BolderBoulder

Every year on Memorial Day in Boulder, there's a 10k race called the Bolder Boulder that has a huge turnout. This year, I read something about 47,000 people being there, which is totally nuts! The race ends at Folsom Field, which is the big football stadium on campus. Everybody who finishes the race gets to run into the field and see themselves on a big screen and everything. Participants also get tons of free food, massages, an insulated lunch bag, and a t-shirt, plus there is entertainment on every street corner and some people even wear costumes. In addition, there are international races for men and women, with people from as far as Kenya and Ethiopia participating.

Brent and I decided to ride our bikes along the creek trail to Folsom Field to see some of the action. We missed the Memorial Day flyover of fighter jets and skydivers, but we did get to see the middle and end of the women's race. I have to admit that I was grumpy and pessimistic at the beginning of our adventure, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. My favorite thing about the race was the fact that everyone clapped and cheered for every professional runner as they crossed the finish line, no matter how far behind they ended up. Boulder is so friendly! We're now inspired to participate in the BolderBoulder next year so we can be in on all of the fun as well.

Folsom Field is huge!


Tons of people were there to watch the professional races.


Me, no longer grumpy while watching the race. Yes, that is my shoulder reflecting the sun, and yes, I was coated in sunscreen!


The female winner crosses the finish line. Her time was 33:42... for 6.6 miles. That's crazy!


More women finishing up... still ridiculously fast.


The leader of the men's race about halfway through. We were on our way home when they ran on a bridge over the bike path, so we pulled over and took pictures on their trip out of the stadium (2 loops of a long route for the full professional race).


More men running, plus girls holding up a mileage sign and an official yelling out their times. The male winner ended up being a man from Morocco who finished in 29:52!

boulder creek festival

Every Memorial Day weekend, Boulder has a festival along the creek trail. It's pretty fun, with food vendors, a huge art tent, and lots of local businesses offering free samples. My least and most favorite booth is the Humane Society area, where homeless kitties hang out and hope for a new family. A lot of you probably know that I grew up with kitties, and so did Brent, and I've been missing mine from home a lot since we moved to Boulder. However, we wont be getting one any time soon, because condo homeowner's associations out here aren't too open to allowing renters to have pets. It makes sense, anyways, since we wouldn't have a good place to keep a stinky litterbox in our current and future (as of this coming August) rental.

Either way, we went to the creek festival last year, and again this past Sunday, and it was a nice afternoon. It was less awesome than the first time because it was 85 degrees outside, and it was pretty much exactly the same as last year. We did, however, see lots of cute dogs and kiddos playing in the creek, and we got to sit in a new Prius (really hard to see out the back of), and I got to eat a strawberry snow cone...YUM. On the way back to our car, some big afternoon rainclouds rolled in which cooled things off, and made for a pretty picture that I've posted below. Oh, and all of the pictures in this post have been resized so that if you click on them, they aren't so huge as they were in my earlier posts, and they should load faster. Ok, on with the pictures:


Brent is not thrilled with the heat.


This dog is happy in the creek though.


The creek.


Some festival booths along the creek. It looks small here, but the festival was really big!


Brent and I... happy again because the clouds came to cool us off! Note my awesome new sunglasses... they totally look see-through in this picture, but it's just because of the camera flash.

this is pretty cool

So I found out (yes, while watching American Idol) that Amnesty International is putting out an album in June called "Instant Karma." All kinds of really great singers and bands covered a bunch of John Lennon songs, and a few of them are up for download (which I really like because I'm picky) even before the album comes out, and the proceeds go to help their work with the Darfur crisis. Aerosmith, Green Day, U2, and REM are on it, along with a lot more awesome groups. The website is at: http://www.instantkarma.org/download.html. I don't mean to sound like a commercial or anything... I just thought it was a pretty cool idea to support a really worthy cause.

In other news, my plants are growing, not dying! Yay!

another crazy weekend

So last weekend, again, was crazy. I think after having Drew here, we have a problem with sitting still. Anyways, Friday was the gym, and then enormous salads at Whole Foods (ok, mine was but Brent's wasn't), and then Spiderman 3 with another grad student couple. It was super fun, and good to see in the theater. My favorite was the mean, eyeliner-wearing spiderman.

