Week In Review! Denver Pt. 2!

It's been another two weeks in Denver--and they have been jam packed. Jam packed with adventure, heartbreak, meetings and, as of the last two days, snow! So, here we go--the week (ok, it's been two) in review!

• Remember how I had a horrible tree mural and Cookie Monster blue shag carpet in my walk-in closet sized room? Not anymore. One of my housemates had a massive room and didn't like it. So, we switched! Now we are both happy campers. (And, she painted the mural and psychedelic dresser within 48 hours of being in there. She's got way more energy than me!)
• I continue to love my jobs. The stories I hear though, at my afternoon job especially, continue to break my heart. We had a guy in who couldn't come up with the three dollars he needed for the copay on his heart medications. He'd gone without for two weeks before he found us and came in. (He said it might as well have been three million dollars because he couldn't come up with it on his own either way...) There was another guy who had recently become homeless and because of all the rain had found shelter for the last few nights night...in a port-a-potty. 
• Fall was beautiful for a few days. Then, after an 81 degree day, winter rolled in. Friday I woke up to snow. Flurries have been falling on and off since. (Brrr!!)
• UnderArmor cold weather socks continue to be my best cold weather friends. 
• As much as I love my jobs, I love the weekends even more. Last weekend David had cooked up some kind of a surprise. It had been on my calendar for a month, but I still didn't know what it was going to entail until I arrived at his house last Saturday. We drove out to a state park in the foothills, had a picnic lunch and then went horseback riding! I did not see that coming! David later had a lesson to teach up in what is the beginnings of the mountains, so we headed up there, had some coffee, and spent the evening there. While he was working I had a walk around town and wrote some postcards. It was absolutely what I needed to get me through the next crazy week. 
• Last Saturday eased some of the restlessness bubbling up in me. Horse back riding somehow reminded me of Moroccan camel rides (except way more comfortable!) and the little mountain town was giving me flashbacks to both Boquete, Panama and the mountains of Cyprus. Sunset walks and postcards just set the travel mood even more. 
• This weekend we took things in a completely different direction. We found a free jazz concert with a famous local band playing at a Methodist church down in Littleton. We thought it might be fun. (And, since it was free we were more than willing to take the gamble!) We walked in through snow flurries to find A) warmth (both of our houses and both of my jobs are so cold!), B) lots of old people (there were about 125 people in there. I think we were the only ones who weren't grey headed), and C) lots of fantastically ugly sweaters. The whole evening was great fun. The band was good, and really got rolling at the end--and the old folks were loving it. Orthopedic shoes were tapping all over the place. The grandma in front of us was especially getting down. 
• Two separate couples stopped to tell us that we did not old enough to be there--which just tickled us even more. 

Some pictures from the last couple weeks:  

I remembered to take a picture of our house. 10 of us live here and there are also offices for our directors. 

Horses!

Stables in the foothills. We weren't that far away from town or a freeway, but it still felt like we were in the middle of Wyoming. 

I did not fall off! : )

Our horses: Sky (David's) and Shy (mine). Not really sure why mine was named Shy. It certainly was not shy about stopping to eat, pooping at will or passing gas when others were near. 

It was a beautiful area. 

Up in Evergreen. (Seriously, it reminded me of both Boquete (remember?) and the Troodos Mounains (see here)).

Some fall trees

And sunset walks

Back in the work week, I decided half way through Monday (that had already involved staff meetings and inventorying more than 500 vases and other random things we sell) that in order to make it through feeding 1000 people spaghetti and then through an additional 4 hours of afterwork Urban Servant Corps programing I would need a boost. I made a lunch time stop at Starbucks while switching buses downtown. 

It was a good call because I found plenty of messages waiting for me when I got to my afternoon work site...

There's a saying that there's only two things in life that money can't buy: Love and homegrown tomatoes. I'm obviously a very lucky girl to have both. 

Friday morning at the bus stop!

The snow was beautiful...even if it had me worried that it was getting so cold already.

Totally

And finally, this evening even my Under Armor socks weren't quite cutting it. It was time to bust out my socks knitted by a Bosnian nana. David brought them back for me this summer and I've been waiting to rock them ever since. 

Greetings From Denver

Hello from the Mile High City! My, my, it's been a while, no? Quite honestly, it's been a while since I have been able to catch my breath. Life has been rolling along at full speed for the last month. I've moved to a new city, to a new house, acquired nine (yes, nine) new housemates, started breaking in two separate jobs in new fields, and...a million other things it seems.

