Colorado Trip Part 1: Denver

Hey guys!  We got back from our Colorado trip over a week ago, but I have had ZERO time to post about it!!  Life has been insanely busy (especially work.... I really wish we'd win the Lottery!!). But, we had an AMAZING time on our trip, and Colorado is unbelievably beautiful. I'll split this trip into smaller posts, and I'll try to get it all done within the next few days!

Day 1 (9/3): Denver. We landed in Denver on Saturday afternoon, and it took FOREVER (hours) to get our car from the car rental place. We met some nice people in line though, so it could have been worse. Once we finally got our car (a Subaru Outback! We've been wanting to test drive one of those), we drove towards our B&B but stopped at an awesome taco place called Tacos Tequila Whiskey (the name convinced us), and ate some seriously AMAZING tacos!! Then we got back in our car and drove to our B&B. It's called the Capitol Hill Mansion, it was built in 1891, and it's gorgeous. Our room had a private balcony, which was quite amazing! After we settled in there a bit, we went to the Great Divide Brewery for a tour and some beers! That was a great way to get acquainted with Denver. After we'd had a few drinks and had an amazing brewery tour, we walked around the Lower Downtown area of Denver! It's such a cute area, with so much to see. There was a bookstore there called Tattered Cover that I'd heard was AMAZING for finding really cool old books, but it turns out way too many people have discovered this "hidden" gem and they've been totally picked clean of any cool old books. So, they had lots of new books, but that wasn't as interesting to me, so we got some coffee there (delicious! Plus, we were pretty exhausted and in need of caffeine) and then continued exploring Denver. We also saw a super cool bridge! We had dinner downtown, and then we went back to our B&B to get some much needed sleep!

Our B&B! They also have AMAZING breakfasts here. 

Here's Kevin at the Great Divide Brewery! 

The bookstore! 

The super cool bridge!

A fun picture looking up at part of the bridge

Day 2 (9/4): Denver. We started off our day by going to Breckenridge Brewery!!  I LOVE their Avalanche Ale (it's one of my favorite beers nowadays!), and their brewery is pretty stunning. It was also one of the most informative brewery tours we've ever been on! It was about 90 minutes long. We had a lot of fun hanging out on the 12 acre grounds and enjoying some beers after our tour was over, and it was SUCH a relaxing day! They also have an amazing restaurant where they use all local ingredients, so we enjoyed a really nice lunch there. After Breckenridge Brewery, we headed back towards our B&B because we wanted to check out Molly Brown's house which was just a few blocks away. I'm sure you've all heard of the Unsinkable Molly Brown (Titanic), but if you're like me then you didn't know much about her. Turns out her name wasn't even Molly (it was Margaret, or "Maggie"), and she was quite an amazing woman in addition to surviving the Titanic! The house was super cool, and it was fun to learn so much about her since I hadn't really known much. We spent the rest of our evening just exploring Denver some more! Such a cool city.

The bar area of Breckenridge Brewery. 

Part of the brewery tour. This place was massive! 

A cool lighting fixture in part of the brewery. 

Beer!  They give you so much beer to sample on this brewery tour. The one on the right is my Avalanche Ale. The one on the left was a Mango beer that they're trying out... It was actually pretty good (McGee didn't like it as much as I did though). 

Molly (Maggie) Brown's house

Boulder will be next!  I'll try to post again later tonight.

Under the Weather

Our trip to Colorado is quickly approaching!!  So, of course, McGee and I have both been super sick!!  I think I'm finally starting to feel a bit better, but I think poor McGee is at the worst of it right now... So, our trip may involve more relaxing and less activities than we'd originally thought, but that'll be great too! On top of being sick, we've both had an incredibly stressful and long week of work, full of some incredibly long days/nights (so I'm sure that isn't helping our health this week...). We both REALLY need a vacation... so this is going to be great, no matter what.

