Back from a great Father-Son trip to Colorado

I am back in Tally after an awesome Father-Son trip to Breckenridge, Colorado! It was not the longest trip, but dad and I sure know how to pack a lot of fun into a long weekend. We actually had a few convos about the awesome long weekend trips that we have had in the past. We can cover some ground!

So this might be some repeat to anyone that saw my mobile uploads to facebook, but oh well. Things will be a little more in context here so that will be the added benefit. :-) I am also using the standard "insert image" that livejournal provides to put these pics in here. It makes for fairly small resolution pics, but for most of these I think that gets the point across, and anyone can always click on the pictures if they want to see an enlarged version. I think all of them were taken with my phone so it isn't like they were super awesome to begin with.

The first pic is on the way from the airport out to the mountains. The last couple of times we have been out there, there has been tons of snow and the roads have been pretty crappy. We were definitely happy to be greeted by some warmer weather and clear roads, though it definitely made it feel a little less like we were starting out a ski trip.

As has been the case the last two trips out to Colorado, we have gotten snow every day. Now that may sound awesome (who doesn't like fresh powder?), it can actually get a little annoying sometimes. Not only is it colder having snow constantly hitting any exposed surface on your body, but to snow you need clouds. This means it is very overcast, which means you will have very flat light, which means it will be hard to see the surface of the snow. It can be good practice to learn to ski or board more by feeling with your feet that actually seeing the snow, but it sure is nice to have a sunny ski day every once in a while! You can see some of the aftermath of boarding in a snowstorm in the accompanying picture. Dad got a pretty good covering too as you can see.

Both days we got snow, but the second day it was definitely the harder snowing day of the two. We (luckily) got out pretty early both days so we got tons of good runs in before the crowds got out and before the weather got worse. You can see in the picture that the snow is really coming down. It never let up! We did see a little sun after we got off the mountain (of course!) on our last day. The snow was still awesome though and we definitely made the most of it and had a frickin' blast! One random note I just thought of... the riding was made a little more interesting for me by the fact that the toe strap on my right binding fell off at some point. Luckily, my left foot is my control foot, but it is definitely a bit of an odd feeling to be riding with only one strap on your binding! Nothing will take your mind off it like a nice beer sampler from the local brewery though!
It was definitely a kick ass trip, but it started getting kinda crazy cold towards the end. At one point I was walking around taking pics and I stopped to prop my camera on a railing for a long shutter shot. The railing ended up being so cold that when my hands touched it, it literally felt like someone had lighters under my hand because it just started burning. It was nuts! I believe one of the last times I checked weather.com before I went to bed, it said it was -4 feels like -15. That's chilly!

You may not be able to read it in the picture, but the car's thermometer was reading -5 when we were leaving in the morning. Not quite Tallahassee weather! There was a little snow on the road from the recent storm, but after the last couple of trips it pretty much seemed like nothing. We DID get to see the buffalo herd chilling next to the road on the way in. We've always seen the signs, but rarely see any actual buffalo. Dad and I had the same flight to Atlanta, then his flight home headed out about an hour earlier than mine so I had a little downtime in the airport. Had a little interesting and cool experience while I was there.
I went to the ice cream vending machine to get a snack. It said 50 cents had already been put in so I was kinda pumped. Then I realized why that was the case. I put in 50 more cents, then tried to put in a dollar and realized the dollar accepter was nonfunctional. Bummer. So I push the cancel and return change buttons a couple times and it seems like nothing happens. I'm about to walk away when I hear it drop change, but it definitely doesn't sound like 4 quarters. So I check and it is a snazzy new one dollar coin! The pic below isn't the greatest, but it was still a pretty snazzy find. This week has been good so far too. Got my shoulder checked out and bloodwork done (good to check) on monday, did PT for my calf and found out I need to lower my triglycerides a little bit today, and have fit a little research in there as well. Yesterday MC and I decided to join a local group who is training for the 10k at the end of the month and we had a nice 4.5 mile run without stopping! That is by far the longest MC has ever run nonstop and I was pretty stoked I didn't die considering how little I've been running lately. It was a cool little accomplishment. Tomorrow I have lots of chores to take care of and such and it should be a pretty busy day! Oh, and I couldn't fit them into the post well, but I'm including a few other "bonus" pics below of the drive out of Breckenridge :-) and as a side note, I'm just looking at my actual blog when I am figuring out where to align all these pics, so if it looks like crap on your feed, you might wanna check out my original post to see what I had in mind. ;-)

Race to Live 5k

MC and I decided to run a 5k, even though our training regimen has been a little sub-par for running lately. It was a cool morning, but the race wasn't until 10 am so it was actually about a perfect 50 degrees when we ran. Some decent hills as we looped through campus, and we stayed running for the entire race, minus a quick stop at a water stand. Lynn and Matt came out too and Matt ran with us and Lynn ran with some of her work buddies. My calf started bugging me about half way through but never really hurt too bad. And though not by a ton, MC got a PR, which is always awesome :-)

31:16

MC - 31:16 (PR)

Top Chef Night... with guests!

