taking the boy to the ol’ stomping grounds

highlights of our dc trip

i knew it was going to be a good trip right at the beginning when the boy pulled out and wore a foam pirate hat through the entire airport – from security to sitting on the plane. still not entirely sure why.

we went to the smithsonians because the boy hadn’t been since he was a kid. i discreetly hid the foam pirate hat where he would forget about it for the rest of the trip.

air and space museum. we went into the planetarium and watched a show on how all of the constellations are colliding and we’re all going to die. it wasn't quite that dramatic but it may as well have been. robert redford was our tour guide – telling us all about how it only took the moon one week to form (how does he even know that??) and that we can avoid going extinct like the dinosaurs because we have what looked like computer-generated crayons floating around in space to pull the meteors away from earth. as much as i love crayons, that’s not that comforting. and no offense robert, but i’m not taking you that seriously. you make a good sundance kid… maybe not so credible as a scientist though.

contemporary museum. we spent a good 15 minutes watching this piece of art (this is what i love about contemporary museums. you can actually watch art. i bet a good idea for a piece of contemporary art would be a foot of grass sod. you can encourage people to just sit back and watch it grow. it’d be an international hit). the video was a very cool display of the process of things and there was a lot of fire involved, but after 15 minutes, we realized it wasn’t ending anytime soon. so, i’d suggest watching this video some night when you have insomnia and therefore all the time in the world to sit and watch fire push over tires and stuff.

i told the boy to bring a surprise (one of his surprises was the pirate hat). a second surprise he brought was a barbie puzzle. i love this boy. we put it together at around 1:00am on the bed while eating room service. he bet me i couldn’t sleep the entire night without disturbing the puzzle. piece of cake, i told him. and it was, until 5am when i woke up with stingy eyes and realized i probably hadn’t really been sleeping because i was so concentrated on not rolling onto my puzzle. so then i ripped it up before we could even take an after picture. you do crazy things when you’re half asleep. to my credit, it was still almost entirely intact before i ripped it up. go me.

international spy museum. they had a special exhibit going on called operation spy where you get to act like a spy and go through this whole rigamaroo to figure out who stole what – it included bugging and deciphering telephone calls, breaking and entering, getaway cars… you know, wholesome stuff like that. it was a blast!

random invite-only costume party at local coffee shop. invite-only doesn’t apply to us. we make ourselves welcome anywhere. i guess i could have let the boy wear his hat for this one… p.s. isn’t that a great picture? it looks like superman is flying towards my camera. cool.

wedding was great (and the real reason we went out there…) congrats peggy!!

then we went to mount vernon to see the digs of our first prez. am i the only person who didn’t know he died of a throat infection? how embarrasing. and i've even been to mount vernon before! i guess i wasn't listening the first time.

then we rushed back to the airport where it somehow worked out that i was able to check in but the boy wasn’t because by the time he got up to check in, it was 44 (literally) minutes before the flight took off and they close check in at 45 minutes. dumb airports. so we said a very aggravated goodbye and i boarded the plane leaving him in dc. i guess i should have left him with his hat so he could have entertained himself. is it funny that i didn’t even talk to the guy sitting next to me but i hated him anyway because he stole my boyfriend’s seat?

so now we feel a little bit better skilled at puzzles, could become spies and know that george washington died of a throat infection. oh yeah, and be sure to print your boarding pass out before you go to the airport. thanks dc for all the valuable lessons.

sometimes snow just doesn't belong

ask me how excited i am that it’s april 9 and there’s a forecast for seven freakin’ inches of snow tomorrow. seven freakin’ inches. seven. no amount of therapy can make me less depressed about this. but this helps a little bit

i decided to finally give in to winter though (after it was already technically spring) and go skiing for the first time this season. (let’s be honest – if it wasn’t for my skiing freak boyfriend, i would still be standing strong against winter.) two weekends in a row even! we went up to beaver creek one weekend and steamboat the next weekend. and i didn’t even fall off the chairlift like bill suspected (and, for the sake of the story, secretly hoped) i would.

