It has been a busy week! Well, month, really, if you want to be specific, but I'm going to talk about this last week so the rest is, for now, irrelevant.
My mom and I drove my little Saturn out to Colorado Springs, where I am doing my Very First Internship. It was two long 12-hour days, and I was glad when we finally arrived in the city around 8 p.m. mountain time. When they say there's nothing to see in Kansas, they mean There Is Nothing In Kansas At All. It was the longest day of driving ever.
But we survived, and it was definitely worth it. Colorado Springs is a beautiful town right at the base of Pike's Peak and the start of the Rocky Mountains. It has a population of about 350,000, and counting the outlying areas it's about 500,000. You wouldn't know it, though, from driving around the city (which I've been doing a lot of). It's kind of like an enormous suburb with no urban center. The downtown is nice, a really snazzy (yes really) collection of specialty restaurants, bistros, nightclubs and boutiques. I think Colorado Springs is one of the wealthiest towns in the United States. If it's not, it soon will be, if the stores here are any indication.
Before I got here, I had thought that Colorado was mostly a Democratic state. I found that this is not true – in "hippie" places like Denver and Boulder, the Democrats are a lot more powerful than here in the rest of Colorado. It supposedly seems pretty conservative, I guess by western standards. I still found it pretty liberal, after living in the capitals of conservatism for so long.
I'm living with a reporter on the Gazette, Dave Philipps, and his wife Amanda in their house a few blocks from the paper. I was worried that the situation might be weird, but so far it's worked out well; they're both really nice people and this way I didn't have to worry about finding housing by myself. Instead, Dave has lived here his entire life, so he's really helpful with information and directions in case I need to go somewhere. (The satnav helps with directions too, haha)
Work so far has been fun. All the designers are really friendly, and have been really helpful with the new system that I'm learning. They recently switched to InDesign and a data system called DTS, so I can sometimes help people with InDesign and they can pretty much always help me with DTS. It's not that complicated, but there are a lot of steps to remember when designing a page. I've actaully already gotten to design a couple pages that will run next week, which has
surprised Jerry, my boss. To take off the modesty hat for a second, apparantly I'm the shit. (puts hat back on) So I left work feeling pretty good today.
I think that's good for tonight. I'm still adjusting to mountain time, which is two hours behind Indiana. It's good in the morning, but right now at 11 p.m. it feels like 1 a.m.
Goodnight!
But enough of that. The venue was amazing – it's a little outside of Denver and the stage and seating is carved into rock. I honestly don't know how to describe it. It was that incredible. I got there an hour early, thanks to the advice of my coworkers. Sat for an hour, thinking about how much fun I could be having. Anyway. The first band was Rogue Wave, a band not a lot of people have heard of, apparently, but I was really excited about. I hadn't realized they were playing, so it was a pleasant surprise to see them. Then Death Cab for Cutie! I didn't think I would be so excited, but I was yelling with everyone else when they came on stage. They are by far my favorite band, and I knew most of the songs they played. They've been together since 1997, so they had a lot of material to chose from. I'm glad they played more than just stuff from their new album Narrow Stairs and their first major-label record Plans. Cause I've been listening to them since before Plans, which is I think when a lot of people became fans.
