Mumbling Madly

This alone is a great reason for not moving to Denver. Not only do they have notoriously gun-happy cops but now they’ll arrest you if your bumpersticker is not to their liking. Check out: “Sticker stuck in cop’s craw”

Ah, the gift bag…
I don’t remember gift bags as a kid. Seems like we could wrap any lopsided gift and make it work. You might use an entire roll of wrapping paper, but that wierdly shaped gift was getting wrapped no matter what. Now we have gift bags: You stuff one with tissue and plop the strange oddity right inside. And you can reuse gift bags! Many times over….how many times have we torn the tag off, recreased the edges, and put new tissue paper into a gift bag and WHAALA! We can regift the gift bag. Sadly, this cuts down on our ripping into presents tradition…it’s really anti-climatic opening up a gift bag–especially if someone is shoddy with the tissue paper. Gone are the days of ripping the paper down the middle to reveal whatever treat is inside, or meticulously peeling off the paper and saving it for another use. Now we merely peer inside and there’s our gift…you don’t even need to work for it!
Now, I find that I use gift bags with casual aquaintances and co-workers. But family members get actual wrapped gifts. I really enjoy wrapping presents. I’m certainly not as talanted as some, but I can do a mean fold down the middle…

How did I get here? Similiar to my feelings about Fort Collins: “This is the last place I ever thought I would be.” I remember when I was a young, care-free Seattelite with the mentality that everything liberal, yummy, hip, and trendy was right where I needed it so why venture out to anywhere else in the country? Of course, moving out to CO has changed this a little bit as I cling hard to the value of change, experiencing things “outside of the box,” and trying not to grimace every time I pass a NRA stickered pick-up truck. I know I’m in a strip mall infested, suburb loving, conservative cowboy country, it’s hard to avoid it here in Missouri, a place I never thought I would ever venture to. It took ten hours to get here, through a flat and vast wasteland as we strode through Dorothy’s homeland. I admit, Kansas City looked impressive with its old buildings, skyscrapers kissing the midwestern sky, and the Missouri River traveling right on through. I’ve never been to the midwest…well Chicago, IL and Madison, WI, but I don’t feel like they were true midwest…Alas, we’ve not ventured into the city, which breaks my heart considering the bounty of museums and historical buildings Kansas City has to offer. Instead we were shuttled from strip mall to strip mall, crammed in the backseat of a small compact. Perhaps five people stuffed into a car would not make for a pleasant trip to Kansas City, forty miles west of Grain valley…but I was still disappointed.
Suddenly, the cookie cutter neighborhood Josh’s parents live in evokes a stifling, smothering, sort of feeling inside me. As if there’s no way out, I’ve traveled further and further east and out of my comfort zone. Perhaps this can be attributed to my intense feelings of homesickness around the holidays. I always miss the Northwest around this time. I know that Portland consists of strip malls and suburbs, but it seems different to me, more tolerable. Here, I can’t seem to find anyone who might like me, or really know me…I feel that way in F.C. too, as if those really deep, trusting, friends who watch your back could never exist here..in cowboy country. Traveling through the entire state of Kansas into Missouri has further strengthened my decision to be forever an Urban Girl. Oh, perhaps one day I’ll have to worry about the quality of the local schools and the crime rate and all that parental stuff…but until than I can not be truly satisfied living out here.
Josh travels (!) to several job interviews this week…I hope for the best.

Dead to the world due to overperformances…four in three days…that’s too many shows. Thankfully, my friend Brandon sent me a link to this funny clip.
Check it out, it’s well worth it.

Tommorrow we fly away from This Place….this hot, dry, bright, sunny, place known as Colorado and landing in Portland, Oregon, home of fur trees, 0 altitude, and fir trees. I can’t wait. Let me tell you…I can’t wait.