Saturday we rode our bikes to the farmer's market and got lunch. The Boulder Creek Trail is seriously so pretty, so we'll have to remember the camera next weekend when we head out to the Boulder Creek Festival (yay!). After the farmer's market, I got my super cool aviators adjusted so now they are majorly awesome, and then we went with 2 other grad students to hang out with another grad student couple at their house in Denver. It was really fun, and we all ate a ton of food.

Sunday was the gym again and then we finally, FINALLY went to the plant nursery to get some veggie plants to try to grow on the deck. A few years ago, I tried to grow tomato plants in pots on a deck, but they never made any tomatoes. As a result, I am no longer allowed to attempt tomatoes. I am, however, attempting to grow cilantro, chives, a mezclun lettuce mix, tomatillos, and bell peppers. Hopefully, they'll make lots and lots of produce for me to eat up. Here are some pictures of my baby garden.

Oh, and for those of you who know Brent, in other news, he shaved his beard off and he is back to the goat (goatee w/o a mustache). It totally took me a while to get used to it, even though it's how he looked for the first 3 of our now 3 and a half years together. That kind of suprised me. I'm also throwing in a bonus picture of his new (or return to his old?) look.


Big bowl pot with lettuce mix, chives, and cilantro. They are all babies now, but someday they will be big and productive. Yum!


Bell pepper plant in front, tomatillo in back. In the distance are my birthday roses and some chocolate mint that's been hanging in there, but not growing much, for the past year.


Brent and his fantastic balancing skills. What a guy!

birthday picture!

Lots of you know that this Monday (the 14th) was my 24th birthday woohoo! I had such a great birthday, and it capped off a great weekend from when Drew was visiting us. I did, however, go into work/school on my bday, which I think means that I'm growing up. But I had a group meeting for today to prepare for, so I was busy trying to figure out what exactly I've done in terms of my research over the past year. I got some really neato cards and gifts, including comfy headphones for my ipod (because the ones that come with ipods hurt my child-sized ears), a super-absorbant towel for my hair, very snazzy dish-washing gloves complete with pearls and fake pink fur trim, cold hard cash, and some super duper trendy aviator shades! Brent saw me fall in love with the sunglasses when he was buying his last weekend, and the nice guy went back and bought them for me. After trying them on, though, they seem a little too big for my face (again, it's child-sized), so we're going to go back and I'll try on all the little aviators in existence to find the coolest ones. Yay!

Anyways, after presents, Brent and I met up with 10 other grad student friends at Juanita's. It's a fantastic Mexican restaurant on Pearl Street, and I was really excited to go. It was so neat that so many friends were willing to come out and celebrate with us, and we had a great time. I had the waitress take a picture of all of us, so that I could prove that so many people came out to celebrate! A picture is below, along with a picture of my super cute victory rose birthday plant from Brent. So much fun... and now my age is even!! I seriously love even numbers.

crazy fun whirlwind weekend

Well, Drew went back to San Francisco today, and we are SO tired, but we had so much fun. Since Thursday afternoon, we all: hung out at Pearl Street, got tea at the Dushanbe Tea House, took a trip to Nederland and Boulder Falls, toured the Coors brewery in Golden (I have to agree that freshly brewed Coors served at 37 degrees tastes just like regular coors, which is not good), watched the Giants defeat the Rockies in Denver, explored Rocky Mountain National Park, walked around the old Stanley Hotel (where Stephen King wrote The Shining), and ate obscene amounts of food. We honestly saw more of Colorado this weekend than we have in the past 2 years of living here. Hopefully, Drew had tons of fun too, because I want him to come back and visit us again! The time flew by for Brent and I because we were having such a good time. Anyways, here are a few fun pictures from the trip! I want to try to put more up online eventually, but these were some of my favorites... sorry the last one is a little blurry.

The guys at Estes Lake.


The three of us at Rocky Mountain Nat'l Park. I think that's Long's Peak in the background (on the right).



Drew is happy because Colorado is so awesome!