As of tomorrow I will have been in Denver for a whole month. That's hard to believe mostly because it feels like it must have been at least 6 months.

In the midst of all this craziness I have been using just about every milligram of free time to sleep or silently stare at a wall to try to regain some strength. I've been doing a horrible job at keeping in touch with everyone, so, well, here we have it--a new blog! It's a bit impersonal, but I don't see myself having time for all the phone calls I'm behind on anytime soon. I'll see what I can do with reviving the Week in Review bit, but for now I'll throw in some tidbits from the past month. I haven't been doing a great job of taking pictures either (and they're all from my phone), but I'll share what I have. (Feel free to throw out questions in the comments if you're curious about anything.)

OK, a month in Denver in review!:

• My house is massive and laid out like a maze. I still forget where the stairs are that go up to the third floor sometimes. I think there are probably some secret passages lingering behind boxes in our basement. 
• A large chunk of my housemates are from the midwest. I'm already afraid of the things I'm going to start saying or how it will affect my accent. Hot dish anyone?
• Friday I learned how to harvest worms and how to put together a worm bin at work. (These are one of the gardening items we sell.) It's probably just as gross as you are imagining it.
• In the mornings I work at an organization called Earthlinks. If you want to learn a little more check it out here: Earthlinks-Colorado.org (You can also click over to the staff page to see their newest staff member!)
• In an effort to live a more sustainable life, to be in solidarity with the poor, and because, well, I am poor, I take the bus or walk everywhere I can. I take the bus in the morning half way to work and walk the rest of the way. At lunch I take two buses and walk a little bit to get to my second job, then I walk home at the end of the day. My attitude might change once it gets cold, but I love these times during the day. My morning walk is peaceful and full of gardens and snapshots of the skyscrapers and mountains. The bustle of downtown Denver at lunch hour is energizing. The walk home is stress relieving. 
• I've seen quite the characters on the bus, too. Sometimes these characters are people I know from work, so we chat for a while. (It's a nice feeling of connectedness.)
• Bus 44 frequently tries to ruin my day. 
• The weather has been fantastic. It got a bit cold for a day or two (high 40s in the morning/evening), but has been sunny and hovering in the 70s for the most part. 
• The sun really does shine constantly here. (Cue Ben Harper's She's Only Happy In the Sun)
• My room in the house came complete with a horrible painted mural. Since the room is pretty tiny it was dominating things. I don't have anywhere enough energy to paint the wall, so I got in a problem-solving mood and tacked up king sized sheets. Not beautiful, but satisfactory. 
• I have seen more rotten food in the last 3 weeks than in the rest of my life combined. (We get a lot of "day old" type donations at the house, and at Earthlinks we get food off a truck that comes by with expired or wilting food the grocery stores threw out. On top of that, many of us get random things from our worksites that they can't give out to their clients anymore (yes, we happily take the things they can't even give away to homeless people!). We try to use all this food on it's last leg, but, I'll be honest: a lot of it get's composted.)
• After this year, I will have cured myself of any desire to ever eat a bagel again. (Matter of fact, I'm pretty much there now.)
• We've actually been eating quite well. We rotate so that 2 different people out of the 10 of us cook and clean each weeknight. There's been a slight learning curve, but I'm pretty impressed with a lot of what we have come up with. 
• One of the perks I love about my afternoon job at the church is that I have an office. A real, downtown office. 
• I'm developing a healthy fear of the answering machine at work with all the sad and desperate stories I find there daily. 
• Monday afternoons at the church are exhausting--but the good kind of exhausting. The kind of exhausting where weekly we feed about 1,200 people in 4 hours. 
• Living between downtown and the huge city park is a great location with a lot of energy. It's also nice to head out to the foothills to the suburb where David lives once a week or so. It's amazing how much different it feels. 
• Actually, every 4 blocks or so Denver feels like a very different city. 

OK, that's plenty of bullet points. Some pictures to finish things up: 

My, um, interesting, whole wall, multilingual mural. Complete with mirrored flowers. Yeah. 

My solution. 

Our first day of work dinner. I helped cook this meal that turned out to be a bit overzealous, but delicious. (Seriously, cooking for 10 people mostly from scratch (because that's cheapest) can turn out to be like cooking a Thanksgiving-esque meal every night.)

Work in the morning

My afternoon office!

After a particularly long and heavy day (and week) I spotted this guy on the back of a wall. I figured no one was looking at it anyway, so I might as well take it...