both weekends were great – full of things like skiing (for those readers who just tuned in), snowshoeing, sledding down hills with showshoes on, slaughtering everyone at (and quickly becoming obsessed with) guitar hero, riding up mountains on sleighs, eating dinner on mountains, riding down mountains on sleighs, buying $30 worth of candy from the local confectionary (or candery as i like to call them)… you know, stuff like that.

i'm not sure why these pictures turned out like this, but they look kind-of blair witch-esque, don't you think?

my two bits of advice:

1. just because a swiss sandwich shop sounds like a good idea, you probably still shouldn’t eat there. you might end up with ¾ of dry uneaten zopf and a stomach full of candy from the candery as a substitute lunch.

2. if you’re ever driving in the colorado mountains, be sure to stop at kremmling. i always figured i liked kremmling because it kind-of sounds like gremlin and who didn’t like that movie? but kremmling, colorado quickly became my favorite place because of this little gem of a billboard.

i got jipped an hour on my birthday

i always assumed i was a supporter of daylights savings. i guess supporter’s not the right word. i just never cared enough to figure out why they (whoever “they” is) decide to give us an hour here and take an hour there. until this year. they stole an hour of my birthday away from me. jerks.

i made up for it though. well, other people made up for it. i was just along for the ride. that’s what birthdays are all about. it started off with a “surprise” trip to gold lake with the boy. it was a surprise because i wasn’t supposed to know where we were going, but i assumed i figured it out and he assumed that i assumed that i figured it out, so then he planted a bunch of misleading clues to make me think my guess was totally off-base. it worked. i thought we were going to the frozen dead guy days. and then we went to gold lake instead. and it was perfect. check it:

we almost got lost on a snowshoeing expedition. good thing i wasn’t wandering around by myself. sometimes i feel like christopher columbus – trying to reach india but ending up in america instead. is it funny that i never knew until just now that christopher columbus was arrested in spain? what kind of a history teacher did i have? (answer: one who made us watch casablanca all the time because he was obsessed with ingrid bergman) anyway, bill led us through the wilderness – wet butt and all (his snowshoes kept kicking up snow onto his pants. (i used that pair the last time we went and it did the same thing to me (that’s why i wore snowpants this time (i didn’t need them with the pair of shoes i was using.))))

we continued our day by ice skating (he skated. i more or less crawled) around on the lake in our bathrobes. it only made sense to be in our bathrobes because we went to the hot tubs after skating. duh.

then the massage. dennis massaged me. dennis looked like this. nuff said.

i can’t tell if my favorite part of my present was the gift or the wrapping. every time bill gives me a gift, he uses the exact same piece of wrapping paper. it never fits the box, but he carries that piece of paper around everywhere (don’t worry – he put it back in his suitcase after i opened my gift) just in case he needs to wrap something for me later on. my gift was awesome! an instant hot water spout. does he know me or what? he has one at his house and i spend hours turning it off and on. even if i don’t want tea, i’ll pour some just so i can use the instant hot water. it was probably one of those gifts that was more for him than for me – probably now his water bill will go down a bit.

we had full intention to get back by noon, per meghan’s demands, but because of somebody’s dumb decision to make daylight savings time on my birthday, we were an hour late (you do the math). but i made it home all the same to a houseful of streamers and a giant bag that screamed “birthday gift”.

inside that bag was a little thing i like to call a tickle me elmo. brilliant. i proudly admit – i got an original tickle me elmo back when you couldn’t find the thing anywhere. this is version 2.0 – he slaps his knee, rolls onto the floor…it’s hilarious. we probably played with him for a good hour or so. meghan rocks.

then meghan took me to a recorder concert. yes – recorders. as in 3rd grade music class recorders. there were hundreds of them – all different shapes and sizes. and some incredible people watching. poison ivy was even there.


and then meghan reminded me how old i am by shoving 26 candles in a piece of angel food cake. the cake was good except for every bite came with a surprise helping of wax. thanks, bug.