And we'll see if we feel up for camping in the Rocky Mountains (I hope we do!) because we've been keeping an eye on the forecast and the overnight lows are supposed to be in the 20s and maybe even a little snow!!  Brrrrr!!  That is darn cold for camping, especially since we're acclimated to summer weather right now... So, we're going to pack some extra supplies for warmth (we have warm fleece sleeping bag liners, sleeping pads, etc), and we'll see what happens.

Another crazy weather thing going on is that Hurricane Hermine (is that said like "Hermione" from Harry Potter?  I have no idea...) is supposed to affect our area of Pennsylvania either Sunday or early next week... so that always makes us really nervous thanks to the HUGE tree right by our house. That's the same tree that we were talking nicely to during the blizzard this winter, begging it to not lose any big branches/limbs on our house. The irony here is that we've been talking with landscaping companies for a few weeks now getting quotes to remove that tree (they all agree that it definitely needs to come down since it's a Tulip Poplar, which is a soft/weak type of tree... Not like an oak, etc. Plus, it is HUGE, and right by our house). And we have it scheduled for removal about a week after we return from our trip. So... Fingers super duper crossed that our big ol' tree can hang on to its branches during this hurricane and until the tree guys come to take it down! Any and all good thoughts are greatly appreciated. Here are a few old pictures where you get glimpses of the big tree... It's the one just to the right of our chimney. It is HUGE. We'll definitely breathe a lot easier once it's removed.

This is from Winter (obviously). Can you see it? It's that super thick trunk just to the right of the chimney... 

And here's a picture from last Fall... I took this from across the street so you can see almost the whole tree... The top of it isn't in the picture though. 

Yeah... Yikes. I'm glad we're getting it removed pretty soon, but I wish the hurricane was waiting a few weeks!!

I'll post again when we get back from Colorado! I hope you're all doing really well!!

Almost September??

Wow, this summer is flying by!! I'm kinda glad because it has been SO gross and hot all summer!  I feel like this has maybe been our hottest summer here yet, and the humidity has been off the charts. I'm hoping some Fall weather is just around the corner!!

I haven't blogged in awhile because we have been busy!!  One fun thing we did was we went into town last week for a Goodbye Party for our friend Timmy. He's going to be traveling the world for 3 months or so, and he had a Happy Hour goodbye party at our favorite bar in town (Good Dog). I didn't take any pictures of the festivities, but I did take a few pictures of City Hall while we were walking in the city!

City Hall! This is when we were walking to the bar from the train station!

And this is City Hall again when we were walking back to the train station at the end of the evening! This is by far my favorite building in the city. It's so pretty. 

Everything else is going well! We had to take Guinness to the vet for some immunization boosters, and he's super healthy and doing well (and still likes to sit like a person sometimes!)

We had our Fantasy Football draft last night, and I'm hoping my team is decent this year so I don't get last place AGAIN and get the loser trophy AGAIN. I always forget to explain that squirrel head trophy to people that are coming to our house for the first time, so people probably think we want to have that squirrel head by our front door...

Other than that, just general house maintenance stuff and a few projects (but nothing that would be exciting for me to take a picture of...), and we're getting SO excited for our trip to Colorado in a few weeks!!  I can't believe it's finally almost here - We've been planning this one for over a year!  I'll do a quick summary, though this post is now going to be crazy long (sorry!!).  

We're flying into Denver, and we're going to spend a few days there. We plan to visit a few breweries (Breckenridge Brewery, Great Divide Brewery, and MAYBE Coors if we have time). We also want to spend lots of time exploring the city and we also might go check out Red Rocks Amphitheater even though there aren't any good shows while we're there! Oh and we found an awesome B&B to stay in while we're there!  It's a big ol' mansion with a ton of history:

After Denver we're heading to Boulder for a few days, and we're staying in a cool place we found on Airbnb, and it's a cute little house right off of Pearl Street, which is where all the cool shops, restaurants, bars, etc are! So that'll be convenient. There are a few cool hikes just outside of Boulder, so we plan on doing those hikes while we're there. And Boulder is also the home of the Celestial Seasonings Factory, which I'm SO excited about!! I'm a big fan of their teas. It should be a fun tour, and I've heard they have a Mint Room that spells amaaazing. And there's also an awesome brewery in Boulder that we'll check out (Avery Brewing). 

