Category: Colorado

I’d like my state medium well, please…

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So in case you haven’t heard, Colorado has a huge wildfire going on right now. The High Park Fire is currently 5% contained and it is the third largest wildfire in the history of the state at 43,400 acres. Keep us in your thoughts though. People are being evacuated and one person is thought to be dead… scary stuff! I was worried about this when we didn’t get much snow/rain this winter and spring… Booo…

Today’s pictures feature the picturesque Flatirons that look over Boulder. The top picture shows all the haze from the High Park Fire that we got here this morning. The bottom picture shows a Flatiron peaking up over some bushes in less hazy conditions this afternoon to give you an idea of the difference…

What sorts of natural disasters do you get in your area? Have you ever been evacuated? Btw, this week has been a bit ridiculous so my usual Wedding Wednesday post is probably going to be late… Also, for the record, I prefer my steaks medium or medium well… I like my states to be not charred too…

Ribbit?

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This weekend, Cobalt and I went to the Denver Botanic Gardens as part of his birthday adventures and we had a really good time. The gardens are kind of awesome (except the plains one which, in our opinion, seemed a little plain… :-/). It was all overcast and wet outside, which apparently inspired me to be really creative with my photography. I took so many cool pictures with my DSLR… it was awesome. As soon as I can pick out which pictures I like best, maybe I will post some cool flower pictures on here. Today’s pictures come from the rainforest part of the garden (verrrrry humid in there…) where they had some poison dart frogs. The frogs were being a little antisocial and hiding behind the plants in the darker parts of their aquarium so it made taking their pictures kind of challenging (working at really low exposure speeds and f stops…). Which is your favorite?

I like that his little toes are in focus in this one…

One without a flash…

Mountain towns are fun…

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Oh the joys of living in a mountain town… This morning, as I cruised along my new (mostly downhill) route to lab, I noticed these signs on cones in the middle of the bike path reading “MOUNTAIN LION PRESENCE IN THIS AREA CONFIRMED. BE ALERT!”

…

Be alert?! That’s it?! If I see a mountain lion on my way home, should I just nod and be like “Hey Mountain lion! Please don’t eat me but I’m aware of your presence!”? Hrmmmm… maybe I should take the long way home….

In other non big scary cat related news, I repotted my baby lemon cucumber and tomato plants last night! They are growing so happily. I hope they weren’t too traumatized by the move to bigger pots. They will thank me when they realize their roots have so much extra dirt to crawl through… Pictures hopefully next week…

In OTHER non plant or cat news, my sister’s birthday was this week! This message is as belated as my present to her is (hopefully you get it today, wee!) so I hope both find her well. Happy belated birthday! :D Here is a picture of me, Gustav, and my sister in CA last time we were both home…

Reflections on a busy week

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WOW! It’s been a while since I wrote. Thanks grad school for making my life insane for a bit there. It’s funny. I am done with all my qualifying exams and my classes so all I have left to graduate is “just” research. That’s right. Do enough research to be able to publish two scientific papers on new findings and then I can graduate! If only it were that easy… Sometimes the “just research” part of grad school is awesome. You go in, get your work done, you go home, no sweat. Life is great. Sometimes the “just research” part is insane… so insane it makes you wish you still had classes left because at least classes have a finite length and obvious expectations (write this paper? DONE. Study for and take this test? DONE… vs… I looked at bacteria under a microscope for HOURS and I took HUNDREDS OF PICTURES and I still have NO idea what anything means… Whyyyyyyyyyyyy?). Anyway, you get it. Plus we packed up our whole lab and moved it a mile away into a new building. There was some moving drama in there last week too.

ANYWAY – I have been really sad that I haven’t been able to write recently. So much stuff has been going on AND I got tagged by Karyl to write a post on marriage and I am worried that she thinks I forgot about it. Don’t worry Karyl, I’ve been thinking about it all week and I hopefully will be able to finally publish my thoughts tomorrow or Thursday this week! Yay! So, I talked about grad school being dumb and moving being time consuming… What have else I been up to, you ask?

Well, besides apparently freaking out small children at church on Sunday, here are a few things I did since the last time I wrote.

1) Had really good barbecue in Longmont, CO. Seriously. Amazing. Best BBQ I’ve had so far in the state. Go check them out. Obviously skip this recommendation if you are a vegetarian.

2) Moved the lab – already talked about this but here are some pictures:

Old Lab – see that big thing of pink bubble wrap? It was probably 3 times as big when we got it and then we used it and another whole roll up moving all our fragile stuff… intense… There is nothing worse than trying to get lab tape off of bubble wrap for your information…


New Lab – my new bench bubble wrap free! In other new lab news, I learned today that it is about a 2 mile bike ride to the new building and it is almost alllll downhill on the way there. Fun times coming home this summer… :-/

3) Saw President Obama speak at my school. Regardless of your politics, how cool is it to get to see a president speak in person? Obama pictures in a minute. I just want to emphasize on here that part of the awesomeness of all of this was actually all the waiting in line to get into the events center.


