Ah Halloween.

One of my very most favorite holidays. And why, Amy, are you sitting at home on Halloween evening, you ask? Because you most definitely know me, and typically I should be out galavanting about the bars of Denver wearing ass-less chaps and a cowboy hat, downing whiskey filled drinks that will invariably set me up for a miserable day tomorrow. But no. I am here. It's approximately -3892943 degrees outside, w hich is too cold for even me to wear a scantily clad ensemble outside of this living room. Furthermore, I have several projects going currently and a hectic week and a half ahead of me. So no, I am not bar-hopping tonight. Be proud, be very proud.

It has been a long while since I've updated. Just working, working, working. Busy, wonderful, awe-inspiring days at Campuspeak; busy, long, on-my-feet hours at J.Crew in the evening. By the time I get home around 10:30pm I pretty much crash out. No time for blogging, unfortunately. Very sad, I hope to improve upon this in the future.

So I need to get to work, but for those of you who are anxiously awaiting, I thought I would upload a few Halloween pictures from Saturday night. Brady is a porn star character with chest hair, I am the usual. We went downtown to some Irish bar our new friends from the Stampede rented out. Then we tried to do LoDo's, realized we were never going to get in, and hit the Martini Lounge.

Enjoy. You would expect no less. :)

Snowing... again.

Well, it is Friday night at like 2:30am. We just got in from the bars and it is snowing... again. That's twice in a week. Absurd, I tell you, absurd. In what place does it snow this often in the middle of October?! Unbelievable.

We had a good night, though. I'm glad becuase to be honest, I am a little sad about not being at home at JMU for Homecoming this weekend. OK, truth, I'm a lot sad. Anyway, Shannon's birthday is Monday so we went out tonight with some of her friends from Outback to Legends. Well, actually, they went downtown earlier tonight but I had to work at J.Crew until 10 so I came home, ran through the shower, and hit up Legends. It started snowing around 12 and the roads are already sort of covered. Luckily Shannon's boss, Shawn, drove us home. That was good news. My car is still at Legends so I will have to go back in the morning and pick it up. Hopefully the roads won't be too bad then, we will see. Anyway, tomorrow I am on call at J.Crew from 5-10, but I need to shop for some shoes and get at least two jobs applied for also. I am really hoping I don't have to go to work, just becuase I have so many other things I need to get done. But I am sort of going to assume that I will get called in. I have a feeling I will.

Otherwise, not a lot is new. Applying to tons of jobs, praying that something works out for me. A couple of our speakers were in town today- Mark Sterner and Christian de la Huerta- so we got to meet both of them which was really cool We got to see Mark speak this afternoon which was absolutely an unforgettable event.

I am very tired. I haven't gotten a lot of sleep this week so I am goign to crash out. I will definitely update in more detail and post some pictures soon!! Hope everyone is well...

Kickin ass and takin names...

Tonight at The Stampede, a guy came up to me and grabbed my arm and said, hey, did you ride the bull yet tonight? And I laughed and said, yeah, of course.... why? To which he said, oh really, are you kickin ass and takin names like usual?....


Apparently I have a reputation around Denver. I am the "bull girl". And people know me for my mad bull skills. I totally rock.

Oh, and PS- I got up to level 90 out of 100 tonight. Which is AWESOME!! I'm pretty psyched.

And now I am going to bed. Because quite frankly, I am going to feel icky in the morning.

Great day!

Today was a great day! Seriously, all around wonderful day. And when I woke up this morning, I was not really anticipating such a fantastic day. Which makes it that much better.

I went to work this morning and spent most of my morning doing late contract calls and working on the article I am writing for the newsletter that is going out Friday. I love writing, particularly this kind of assignment where it is not really 100% fact, and it heavily draws on my experiences and things that have happened to me. It was a really good time. Plus, it was a gorgeous day so I was just sitting at my desk looking out at the snow capped Rockies. Amazing.

At lunch time I left to go meet one of our awesome speakers, Andrea, for lunch. Andrea is really one of the most inspiring, energizing people I have ever met. It was a great lunch, just talking to her about where I'm going and how I plan to get there. She really helps to put things into perspective and she gave me a lot of great advice about how to approach breaking into the field and things like that. She is also going to be at the conference I am going to in November, as will so many of our speakers. It's going to be great. Anyways, I left there smiling at the world. She's SO knowledgeable. I feel really lucky to have had contact with her!