As the title implies, this is a magnificent thing. Plus, with our elevated, unlit, 2nd story positions, Josh and I can successfully spy on everything that goes on in the parking lot behind our house. Don’t get too excited…it’s still Ft. Collins. No drug deals or alley fights. We have observed countless dumping in the dumpster owned by several businesses. Josh becomes disgusted by the audacity of these people, who pull up with full garbage cans and secretly unload them in, what they perceive to be, a completely free receptacle. WRONG! It’s all so wrong!
A scraggly lady lives next door to the Conoco we’re neighbors with. We see her walk by with her laundry, gaunt and wearing jean shorts, she suddenly reminds me why I haven’t bothered to cut off a pair of my own jeans and replace the jean shorts I threw away a long time ago. Now that I work in a semi-professional enviornment, the days of jean shorts have sort of disappeared and been replaced with denim skirts and practical blouses.
I’ve decided that, somehow, I have Afternoon Depression. This is something I’ve identified for many years now, since adolesence. I’ll wake up, refreshed and joyful, the morning simply thrills me. Around noon I’ll feel a bit of a change, a slump so to speak, progressing into a mild disenchantment. By four o’clock I’m hating life. But in a totally passive, (sigh), kind of way. I was totally going to paint the hallway lavender today, but when I got home at 3:30 I couldn’t peel myself off the couch. Maybe it’s the afternoon sun (as the depression increases during the summer months). Maybe it’s the fact that half the day is gone. I have no idea why the afternoon is so hard for me. I heard, somewhere, that this is the sign of a Morning Person. This type of individual feels their energy drain in the afternoon instead of the morning. Allegedly, Night Owls feel like hell in the am, while morning people feel like hell in early pm. Or something. Anyway, after the sun goes down I feel much better.
I think Summer, in general, is my least favorite time of the year. I like Fall much better, and Spring too…and I like Christmas a lot, so that put’s Winter in a good place. Maybe it’s just Summer in Fort Collins. Maybe I’m just tired in general.

Now that we have a bigger place, it has become inevitably hard not fill it with more things. Originally we thought it would be a great idea to move now instead of later because we could whittle down our exisiting stock. That being said, I have been fairly good about donating old clothes I never wear, the set of chopsticks I never opened, and the hanging, wire, fruit baskets I no longer have a place for. Now that we have two rooms: A Sitting Room and A Family Room (I have huge issues with the naming of both of these rooms. I totally refuse to have a room that nobody uses and is only there for display. Our “Family” consists of Josh, myself, and Hobbes which hardly constitutes the need for an entire room). One room has bookshelves, the glass end table, and our awesome, overstuffed, blue couch. The other room has our dining room table, our tv, dvds, etc, and Josh’s parent’s old brown couch. Now, we took the brown couch so that we could establish two rooms: One for reading and one for lounging and watching tv. We didn’t realize that the brown couch is the most uncomfortable piece of furniture known to man. After being spoiled for so long with the blue monstrosity, the brown couch has proved to be a miserable experience. Therefore, it was unwise for us to wander into American Furniture Warehouse last Sunday.
This was a mistake. Nobody should enter a furniture store after moving into a home that’s too big, has too much space, and not enough to fill it. Of course Josh fell in love with the crimson, leather couch. Of course it’s now only $600 on sale. Of course we’re hemming and hawing over it, knowing full well we have sworn off credit cards and are taking a trip in less than a week. This has caused us to yearn for the couch like one yearns for Christmas Day as a child. Now, I could pull money from my precious savings account…but I just can’t do it. We could buy accessories for the awful brown couch (oversized pillows, etc), but any money we spend on it feels wasted. Like, why buy a matching sham when we could really buy the leather couch? Such a difficult decision…

So, this is it. The front of the house is a laundromat and the Colorado Coalition of Artists building. The back, well, you can see we have nothing but weeds and hidden yellow jacket nests in the ground. But the big sunporch plus the access to the roof from our bedroom is pretty cool. There’s a lot of pluses and minuses. We’re still working on it. I’m sure at one point this place was a 70’s Dream.