Shyne

The Vacation Wrap-up

Well, it’s all over for another year. Time to sadly put away the snowboards and the jackets, the thermals and the gloves. Time to come back to sea level with a higher alcohol tolerance and the driest skin ever! Thank goodness for cocoa butter.

Let me share with you some highlights:

  • During a ride with Kiddo, I was on the side of the trail to take a picture. As you can see, the snow was a little sparse in places. Kiddo was trying to avoid one of those spots and in turn, lost control of her board and crashed into a tree. Head first. Thank goodness for helmets! (She dented hers, btw.) Fortunately, she has a hard head and suffered nothing more than a little headache. The tree was fine.
  • That’s what she said. Who is she? I want to meet her. Ha!
  • Margaritas and enchiladas at Mi Casa FTW!
  • You really just can’t ever go wrong at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.
  • Jerky! Venison and elk and buffalo!
  • Vanilla Porter at Breckenridge Brewery. I love beer!

And some of the lowlights:

  • Arrived at the airport 2 hours early for our flight only to find lines that went back to the house where we stayed.
  • Airline rep said the line would only be 20 minutes outside with the skycap.
  • We believed her. Dummies.
  • 90 minutes later, we were frozen, still needing to go through security, and our plane was boarding.
  • Made it through security in record time, ran over several people on the way to the gate, made the plane but couldn’t sit together.
  • Upon our arrival in Florida, 2 of our bags were missing. Of course it’s the one with all of my toiletries, makeup, etc.
  • The airline had no idea where out bag was and told me about 15 different stories.

Happy endings:

  • We did finally get our bags a day later.
  • Everything was intact.
  • They delivered the bags to the house at the exact time we specified.
  • Next year, we’ll ride all season and take a cruise on Christmas!!

2010 Blog challenge

Hi there, folks.  Sorry to be so late with getting to this, but I know you’ll forgive me. 🙂

So, what do you say we start this friendly competition (with no real prize other than saying, hey, I blogged a lot this year) on Monday, January 4.  Each blog post needs to have at least 100 words and there should be three posts per week.  If we want to go really crazy, we could take turns picking a topic.
Please post a link to your blog in the comments and every Sunday (or early Monday), I’ll recap them all in a post and send out the link through Twitter.
Am I missing anything?  Let me know and let’s have some fun!

Letter to and about 2010

Well, 2010, here you are.  I didn’t stay awake to see you make your entrance, but then again, I haven’t done that in a while now.  I did make it to 11:30 but I really just couldn’t be bothered with trying to stay up any longer.  You’d show up whether I was there to greet you or not. 

I’m not really of the school of 2009 was sooo bad, so hurry up 2010.  I realize that a lot of bad things happened to a lot of people, but on a whole, 2009 wasn’t that terrible, at least, not for me.  2010, though, you, you have potential to be a great year.

You started out in the cold but beautiful Breckenridge, Colorado.  I’ll tell you one thing, 2010 and all of your followers, we won’t be traveling during the holidays any more.  Next year our Christmas will hopefully be white and we’ll just be able to hit a mountain within driving distance.

Looking at the rest of January, my schedule is already full.  The last class of this Bachelor’s degree starts on the 5th.  It’s been such a long time coming and there really aren’t even words to describe how happy I am to be this close to done.  One Saturday this month, I will need to go and get trained in CPR.  Why?  Well, because at the end of the month, on a Saturday, I’ll be going to Zumba training so that I will be a certified instructor.  Oh, yeah, and at some point, I’ll also need to read through all of my training manuals so that I can also do my group fitness certification.  Might sound as though it makes no sense to finish a degree and then take an entirely different route, but as far as I’m concerned, I can never be good at too many things.  

February will bring (finally!) the graduation. It is the culmination of years of work, of staying home, of banging my head against the wall at times.  Finally, it will be over.  I will have “gotten that paper” and hopefully it’ll be worth it somewhere.

March, April and May don’t have exact milestones as of yet, however, they will be filled with dress hunting, invitation sending and general paranoia about if the wedding will go off without a hitch.  Yikes!  These three months will also be filled with job hunting and apartment searching for the new place out west as well as trying to prep the house we’re in to be in move-in condition for someone else.  These will probably be the three most stressful but entirely worth it months because leaving Miami is really a high priority for me.

June, I’m really looking forward to you.  It’ll be nice and warm and we’ll be on our way to Cancun to be married on the beach.  Immediately following seeing off our guests, we’ll begin luxury lounging at our hotel for a week before we come home and finish up packing the house.  If all goes just perfectly, we’ll be in our new place, wherever that may be, by the fourth of July.

July and August will be dedicated to adjusting to our new neighborhood, hopefully making some friends, and getting everyone settled in their new jobs/schools.

The last third of the year is really just anyone’s guess.  I’m probably doing good to have as much planned out as I do.  Maybe closer to the end of the year I’ll revisit this and see what’s up for the end of the first year of this new decade.