We had to wait for the bus…


In the line, we had a race across a random patch of grass/compared our weird feet/did other silly things. If you look closely in the top left hand corner, you can see the line behind us…


We were all distracted by this helicopter that we thought Obama was in but then he drove right past us…


Obama on the jumbo screen of the events center. I’d say that’s a typical Obama face…


Live Obama and jumbo screen Obama in the same shot! Because our lab move day was the same day as Obama’s speech and because that was the same day my boss decided to tell me how much data analysis she needed me to do in the next few days, we didn’t get to get in line until later in the afternoon so we didn’t get the most amazing of seats. But you can still see Obama!

4) Took a road trip with Cobalt to see his family

On the road again… Cobalt and I enjoyed rocking out to crazy mashups (courtesy of Milkman) as we drove along…

Anything exciting going on in your lives? Do you obsessively photograph everything like I do? Discuss!

On the docket for tomorrow (hopefully… or Thursday… sorrrrrrrry) – What do I look forward to in my marriage? Stay tuned. It should be exciting… I have been thinking about what to say for a week now…

Baby plants!

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Or at least one baby plant… This is a follow up to last Friday’s post about our garden. Look! A baby lemon cucumber has sprouted! Angelica the crocheted octopus is excited about it (and we are too)! It must have been all that warm weather we had last weekend (it was in the 80’s!). Too bad it was freezing and snowy yesterday (told you Colorado weather was weird)… Poor baby plants had to stay inside.

No worries all! Wedding Wednesday will be back on Thursday! Wedding… Thursday? I’m not sure it sounds that good but just go with it…

Antsy Questions

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I am a girl of lists. At any given second of any given day, I have at least one list running through my head. Whether it’s the lab list (if I start my cells here then I can do this experiment here and then…) or the wedding list (why isn’t the registry done? We should order our rings… What song are we gonna play here?) or the Potassium list (pick up Mom from airport, text friends back, need… sleep….) or all of them at once, something is running through my head at all times. So for today’s wedding Wednesday post, I thought I would post some things going through my head about all of that. Ready? Let’s go!

  1. Tans
    So we live in Colorado. We are 5300 feet closer to the sun here than people who live at sea level. Basically, once spring hits, I can’t really go outside without getting tanned, burned, or both. So by the time we get to May, I am already sporting a pretty decent farmer’s tan just from walking to the bus stop/biking to work. Not to mention that I also look like a raccoon thanks to my sunglasses tan. Because we are getting married this summer, I am getting increasingly worried about having a farmer’s tan with my wedding dress. Sure, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world but I would really rather not see a fat farmer’s tan/raccoon eyes on me every time I see my wedding pictures. So it’s going to be an interesting next few months I think – full of sunscreen and maybe less sunglasses use. We’ll just have to see because I refuse to do any fake tanning. Thoughts?
  2. Dress!
    My mom was here visiting earlier this week and we made progress on fitting the bodice of my dress. I think the next time I head out to California for a long weekend we are going to go pick out fabric!!!! So speaking of fabric, we went and looked a little at my mom’s favorite fabric shop here in Boulder (you know you’ve lived somewhere too long when your mother has a favorite fabric shop there…). I want my dress to be white with just a HINT of blue. Something that you could really only see in the sunlight. Unfortunately, there were no bolts of fabric that came anywhere close. The only “light blue” they had looked silver or gray to me. It was if, in order to make things lighter, they just took out all the hue in the color, if that makes sense. So instead of just making it less saturated (so still sky blue or whatever but fainter), they just took out everything that made it blue so that it looked dull and gray. I think a dress made out of the fabric would look dull and lifeless so I dunno if that would make for a very good wedding dress. Do you have a favorite fabric shop? Have you ever seen anyone in a blue wedding dress?

In other wedding news, I ordered my necklace to wear with my dress. It’s a shark (duh)! Click the picture to go to the Etsy page it is from.

Weather Report: ????

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I usually check the weather on Weather.com every day before I go wherever I am planning on going. Yesterday when I got up and checked the weather before my soccer game (first outdoor game of the year woooooooo!), I saw the following weather report. If you are thinking that this looks like a decent report of the weather, make sure you take a look at the current wind listed…

I am sure this was a random mistake on Weather.com’s part because when I reloaded the page a few minutes later it was fixed. But it still made me laugh and made me think of how appropriate the report was for the month of March in Boulder. You see, we don’t really get one of those “normal” springs where it gradually gets warmer in March and then the “April showers bring May flowers…” No, Boulder basically has a split personality for this whole part of the year which makes the weather almost completely unpredictable (hence “wind: ??? calm??? Maybe?!?!?”). So yes, one day it will be absolutely gorgeous and a nice 66 degrees outside and the next day it will snow 2 feet (or rain/snow, or drizzle, or just be freakin’ COLD for no reason, etc) and then the next day the sun will come back out, the temperature will go back up, and it will be like that day in the middle never existed.

Ohhhhh Boulder…

Is it spring-like where you are yet? Are your springs as two sided as ours? I know we technically have 8 days until spring starts according to the calendar but no one seems to have told our weather that…