Before the Rockies/Giants game!

free skin cancer screenings

While reading Allure, my favorite and only junk magazine (that totally isn't junk because they have lots of great tips!), I learned that May is skin cancer awareness month. A bunch of dermatologists all across the country are offering free skin cancer screenings during May, June, and July. It seemed like a cool deal, so I thought I'd mention it here in case anyone is interested. It's sponsored by the American Society of Dermatologic Surgery, so it's not like a shady deal or anything like that. The website you can go to to find a dermatologist who's offering the free screenings is: skincancertakesfriends.org

Enough seriousness, though... for happier things, scroll down to my previous post with cake pictures!

cake!

Here are some pictures from the cake class I took the weekend before last. It was super fun, and super informative. I have all kinds of great recipies now, all of which are supposed to be fail-proof at Boulder's high altitude (5656 ft). Often, baked goods here will over-rise because the air pressure is lower, so the breads, cakes, and cookies don't have to worry about rising as much. Then, they can collapse. Other times, the edges will bake much faster than the center, because of the dry air, and so a cake will look done, but it's really not. Then, when the oven is opened, heat rushes out and the uncooked middle of a cake can collapse. Either way, I learned how to correctly cut a cake into layers, and how to make different frostings and how to properly use frosting on a cake. Someday, I want to take the fondant class also offered at the cooking school where I took my class. Fondant is like a paste kind of thing that you can roll out or make into shapes. Then you can make crazy cakes like ones that look like pianos or footballs, or pretty much anything you can imagine! The cake I made was a white chiffon cake, with white chocolate buttercream frosting, filled with fresh raspberries and coated in almonds. I also made white chocolate shavings to put on top. Yum!! We all also partnered up to make a total of 6 group cakes, and we got to take home slices of each of those.

A group cake: chocolate with choc-peanut butter frosting.


A slice of my cake!


My stash of cake slices from the group cakes.


My cake is in the front!

d-o-n-e, done!!

I just, JUST finished up with my last project for the semester, an annotated bibliography about the Indian Ocean Monsoon during the Holocene (like 11 thousand years ago up to the present). It was actually really interesting to research, though reading 16 scientific journal articles since Friday was pretty crazy. It's really neat to see how far research has come since the 1970's, when research about the evolution of the monsoon really began in earnest. Anyways, enough nerdiness, my summer of full time research and NO CLASSES begins now!! I think I am going to take the rest of today and tomorrow off to help our house recover from my two weeks of constant schoolworking.

Later, I'll post some pictures from my cake class and of the cake I baked the weekend before last. Most of it is now frozen because the teacher said that the buttercream frosting we used freezes really well and keeps the cake super moist and tasty. Maybe Drew (Brent's best friend) will get to eat some when he comes to visit us, if he wants. That's right, someone's actually coming to visit us!! Yay Drew... at least someone will learn about how super cool Boulder is. Actually, my parents and Brent's parents have all been out here once each, but nobody's been here in a long time. And Drew is the first friend to visit us, so he's putting any other friends out there reading this to shame!

Anyways, here's what my desk area at home currently looks like. It's so bad... this is what grad school can do to a person's house! Notice the plastic bag near the books. The people at the library gave it to me when I checked out 5 books of old journal articles because they felt sorry for me having to carry so much. What is grad school doing to me?!

end of semester craziness

It's been a while since my last update (almost a week!) but I have a good excuse I promise. It's the end of the semester, and I've been working like crazy on my 2 research projects and 2 presentations. I finished up with one presentation last Tuesday, and I just finished writing a huge research paper tonight yay! For those of you who are curious, the research paper is 24 pages of info about the HYCOM ocean model, and its three differential vertical circulation submodels, and then I threw in a design for an experiment because the professor wanted us to do "original research," but HYCOM takes 23-24 hrs to run, and I would need to run it at least 3 times (talk about a run-on sentence!). Anyways, one more research paper (but it'll be an annotated bibliography, so it's like doing the research for a paper but not really writing it), and a presentation about this fluids paper I just finished, and I'll be done for the semester. It all ends May 7, which should give my brain a week to recover before my birthday!!

More posts, including photos from the cake baking class I took last weekend, will resume around May 7!