heading (home? away? back?) ...east tomorrow

It's always weird when you leave a place that you've become familiar with, especially after you've come to appreciate it - be it a small town in the middle of nowhere or a big city, there's always a certain amount of remorse that comes with leaving. This time, I've been counting down the days until I'm back in Indiana, but now, with only a few hours left here in Colorado Springs, I'm dragging my heels.
It's not because I don't miss everyone at home — I really, really miss everyone at home. I've been musing it over, and I think someone at the paper said it best: I just dipped my toe into the giant ocean that is the Real World. And I like it. I like the feeling of being responsible for myself. I like having a nine to five. I like going out with friends from work.
I like feeling like an adult.
But it's more than that. It's also that nine or ten weeks seems like the amount of time it takes to adjust to a place. Everywhere I've been in the past few years, there's always been this period of uncomfortableness when I'm not used to the atmosphere or the pace of the city. Of course it's always a little different, but nine seems like the magic number.
So here I am, in my tenth week in Colorado, and I'm finally kind of okay with people driving ten under the speed limit, dressing like they just worked out, and walking around with their head in the clouds mountains. I'm starting to hang out with people. I like my job.
And now I have to leave.

Anyway, here's my travel plans, in case you're wondering.
I'm driving back with my mom, taking three days (or two, I guess, if we're feeling up to it). If we take three days, we're stopping in Salina, KS, and St. Louis. If you're following me on twitter (/beckyrother), I'll be posting updates as we hit milestones.
Wish us luck!
Cheers!

i swear this is not the only thing i do at work

more cat pictures

unplanned productivity

Today I woke up at 6:30 in the morning because both dogs were howling. Loudly. And then the alarm clock went off in the other room. I knew it was hopeless. I got up.
I had been planning to get up pretty early anyway, to schedule a time to bring my car in for an oil change and tune-up before my Very Long Drive next week (next week!). So I called them at 7, when they opened, and then just stayed up.
At 9, I went to Starbucks, partly to get out of the house, partly to work on my DVD project and partly for a latté. I sat between some people doing an interview (still not sure who was interviewing whom) and a group of what I took to be young New-Lifers, one of the ultra-Christian churches in town. They talked about Batman for about half an hour, saying how they would never bring young children to see it, making terrible faces about how graphic and terrifying Heath Ledger as Joker was. I'm not going to judge.
What did I do between 7 and 9? I still don't really know. I started packing, I put some stuff in boxes, I moved them into the spare room, but I don't think that should have taken up two hours' worth of time.
Oh well.
I left Starbucks, went to the library to return some books, and came back to lay out in the park for a while. (I know you probably don't really want to hear about every second of every day, but that's what ya got.)
Then I took my car in to the Saturn dealer, where I was confronted with those terrible questions about whether to replace seemingly vital parts of my car that may or may not cause the engine to fall out, catch on fire or explode. I chose to risk it. It was either that or pay $400. Life's tough when you're poor. I still ended up paying $250 for new brakes, which really did look bad and were clearly in need of replacing. The other part, that could be any dirty old metal part on the engine, but I know what brakes look like, and I know mine were bad. So they replaced them, and I got to take them on a test drive with the manager of the Saturn dealership. That's why I like Saturn — everyone who works there is so friendly. I've really had nothing but good experiences with them.

And that's all.
Cheers!

rodeOOOH

Last weekend was one of the better ones this summer, mostly because I got to hang out with other people and actually do things.
On Saturday, I went to a couple art museums in town - they were having free admission days. We went to one downtown that was supposed to be modern art, but it turned out to be a room with screen-printed scarves. It was cool, but there wasn't much to look at. The next one we went to was bigger - The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. It had literally all kinds of stuff - one room was Native American stuff, and one room was photographs, and one room was "everything else" with abstract, sculpture, glasswork and pottery. It was a pretty good museum, considering it's in the middle of Colorado.
Then Saturday night we went to the rodeo. Yes I did, I went to the rodeo. With Rina and Alexis, interns, and Rina's roommate, a Colorado College student. It was a lot of fun, we were laughing a lot of the time and no one really looked at us. I think we were the only people there just to look - everyone else seemed really emotionally connected and seriously into it.
On Sunday I got out of work really early and went to a dance performance at Colorado College that had people from the Cirque de Soleil and crazy stuff like that.
So that was my weekend.
I'm putting up pictures.

LOL

more cat pictures
I'm sorry, I had to.

Busy weekend

First of all, I would just like to tell you that my window is open and cigarette smell is coming in from outside. Also, I'm reading a book by Chuck Palahniuk - think Edward Norton in the beginning half of "Fight Club" - so I might be a little more brusque than usual. Or something. So.
And now for the post.

