Denver Trip

LivingDeb gives a good overview of Tam's graduation weekend with some photos (including window bunny art).

I will say that I did look up the weather before I left, but still did not pack enough warm (and water-resistant) clothes to deal with going into the mountains. (It did not occur to me that people would want to do such a thing when it is 35 degrees up there and raining/hailing, but apparently so.) Anyway, nobody has room in these days of the $25 per checked bag fee to pack big fuzzy fleece jackets in their carry-on luggage; it's a given that I will be borrowing this kind of gear from my host.

It was established once again that I would rather be right than happy.

There was a hell of a lot of riding in Tam's rented white van of doom. It worked out that Tam's own vehicle held the religious vegetarians and the van carried the irreverent omnivores. (I think RB managed to wear only T-shirts with vegetarian/carnivore themes over the weekend.)

Robert established himself as the king of all things sports trivia. My favorite was when people were marveling over his knowledge of Babe Zaharias (a person that nobody else knew of but me because I remembered her from the US stamp and because Robert had talked about her before as one of the best, most versatile female athletes in modern history), he offered that she went to school in the Houston area. When asked where exactly, he said he didn't know because he didn't know all that much about her. (Um, yes, except for the 47 million things he did know.)

At the graduation party, I think I could have eaten my weight in butter drenched mushrooms on small sourdough rounds, but I'm glad I didn't because the actual meal was really good, too. As were the various wines and the grappa. And though I still don't have a working elevator speech (a 2-minute synopsis of my research), I got to try out a made-up-on-the-spot (5-minute? 10-minute?) half-drunken dinner party speech, which I think was at least reasonably coherent based on the questions I was asked about it.

Now that Frontier and Midwest airlines have merged, you can fly on a plane with a cute animal on the tail while eating complementary, fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. (You can also be glad that you have a 3 hour layover in Milwaukee when your first flight leaves 90 minutes late.) On the way back to NC, once we were going into our descent, I looked down and was like, Oh my god, we're home - look at all the trees! I know MV was glad to be in Colorado again and out of the actual desert where he lives, but Colorado was like a desert to me.