So I came back to the office where things were totally jumping. I love that. I was really busy. I also heard from Kelly and Becca, two of our other amazing speakers. They speak about sexual assault and everyone loooooooves them. I have seen Andrea speak but I haven't yet seen Kelly and Becca... I am really anxiously awaiting the opportunity, though, because I've heard rave reviews. Plus, hats off to them for approaching such a difficult topic with confidence, openness, honesty, and heart. They are such warm people- I'm also blessed to have gotten to know them! They are in Florida, which is one of my choices for when I leave here, so I will totally be calling on them for their thoughts. :) Anyways, they sent me a note about this AWESOME gig they had last week at the fabulous Grand Valley State University along with a Take Back the Night tshirt. So cool of them!

Then I called into J.Crew because tonight was my on call shift. I was informed that they would not be needing me, which was a THRILL because I really needed a night of nothingness to get my stuff in order a little bit. So after I left the office I hit up Express because I had accepted the fact that I needed to buy new pants. I have been putting it off for several weeks not and it just got to a point where I couldn't not do it. Unfortunately I think that I am still growing (freakishly tall girl) and my ass is definitely growing, so I had to do it. So I got to Express where I found a HUGE fall sale going on!! YIPPEE! So basically I got a shit ton of clothes for not too much money. Rock on.

I then came home and ate lasagna for dinner, which made me happy, and I followed it with this crazy chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream Brady invested in (yet another reason my ass is growing). Then I did a little work on the cover letter and resume I am sending off tomorrow, and I am about to shower and hit up the Stampede tonight. Yay!

Tomorrow night I am so going to bed early. Seriously. :) Because this weekend is going to suck. (Working lots.)

OK, going to run. Hope everyone is doing great. Miss you all, hugs and love!

Snow in October... my personal hell.

Well, it is 12:30 here and I have sooooo much work to do before I go to bed. You know, cover letters and the like. And despite the fact that I had a full day, super busy with 14 hours of two jobs with a lot of time on my feet, I am wide awake! I feel like a little kid at Christmas time.

We are supposed to get snow tonight. Not a lot of snow, but enough snow to make it worth my while. I think they are calling for 1-3 inches, and although it hasn't put down a flake yet, the temperatures have been miserable all day and I think rain has been falling since I woke up this morning. Now don't get me wrong, I am not overjoyed by the snow. I don't even really like snow all that much as it usually just interferes with my plans and makes me cold and cranky. But I am very excited to see my first Denver snow. Maybe it'll be nicer and prettier and less miserable than Virginia snow. I don't know, we'll see. I fully intend to have my camera wired to me tomorrow in the event that I do, indeed, wake up to white skies and ground.

And then I remember that will mean that I will have to scrape my car, which is oh-so-unfortunate seeing as that is not only my least favorite activity of all time, but I haven't seen my scraper in some while. I feel certain it is buried deep in the confines of my trunk. Lovely.

Work today was good- Darren asked me to do some article-writing, which as we all know, I love the opportunity to voice my thoughts and opinions through writing. And I certainly have some strong opinions. Our office is getting flu shots on Friday which should be lovely fun for us. Tomorrow Shannon and I get to start hand addressing 200 envelopes, which will be the funnest activity of all time. From the 'Speak, I went directly to J.Crew where I made the horrific mistake of wearing deadly shoes and I spent a whopping 4.5 hours on my feet. (I wanted to wear flats, I needed black shoes, I had one pair of black flats and I guess I had forgotten all the reasons I never wear those shoes. Now I remember and it won't happen again.) Anyways, it was lots of folding and even though it was not busy it took us forever and a day to close tonight, which was frustrating. Ah well.

I need to sleep, I suppose. After, of course, I finish the cover letter and other things I have going. Godspeed, everyone. If I wake up tomorrow buried in a blizzard, I will call as soon as we restore power and stock up on bread and water and milk and things like that. ;) (Sorry, that's the Virginian in me slipping out...)

Beautiful people.

Pictures from the top of LoDo's. Below are pictures of me and my new fabulous friend Ryan and me and Brady. I decided against putting the gross burrito pictures on the website. They're funk nasty.

The rooftop bar

Last night we went downtown to LoDo's, which we had not yet tried out but really wound up liking it. Downstairs is a kind of college hangout type place, it was sort of similar to Croc's, I guess, but bigger and not nearly as crowded. But upstairs is a rooptop bar. It totally rocked. It's right across the street from The Tavern, which also has the roof top setup, and across from the Cowboy Lounge. We had a great time. We met a very nice man named Ryan who is a lawyer in California and was here checking things out, trying to decide whether he wanted to relocate here. We spent most of the evening with him and had a really good time. Dean joined us around 11, too. It eventually got sort of cold, so Ryan and I left LoDo's and tried out the Cowboy Lounge, which naturally I loved. I love the country scene around here. It rocks.

