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!

Memorial Day Weekend Things

I am sick.  Again.

I am not even joking when I say I started coughing the minute we landed back in Denver last week.  And not a dainty lady-like cough.  A loud donkey-like cough.  I guess I should be glad I was able to sandwich our trip to Vegas in between two colds, but I would rather just not have had either cold at all.

That being said, this weekend has been a blast.  Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial kickoff to summer, is one of my favorite times of the year, so I’ll be damned if I let a stupid cold get in the way of any warm-weather fun.

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It is officially taco season (for me, at least) and I could not be happier.  This recipe for Blackened Shrimp Tacos was in last month’s Cooking Light so we tried it out on Friday and loved it.  Then again, what isn’t there to love about perfectly spicy shrimp, crumbly queso fresco, mashed avocados and a ranch-y mayo sauce?  Oh and Joey made me have that strawberry margarita.  He’s so unfair.

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Headed to the Boulder Famers’ Market on Saturday morning, totally forgetting the Boulder Creek Fest was also going on.  It was packed with people and tents, so we grabbed breakfast, took a quick stroll along the creek and got out of there.  Whose idea was that outing anyways?…

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We ate cheesy pupusas and I grabbed my beloved Vietnamese Iced Coffee and completely regretted it later when I was buzzing so hard on caffeine that I felt absolutely insane.  Some days caffeine doesn’t affect me and other days, it hits me so hard that I vow to never drink it again.  I had to stage my own intervention later that day and tell my family and Joey to not allow me to drink coffee anymore.

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My mom bought tickets for us girls to see Les Mis on Saturday afternoon at the Buell Theatre in Denver and I loved the performance.  Call me crazy, but I wasn’t especially wowed by the film version so I was sort of worried I wouldn’t like the play either, but I loved seeing it live.  It may have helped that the actors in the play had better singing voices than Russel Crowe.

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After the show, I forced my mom and sister to walk around Denver with me to find something to eat (all those starving French peasants were making me so hungry!) and stumbled upon the Denver Day of Rock celebration, complete with a line of FOOD TRUCKS!  I was slightly excited.  I got two Korean Short Rib Street Tacos at the Epicurean Catering truck and felt totally revived afterwards.  Stole a few of my mom’s sweet potato fries too 🙂  They had a glaze on them that made them different than any other sweet potato fry I’ve ever tasted.

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A friend of ours was in town for his brother’s high school graduation party, so we spent the rest of Saturday night at the celebration.  This is legitimately another friend of ours’s car.  The shifter is made of a Coors Lights tap handle.  He says he’s going to fix it up, but I say leave it as is!

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Also, if you want to feel old, play beer pong at a high school graduation party where none of the kids even know what beer pong is.  Also, play one game and make all of one cup and you will realize you certainly aren’t in college anymore.  All beer pong nostalgia aside, the sunset going on in the middle of the party was so spectacular.  Maybe I’m biased, but I swear Colorado sunsets are above all others.

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I think this pictures basically sums up Sunday.  But that’s a whole different post.  I also went to yoga for the first time in for.ev.er.  I drove there with the windows rolled down, then chatted with the teacher and headed into the locker room, only to find pieces of my hair sticking straight up in the air.  Only slightly mortifying.

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Monday was the annual running of America’s Best 10K, the Bolder Boulder.  We’ve been digging the Denver scene lately, but Boulder will always and forever have my heart.  Just look at that view!

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Why Joey insists on doing this slip and slide during the race is beyond me.  He just ends up complaining about how he’s soaking wet and out of breath afterwards.

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And speaking of things that are beyond me, I have no idea how these two people ran in these full bear costumes without passing out.  I can only imagine how hot it probably was in there.

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My parents were nice enough to come down to crazy crowded Boulder just to watch us finish.  Thanks, Mom and Dad!

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It certainly wasn’t our fastest 10K by any stretch of the imagination, but considering how terrified I was for the race — I haven’t run a 10K since the Bolder Boulder last year and last year I didn’t think I was going to make it up that final super steep hill into CU’s Folsom Field! — I felt pretty good about our results.

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I really only go so I can hang out with these people all morning and sit in awe as the elite runners sprint 6 miles in about half an hour.  I see it happen every year and I still can’t believe it.

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Rounding Memorial Day out with our first CSA (or Community Supported Agriculture) pick-up.  Basically, we’ll be stopping by this organic farm in Longmont every other week to pick up our share of fresh veggies.  They let us know ahead of time what we’ll be getting, so hopefully we’ll be able to plan what to do with our loot.  For now, will someone please tell me what to do with broccoli rabe?

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And last but not least, a BBQ at my brother and sister-in-law’s.  Where my mother taught my niece to say “diamond,” and my nephew only pushed me over and told me he didn’t like me a couple times.  I swear he doesn’t really hate me 😛

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What did you do with your Memorial Day weekend?

Have you watched the new season of Arrested Development?

Are you much of a caffeine drinker?