The Great January Flood

I mentioned a few posts back about an incident that occurred in my house that involved pipes freezing and bursting and I am here to tell the story and show you the proof.  Back in early/mid January it was consistently around 30 to 40 degrees below zero every night for a couple of weeks or so.  Needless to say, it is hard to keep a very poorly insulated trailer warm in that kind of weather.  So I had problems with the pipes freezing pretty much every day.  One day while I was home (Thank GOD) I had the kitchen and bathroom sinks turned on waiting for the pipes to unfreeze when I finally heard water running.  However, when I went to investigate, the running water was not coming from the kitchen, nor was it coming from the bathroom. I looked into my bedroom where the sound seemed to be coming from but didn't see anything, until I looked under the bed.  There I saw a veritable geyser shooting out from my pipes into my bedroom. Naturally, the first thing I did was fly outside and turn the water off.  Then I called my landlord to tell her what had happened. She sighed and said her husband would be over soon. So I got to work taking my bed out so he could get to the problem area.  He came over and checked it out and said he would have to come back the next day to fix it. So the next day I went to work and not long into the day got a call from my landlord saying while Jeff was fixing the pipes they burst in another place and I had to get there to help clear the room out.  So I called my boss to make sure it was ok that I left the store and headed down to assess the damage.  It wasn't quite as bad as I was envisioning, but the whole floor was soaked.  So with help from dear Tyson I got everything out of the room and started to pull up the carpet.

The flooded room.  We thought about letting it freeze so we could have an indoor skating rink.

 It was a nasty job, and that soaking carpet was pretty heavy.  We pulled the carpet out and my landlords decided to put tile down instead of putting carpet back in.  This was January 15th.  After a couple weeks of no progress in getting my room fixed--and all my stuff scattered about the house, and me sleeping in the living room--I finally got a hold of them and asked when it was going to get done.  Turns out there was a lack of communication between them and they both thought the other was taking care of it.  After my friendly reminder they finally got their acts together and by February 7th the tile was down and my room was finally ready to be my room again.

The finished product.  Back to normal--finally!

I wasted no time in getting everything put back and my house back to normal.  The only casualty was a cheap-o bookshelf from Wal-Mart.  I kept the pieces and bought some brackets and repurposed the shelves into new shelves.

Shelves turned into shelves make great shelves!

It felt so good to get everything back where it belonged and to have a clean living space again.  Thankfully after this we had a run of pretty warm weather so I haven't had any fear of a repeat incident.  Hopefully I won't have to worry about it at all anymore. 

So that is the story of the Not-so-Great Flood.  It certainly made for another good story to add to my memoirs.  Not sure what I will post about next, but I'm sure I will come up with something.  Maybe something from last summer.  It will be nice to relive some events from a warmer time.

Thursday, February 14th

I've never been a fan of Valentine's Day.  This year I had every reason to feel differently and take advantage of the fact that I had someone to spend it with and make it special.  But I was kind of a Negative Nancy about it whenever Tyson brought it up and insisted I didn't want to do anything for it.  Being the great boyfriend he is, he insisted on at least making me dinner.  So Thursday after work we went out to his family's ranch (La Garita guest ranch just outside of Creede; it's unoccupied during the winter so we are able to go out and stay there when we want to get away) and Tyson made me a delicious meal.  But first, this is what we saw when we first arrived:

In addition to having beautiful scenery, the ranch is often occupied by herds of elk and big horn sheep.  Here are some lady elk showing us their bums.

For dinner we had elk burgers.  HA.  Just kidding.  That would have been yummy though.  Actually we had some filet mignon seared perfectly on the grill, roasted potatoes (TO DIE FOR) and mixed green salad with Creede Olive Oil Co. Raspberry Balsamic Vinegar dressing. 

I decided to get into the spirit of things and set the table all romantic like.  Including paper towel origami swans.

The meal.  Those potatoes were seriously out of this world.  Roasted with shallots, garlic and rosemary. HOLY MOLY heaven in my mouth.  The steak was obviously delectable as well.

 After dinner we spent the night playing video games, which is always highly enjoyable.  Overall it was a lovely evening doing something a little special with  my someone special.  Even if Valentine's Day is a lame, made-up holiday for suckers. ;)

Underground Mardi Gras

In case you didn't know, Creede used to be a mining town.  Actually, it is again now, but it used to be exclusively a mining town.  So part of Creede tourism revolves around mining; there are lots of mining landmarks and cool abandoned mines all over the place.  In addition to the underground mining museum which you can visit and take a creepy tour of, we also have an underground fire station and community center.

I apparently don't have any pictures of it, so I got this picture from the Underground Mining Museum website.
 http://www.undergroundminingmuseum.com/ 

They hold all sorts of activities in the community center, including Bingo every Monday during the summer months, holiday potlucks and--as was the case last week--a Mardi Gras party.  I had heard that this party has been really fun and happening, but this year there were about a dozen people there.  But there was a local band playing called Mojones and I rarely turn down the opportunity to see them.  They play awesome funk music that is impossible not to dance to.  So my friend Heather and I showed up in time to enjoy their second set and dance our pants off.