During our first week or so of orientation we were subsisting on basically nothing but carbs: bagels, rice, pasta, bread.  We hadn't yet received our weekly batch of produce from the farmers market that gives us their unsellables, and we were longing for pretty much anything that came from the ground. That day our generally kind and well meaning director showed up at lunch with a peach. A peach that she ate in front of all of us. Waved it around a bit as she talked. (Oh man, we were all experiencing a range of emotions that were not the most generous!) After relaying this story to David, he showed up later with...giant peaches! Best. Peach. Ever.  

We also found a park throwing an end of summer festival--complete with a hot air balloon "glow" and fireworks. All for free! (It's true. We make poor look exciting.)

And finally, some shots from my morning commute:

Somebody forgot a few important things at the bus stop...

I'm not sure why, but I love this building.

My morning worksite is in a bit of an industrial area that is full of interesting artwork. 

Waiting for good ol' bus 15 (hotbed for interesting and/or homeless people) downtown at lunch. 

The End. 

The Last Two Weeks

I'm finally back home in Texas and thought that while I get caught up on laundry I'd give you all a little mini-update on my last couple of weeks. 

There was a lot of this: 

Mixed in with a daily dose of this: 

Backdropped by hundreds of miles of this: 

And punctuated with a brief trek on a few of these: 

{When was the last time you got your parents on a pack of camels?}

Finally, to round things out, I smothered the sunshine with a couple of feet of this: 

All of that, added to reunions with Camino friends, my former pastor and his new baby, my boyfriend, a long lost friend from seminary and a good friend all the way back from the freshman dorms--let me tell you, it equates to a very good last two weeks!

Update!

OK, I keep getting asked what I'm up to these days. I used to do Weeks In Review, which were fun, but honestly, my weeks currently are not as packed with excitement as they used to be. So...how about a like a month in review? With pictures!

Let me set this up by saying the sabbatical continues. Viva la pre-tirement! Yes, yes, I will find myself a 9-5 eventually, but for now I'm doing odd things here and there and continuing to live it up a bit.

So here we go: besides getting possible brain leaks (and the subsequent 2 weeks of migraines), I have been...

Travel cooking:

Falafel!

Patacones/tostones! 

Fried platanos! (mmm)

Syrian-style eggpant casserole!

Flan! x17...I will dominate flan making!

 (And thankfully I've pretty much talked the young adult small group that meets at my house on Sundays into testing out all my flans. Because even though I love it...a girl can only eat so much flan!)

Dusting off my inner artista: 

I finally got around to printing and putting up a photo project I'd been planning for a while

(and don't worry, they ended up much straighter than that!)

My mom bought a groupon for us to go to one of those painting night things. I'm not gonna lie...it was kind of stressful! But also a lot of fun. I know we didn't make Van Gogh jealous or anything, but I think we did decently! I hung mine (on the left) on a random nail in my kitchen to dry and ended up leaving it there. 

Ha, and another day, out of nowhere, I was in the mood to water-paint. So I wrote and painted my niece a book. There's no pictures of the end product, so I'll just let you imagine how that worked out : )

And taking some pictures around Fort Worth for a project with my mom. So many good looking buildings!

Reading!

I've been stowing away in libraries...

Having time to read was a large part of the "loafing" (Razor's Edge anyone?) I planned for on my sabbatical. While traveling I did conquer some giants (like all 900+ pages of Of Human Bondage) and lots of other good stuff, but with all the adventures and talking with strangers and naps, I didn't get as much reading in as I figured I would. 

I'm making up for lost time. 

Writing!

Postcards! What? Did you think I was gonna say a novel or something? ; )

Send me your addresses! 

And finally...Traveling!

(Of course! But just a little bit...) 

I made a weekend trip out to Albuquerque to have a little mini-reunion with some of the girls I lived in Spain with. Last year we met up in Austin for the weekend, and this year was even more fun! And look--we timed it so that we made it to the (world's largest) hot air balloon festival!

Then I took Greyhound bus (oh yes! I had been wanting to do that for a while now!) up to Denver, where again timing was perfect and David took me to see the Aspens changing colors. So beautiful! 

OK, and one more thing, aka, the real reason I am blogging (...procrastination!): 

Studying for the GRE!

Yep. I know. Strangely everyone around me is much less surprised than I am that I am thinking about applying to PhD programs. It was all getting overwhelming, so I took advice from soon to be Dr. Meredith and just decided I'd take the GRE, see how that goes and start from there. 

PSA: If a book's introduction feels the need to tell you that you shouldn't start hyperventilating...that's not a good sign. 

OK, so that's what I've been up to!