tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

We just spent 5 days in Denver to visit Aaron’s sister, Amelia, and her family. We had a really great trip – Amelia is showcasing her photography in a gallery in the Denver art district, which was the main reason, or excuse for the trip.

We started out with gorgeous weather – 70 degrees and bright blue skies. We tried to take a hike up near Eldora, but the road to the trail head was blocked by a snowpile. I wasn’t too upset about that since around 8k feet, I started feeling a little nauseous from the altitude. We settled for a photo op instead.

We walked around Nederland a bit, and then headed into Boulder for lunch. We ate at The Med which was delicious.

We also met up with our friend Becky, who moved out to Boulder last year (I think). It was great to catch up with her – and we even scored a free cupcake at the coffee shop!

It started to get a little colder and greyer over the weekend. We stopped by the art gallery to check out Amelia’s displays, which looked awesome. My friend Tara had just moved to Denver three weeks ago, and she was able to stop by and grab a cup of coffee with us so we could catch up.

We broke out the poker set on Saturday after dinner and clearly had a good time:

We went out for breakfast on Sunday and met up with yet more friends of mine who have moved to Denver – Kerri and Ryan. I think I know more people in Denver than I do in DC at this point!

We didn’t do much on Sunday but relax. On Monday we woke up to snow!

Amelia chauffeured us around so we could check out some neighborhoods and see if we could find a place we would like to move to. We found a few cute areas that I could see us living in. Aaron still needs some convincing, but it’s sort of a moot point since we can’t sell our house in this real estate market anway.

While we were off cruising the neighborhoods, Joe was slaving away making a huge brisket for dinner. This is half of it:

It was sooooo good. I was sad to leave the leftovers behind! But  we will be getting the rub recipe from Amelia, at least.

It was a great trip – we got to spend time with family and friends, eat well, and do a lot of relaxing.

I finally decided to go to a new chiropractor after realizing I get 30 visits a year through my insurance. I wasn’t very pleased with the last guy I went to, and it put me off chiro’s in general for a while.

But I looked around and found a guy right near our house (and next to a Dunkin’ Donuts – a common theme with chiropractors around here, it seems) who does Active Release Therapy, which sounded interesting and like it might actually do some good. He also does something called the Graston Technique which looks very painful, but he doesn’t think I need it. Phew.

So I went in there and told him about my various aches and pains and my history with chiropractors. He gave me a funny look and said I was too young to be having these sorts of ailments. He wanted x-rays before he did anything.

On Saturday he took some and reconfirmed that I am way too young to be having the issues that I’m having, and they will only get worse so I really need to do something about them now. Sounds almost like a sales pitch, right? But then he showed me the x-rays.

Yikes.

I definitely have scoliosis in my lower back and in my neck. I also have squashed discs between my S1 and L5 (I think) in my lower back. He said if I had an MRI of that area, it would probably show the disc being dark grey, signifying a lack of bloodflow to the disc. So that is the root cause of my lower back pain, apparently. Discs can’t regenerate, but I can try to stop them from getting crunched any further.

I have a similar situation going on in my neck, but I have no idea what those vertebraes are numbered.

Sigh.

He cracked my back and did some ART which felt awesome. Well ,for a while at least – later that night I was pretty sore. But he gave me some exercises and stretches to do which should help a little as well.

I guess I’m a bit of a mess. Good thing I have been DVRing the yoga channel. Time to get on that.

Today was absolutely gorgeous. The weather was so perfect it felt like we were in San Diego.

I took a jog by myself to see how far I could go without stopping, since Illy likes to take frequent breaks to hunt squirrels whenever I take her with me. So I don’t really have an idea of what my endurance is like. I took our usual route and made it the whole way without stopping. I probably could have gone further, but I was hungry for lunch. It ended up being a 1.2 mile loop, and I didn’t even get honked at! Victory, I say.

I also upgraded my Blackberry to the Storm. I was very hesitant about it when it first came out, but the recent firmware update seems to have taken care of a lot of issues, and I really love it. The camera lag is sort of annoying, but it’s a big step up from no camera on my 8830. I don’t have too much trouble with the typing, either. And, they have a pink case for it! Score! I did have an issue setting up my email, since the lady who sold me the phone put me on a plan that didn’t provision BES, and didn’t even bring it up as an option.

Really, Verizon? This is the default option for your Blackberry plans? Assume the user does NOT use a Blackberry Exchange Server? Isn’t that, like, the whole point of using a Blackberry? Sigh.

Anyway after a little Googling I got on the phone with Verizon and spoke to the nicest lady – she is based in the Chicagoland area, which explains it She got me onto a plan that does provision BES, and even kept the rate the same. Brilliant! So now I am all set up.

And, it’s my brother’s birthday! He got the first call from my new phone. Happy Birthday, Matthew!

So, life has gotten busy. Well, work has gotten busy, really.

But at least the weather is finally starting to turn nice. I’ve been taking Illy for runs on the warmer days. She is usually pretty good about trotting beside me…or lagging behind if she’s not happy to be moving so quickly and would rather be sniffing around for squirrels.

I took her to the Battlefield one Saturday morning so we could have more of an open area to run in, and there was NO lagging behind at all. She took off at a gallop and never slowed down. It’s kind of hard to keep a running pace while you’re being pulled by a freedom-crazed dog. It’s supposed to be 80 this weekend so I’ll give it another try on Sunday.

In other news I treated myself to a digital piano. Basically just a keyboard but without all the crazy add-ons that keyboards usually have. It’s supposed to help me de-stress, and I think it’s working. Although I need to find some music books inbetween Little Brown Jug and Beethoven.

Anyway, back to the grind.