Strange events of last night. When Brady and I got downtown the original plan was to go to Sing Sing until we got there and discovered the massively large line outside and decided to find a different place. Anyways as we are walking through downtown we came up on a rather hairy, homeless man walking down the road. As it turns out, he was also perhaps foreign, as he had a very difficult time communicating his thoughts. We were walking toward him, at which point he turned to us and said something. I say "something" because it was nearly impossible to translate. At any rate, it came out like this: "Horrrrrrrrrr." With a R rolled. "Horrrrrrrrr." Now, after asking him to repeat himself four or five times, I came to the conclusion that the man was trying to tell Brady, "Hold her." As in, hold my hand, or hold my hair, or hold whatever he wanted to hold. The problem, however, is that our dear hairy friend was phonetically saying, "Whorrrrrrrrre." "Whorrrrrrrre." Yes, it's true, I was called a 'whore' by a nice homeless man in downtown Denver. Wow. What a night.

Also, as the bars were closing out last night there were a few Mexican men strolling around downtown dragging coolers behind them, carrying signs. From atop of LoDo's, I suspected that they were selling beer from these coolers. Brady disagreed and thought that they were selling bottled water. As it turns out, however, they were actually selling prewrapped burritos. Now, I would never in a trillion years eat a pre-prepared burrito out of a cooler in downtown Denver from a man I dont know, but Brady is slightly more adventurous and he bought two. Here's where the warnings come in: Be careful with those burritos. Seriously. We both took one bite in the car on the way home and they were so spicy we thought we were seriously going to die. No lie. This is coming from the girl who drinks whiskey out of the bottle. My throat was on fire and I couldn't breathe. Be careful.

OK, must go. Gotta get ready, working at J.Crew all afternoon. I have a few pictures from last night that I will post when I have more time. Hope everyone is doing great!

The Fray at Red Rocks

Last night Brady and I ventured out of beautiful Aurora up to Red Rocks for the Fray concert. It pretty much rocked. First of all, I've never seen anything as absolutely breathtaking as Red Rocks... ever. It is gorgeous. It's kind of a waste of time for me to even attempt to write about it, because nothing I say is going to do any justice. If you get a chance, you really must go check it out for yourself. It's overwhelmingly beautiful.

So basically you drive up this mountain to get to the venue and there are just these huge rock mountains all around you. You kind of don't know what to look at first, it's awesome. Brady and I just were kind of driving in silence and we kept going, "Wow..." Once we got to the top we tailgated for a while- Brady drank a two liter of Bullfrog and I did the standard whiskey... and we made friends with some of the folks around us. Some very nice people- a carload of CSU kids in front of us and down the aisle there was a guy from Virginia who had very nice things to say about the party life at JMU. I had to agree. Anyways, totally beautiful.

So once we decided to venture inside for the concert, it was seriously the hugest, longest hike ever. We were basically hiking up a mountain and really, it's not very smartly engineered. Now I realize that seeing as the arena is esentially cut out of a big huge slab of ROCK... engineering was probably not the greatest of their problems. But it really is not an easy stadium to get in and out of. For instance, after the concert it took us an hour to physically walk out of the place, down the big walkway on the side of the mountain to get back to the parking lot. It was craziness.

Anyways, once you are in, all of the seating is like picnic bench type things going up the slope. Directly to your left and right are these big huge rock slabs. The stage in front of you pretty much has rock for walls on the left and right and the floor and the 'ceiling' above the band... and over the top of the stage you can see all of the lights of Denver. It's amazing. I seriously just sat there with my mouth hanging open, gawking at all of the scenery. Gorgeous! The weather was perfect- beautiful sunset and the temperature was perfect. I only put on my hoodie around like 9 when a little bit of a breeze kicked up. It was gorgeous.

Oh. And The Fray was really awesome too. If you get a chance to see them, I'd say it's well worth the money. They're from Denver, too, so it was a bit of a homecoming for them. Very fun. :)

I'm going to post a few pictures I have. Most of them are just from when we were driving up the mountain, and some of them are from when we were tailgating- the rocks around the parking lot. Again, these pictures don't do the place justice. But they're the best I've got.

(OH... and once Brady sends it to me, I will post a very interesting pictures in which you will get to see what me and Brady look like after I've had an absurd amount of whiskey and he's had a two liter of Bullfrog. Yeah, we're beautiful people...)

In other news, I started J.Crew today. I am tired and starving!! I'm gonna go eat and chill a little before another rockin week at Campuspeak kicks off. Hope everybody's doing awesome! I hear I missed a great weekend back home with the wedding action and whatnot. Miss you all!