so all in all, it was one of the best birthdays yet! and i decided that the only fair thing is, since they took an hour away from my birthday, i should get it back when they add an hour next time our clocks change for daylights savings. so mark your calendars, i have an hour to celebrate my birthday on november 2.

hunters and gatherers

while most three year olds have imaginary friends, my nephew has imaginary coins. he holds out his little cupped hand and says “here chelsea, i have a coin for you.” it’s sad to me that i can’t keep the movement of the coin going – you know to help the economy grow and all. people don’t take well to a 25 year old trying to give them an invisible coin though. i wonder at what point people stop thinking imaginary coins are cute and start calling you crazy?

my dog isn’t as much about helping the economy grow. he doesn’t share his wealth so much as he does bury it. anything and everything – treats, toys, dead bodies. (this last item is yet to be confirmed) when you’re an inside dog, your hiding places become a little bit limited. under a blanket, under a pillow, under the carpet after ripping it up. the other morning, meghan woke up with a chicken nugget buried deep down into her hair. it still had bbq sauce on it.

a good way to contribute to the economy is to go see a movie at your local theatre. u23d is a good option. bono is pretty much sitting on your lap. who would complain about that? i told bill i would leave him for bono. i think he was okay with that because he probably would secretly leave me for bono too. anyway, when you buy tickets for a movie and the tickets say 11:30 with no am/pm indication, don’t assume that any theatre would show a family friendly imax movie at 11:30am on a saturday morning. you’d be wrong and then you’d look like a dork as you rush into the theatre at 11:45am (we blame our tardiness on the gps. it led us astray) and hand your tickets proudly to the ticket guy and he says “you realize this is at 11:30pm, right?” yes of course we realized that. that’s why we decided to come 12 hours early to reserve our seats.


happy president’s day!

what not to do at a concert

every summer isn’t complete without a good ol’ down and dirty, sit-in-the-scolding-sun-for-hours-with-some-of-the-best-people-watching-on-the-planet, rock concert. our concert of choosing (thanks to meghan winning free tickets for…well, we don’t really know why…) was the big gig. of course i was excited for this because i thought it would be some sort of pink floyd “great gig in the sky” tribute or something. i was mostly wrong except i’m pretty sure the words “pink” and “floyd” (okay, maybe not floyd) were used at one point or another during the show.

it was a 6+ hour long concert with about a dozen bands playing. i was shocked when i heard there were different groups – i thought it was the same band changing clothes and occasionally number of members during breaks. that’s how unique each band was. yay pop culture. *disclaimer: blue october has a very unique sound.* *disclaimer on my disclaimer: i have to say that so meghan doesn’t beat me up.* *disclaimer on my disclaimer on my disclaimer: she could*

now, if you’ve never been to one of these types of concerts, let me set the stage (har har) for you. imagine a huge community picnic (with more drugs). you pretty much have to come at 2pm to get a good spot on the giant lawn. it’s really ironic because at 2pm on a steamy august saturday, the “best seats in the house” are actually shoved back in the corners of the field…aka the only places dotted by shade. you can’t fall into this trap though, because these “best seats of the house” will be the absolute worst seats of the house once the sun sets and 8 billion more people come. so, even though your doctor might disagree, sitting in the spot most prone to give you heat stroke is the option for you.

the concert was fun. me, meghan and kyle swayed with the music (or because of heat stroke…i’m not really sure). more and more people piled onto the lawn, meaning by the end of the night, we were in very close proximity to the girl who mooned us, the belly dancer, any number of illegal substances and to the innocent foot that i violated.

in my defense, when there’s not enough room to even spread your personal bubble to 2 inches, you can’t be held responsible for your actions…kyle was sitting on one side of me and i had my arm around the back of him – you know, not wrapped around him or anything, just resting on the ground behind him.