After Boulder, we're heading up to Rocky Mountain National Park!!  I'm so beyond excited!!  We found a cool campground in the park where they said you have awesome views and there's tons of wildlife. They said that the elk love the area by the campground and they have a very loud call (it's called bugling) that wakes you up every morning! I'm so excited to hear it :)  We have tons of fun hikes planned, and we're going to explore like crazy for 3 days. 

A bull elk bugling!! I'm so excited!

And after we have camped for a few nights there, we're heading just outside the park to The Stanley Hotel. It's the hotel that inspired The Shining (by Stephen King), and it's SO beautiful (and supposedly quite haunted). We're going on a few tours at the hotel, but we're also just going to spend lots of time relaxing and having fun. It's in a really beautiful area of Colorado (Estes Park). 

The Stanley Hotel!

That's our trip!! We're soooo beyond excited!! 

Mo's Birthday!

Man, I feel really exhausted from this weekend, even though we didn't really do much! On Saturday we went to a morning showing of Suicide Squad. That movie has some terrible reviews, but I was thoroughly entertained! It was no Captain America: Civil War or anything, but I thought it was quite entertaining and not nearly as bad as everyone is saying. After that, we ran a few errands and then also did a few productive things around the house, and we watched some of the Olympics. So, it was a pretty chill day on Saturday!

On Sunday, we went out to breakfast in town, and then after that we met up with McGee's family at Yards Brewery to celebrate Mo's birthday. McGee's good friend Big Mike (the opera singer) leads tours at Yards Brewery, and I'd never been on his tour and neither had anyone in McGee's family (but McGee had been on Big Mike's tour a bunch of times already... haha). It was an AMAZING tour!! Michael is so funny and knowledgeable, and his powerful opera voice is very handy for being able to speak loudly over all of the brewery noise. We had some fun hanging out after the tour was over, and then we also went out to a late lunch.

This is an amazing stone building right across the street from where we like to go to breakfast. Isn't it beautiful?  You'll never guess who lives here... a FRAT.  Yes, a college fraternity lives in this amazing old stone house. I can't even imagine what this poor house goes through... 

Here's Michael leading the brewery tour! He has a beard and is in the red shirt on the right..  And you can see McGee's mom and sister (Mook) on the other side of the room! 

Happy Birthday to Mo!! It was a very fun day. 

This was the sky on the drive back home! So pretty! 

Our Sunday evening was pretty chill, and we watched some more of the Olympics. I'm totally loving the Olympics!!  I'm especially enjoying the men's and women's gymnastics, and all of the swimming events. I'm so sad that it's Monday already!!  Where did the weekend go??  I wish the weekdays flew by as quickly as the weekends!! 

Guinness is just chillin', watching the Olympics with us. He tries to sit like a human sometimes.

A Relaxing and Fun Weekend!

We had a really great weekend! It was a good mix of relaxing and fun. We didn't really do much that was productive... But I'm sure we'll make up for that next weekend. On Friday night we just hung out at home and watched some movies. We also hung up a few pictures in our kitchen!  This was the only productive thing we did all weekend, but it's something we've been wanting to do for awhile. We got a few posters that we loooooved, and so on Friday we framed them and put them up in our kitchen! They probably don't really "go" with our Yuengling dogs picture that's in there, but we love them so we don't care :)

Here they are! It's a Yosemite one and a Grand Canyon one... and they are both quite beautiful! 