It was crazy dark in there and I only had my phone so I didn't get great pictures, but here's what I managed to get:

This is the underground bar. I've heard it called the Cave. 

This is my very feeble attempt to get a picture of the band. It was REALLY dark in there.  But they were awesome and I had a good time, even if I was one of the only people there.  

When the band was done playing Heather and I headed to Tommyknocker Tavern to meet Tyson and ended up playing some foosball, which besides hockey is the major activity in Creede during the winter.  Then a brawl broke out between a few guys who were raging on excessive amounts of machismo, testosterone and--of course--alcohol.  We pretty much stayed out of it and kept playing foosball except for a few times where a couple extra bodies were needed to peel guys/girl off of other guys/girl.  I steered clear for obvious reasons.  Overall it was a fun and exciting night--a good change of pace from staying in most nights.

I suppose in keeping with chronological events, my next post will be about--dare I say it?--Valentine's Day, or what I like to call just a lovely romantic Thursday night with my BF.  However you want to look at it, I'll do a short post about it, mostly just to show pictures of the delicious meal we had.  Trust me, you will be jealous.

Happy Birthday Abraham Lincoln...er...Tyson!

Earlier in the month Tyson mentioned his birthday was coming up.  I knew it was in February, but I said "...the 12th?" and he said no.  So then I listed almost every number before that until I got it right: the 7th.  I felt pretty bad that I didn't remember, because I know he had told me, but I can't remember everything, as much as I would like to. Of course, the other day his roommate was listening to country music and I was singing along to all the songs and Tyson remarked upon how I know the lyrics to "every country song, ever."  Maybe if he sang his birthday to me, I would have remembered it.  Anyway, It occurred to me later that the 12th is Abraham Lincoln's birthday, which is probably what I was thinking of.  So really Tyson should be flattered that I mistook him for a pretty cool former president.  I'm sure he doesn't think of it that way, though.  He was probably thinking if I know the lyrics to "every country song, ever" why can't I remember his birthday?

Oh well, the point is when I did remember I asked him what he wanted to do and he didn't have anything in mind so I told him I would cook him anything he wanted for dinner.  I thought he might pick something he knows I can make and that he likes, but that would have been too easy.  But I did say anything.  So he decided on Steak au Poivre with a balsamic reduction, frites with cajun seasoning, and salad.  I had never made Steak au Poivre before, so I was nervous but I found a fairly easy recipe and did my best.

On the night, I told him he couldn't come over until I told him he could.  Mostly I was thinking if I failed horribly and dinner was a disaster, he wouldn't be able to see and I could recover somehow before he got there.  Also, since my house was a bit of a mess (due to burst pipes, which I will explain in the next post) I wanted to set up the living room to look a little nicer.  So I put up sheets to cover the messes and set up an improv table (we have no actual table of any kind) and generally made the place presentable.  When I had most of the food done and it appeared nothing terrible would go wrong, I told him he could come over.  He brought the wine and when the food was ready we loaded up our plates and sat at our picnic fort and had a lovely dinner. 

The steak was good, the potatoes were a bit over cooked, the salad was salad, but it did have homemade croutons and homemade vinaigrette. Yum!

Overall it was a success. Tyson seemed happy, which all that matters.  Beej the dog was also very happy since he was tossed quite a bit of steak during dinner. 

Today is Abraham Lincoln's birthday so I figured it was a good day to post.  I don't have anything planned for him but maybe I'll make a toast at the Mardi Gras party tonight (at the underground community center).  Tune in soon to learn about my water pipe shenanigans.  Thanks for reading!

Snowy Creede

 I was going to post today about the birthday dinner I made for Tyson on Thursday, I even brought my camera charger and cord.  Problem is, I forgot my camera.  Sooo that will have to wait until a later date.  Since snow seems to be a common factor for most of us, I'll give you some pictures I've taken of snowy Creede. 

Upcoming posts to look forward to: Tyson's birthday dinner, before and after pictures of my burst pipes and flooded bedroom incident, ummmm not sure what else, but probably some good stuff.  So stay tuned!

Scones!

Oh, hello! It's me, the enormously slacking blogger who has been basically absent for almost two years or something.  I really do want to start up again though, so to start here are some scones I made this morning:

Chocolate chip scones. Yummmmmm.

I guess I could have picked something more exciting for my first post back, but during the winter in Creede you really learn to appreciate the small things.  Like tasty chocolate chip scones warm from the oven for breakfast on a chilly morning. In an attempt to post on a fairly regular basis, I'll be posting anything from what I'm eating (sometimes quite exciting actually) to adventures from last summer that I failed to post about at the time and anything happening in my life that I think might be of some interest.  So stay tuned, I promise you won't be disappointed...well, I hope not anyway.