i started playing with his hand a little flirtily (real word?) (p.s. it’s not...but flintily is) when it all of a sudden occurred to me “hmm…that’s kind-of an odd position for his hand to be in…” my stomach sank a little bit because i pretty much knew what was going on before i even turned around to confirm it. i turned around to see my hand, groping the barefoot attached to the lady sitting directly behind kyle. i thought her foot was kyle’s hand…my bad…

so what’s more disturbing – the fact that i was groping a strange lady’s foot or the fact that the lady behind me was letting me grope her foot without saying anything. was she getting some sort of satisfaction out of it? sick. i’m going with that’s the worst part. but maybe she was just embarrassed because what do you say to some stranger who’s fondling your foot?

the rest of the concert was good. kyle even let me hold his hand again after i washed all the random foot germs off.

llamas llamas everywhere

i can't say i'm particularly fond of llamas, but that's probably widely disputed based on:

1. i recommend emperors new groove to everyone (shameless promotion - you should see it)

2. this is one of my favorite things on the internet

3. my llama shirt

4. my recent journey to the burro days in fairplay colorado

here's the funny thing about the burro festival. there are camels...there are llamas (more to follow)...but from what i saw, there aren't any burros actually in attendence. (this is a lie. i think we just missed the actual burro day)

here's the other funn(ier) thing about the burrow festival. the festival kicks off with a 3 mile run/walk. sounds sane enough right? right. the trick is this - you have to race with a llama. like this:

(p.s. i had no idea that guy was wearing a byu shirt before i took that picture...)

you and your llama speed through main street, dodging all obstacles in your way. then it's off to the fields where you tread through streams, over rivers and through the woods. oh and, these llamas are hardcore - they train for a whole year! the 2008 llamas are already starting their boot camp. of course, they are still llamas and llamas are apparently stubborn. this is no task for sisies. even some boston marathoners probably couldn't do this race. we unfortunately couldn't do it because by the time we got there, they were out of llamas. so sad

how brilliant is this? uh doi - very brilliant! i'm not really sure where the money goes or what organization puts this on, but i assume it has to do with the national association of llamas or something equally llama-minded.

the happiest place on auraria parkway

in the name of crossing-things-off-the-summer-to-do-list, we (kyle, kyle o, meghan and i) went to elitches last weekend. in traditional nathaniel style, i've decided to rate the highlights of the day to help you and your friends plan out your most successful elitches amusement.

the mind eraser - b+

definitely a good coaster to start on to make sure your accompanying friends can hold their lunch. you have to wait the extra 2.5 hours to sit in the front though to get the whole effect. I'm pretty sure the other seats don't jerk your head back and forth like a pinball on the headrest (thus the literal name)

the boomerang - a-

a personal favorite. once again, a literal name (elitches is clever like that) - this coaster combines the forward acceleration of a car on a track with the backward umpf of a car going backward on a track. my favorite part of this ride was when they closed it down temporarily for "minor technical problems" while we were in line - those tricks really get people pumped for the rides. nobody wants to ride a safe roller coaster.

shipwreck falls - b-

this is our version of splash mountain, minus any singing robots and about 30 feet of drop. i would rank this one higher if the water that splashed all over us wasn't a lovely shade of asparagus green. also, this ride is not nearly as fun as standing on

the bridge at the bottom of shipwreck falls - a

anytime you can't even see blurry images of anything because the wall of water coming toward you is so thick, that's a good thing.

the seadragon - a-

the only appropriate way to go on this ride is to put half your group on one side and the other half on the opposite side. and then you have screaming contests. lucky for us, the entire ship agreed to participate. it was a lovely chorus and for the record (pay attention meghan), my side won

insanely huge blue snow cones - a++

except for the $280 pricetag

white water rapids - c+

this one looked really fun when it was 98 degrees, but then when it was hands-down the longest line we waited in and only about 32 degrees and raining by the time we got into our raft, it wasn't as fun. we pretty much all huddled in the middle trying to avoid even the smallest drop of dumb asparagus water. i think my favorite parts about this ride were the two random girls in our raft - one took her shoes off because she just barely drew checkerboards on them and didn't want it to wash off. the second because she just barely drew eyebrows on herself and didn't want them to wash off. she kept asking us "are my eyebrows gone?"