And then here's a picture of them along with the Yuengling dog picture... They don't really go together... but oh well :) We love beer (and dogs), and we love National Parks... so... that's our kitchen! :)

On Saturday morning we took Guinness to the dog park, because we knew the rest of the day was going to be really gross and stormy (yet still like 90+ degrees). After that, we dropped Guinness off at our house, and then went out to breakfast at one of our favorite breakfast spots near our house. Shortly after that, we took a train into Philly to meet up with Timmy at his place! Timmy is leaving in a few weeks to embark on an amazing adventure - He is quitting his job, and is going to travel the world for 3 months or so! We're so excited for him, but we'll miss him a lot too. He's going to have a huge Happy Hour celebration at some point soon, but we wanted to have a day of hanging with him so we could have some quality time. We spent a lot of time hanging at his place, and he'd picked up some cheese, crackers, hummus, and chips along with some drinks for us. We spent a few hours hanging there, and then we walked a few blocks to an AMAZING bar that's right near his house in Philly. It's called Monk's (it's a Belgian bar), and it always has an amazing beer selection and awesome food. We all ordered lunch - Timmy ordered a chicken breast sandwich, I ordered beer-battered chicken strips, and McGee ordered a huge pot of mussels. They're known for their mussels and have like 8 or 10 varieties. And all of you beer-lovers will appreciate that they had Pliny the Elder on draft, so that's what McGee and Timmy ordered! We spent a few more hours hanging out with Timmy in town, and then we took the train back home! 

Monk's! 

This is the bar in the back of the building, where we sat! They also have a bar when you first enter the building. 

This is a weird little light that they had behind the bar! 

 On Sunday we didn't do much at all! We pretty much just relaxed all day. We were going to help McGee's sister move into her new place, but McGee's folks called in the afternoon and said that they didn't need help after all. And we were also going to go to a Philadelphia Union game in the evening (it started at 7pm) but it was such a gross day/evening that we decided to just stay home and relax. Our workweeks have been kicking our butts, so it's been really nice that we've been carving out some time to relax on the weekends!

I hope you all had a great weekend, and I hope your week flies by! I have SO many meeting this week... Booooooooo.

Hot Hot Heat

Wow, it has been a doozy of a summer so far! The temps here have been crazy hot with the intense humidity. This past weekend it hovered around 100 degrees and was quite humid, but I am happy to say that we totally survived the outdoor birthday party we went to on Saturday! We had a lot of fun, and our friend Juliff was soooo surprised. We stayed in the shade the whole time, and we made sure we were staying hydrated! We also guzzled some Gatorade before the party, and I think that helped us a lot. We were outside for about 5 hours though, so when we got home (around 8pm), we were exhausted!  We just relaxed on the couch and then went to bed around 10pm. We felt completely zapped of energy!

The Birthday Boy! He was definitely surprised! Oh and to the left of the cake are cookie bars I made! 

On Sunday morning we were up pretty early (that's what happens when you go to bed at 10pm!), and we took Guinness on a hike on the nature trail near our house! The trail runs right by a creek and it's completely shaded, and I forgot how much cooler it is there!  It has to be at least 10 degrees cooler than it is anywhere else. It was a HOT day, so I'm glad we were able to take the hike nice and early.

Guinness jumping over the branch! And McGee had just jumped over too but was looking to make sure Guinness was following! 

I love this one! Guinness is looking up at Kevin and he's so darn happy. 

After the hike, we went to see Star Trek!  It was AMAZING. I think it was the best of the Star Trek movies so far (and RIP Anton Yelchin... Ugh, so sad. He was such a great actor). After the movie was over, we ran some errands for a few hours, and then we returned home and decided to just relax and have a movie day. One movie that we watched was The Departed, which McGee has been trying to get me to watch for YEARS but I kept resisting because I'd just always heard what an intense movie it was, and I rarely feel in the mood for extremely intense movies. Well, I LOVED it. It was SO good! Jack Nicholson was crazy good in it (and just crazy...), and Leonardo DiCaprio was crazy good too.

Last night (Monday night), we had a really massive storm!! It was soooo bad, and our power flickered off a few times... and just as we were like "Ummm let's head downstairs to the den" and we were gathering our stuff to head downstairs we heard an incredibly loud BOOM, and I could see through the dining room window that a large tree limb had fallen. I think it must've hit our roof a little bit, but I could see it on the ground by our house and it had broken into a bunch of pieces. So, we did go downstairs to our den area and hang down there until the storm was over at about 10pm. We briefly investigated outside to make sure our roof, etc was ok, and we'll deal with that tree limb soon. I took a picture of it today, but I don't know if you can tell how big it is from the picture! There are pieces of it everywhere too. Scary!!!