How to begin. It's been a long two weeks, with no break between last week and this one, and my family visiting starting Tuesday. Not to complain, I'm much happier when I'm busy and feel like I have a purpose instead of just sitting around on Facebook. So I went up to Denver on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, which I already talked about.
This weekend was packed with all the tourist stuff I haven't done since I got to Colorado Springs. I feel weird going out on my own sightseeing at places people usually bring families or friends, so mostly I've kept to the suburban aspects of sightseeing: the malls, the Starbucks, the highways... I really thought Colorado would bring out the woodsy adventurer in me, but for the most part I guess I was wrong about that.
We started out on Friday, when there was a cattle drive through downtown Colorado Springs to celebrate the Fourth and also to raise interest in the Rodeo next week. It was weird and surprisingly short, with very little fanfare leading up to the moment the cows would shuffle past us surrounded by cowboys on horses. The road didn't close until about five minutes until the scheduled time. The whole thing was kind of surreal.
After that we kind of hung out till 4, when we went to a barbecue at my coworker Dave's house. He had gotten up at something like 6 in the morning and smoked a "couple'a huge pork butts," as he said. They were really shoulders but called butts. It was worth it, the sandwiches were delicious.
We left about 6:30 or so, in time to decide where to watch fireworks and what time to go. The Fourth of July really confirmed my suspicions that Colorado Springs is the most patriotic place in the country, next to Washington, D.C. Combine the center of a giant Red state with a couple of military installments and evangelical Christian bases and you get a whole heapin' pile of patriotism. So there were about four different displays we could have gone to. The one we went to was in Memorial Park, and the Colorado Springs orchestra played a concert beforehand. It was nice. By the way, I did take a lot more pictures than I'm putting up here, and I started a flickr account: www.flickr.com/photos/ihavegoodnews/ - There's a link on the right side of this page.
The next day, we started out really, really early (7 a.m.) and took a cog wheel train ride to the top of Pikes Peak. That was something I've been looking forward to since I got here, so it was exciting to finally get to go, even if it was pretty early. The view from the top was absolutely spectacular, and I had a great time walking around with my brother.
Lessee, then we went to Seven Falls, the only really lame thing on the trip. It was a pretty tall waterfall, sure, but we had to pay something like $17 each to get in, and all we did was walk up some stairs. I'm still sore, and didn't really see anything spectacular like I would expect after paying some exorbitant fee to get into a park.
After that we went to Royal Gorge, which was expensive but really was worth it - it's a pretty narrow bridge 1,000 feet above the Arkansas River. Kind of scary, but neat.
Then today we went to the Garden of the Gods in the morning before the family had to leave at 2. That park was free, and the best one, I thought. The rock formations were really cool, and we were able to actually walk around (the path was paved) the area and take pictures and stuff. And it was morning so it didn't get ridiculously hot.

And now I'm tired. But look at my flickr account - I can only put up a few photos a month (basically the limit I'm at right now) but it's good if you want to see more of what I did one weekend.

wild, wild west...

Driving back from Denver today got me thinking. Mostly because I couldn't get This American Life back on my ipod to listen to it while driving, so I was forced to keep Gnarles Barkley on repeat.That's not a bad thing, they're a great band, but after a while I tend to stop listening to music and actually think about things. So I wanted to write some of the things I was thinking about before I forgot them (as has already happened with 97 percent of the rest of the things I think about).

I think the West is the ultimate embodiment of America: huge and expansive, with subdivisions full of enormous houses on their half-acre of land each. There isn't much between Denver and Colorado Springs - it's mostly just rolling hills and blue-tinted mountains going off into the distance. What do they do with all this land, I wonder. It seems like such wasted space to me in my still-kind-of-European mindset. In London, there wasn't a centimetre of land that wasn't a building, or a road, or the Thames (and even that was crowded with boats and ferries). But Here, in the West, there appears to be more land than people know what to do with. The result, intentional or not, is a general feeling of excess, of being big for the sake of being big. American.
On the other hand, the grandeur of the Rockies and the vastness of the scenery - that in some places you can look around you and see nothing but rolling hills dotted with evergreens, huge white puffy clouds and the winding road ahead and behind, give the place a closeness with God that I haven't felt anywhere else. The sheer beauty of the place - of the West - makes me certain of His existence. And His greatness.
Amen.


Oh also.
I guess I should mention the reason for my being in Denver. Unlike my other Denver adventure, this one had a purpose: my family has flown out to visit me for the week. They're staying in Denver for two nights before coming to Colorado Springs, so I drove up after work to meet them and have dinner with them. I ended up spending the night there, in their hotel room, in a double bed with my 18-year-old brother, and leaving this morning. They get to go to Estes Park, while I had to go to work.
It makes me feel so grown up, to have my family visit me in the other place where I live. It's really happening, this growing-up thing.
Yikes.