so because we waited in line so long to sit with miss no-eyebrows, by the time we got off it was lightning...ing and they closed the rides. we were bummed because we didn't even ride the grand daddy of rides. but a close second included going to

qdoba for dinner - a

best burrito place around in my humble (and true) opinion

after we were stuffed of burrito we found out that all the rides were open again, so we drove back to elitches and headed straight to

the flying coaster - a+

this used to be called the superman i think but then six flags sold elitches and everything went generic. so sad. what a crappy name. anyway, didn't change the quality of the ride. this thing was awesome! you climb up this little ladder into a pod and then it rotates you onto your stomach and you go through a coaster superman...i mean flying coaster...style. crazy feeling!

and finally...

merry-go-round

this one is too scary to talk about

who needs the kwik-e-mart?

why are apu and i so happy? because denver now holds one of 12 kwik-e-marts nationwide!

go us

on a slighter sadder note, the squishy machine was broken

chalk art at its finest

yet another reason to love colorado (this blog should seriously be on the colorado promotions page huh?) - the sidewalk chalk art festival. um, hello - how could i not go? the paintings were awesome. you've all gotten that email of all the 3d sidewalk art chalk guy and stuff, yeah - imagine that live and in person right on our very own larimer street. it was dreamy. of course, it was about a bamillion degrees outside (i'm pretty sure that means one million times one billion) but the artists probably weren't too hot. i mean sure, they were pretty much lying on the bajillion (one billion times one...jillion...) degree pavement for two days straight, but they sat on little carpet squares, which i'm thinking probably counter-acted the heat. carpet squares are said to have that kind of healing power i hear.

there was a little kid section where the kiddies could practice their own sidewalk chalking. we of course had to get in on this action to see if carpet squares really are heat reducers (they aren't by the way) our artwork was hands down better than any of the little kids' stuff. blew them out of the water.

it was maybe funny that my boss was there with his family and saw me on my carpet square in the kiddie section...i asked him if he was glad he hired me since my work was better than any of the kids' there...he didn't answer me

another plus about the chalk art festival was the naked children. i'm so glad we're raising the next generation to be even less reserved than we are. thank you sidewalk chalk art for helping us evolve.

happy birthday bug!!

birthdays are kind of a big deal. whether you use them as an excuse to draw attention to yourself (my favorite approach) or just as an excuse to pack your day as full as possible with random things (meghan’s approach), you just can’t complain with a birthday. here is a sample list of what we did for meghan’s birthday yesterday:


free day at the denver botanical gardens (it also helps to share a birthday with earth day) we got to visit the tropical steam room that reminded me (but didn’t make me homesick for) d.c. summers. a good indicator of not fun humidity is when your glasses fog up upon entry.



also since most people associate delicate lovely flowers with over-sized disturbing bugs, the botanical gardens decided to combine the two and add giant statues of various garden bugs (made me want to run right out to my local greenhouse and get some flowers to start my own garden). my favorite bug was the one with a rotary saw on its back. i was a little bit disappointed when meghan informed me that the saw doesn’t actually spin. what kind of cruel joke is that?

next we went to the denver aquarium, which is probably about my favorite aquarium ever. they’ve figured out that most people are getting bored pretty quickly looking at fish, which is why aquarium profits have gone down 32% over the past five years (i’m completely making up all traces of that statistic). but the denver aquarium doesn’t stop at fish. no no – the denver aquarium has real life tigers! who knew tigers had anything to do with fish?? three big ol’ tigers strutting their stuff and eating any fish in their way…seems like a bad investment to buy something that eats your main attraction right? wrong! the tigers are great. i’m still not sure what they’re actually doing at the aquarium, but i like it all the same.












another thing the denver aquarium has is tandem bike rentals. you can rent a lovely surrey bike for a measly $12 per half-hour and ride around the platte river. this is what we decided to do. how could we resist? the dumb thing had a canopy and a little bell! we made some friends and probably some enemies on that thing. one biker tried to get around us (we were kind-of large) and biffed it on the gravel…we rang our bell as an “i’m sorry” gesture. we even tried off-roading a little bit, but got stuck and had to push our bike out of the rocks. it was probably the best half hour of my life.


