Last week, when I was in unpacking hell, my friend Toni reached out to see if I wanted to grab coffee soon. Though I’ve known Toni for… oh, 8, 9 years?… I think we’ve met in person twice before. She lived outside of Chicago until moving to Loveland, Colorado about a year ago, so we […]
Read MoreFiguring out Halloween
Our Halloween turned into an example of things being as good as you make them. During the day I was feeling stir crazy, so I took a walk down the same Poudre River Trail that Dan biked on Sunday. I got as far as Salyer Park, pictured here. It’s about 1.3 miles from home, so […]
Read MoreHouse tour: the kitchen
Voilà, our kitchen! I had just finished hand-washing our lunch dishes — currently, the dishwasher is strictly decorative, as somehow it was installed without being hooked up to either power or water — and decided the kitchen looked as photo-ready as it was going to get. Without a doubt, the kitchen is the most stunning […]
Read MoreSolarCity
Our neighborhood, Revive, caught Dan’s eye because of its focus on renewable energy and conservation. On Saturday we met our consultant from SolarCity (recently acquired by Tesla) — Justin walked us through the monitoring for our solar panels, which should produce enough electricity that the overage on our power bill also pays our water bill […]
Read MoreWait, why is it 75°
This is the kind of day we woke up to today: 70s and sunny, t-shirt weather. Dan starts work again tomorrow and was itching for at least one exploratory bike ride along the Poudre River Trail before his “vacation” ends. He ended up riding ~20 miles and says he has barely scratched the surface of that […]
Read MoreI didn’t cry at IKEA
It’s true! Dry eyes all around. IKEA overstimulates me. I can’t be alone in that. As design-chewy and dazzling as I find it, about 40 minutes in I am usually reduced to an anxious, weepy version of myself until I can sit in a dark room sipping on some Orinoco Flow. But not this time […]
Read MoreOld Firehouse Books, Scrumpy’s Hard Cider
Dan and I have been unpacking relentlessly since Monday and both needed a night out. For a month I’d been planning to visit Old Firehouse Books for their “Swords & Lasers Book Club” (fantasy and sci-fi, if you couldn’t guess; they have other clubs for other tastes). I visited on my own to chat about […]
Read MoreQueen of King Soopers
Grocery shopping saved me today. I took a solo trip while Dan was organizing the garage. Walking around King Soopers — just Cincinnati’s Kroger chain under another name — was incredibly cathartic. Everything was where it should be, laid out exactly like my hometown store. And then there’s retail therapy, of course. Dan and I […]
Read MoreFort Collins, we are in you.
Technically, we rolled into town on Saturday afternoon. Because we had time (our moving truck would take a week to arrive in Colorado), we took a longer-than-necessary route through Memphis, TN; Little Rock, AK; Oklahoma City, OK; Lincoln, NE; and North Platte, NE. I won’t recap those adventures here but I’ve linked each of these […]
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