No Sour Grapes in This Bunch

A couple of weekends ago, my sister and brother-in-law invited me to Divine Wine in downtown Denver because they had made their own special wine blend and it was time to bottle the goods! Here's a pic of my sister putting on the custom labels she made for their wine. She made two, one for each of her doggies called 1) Split Personality for Dexter and (2) Jealous Boyfriend for Chico. Very fitting names if you've met the pooches! And that big jug the guy on the left is holding, that's what had their wine it it... they were kind enough to share!
And here's a pic of the bottling process, I only did one bottle because I was scared it would explode all over me!
It was a really fun process and I'm happy they included me!

New Year, New Challenges

For the start of 2011, I am taking part in the Whole Living Action Plan 28-Day Challenge. Today is Day 1 and I began my Monday morning not with my typical cup of joe, but instead with this:

It's the Green Smoothie which includes Kale, parsley, one banana and a green apple. I brought it with me to work at 8 this morning and am still working on finishing it. The consistency is a little jarring at first, but you get used to it and it actually is pretty tasty! For the rest of the day, here are my meals:

Lunch will be a salad with some left-over pork roast (a piece about the size of my smart phone), and my snacks will be a green apple with peanut butter (I'm not sticking with the plan where it calls to cut out peanut products) and another shake later on in the afternoon.

I think this will be a good thing, but we'll see if it is or just another good sounding, bad idea! So far, the most difficult part of the process has been cutting out caffeine, but I'm hoping that over the next 28 days, I will be more alert, clear-minded and not as dependent on coffee as I was just one week ago.

I will be using the blog as a way to track my progress and also talk about the challenges and triumphs that come with The Challenge.

Brandon Flowers - Crossfire

Last night, my friend Hagen, and I went to see Brandon Flowers at the Ogden. He's the lead singer of The Killers but is doing a solo thing for a while.

I haven't heard much of his solo work so I didn't know what to expect and Hagen won the tickets through an online raffle so he couldn't give me a whole lot of insight into Flowers' Flamingo album.

But, my reviews are all positive! If you're looking for a new addition to your iPod, run don't walk, get Flamingo today. Listening to this album live last night was amazing! Maybe it was the mix of light show, performance theater and musical talent that intrigued me but whatever it was, I am hooked on The Killers front man! I can't stop streaming his stuff online and am headed out after work to buy the CD. Yes, I still buy CD's.

Anberlin - Impossible = my new song obsession

Dating in Denver

Way back in 2005 Forbes.com listed the Denver-Boulder as the #1 spot for singles. Times have changed my friend. By 2009 Denver-Aurora had fallen 12 spots to #13 and in 2010, it's feeling like the Mile High City should be closer to #40 on that list.

Dating anywhere is difficult, but dating in Denver has its own unique challenges.

(1) No one is from Denver, or Colorado for that matter. So if you do get serious with someone chances are pretty high they'll want to return to their hometown and be near their family.

(2) No one is ready to make a commitment. There are more Peter Pans running the streets of Denver than anywhere I've lived before.

(3) Quirky is confused for trendy. It's not trendy to be a freak, it's just freaky. Some days I feel like I'm living episode 15 of Sex and the City, The Freak Show:

Oh how I miss my weekly dates with Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte & Miranda, they rarely let me down unlike my recent outings.

Lately, I've been out with a man who in his mid-30's couldn't hold his liquor which lead to multiple embarrassing texting mistakes only one day after we met, a man who thinks recreational drug use is cool, a man who makes and breaks more plans than I can count so we really have yet to meet for a second time and a man who made future plans with me on our first date but hasn't called to let me know when we're doing all that fun stuff.

Judge for yourself, but for now, I agree with Carrie.

It's not me, it's you

Stefanie Wilder-Taylor's book, It's not me, it's you, is perhaps one of the funniest reads I've sat down for in a while!

There are a lot of really funny parts so it was difficult for me to narrow down my excerpt selection, but I hope you find this as funny as I did.

So, I'd heard all the bad advice and more while spending the better part of my prime hoping the right guy was going to happen along while I was too busy loving myself to notice. When I finally did meet a meet the man I eventually married, one of my friends said, "Good for you. You did the work on yourself and the right guy came into your life." Wrong. I did eventually find "the one" but I credit luck, AOL and some particularly bad dates with other people for my husband, Jon. I didn't suddenly develop a better, more evolved personality.

In the old days of the Internet, everyone had AOL - sadly, I still do, mostly because I'm deathly afraid of change, not because I like AOL. But back then we were a proud community; we felt we belonged to one of the first networking sites and we filled out our member profiles, listing our hobbies, jobs, marital status, and age, with great gusto.

It just so happened that I enjoyed looking up these member profiles, finding people who were online at the time and then sending them a random instant message along the lines of "Hi, I'm seventy-five years young and looking for a good time. You game?" Usually the recipient of my communication either completely ignored me or immediately asked for my height/weight/pic, which is gross. Come on, I'm seventy-five!

Thanks to the Eloise May Library, I enjoyed this book for my two weeks and am on my way at lunch today to pick up a new one, Julia Phillips You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.

Good Sounding, Bad Idea #15

Planning Your High School Reunion

Sure, it sounds fun and easy enough, right?! Wrong! Planning your high school reunion is one giant headache.

First ensuring you get a hold of everyone is impossible. Second, trying to please everyone is even more impossible than trying to let everyone know it's happening in the first place and third, getting everyone who says they're going to be there to actually show up is the biggest hurdle.

When people started bugging me on Facebook about planning my 10-year high school reunion (why did I have to be an overachiever in high school, why?) I felt pressured to be on the planning committee so I said yes. That was my first mistake.

My second mistake came when one of the planning committee members said she was "too busy" to find a place for our class dinner. For some reason unknown to me now, I said, "No problem, I can do that too" although I had already decided on the date, the location of the mixer and was apparently the lead on the planning committee.

The second mistake ended up being the biggest. Given roughly a month to find a suitable place for our Saturday night dinner, I didn't even think about having people pay in advance. I was too worried about finding a place that could hold as many people who said they were coming. Once I made the reservations and paid the deposit I thought the headache was over...wrong again.

Before I get into why the dinner was so horrible, I will tell you about the rest of the reunion which was actually pretty fun!

Friday night we had a mixer at a local bar, the Gold Dust, in downtown Pueblo. It was so fun, a lot of people came and it was really great seeing everyone again! The turnout for the mixer was really good, about 100 or so people. I did overhear people talking about the dinner and saying they couldn't make it which made me really nervous but I still figured we'd hit our minimum of 80 people.

Saturday afternoon we all met at South High to do a tour of the school which was really fun! It was so weird how small the school seems now and big it was to us just ten years ago.

Here's where the story gets good... Saturday night as I was driving to dinner I was really nervous about us not meeting the minimum of 80 people for dinner. As I was unloading my car, I apparently forgot I was in a nice dress, bent over like I was at the gym picking up the weight bar and split my dress! It wasn't a big split, what happened was the slit at the bottom came undone just a little too much. I began to panic. Thank God my friend Luz was on her way over, stopped and got some safety pins and saved my butt, literally!

After the humiliation of having my entire class know I split my dress, I had to tell them that we were 40 people short for dinner and ask them to pay more. While some were pretty unhappy, most understood. I just wish that 1)the people who said they were coming had shown up and 2)that I would have planned better!

Guess I know better now and I will be able offer some helpful advice to those who plan the 20th class reunion because it won't be me!