finally, we went to a decemberists concert. the concert itself was great – especially the part where they were singing about a whale eating everybody and then a whale actually came out on the stage and “ate” the entire band.



the concert was definitely shadowed by what was going on right in front of us. a fabulously nerdy girl and a guy were being very cuddly – holding hands, kissing…the whole bit. we thought it was cute and made some comment about how the right people find each other. then, the girl turns around and kisses the boy directly in front of her! they started holding hands and smooching! turns out there were about 4 guys surrounding this girl and she was acting all lovey dovey with all of them and they all knew about it…it was really bizarre. meghan had to drag me to a different area because apparently i was “ruthlessly staring” (i don’t think meghan used the word “ruthlessly” – after all she is only 23, you can’t expect genius yet)

so all in all i have no complaints about the day. wait – one complaint about the day. next time, i’d like the saw on the back of the giant bug to spin. happy birthday meghan!!

saturday in the park

so on saturday, meghan and i decided to put our i’m-terminally-ill-from-seattle-and-only-have-enough-energy-to-cry-while-watching-grey’s-anatomy acts on hold and go outside to play. we walked (yes, walked(!)) to our local park and tromped around in streams and exotic plants for awhile (it may have been more sewer run-off and overgrown weeds, but for the sake of the story, let’s stick with what sounds better here.)

things really picked up when we found a frisbee. hallelujah! sent from the gods for our entertainment! we played for a bit and then got bored and decided it would be the moral thing for us to find the frisbee’s original owner, but since that’s next to impossible, we instead hooked the frisbee onto a empty flag pole and raised it up so it was in plain view for the owner to see and come retrieve. how nice are we?

our next discovery was an old soccer ball. hallelujah amen! could this day seriously get any better (the obvious retrospective answer is yes, but at this point in the story, we didn’t know that) we played with that for a second and then a park ranger came driving up to us. we braced ourselves for the inevitable separation of the stolen ball, but instead, the park ranger offered us a new shiny orange soccer ball in place of our old one! how nice is that? you steal something and then replace it for something even nicer, but still sort-of stolen! i felt the joy i think robin hood feels when he steals from other people and then gets rewarded, only i don’t remember him ever getting a nice shiny orange soccer ball.

so, we merrily rolled along with the newest member of our family until we were stopped in our tracks. at least a dozen high-school-aged boys dressed in makeshift outfits, looking like a combination somewhere between braveheart and zelda, marched right in front of us! what the?? so naturally, we followed them – we probably could have been more discreet (ie. – stop kicking our bright orange soccer ball and don’t laugh right out loud). it didn’t really matter, though – as far as they were concerned, we didn’t even exist. some had pillow-shields (use your imagination), some had homemade bows and arrows/swords/bombs/any other type of weapon boys can think up…of course, every weapon was covered in a dish rag or something soft so as not to actually kill each other. that was at least a relief since we didn’t want them to make a faulty throw and deflate our soccer ball.

they finally stopped in this wooded field and jumped right in – two teams, lots of screaming and throwing of dish rag weapons. when somebody got hit, they had to freeze in place. i’m not quite sure what made it okay to stop freezing in place, but every so often, freezers would become movers again. each battle only seemed to last a minute or so and then somebody would inevitably start yelling at somebody else that they weren’t following “the rules” and both teams would put aside their war-evoking differences to huddle together in an inspiring moment of peace and discuss what “rules” were broken and how to fix it in the next round. i’m not sure why this was the topic of conversation rather than arranging a peace treaty or something, but sometimes war just isn’t that easy. so, the battle would always start again…of course, until another “rule” was cheated.

we never picked up on the rules…or the point…of the game, but finally forced ourselves to break free from the trance this thing was placing on us and move on with our lives. our lives, of course, that consisted of kicking our soccer ball all the way back home and sitting down for a good, long cry with grey’s anatomy. what a tiring day.