So, as has been the case, we cooked for Top Chef night. Usually it has been MC's night (and I'm still trying to get her to start a blog to at least log her cooking too) but she had a lot going on so I volunteered to take care of it. This was a little different too because we had guests!! Ian and Caitie are avid Top Chef watchers as well, so we invited them over to join in dinner and watch the show. It was a lot of fun!

I tried a recipe from the Biggest Loser cookbook called Southwestern Pileup or something. Usually I am very rigid about following every direction and measurement, but I just sorta winged it through most of this one. It was pretty simple so it wasn't hard. It called for a pita, but I liked the look of the flatbread better. I seasoned some chicken with mexican spices and garlic and grilled it, then toasted the pita a bit in the oven. I spread a layer of roasted red pepper hummus, then added the chicken, red peppers, cilantro, tomato, black beans, and cheese. Bake for like 7 minutes and voila! It was pretty darn scrumptious, especially for being so simple. I also had some guacamole and sour cream for people to add to taste and paired it with some chips and salsa.

At the time I actually forgot to take pictures, but luckily the flatbread pack had 5 in it, so there was one left over for me to recreate the meal for my lunch today. I had to get a snapshot somehow! :-) I'll probably be a little more adventurous when friend's lives aren't on the line ;-) and will have some more complicated recipes in the future. For now, this'll do though!!

Quick Valentine's Blurb

MC and I decided to go pretty low-key for valentines. It WAS our first valentine's, but cash is kinda tight so we thought we'd just keep it simple. We had a wonderful day of just hanging out and enjoying each others company. We were going to start the day off with a 5k, but it got canceled due to rain (weenies!). So we came back to the apartment complex and did a short jog on the treadmill. After the jog I fixed us up some breakfast and made MC a special plate. Notice the hearts on the toast on the left as well! She saw this recipe and it looked absolutely perfect for a little valentines meal. :-)

Top Chef Wednesday!

Usually this would be MC's day to cook and I would get tomorrow, but with Valentine's day being this weekend we modified our schedule a little bit. Also, MC had a little dinner shindig to attend in the evening and we wanted to get a run in before Top Chef/dinner so it made sense for me to make something quick and easy. I decided I would make some soft tacos since it would be easy for MC to just grab one or two since she didn't need a whole meal.

It wasn't anything fancy, but the twist was that instead of ground beef, I tried a tofu crumble meant to resemble it. I cut up green and red peppers, tomatoes, and onions and tossed it all in a skillet for a while. I heated up some black beans and chopped up some spinach and wrapped each up in a wheat tortilla. It was very scrumptious! I have been intrigued by meat alternatives, but haven't really tried that many. It was healthier (the 10 oz package had like 220 calories and very little fat) and it had a different flavor, but a good one. A simple, but successful, meal indeed! It was a great recovery meal too since MC and I got a little lost on our run and what was supposed to be like a light 1.5 miles, turned into about 2.9 miles. Fun!!

Taking after my sis

So MC and I have decided that we are both going to work on developing our culinary skills. Since we watch Top Chef every wednesday, we thought that would be a good cooking night since that show always makes us super hungry anyways. I don't know if I will keep track of MC's cooking or just log what I am doing, but we shall see how it develops. Since we were having a cold spell, we thought that during our dinner and show on wednesday would be a good time to christen our fireplace!

We just made a simple little fire, but it was fun doing it for the first time in our new place and the spinach stuffed chicken MC made was super scrumptious!! And this picture is a bit of a prelude to the apartment post I swear I will make sometime soon. We hope to clean stuff up this weekend and take some good pictures so I can show everyone our new snazzy living quarters.

So thursday it was my turn to do some cooking. We have several cookbooks that we have been perusing a lot lately and two of them I have been looking at especially. The Biggest Loser and Quick & Healthy. Both are really nice because they not only have recipes that are pretty good for you, but they have the nutritional information, which makes keeping the fitday journal up-to-date through our culinary exploration much easier. I decided to cook pecan-crusted chicken from the Biggest Loser book and I paired it with german red cabbage with apples from the Quick & Healthy book.