That "little" box by the window is our AC unit, if that give you any idea of scale in this picture... That tree is HUGE. 

Here's a different angle of part of the huge branch and some of its pieces. 

We definitely have some yardwork to do this weekend if the weather holds up! We'll have to chop up that huge branch and clean up the mess from the storm. I hope you're all having good summers so far, and I hope your weather is cooperating for you!! 

Christmas in July, and a Bathroom Update!

We had a Christmas Party at our house last weekend! McGee and his friends have a tradition of getting together for a Christmas Party, and this past Christmas nobody was able to meet up during the holiday season (and Fro lives in Massachusetts). So, we all decided that we'd do Christmas in July this year! We offered to host at our house since a few people still hadn't seen our house yet. We did some decorating (just some Christmas lights inside our house and a few other random items), and we had Mexican food (that seemed appropriate for the July part of Christmas in July). I meant to take some pictures of the festivities, but I was having too much fun and totally forgot! Luckily Timmy had organized one group picture, so I have that! That's about it though... 

Mike and Leslie Sprandio are on the left, then Fro is holding the duck (McGee's dad made that duck!), and Juliff is right behind her... then me and McGee... and Timmy is in front of us. Ashley (Juliff's fiance) is next to Timmy in the red hat, and Big Mike is behind Ashley, and that's Big Mike's girlfriend (Jen) between him and McGee! 

In somewhat related news, we made some MAJOR progress on our downstairs bathroom!  McGee did a lot of work on it while I was in CA, and we worked on it the week leading up to our Christmas party too. We wanted to have it in working order in time for the party! We still have a bit more work to do, but a lot of the major stuff is done. All we have left is some caulking, some paint touch-ups, and of course we have to put up our ceiling. Oh, and paint the door (it was painted green by the previous owners). I'm REALLY happy with how it has been coming together though!!  I'll show you two "Before" pictures again, just in case you forgot: 

Before!

Before!

And now here are a bunch of how it looks now!: 

It's definitely a tiny powder room, but it's functional now!  Oh and I found a small metal piece of art for above the towel bar, but it hasn't arrived yet. 

You can see most of the bathroom in this one... 

There's still a glare, but I tried to get a clearer picture! We cheated a tiny bit because we haven't actually been to Rocky Mountain National Park yet, but we'll be there in September!  So, close enough, right? We thought the colors worked so perfectly with our dusty blue wall color. 

Last night we had a visitor in our yard, and I was actually able to take a picture!! We get a lot of deer roaming through our yard, but they're usually too skittish and run away long before I can even contemplate getting a picture. This one was just chilling, though!  At one point it stood up to stare at us (we even had Guinness with us), but it never ran away.  Shortly after it stood up, we quietly and slowly went back inside the house so it would feel free to calm down and lay back down. 

There she is! 

She's so cute! She's just chilling. 

This was after we'd been standing out there for a few minutes... She got nervous and started to stand up.

And here she is standing up! We went inside shortly after this so that she wouldn't be nervous anymore.

This weekend we have a Surprise Party to attend for our friend Juliff. It's a pool party, and I kinda hate pool parties... but hopefully it'll be fun. Juliff's mom is organizing it, and it's at Juliff's sister's house which is about an hour away. The bummer part is that it is supposed to be really hot this weekend! The temperatures are supposed to get right up to 100 degrees, plus some crazy humidity (and the humidity always makes it feel worse). Keep your fingers crossed for us that we don't pass out or overheat or anything! Haha :)  And we don't really have any other plans for the weekend, except maybe going to see the new Star Trek. I think all activities aside from the surprise party will be indoor activities with lots of air conditioning!

I hope everything is going really great for all of you!!