Just to add more interest to this rather dull post, here is a cute picture of a horse whose name I don't know and dog named Beej.  Also a horse butt on the right, which I would have cropped out if I had noticed it before.  Oh well, at least it's  not pooping.

 Pictured: Horse, left; Beej, center; Horse butt, right.

Christmas Day in Pictures

              (Without times because I wasn't too diligent about being punctual with my picture taking...)

Fresh snow Christmas Morning :)

MmMmMmm  Breakfast

Unwrapped Stocking Contents

Christmas Smudgey

Festive Earrings

Brunch Table

Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Christmasbots

Post Brunch Relaxing

Afternoon Skype Session, Abel Putting on his Santa hat.

Evening Walk in the Woods

Evidence of My Majestic Wipe-out in the Icy Field

Yummy Guacamole for Dinner

Bedtime Entertainment

14 Hours of Christmas Eve

Sleepy, jet-lagged 9am wake-up

10 am Ping-pong table assembly

11am Balloon shenanigans.

12 pm(ish) Drive to Chelsea w/ Igor.

Mustache time

Heyyyyy

Serioustache

3pm post-presents

4pm Game time

5pm Spike and Aidan Spike convo time--All Smiles

6pm Ravaged dessert table

7pm Hot Chocolate (post home-style Christmas Eve church service with carols and scripture)

8pm Christmas nail painting

9/10pm Christmas Vacation (not pictured: Mom snoring through most of the movie)

11pm Runtley sighting

My New Adventure

I don't have time to do a big post but I wanted to let you all know that I have arrived safely in Virginia and have moved in to my new place in Fairfax. I officially have two jobs, one of which I start on Thursday. I don't currently have internet at my new place but hopefully I will remedy that very soon. For now, I just wanted to let you all know that I am here and ready to start the next phase of my ever-changing life, here with my sister and very soon my little baby nephew. When I get internet at my house I will post more about where I am and what I am doing. I am at sister's house now for the night because this morning my car brakess malfunctioned and so it is at the shop to be fixed. I have to be up very early in the morning to take her to work so I must get to sleep, but I shall return soon enough!

Last days in Creede

Well, as most or all of you know by now, I am back on the East coast. It has been really nice to be home, but I do already miss Creede, especially with all this heat and humidity going on. But it has been so good to see family and I am looking forward to spending the next week relaxing and enjoying some down time before I move to Virginia.

My last days in Creede were terrific. The most notable was Sunday night when we went on our ladies camping trip. It turned out pretty much perfectly. We went out to Middle Rat Creek, which is a pretty rough drive up into the mountains and it was raining and storming as we drove in. A couple of the girls had driven up earlier in the day and set up most of the tents so thankfully we didn't have to do that in the pouring rain. Molly and I brought a huge tarp and some rope from the shop so we set that up as a shelter and it worked out pretty well.

Our fancy canopy.

Once we had the tarp set up a couple of the girls drove back towards town to pick up the last member of our crew and by the time they got back it had stopped raining. yay!

Finally we could start a fire with dry firewood the girls brought back from town.

Setting up the last tent.

Tent city!

We had tacos for dinner and spent the rest of the night around the warm campfire laughing and carrying on and telling stories as people around a campfire will do. And of course, ate plenty of s'mores!

I woke up early the next morning and took a walk around the marshy area that surrounded us where there are all sorts of beaver dams, hoping I might see some good wildlife and get some good pictures. Not much happened on the wildlife front but I did get some pretty pictures.

Sunrise casting light on the mountain.

My only wildlife sighting: A lone deer in the bushes.

Beaver dams! But no beavers to be seen.

When I got back to the campsite everyone was still sleeping so I decided to make a fire and eventually one by one everyone trickled sleepily out of their tents. We had a delicious breakfast of bacon and breakfast burritos with eggs and our leftover taco meat. We enjoyed the beautiful morning but finally the time came to pack up camp and head back to town.

All the ladies (Me, Tara, Molly, Adrian, Elena, Kat, Natalie)

It was definitely one of the best nights of my summer, I wish we could have done it more often. But I'm glad we managed to do it at least once before I left.

Tuesday was my last day and I spent most of it doing laundry and packing and running errands. But that night I went to Tommy's and hung out all night and then Molly and I got up and left for the airport at 9:30 Wednesday morning. I flew into DC around midnight and got up at 5:30am on Thursday to drive to Vermont with Christie and Casey. Needless to say, I spent most of that time sleeping.

Saturday was my cousin Kyle's wedding, which was very lovely. The rest of the week will be spent doing not much of anything, and then Friday is sister's baby shower, which will be fantastic, I am very excited. I probably won't have much to post until then, but don't give up on me, there are still plenty of adventures to come!