Poor Poor Car

So, yesterday my friend TJ and I left our friend Matt's house in Southern, CO to come back to Boulder after a super fun couple of days celebrating New Year's in La Veta, CO. They had a lot of snow where we were, but they had gotten the roads plowed pretty good. Unfortunately the wind started blowing and the snow drifts across the road started to form. Well, I am an idiot and apparently a not very good driver, and I got us stuck in a snowdrift that took us nearly 2 hours to dig ourselves out of. Luckily, TJ is brilliant and came up with a plan that involved chains for the tires (that he brought), the car jack, A LOT of digging with the snowshoes turned shovels, and some traction sticks and branches thrown in for good measure! We didn't have to drive very far to get out of the drifts, but it was probably the slowest forward progress through 25 feet that I've ever experienced! I'm just glad that TJ was with me, otherwise I would have probably been sitting there all day hoping someone would drive along and help me! (I think TJ might have gotten a picture of the snow drift as proof of all of our hard work. My camera died yesterday and has since gone MIA, so I might have a picture for you if I can get some from him.)

So, after my poor little underpowered car had a rough day yesterday, I parked it in the driveway of the house that I live in for the next 3 days. I woke up to quite the surprise this morning! I tree at least a foot in diameter had uprooted itself and fallen on my car!!! Ughhh. One more thing to deal with! Sorry, no pictures of that, as I had to get my car out of the driveway while I had help at home to hold other large fallen branches out of the way.

Well, I hope that everyone else's 2007 is going a little better than mine has been in the last two days! The first 2 days were awesome, on a much better note! :)

Cuddle Buddy

Oh ya, I forgot to mention that I had an awesome cuddle buddy when I was at my sisters. Her "fluffy" (VERY FAT!!) cat Sunni Lightfoot got tricked into sleeping with me the first night I was there. After that night, she decided I was a good sleeping buddy and she'd be on my bed long before I was ready to go to bed! That cat's got a motor on her that is REALLY loud! This weekend I figured out why snoring (within reason) people don't bother me and sometimes make me laugh and sleep really well. I slept with a big fat cat that purred really loudly right next to my ear for 6 years!! Not only does it not bother me, I sort of find it comforting. haha (Disclaimer: Sleeping in the same room as my mother is NOT snoring within reason. I can't sleep in that case!)

Suni Lightfoot, the "Fluffy" Cat

A Rainy Rainy Christmas

2 seconds after this picture Marshall fell over sideways and landed in the tree. There was some crying involved.

I headed out to Portland, OR for Christmas and the week before. I got out of Colorado JUST IN TIME! The day after I left, it snowed 2.5 feet and shut down the airport for a couple of days. All the while I was none the wiser galavanting around rainy Portland with my wonderful friend Molly. We had a ton of fun drinking beer, seeing the Nutcracker ballet, going hiking, and having Molly kick my butt in her spin class! She's a fitness instructor (in her spare time, haha) at a super nice gym in Portland, and I went to her spin class while I was there. I'll just say it ranks right up there with one of the hardest I've ever been to! It was good, though, afterwards I didn't feel quite as guilty about all of the wonderful dark ales that we drank!

On Friday I was off to Sweet Home (not Alabama), population not very many! My sister, her husband, son, cat, chinchilla, and 3 horses live on a 5 acre property outside of this small town in OR. They are crazy! She drives 45 minutes each way to vet school every day, and her husband drives 45 minutes to his job in the other direction each day just so they can have a house with enough room for the horses! It's a cute house, and it was actually kind of nice to be out in the middle of nowhere with no cell phone reception and what not.

We traveled to the Oregon coast and spent the day one of the days I was there. It was amazing, they sun was out and it was 55º the whole day. Sometimes the people on the OR coast don't see the sun for 3 months at a time in the winter. I'm pretty sure the sun had followed me from CO, since it was dumping snow here and not sunny! We had a fun day and saw a lot of sea lions. They are really load and smell pretty bad! My nephew is 16 months going on 3 years old. He's really tall and runs like he's known how to walk for longer than 2 months! He has the best smile I've ever seen a kid have, and he wears it most of the time!

Marshall was enamored with the sea lions

Fat, Smelly Sea Lions

Me and Dad in Newport

Tori, Dad, Marshall and Shane

Marshall on the $4000 rocking horse

The shop owner wouldn't stop bugging me to ride the horse and take a picture...Marshall fits much better!

Christmas was a nice relaxing day (in my pj's all day!!!). We cooked a bunch of food, way too much actually, and had a lot of fun opening all of Marshall's gifts because he thought my dad's tool box and tools were the coolest thing ever, not all of his MANY MANY toys, much to my sister's dismay!

Marshall had fun doing everything EXCEPT open all of his gifts!

I made it back to CO with my new bike (didn't have to pay to get it on the plane, either), and now I'm back in the swing of things trying to find a roommate since the one we were planning on bailed at the last minute today. Oh well, flaky people suck!

I hope that everyone had a very Merry Christmas and are enjoying the holidays! (I'll be enjoying them when they're done.) haha

The Verdict Is In

So, last night I went to my ex-boyfriend's company Christmas party with him. He didn't have a date and I'm way too nice so I said I'd go with him, mostly because it was at the Flagstaff House, haha. I've always wanted to eat there, but I've never wanted anyone I know to have to pay the bill because it's super expensive and I've heard that the service isn't great and the food is only okay. Well, I thought it was really amazing! I guess it could have been the 4 glasses and wine and a glass of champagne, but I don't think so. :) Of course, I have no idea how much any of it cost, because his company picked up the tab, but the food was awesome, the service was ridiculous (1 server: 2 of us!), and the view was breathtaking! All in all it was pretty fun, well except for the hangover this morning...Ughhh. Expensive hangovers are just as bad as cheap ones it seems!

