Busy past few days
Over the past weekend I took part in a few exciting events. It started off with a 6 person ride around Fort Collins hitting up the local breweries on Friday. Adam, Eric (networking post-doc), Doug, Kate, Jesh, and myself took part. We started off by stopping by New Belgium but it was a bit too busy for our tastes. We skipped out there and headed straight to Odell’s. We had a few interesting conversations over a few beers (Nukes!) and then headed off to Fort Collins Brewery. Again, as is usual with our group, interesting conversations ensued. We ended the touring at Coopersmith’s with food and more beer. The night wound down at Adam’s by playing a telephone-like game that uses small drawings/descriptions on post-it notes. Adam’s crazy (but cool) neighbor stopped by and played some songs on guitar for us. It was a good start to what turned out to be a great weekend.
Saturday Kate and I made a trip down to Boulder to check out potential apartments and visit the NCAR Mesa campus. What we learned was that this summer is going to be sweet! Once we got to boulder, we headed up the mesa that the campus is located on. We noticed a few things:
- The building’s architecture is quite unique, and looks really cool.
- The campus is essentially on the top of a hill in the middle of a natural area.
- The views from the top (and from within the building) are really great.
It turns out that the NCAR Mesa lab is at the top of a mesa (who would have thought!), is the trailhead for some really nice trails, and is utilized quite heavily on the weekend by hikers.
After looking around quickly, we headed back down the hill to start apartment hunting. We had done some looking around on Craig’s list and found a few potential places, but one was clearly the best fit for us. Unfortunately at this point we hadn’t heard from the girl that was sub-leasing the place, so we were somewhat stuck. To pass some time waiting for contact from her, we looked around for potential places using the more analog drive-your-car-around-neighborhoods-and-see-what-you-can-find method. This was much more difficult than we’d thought. Not much came from this. We did, however, find the location of our potential apartment and realized we had to have it.
Across from the place we were hoping for we discovered a treasure-trove of stores and shopping options. This includes a Chase bank, Papa Murphys take and bake pizza, King Soopers (for all of our shopping needs), a backpacking store and many more. Best of all, the Mountain Sun brewery is also in this shopping center. We ate lunch at Mountain Sun, made contact with the Liz (the girl sub-leasing the apartment we wanted), then looked for some more stores to shop at while we waited to meet with her. We found a shoe store that was moving and had most of their remaining inventory at 50% off. I found a nice pair of Asics running shoes for $50 rather than $100. Good find!
After shoe shopping it was time to meet with Liz and checkout the apartment. We really only need a small place, which is good because the place Liz has is only a one bedroom, but it’s a decent price, in a perfect location (across from the afore mentioned shopping-plaza-of-amazingness), and the dates fit our schedule. We basically said we’d take it and that was that.
With apartment hunting all but taken care of, we headed back up the hill to do a little hiking. There is a ‘weather trail’ that starts right outside of the office that leads to some other really nice trails further down. Kate and I decided to head out and see what we could find. We discovered some really nice views and got even more excited that we’d be working here for 10 weeks this summer. The hike produced a few nice pictures, taken from my phone:
NCAR Mesa Lab from behind, notice the robot faces (4 of them!):
NCAR Architecture from the back looking East
My favorite, looking up a sun speckled trail:
Up the canyon trail
Finally, Sunday arrived. We headed down to Denver and the Buell Theatre to see the final showing of Spamalot!, the monty python broadway production. It was quite nice, full of laughs and monty-python-ish plot lines. My only complaint was that they forced too many of the well known jokes from Holy Grail. I found myself laughing more at the new material rather than the expected suff. Nevertheless, it was a good show and we were both quite glad we made it. After the show we stopped by Ling and Louie’s for dinner and had Wango Mango Chicken and jewled beef:
Wango Mango Chicken and Jewled Beef at Ling and Louie's
Overall, it was a great few days. A good call before the work-intense week of this week. Only 1.5 weeks left before SiParCS starts and I still have lots to do on IEGen and the journal paper…