Breckenridge – The first three days

Wow! I just realized that we’ve only been here for 2.5 days.  It already seems like much longer, but that’s actually pretty fantastic.

We flew in on Christmas day, which is an awesome day to travel if you’re not of the mindset of caring when you get somewhere.  The airport was nice and quiet even though our flight was full.  We met another family and a single guy that were all coming to Breck.  We haven’t yet run into them, but I figure at some point we may.  Christmas dinner was at The Hearthstone where I had a couple of nice pieces of elk.  The altitude change was not nice to the belly though, and we all ended up a gassy mess, lol.
Saturday we just hung around and checked out the town a little bit.  We had originally planned to do a little warm-up day but decided that we needed the day to continue to adjust to the altitude.  It’s nearly 2 miles high here.  Crazy.
Sunday we hit the mountain full force with everyone going into their separate lesson.  Amazingly enough, the place isn’t jam packed which meant that Kiddo basically had a private lesson since there was only one other teen in her group and I had a private lesson because no one else signed up for the particular thing that I did.  Lovey also had a private lesson, but that’s because he booked it in the first place.  We were all on the mountain from about 9:30 till 3 and let me tell you, at 3, we were all exhausted.  Running 3 miles 3 times a week does absolutely nothing to prepare one for all day on the mountain.
Because it’s vacation, I must have a massage (or two).  First massage came from the lovely folks at Blue Sage Spa.  Super nice people, but most people here are.  Deep tissue massage followed by a seaweed therapy detox.  All I can say here is ahhhhhhhhhhh.  We managed to stay up until 10pm(!) 
*SIDEBAR*  I just saw the Charlie Daniels Geico commercial.  So funny.
This morning, we had it planned to go to the grocery store and run a few more errands.  Well, that was, until I could find my driver’s license.  We turned the house upside down looking for it to no avail.  I called the massage place and they didn’t have it.  I called the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory where I picked up yumminess after my massage and they didn’t have it either.  
Panic started to set in.  How in the world was I gonna get home?  On a lesser scale, how could I take part in the champagne toast on New  Year’s Eve if I couldn’t prove I was old enough to do so?  My mouth started to get dry.  My stomach started to sour.  I have effectively ruined, sorta, vacation.  Our whole crew retraced my steps from last night.  We didn’t find anything.  As it is, my head is always full of random thoughts, but everything was even more jumbled now.  I stopped back in the spa and they said I should call the police station to see if anyone had turned it in.  Another bust.  The other half of our crew went into the visitor center to see if anyone had turned it in there but no luck again.  We left them information to get in contact with us if, by some slim chance, someone turned it in.
AT&T service has been spotty at best for the last couple of days here.  That has led to missed and/or dropped calls and NO TWITTER from my phone. Boooo!  As such, I didn’t hear my phone when it rang and it took hours for voicemail to show up.  It finally buzzed through when we were in the grocery store.  And you will never believe this, because I still don’t believe it and it’s happening right in front of my face, but the visitor center called and said that they have my license!!  Some kind soul found my license and turned it in!!  Breckenridge is OFFICIALLY my favorite town in the world now.  I don’t know if it was a local or if someone else on vacation, but whoever you are, THANK YOU!!!
Tonight, we’re still trying to recover from yesterday and prepare for tomorrow.  We’ve all decided that a calm day of riding greens rather than the blues and blue-blacks we rode yesterday would be a good idea.
Oh!  Photos!  You can see all of them here.
Also, I haven’t forgotten about the blog challenge.  I’m thinking a minimum of three posts a week with a minimum of 100 words.  It’s only for bragging rights and getting ourselves into the habit of writing a little more.
That’s it for now and I’ll be posting more as it’s needed.  Hope all’s well in each of your respective worlds.

When TV sneaks into daily life

Yesterday, I spoke to MommaShyner about general and random things as is the norm. She mentioned that she was going to the football game tonight as her neighbor was nice enough to pass over her tickets for the evening (she’s a season ticket holder; isn’t that nice of her?). Off the top of my head I didn’t know who was playing but MommaShyner felt that it was the Dolphins.

I know. It isn’t.

Later last night, I was relaying the story to Lovey including the Dolphins part. He knew that it wasn’t the Dolphins but wasn’t sure who it was. In a stroke of brilliance, I realized that it was the Colts and told Lovey so.

We discussed the importance of the game for the Jags and that it would likely be a good game. Lovey mentioned that maybe the Colts would start sitting players, though, in preparation for the playoffs. I agreed that it would be a good game and, following my moment of brilliance with a moment of sheer stupidity, I said:

Maybe she’ll get to see someone like Peyton Manning, maybe.

To which Lovey replied:

Maybe.

First, yes, just that quickly I forgot that we said that players might sit. Second, dammit Manning! You’re seeping into regular conversations in our house and we’re not even Colts fans!

Thanks for tuning in to your daily ramble featuring MiamiShyner.

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