanDictionary.com, which is a great resource for finding out the meaning of slang words, but is user-generated, so it contains adult language.]

Dang kids. Pretty good prank though, if you ask me.

This is the real reason why this location is a point of interest: it's a historical site that used to house Native Americans of the Ute tribe. Of course, it's kinda lame to look out at a place with fields and a pile of used tires and a small gold mine and think "Native Americans used to live here until settlers moved in and kicked them out." I'm not gonna get into it, but I'll just say that I think the Utes got a raw deal.

It's hard to read the text on the board, so I recommend
going to the website I linked above.

This point of interest was located just outside of Florissant, Colorado, which is a small town that's claim to fame is the Fossil Beds National Park, where people found a TON of fossils in this lake bed. (We didn't get to stop here.)

(More info on the Ute Indians too)

The other big deal about Florissant is that they're a part of the Gold Belt Byway, which we *also* didn't get to see. [Nikki Note: We had a psycho dog in the car. I wanted to get home as quickly as possible.]

 

 

You can *almost* see the little gold mine that was there to the back right
of where I'm sitting.

So that was our trip. Not super exciting, but at least it was really pretty and we got to go camping before it REALLY gets cold out! Nikki has also sworn that Eva will NEVER go camping with us EVER again, as it's too stressful for everyone involved. Maybe next time we go camping, then, I'll actually get some blankets!