2014 Summer Bucket List

SUMMER!!!!!

Oh, sorry.  Just a little bit excited I suppose.  Being a summertime baby, I feel it’s just in my blood to consider summer the best season of all.  Plus sundresses, iced coffee cravings, Red Rocks concerts, BBQs, patios, evening walks?  Love it.  Love it all.  I don’t think I need to mention the added excitement of both my best friend’s and my own wedding, but I will anyways 🙂  The thought of all the wedding festivities and having family in town basically has my heart bursting at the seams.  Now let’s just add the Rockies making it to the playoffs okay??

I’m half tempted to just re-write all of last year’s Bucket List items and/or list things like “Attend a Rehearsal Dinner” but I guess that’s not very creative, so here we go!

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#1 Go to a Denver Farmers’ Market

I suppose that the 40 minute drive to Boulder makes going to the FM every Saturday pretty out of the question. 

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#2 Clean up our yard

I think we already missed prime yard clean up season so I’m not expecting much gardening to go on, but I’m hoping we can do some landscaping and weed pulling still.  Which leads me to my next item…

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#3 Grow something!

And in case you share a sense of humor with Joey, no, I’m not talking about weed.  I was thinking more along the lines of a planter of herbs or a salad bowl or heck, a damn succulent.  Succulents are easy, right?

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#4 Weekly burger, taco or pizza night!

Preferably al fresco!  Though I’m not opposed to eating any of these things during the dead of winter, they just scream summertime to me.

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#5 Try a juice cleanseCheck!

More on that at a later date 🙂

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#6 Picnic at a Denver park

I think it’s a requirement of being a Denverite to spend your weekends hanging out at a park.  In other words, I feel like a fraud.  Must remedy this ASAP!

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#7 Host a summer BBQChecked a few times!

Okay, this one is kind of cheating because A) we already threw one and B) we already volunteered to throw the July birthday celebration for Joey’s side of the family at our house, but I’m including it anyways.

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#8 Read 3 books from my most recent reading list

I think my reading mojo’s been stolen… but I’ve got some serious plane time coming up this summer so this one should be doable 🙂

#9 Go to Trader Joe’sCheck!

Part of me thinks that place is really annoying and probably no different than Whole Foods or Sprouts and part of me really wants to go.  I guess I’ll just give in already 😛

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#10 Go social media-less for an entire weekend.

Last year’s goal was one day, but I’m ready to step it up.  I’m also ready to drag Joey into this one with me but I don’t think he’ll go for it.  P.S. How will I live without Facebook quizzes like the one above??

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#11 Brew Root Beer

Our kegerator fits three kegs.  One for Joey’s brew, one for mine and root beer seems like the perfect non-alcoholic drink choice to fill the third keg with.

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#12 Hang wall decorations

This is the only house remodel-y type thing I’m putting on the list so I better be able to accomplish it!

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#13 Build a fire in our fire pit!Check!

I think Joey mentioned something about being a boy scout.

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#14 Bike to a Rockies gameCheck!

Preferably more than once, but baby steps.

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What’s on your summer bucket list?

 

Memorial Day Weekend Things

Gosh, I love Memorial Day Weekend.  Because A) 3-day weekend, duh B) I consider it the unofficial kick off to summer and C) the annual running of the Bolder Boulder!  What isn’t there to love about any of those things?  Despite the scary thunderstorm we had every.single.afternoon. all weekend, it just felt so damn summery and my happiness was at an all time high as a result.

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Confession: I’m obsessed with Yelp.  I don’t visit a restaurant without first consulting my fellow Yelpers’ reviews and I don’t go to a restaurant without adding my own review afterwards.  I was recently granted Elite status on Yelp, which turns out, means I get invited to a ton of cool events, including shows at the Buell.

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We got two tickets to American Idiot in the orchestra section (right up front!!) and it was AMAZING!  I should preface by saying I thought this show looked so stupid and I’m not a Green Day fan, but my opinion on something has never done a complete 180 quite a quickly as it did after seeing this!  I seriously loved it and now I have 5 Green Day CDs on my iPod.  Send help.

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So in other words, I was wrong about American Idiot, I was wrong about Green Day but I was right about thinking drinking mixed drinks from a cup with a lid and a straw would be fun.  It is!  Also, Yelp is even better than I thought it was.  I just don’t think I can ever go to the Buell again and not sit in the orchestra section.  I’ve been ruined forever! 🙂

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Saturday morning started like this.  This is the third pair of running shoes I’ve purchased this month.  I started with a size 6 1/2 and by the third pair I was at a 7 1/2.  I was bad and brought my debit card, you know, just in case we decided to stop our run short and grab coffee.  Or maybe I planned to do it that way?…

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The afternoon was filled with a facial, an amazing fajita salad and our invitation design meeting.  We should be seeing proofs by the end of this week and I’m so incredibly excited!  I felt like we were ahead of time on the invitation stuff but our stationary gal made me feel like we were in a rush to get these printed, ahh!

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We planned on heading downtown to hit up a food truck for dinner, but we were driving right into this cloud and it was making me seriously nervous.  It was looking a little tornado-y for my liking so we promptly turned around and headed home.

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Sunday was all about yard work.  I mowed the lawn!  Confession #2: I’d seriously never used a lawn mower before Sunday.  I know… Now you know the spoiled childhood I lived.  But I fully intend on acting like an adult and helping with the mowing at our own house from now on.  After that and some weed pulling our yard looked 100x better.

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Rounded out Sunday night with homemade chicken nuggets, compliments of Chef Joey.  Ketchup for me, BBQ sauce for him.  He used this recipe, which is actually for fish nuggets (that we’ve also made and loved), but used chicken instead and they turned out fabulously.  The chef and that recipe are the best!  Dinner always tastes better when someone else cooks for you 🙂

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Doesn’t the drive into Boulder look fake?!  Those happy little cows, those flatirons, that snow way back there in the background.  It’s breathtaking.  And it was also perfect weather for the Bolder Boulder, aka my favorite race ever.  Not going to lie, this was the most unprepared I’d ever felt for the race, but I ended up running the whole thing pretty easily.  Extremely slowly, but still pretty easily.  And in a pair of shoes that I’d only run in once before.  That’s a serious racing no-no but I like to live dangerously.

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Much lounging was required afterwards.  Also, seriously can’t get over how blue the sky is in Colorado.  I may or may not have just stared up at it for half an hour while Joey was hard at work cleaning off our grill.  Couldn’t help it, I was mesmerized.

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Oh, and I bought this “Salad Bowl” at Whole Foods after the race and am so excited to cut me some fresh greens for big summer salads.  Let’s not discuss the price of the doormat that was the real reason I even went to Whole Foods.  Needless to say, I did not end up buying one.

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We ended Memorial Day with a little family BBQ at our place!  My mom not only supplied, but made all the food — except that apple pie 🙂 — which I think means she’s either a saint or Super Woman.  Possibly both.  Joey manned the grill, I frantically washed dishes, when I realized we had zero paper plates or plastic silverware and half our dishes were dirty, and my niece and nephew got into any and everything, as kids do 😛  I think it was an overall success.

Weekend Events that Went Uncaptured: our second go at kegging (my hefeweizen is on its way and thank god because we just ran out of Joey’s IPA!), Joey chasing a moth around our kitchen while I hysterically ran from the moth, booking an officiant (!!) and a billion episodes of Mad Men.

And now, let summer commence!