New Ride

I normally commute to school on my road bike because I have an awesome office (doubled as my storage unit this summer!) that I can leave my bike in as I wouldn't really want to leave it locked up outside. My office is moving back over to engineering at the end of the month so I needed to sort out a better commuter bike that I don't mind riding through the winter muck and leaving locked up outside. I mentioned this to my friend Kevin on our way to Thursday Night Happy Hour Sushi, and he told me there is a bike that is just what I am looking for, a Specialized Langster. When I got home, I looked on Craigslist and Ebay, and there was 1 on each site just in my size! The Craigslist bike was in Portland, though. Good thing I'm going there next week! I emailed the guy selling the bike and told him I wanted it, and we made arrangements for my friend Molly to help me get it. Yea!!! I have a sweet bike to commute on now, or at least I will when I get back from Portland after Christmas. Check it out:

Oh ya, and I am DONE with my classes for the semester! My final presentation went fairly well yesterday, so now I am off the hook for a month at least!

1 holiday party down and 4 to go. I'm already holiday "festivitied" out! All I do is eat and eat and eat! I'm not a damn bear getting ready to hibernate for the winter! I think I'm heading out for a bike ride right now to justify (try to, rather) all of the food I ate last night!

The Snow is Melting

It's over 50º outside today, and the snow is melting! Last week I was happy for the snow, as my shoulder was still feeling pretty bum. It is feeling a lot better now, after several days of skate skiing and a great chiropractic visit last week! Yea!! Also, I got new lowers for my fork, so I should be getting my bike up and running again, just in time for my feeling better shoulder and the snow to melt!

I have really been enjoying skate skiing this year. I can see how people who are really good at it really enjoy it. Once you get into a good rhythm, it's very meditative. Granted, those moments for me are pretty few and far between the awkward, uncoordinated times, but I enjoy them all the same.

Funny thing, I ran into an ex-bf today, and he told me I looked stunning. Wow, you know, that made my day a little brighter! Now if only I could find a boy who thinks that while we're dating...not years after I break up with him! Hmmmmm....Oh well. :)

Expectations, Or Rather No Expectations

I had a really nice dinner with my friend Tawnya last night. She has been traveling since July of '05. Along the way she has met a lot of interesting people, some touched her heart more so than others, but ultimately, her travels have given her a lot of insight and clarity about life in general. One thing that we talked about last night was expectations. So many people depend heavily on expectations: expectations about what they think they should do , what they think other people should do, how they think things should go...In the end, when you have expectations, whether they're good or bad, thing usually fall short. We spent a lot of time talking about how if you don't have expectations for a situation or for people and you just go with it, in the end the outcome is generally a lot better because you haven't set it up to be something that it ultimately wasn't.

This is something that has taken me a really long time to understand and figure out, but I think that I've been a lot happier ever since I've tried to remember that developing expectations for something or someone only sets you up to be disappointed! Enjoy life for what it is, it's a lot more fun that way!

Well, anyway, we had a really nice dinner sharing a lot of ideas about a lot of things in life. Seeing the world through different eyes has really had a huge impact on Tawnya, and I'm glad I got to hear about her ideas and thoughts on life and the many different ways to live it!

This Week Really Sucks!

The right side, the bad side.

The left side, not as bad. :)

I can't even pretend like I'm having a good week. I killed all of my stem cells again. Yea. Start over and wait 5 weeks again. That's fun. Work sucks, pretty bad. It's a good thing I'm done at the end of December.

To top it all off (and it's only Wednesday!)... My separated shoulder still feels like crap, so I haven't gotten to ride for the past 3.5 weeks. Today I went to try to ride my bike, and it hurt, but I just didn't care, I'm going stir crazy sitting around. I was riding on the pump track at the Fix, and I kept thinking that it was really weird that it sounded like my tire was buzzing something when I would corner really hard. Every once in awhile the tire will buzz my foot in this situation, but that was not the case. I stopped and noticed that my wheel didn't look straight. Hmmm, the QR isn't broken, the dropouts look fine. What could the problem be. Then I looked farther up the fork, and it's EFFING BROKEN! I mean it's really cracked, and almost all the way through on both sides. That's brilliant. I'm pretty psyched about it. I'm glad I noticed and stopped riding before it broke through. Sorry, I'll try to cheer it up after today. :)

Off to Angel Fire...

for collegiate mountain bike nationals. Hopefully I'll post an update or two while I'm there. Keep your fingers crossed that the headline of the update is: CU crushes FLC in men and women's DH and MX, also beats them in XC and ST to take the overall Division I title! :)

Chance and the Universe

So, as I was leaving work today, I began to wonder why the Universe seems to make me "bump into" (not literally, of course) people on a fairly regular basis that I would actually rather not see all of the time. I wondered if it was dictated my similar schedules, but it doesn't seem so, or just plain random. Regardless of the causes, I was a little annoyed with the Universe for messing with me. Not 5 minutes later, I'm walking down the bike path and a girl says, "Is your name Neven?" I was a little taken aback, as I didn't recognize her at first, but then I realized that she was someone that I had gone to middle school with. It was good to see her, her husband, and her cute baby, so maybe that was my lesson about not getting annoyed with chance occurrences. You can't predict them, and I would have hated to miss out on running into her, just to not have to run into someone else.

Oh, and often on my way home, I pass this guy walking down the street that I live off of. He wears this hat, kind of one of those fishing hat things. Only, he wears it tilted back with the string cinched under his chin. EVERY time, I think, why is that guy wearing a bonnet?!? Then I get close enough to realize that it's just the fishing hat guy who must be worried that it's going to blow off of his head or something. It makes me laugh, though. :)