The chicken was very good and flavorful, though the recommended serving size was a little small (1/4 pound of chicken). The cabbage was definitely on the experimental side. I think I could have used a larger skillet and I think I "simmered" at a little bit too high of a heat. In the book the apple slices looked intact, but in mine they started becoming more like applesauce than apple slices. Overall, it was still pretty good! VERY flavorful, almost too much so. I think having larger pieces of chicken so it would need less of the cabbage as a side would have been about perfect. All-in-all it was a pretty successful meal and pretty good on the health side as well!

Maybe having a set day with something specific to post (like back when I did weigh-in posts) will help me keep this thing a little more up-to-date as well. We shall see!

Awesome Weekend Trip

Man, I have been really slacking when it comes to making posts as of late. Things have been a little hectic, but I've gotten into the groove of the semester a little more so hopefully I'll be able to post more consistently. I STILL haven't gotten some good pics of the new place, but I'll get things tidied up soon and I can make a post about that. I don't think there has been a lot that is worth blogging about since my last post so I'll just talk about more recent happenings.

This past weekend MC and I had our first flight together! My friends Jake and Jamie were in Iraq for 15 months and got home not too long ago. They are stationed in Colorado Springs so we decided to have a ski trip / get-together for everyone to visit since we hadn't seen them in forever. Since I only have class tuesday and thursday and I can easily miss my monday meetings, we decided to take a long weekend for the trip.

We got up early on friday and headed over to the airport. We had super awesome seats on the plane. Best view in the house! (if you like engines that is haha).
There was a lot of fog in Atlanta so our plane got delayed and we ended up missing our connecting flight to denver. Surprisingly, Delta automatically rebooked us on a later flight so it ended up not being a very big deal. We rolled into Denver a few hours later than planned and we headed over to Hertz. Turns out they were having a deal for a cheap upgrade so instead of a Rav4, we were big pimpin' in a 2009 Escalade!

The trip to the house in Breckenridge was a little rough. It was pretty snowy so it was slow going, but good thing our Escalade handled it just fine! While I was super glad to have a large SUV like that for the drive, I am always entertained by the other cars that I see on the road. I feel kinda sketchy in some of the conditions with my all-wheel drive, yet see little cars passing me... like a Porsche Carrera 4!!

The house that Roper found was pretty awesome. It was like 10 minutes from the slopes and had plenty of room for all of us.

The first day we mostly stayed together. MC did frickin' awesome!! She took off down the slope with a good amount of speed and was really tearing it up. Towards the latter part of the day the group split up a bit and we pretty much shut down the mountain. It was one helluva day on the mountain! The rest of the evening we hung out at the house, had a great dinner, and just caught up with everyone. It was really good hanging out with everyone, especially the Ropers since they had been out of the country for a long time. We decided to have an "experts only" morning the next day. J.D., Roper, Adam and I hit the slopes right when they opened and got in tons of good skiing and boarding. Unfortunately, a lot of the places we were going were much less accessible to the lone snowboarder (myself), so I ended up doing a lot hiking, mostly through pretty deep snow. Times like those will remind you that you are at like 12,000 feet!! We still got tons of awesome back country time in and then met up with everyone else for lunch. After the previous day and that morning I was pretty wiped out so I just did a couple runs after lunch then MC and I headed down to the bast to wait for everyone to finish up. After we got back, we showered up and had dinner at Bubba Gump's, where the food was pretty good, but the service was pretty shoddy. Had a nice little stroll through downtown Breckenridge, snapped a picture, then headed back to the house.

Roper and Jamie had to work on Monday, so they hung out and played Taboo with us for a while then had to hit the road. It was sad to see them go, but we had a frickin' awesome weekend hanging out with them and everybody. After they left, most of us didn't last very long after a couple long days of boarding and skiing.

We got up early the next day because there were winter storm warnings all along the route from Breckenridge to the airport. The first half of the drive wasn't too bad, but then it got progressively worse.

It was definitely the kind of drive that keeps you on your toes! Most of it really wasn't that bad, but I had to pay a lot of attention. Needless to say I was pretty stoked to finally make it to the airport and relax. Everything went fine on the flights home and we rolled in last night around 9. Still feeling a little beat, but I'm trying to get some research done this afternoon since I didn't get much done this past week. It'll probably be a kinda busy week getting back into everything, but I'm sure I can handle it.

Well, I guess I have procrastinated enough. Hopefully the use of images will help liven this post up. I'm still working on bring more consistent with that as well. Back to the research!