Starting Things off Right

From Kelly:
Well for us, 2010 is already off to a great start!

For NYE, we stared off the night with a Hibachi dinner at Mt. Fuji and then headed to party at Onyx and Audrey's house. It was such a fun party with delicious snacks and even party favors and champagne at midnight. The best part, though was that there was a really cool fireworks show at midnight, which I won't go into too much detail about, but it was awesome! After the party we headed back to Beth/Anna/Jamila's house where we had a big slumber party and played some games.



New Year's day we spent at Mike's cousin's house for the annual Japanese new year celebration. It was sad not to have bachan there to administer the annual Saki blessing, but it was a fun day nonetheless. We spent a lot of time eating and playing games and watching football.

The weekend after NYE, we were lucky enough to get to go to the Broncos-Chiefs game. Carter and Adam each offered us a free ticket, so Mike sat with Adam and I sat with Carter until the very end of the game when we met up with Mike in his super sweet "section 106" tickets. Unfortunately the Broncos couldn't pull out a win, but it was nice to wrap up the season by getting to see a live game!

This last weekend we went on a trip to Winter Park with some friends (there were 13 of us). We rented a house with a pool table, flat screen TVs, hot tub-- the works. It was a pretty awesome set up. When we arrived on Friday, we decided to do some snowshoeing with Carter and his dog, Chloe. It actually worked out really well (considering we had no idea where we were going) and we came upon a place that rented snowshoes for $8 with a trail right next door. Perfect! We hiked a little ways down the trail and saw some beautiful winter landscapes-- mountains, rivers, bridges, etc. It was gorgeous! When we were done we headed to the house to meet the rest of the group. Once everyone had assembled (minus one carload), we headed out to dinner at Smokin' Mo's BBQ. James had found this place and it was a great find-- delicious BBQ and a fun atmosphere. It was a good opportunity for everyone to get to sit down and talk as we got the weekend kicked off.



Saturday, most of the group headed off to the slopes to ski and snowboard, but Matt and Linnea went snowshoeing and the rest of us (me, Beth, Anna) lounged around the house reading and taking the dog for walks; we also went to lunch and checked out the stores and then came back and played pool/wii while we waited for the group to get back. That night Matt and Linnea made a fabulous lasagna dinner and we had a house guest-- Christy-- who was in town volunteering. Later we spent time playing games and hanging out in the hot tub. Some people even took the plunge of jumping in the snow and then back into the hot tub. In fact, I was the only person in the hot tub who didn't take that challenge. I consider myself the smart one!

Sunday we picked up the house and headed out to go tubing in Fraser. If you have never been snow tubing, I would highly recommend it! It was very scary (for me), but also really really fun. We had only paid for 45 minutes, but afterward everyone agreed that we could have gone for twice as long. On the way home we stopped at Beau Jo's for some delicious Colorado-style pizza and then headed back to reality at home. Overall it was an awesome weekend and I was so happy that everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and one another's company.

Other than that, things have been going pretty much as normal for us. I am starting my part-time schedule this week (so I'm off on Tuesdays and Thursday) and yesterday had a wonderful day of running errands and getting stuff done on my to do list. It was also a bonus that the weather was so nice! Another exciting part of yesterday was finding out that I'd had a quote published in my favorite magazine-- Real Simple. They do a monthly question for readers to answer and then they pick some of the answers to publish. I had answered a couple of the questions one day when I was web surfing and sure enough one of them got picked! I was so excited because I've been reading that magazine for years!



I guess that's it for us this round, let us know what's been going on in your neck of the woods!