July 4th Update

We had ourselves a really good July 4th weekend!

I got the day off on Friday the 3rd, but poor Kate had to work. Rather than pining away for her, I visited with Bill to play vidgames for the afternoon. Then I popped back up to pick up Kate from work. We caught Ron from Loveland and headed down to watch a showing of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" at the Union Colony Dinner Theater. As always, we loved the venue and the performance was both top-notch and hilarious, especially the characters of Pseudolus and Hysterium plus Hero and Phillia.

The next day, Kate and I did a whirlwind cleaning of the house in preparation for our friends coming over for our annual BBQ. The dinner plans inadvertently became a grilled kabob night, which was great! We might have overdone it on the amount of food both prepped and consumed. But it was all delish so who cares? :-)

Afterward, most of us headed down to City Park for the city fireworks display. It'd been raining for most of the day, which seemed to scare most folks off. We had a nice spot on top of a hill with a great view.

If you're interested, here some vids of the display...





rant on

As much as a love fireworks, I can't stand the folks who don't consider the safety of others when firing them off. The only downside of the evening was watching as people were setting off fountains, poppers, and spark-shooting spinners along the sidewalks, in the streets, and even in the crowded park over the heads of the rest of us! C'mon, people, show a little consideration!!

rant off

Sorry about that! :-)

Anyway the display was great - we loved it! The finale was particularly good in my opinion - although I was too dazzled to remember to point my camera at it. Oh, well!

On Sunday, Kate and I did some seriously vegging out. We both ended up napping through the whole afternoon before I headed down to Bill's to do some board gaming.

All in all, quite an enjoyable and relaxing holiday weekend!

I hope all of you had an equally pleasant Independence Day weekend! Thanks - as always - for reading and have yourselves a great day!

Trivia Night

Meant to post this last Wednesday when Kate and I along with our friends Ron and Erin tried out a trivia night at the Trailhead Tavern. Erin had done this sort of thing before and was eager to recruit more people into it. The trivia night is hosted by an organization called Geeks Who Drink - a group of people who enjoy both obscure trivia and alcoholic beverages.

Well, naturally Kate and I don't drink. Neither does Erin. Ron had to have a couple of beers just to keep us honest. ;-)

At any rate it was a lot of fun! The Quizmaster (Quizmistress?) was a little foul-mouthed and rude...but despite that, we had a good time. Between the four of us, we had enough obscure knowledge from different areas that we did pretty well. Out of something like a dozen teams, ours came in 3rd! W00t!

(BTW, our team name was "We Can Haz Cheezburger" - since we're all fans of the LOLCats website.) :-)

Here's a shot of my teammates that evening...



Here's the one that's posted on the Geeks Who Drink blog...



(Yes, Ron has some sort of psychological aversion to showing up on camera...) ;-)

And here's Erin with our 3rd place trophy....



We don't actually keep the trophy. (Which was good - the thing was kind of ugly.) We just add something permanent to the thing and return it to the bar.

So I think we're pretty well sold at this point. There's another timeslot starting up on Sundays at the Stonehouse Grille. The Quizmasters are a pair of guys that Erin has seen before and really liked. Might have to give that one a go as well...

That's it for now. Thanks for reading - hope you're having a great day!

Busy Weekend

I'm not sure when exactly Kate and I developed an actual social calender but we sure don't seem to be spending a lot of dull evenings sitting around watching re-runs anymore. :-)

The weekend started (after a fashion) on Thursday when yours truly turned thirty-five. We both had to work so that limited what we could do for my birthday, but we did manage a leisurely dinner at Olive Garden that evening. In addition, I received plenty of cards, well wishes, and gifts from friends and family. Thanks to everyone!!

After work on Friday, Kate and I attended a relaxed wedding between a couple of old chums, Jeff and Leslie. We arrived halfway through the ceremony and were able to hang out afterwards.



Hanging out afterwards was kind of cool. It was sort of an "old home" night since there were a couple of folks that I hadn't seen in (literally) years!

On Saturday, we drove down to Denver to meet up with Emily and Jason for lunch. Emily suggested a cool place called KT's BBQ, where we had some awesome sandwiches! At first, I was twitchy about driving down there since the best approach was apparently I-70 to Colorado Blvd...but when Kate reminded me that the route was the same one we always take to the zoo or museum, I chilled out.

It was a nice get-together. We hadn't seen Emily or Jason since January up in Selah!

(Oh, and there was also this cute kiddo named Linc who was absolutely fascinated by me and Jason. Go figure!) :-)

Shortly after we got back to Fort Collins, we hopped over to a housewarming party for our co-worker Shana and friend Aaron. They had just bought a house and were looking for a rummage party. We had a couple of things we were already planning on taking down to Goodwill anyway, so we gifted them instead. It was a fun potluck - I picked up a couple of recipe ideas from Shana and other folks there. And it's always fun to get together with co-workers outside of work.



So congrats to Shana and Aaron on their new home!

Sunday was reserved for a few errands and our usual game and dinner night with Bill, Tammy, and Ron (plus our new chum Josh).

Whew! Busy-busy-busy! :-)

This coming weekend probably won't be much lighter. Kate and I are hosting our Library Board Game Night on Saturday and meeting with friends at Coopersmith's to try out the trivia contest there.

You'd think we had lives or something! ;-)

Anyway, that's it for now. Thanks for reading and hope you're day is going great!