more pics

so this is how our house turned out, for those of you who dont' plan on coming out to see it for yourselves.

this is the living room.









this is the kitchen...






this is kind of a foyer.










this is like a chill out room. its right when you come up the stairs.






bedroom....it's hard to get a good angle in this room. it's bigger than it looks.












an aerial view. the fabric part is eric's office. it's as messy as ever. hence the fabric.









our back porch with fire pit. yay!!!


not only is it a blog full of house pictures, it's also an interactive game!!! you get a prize if you can find all three kitties in the pictures.


so we're having a memorial day party today. i use the term "party" loosely, due to the fact that we only have a handful of friends at this point. but, it should be a good time anyways. i'll post pics of that later on. i hope everybody has a great memorial weekend. holla.

This one goes out to Gael

From our recent trips to the Boulders Farmer's market I've been inspired by their zero-waste zone to start recycling, or more precisely recycling more. I mean I was going to recycle our various bottles and cans but after perusing the eco-cycle website (they sponsor the zero-waste thing) I got a better feeling for how much you can actually recycle. So basically anything plastic, glass, metal or paper based we can recycle. That means all the paper/cardboard items too (paper towel rolls, shaving razor packaging, shredded paper, etc). Now I'm trying to make my best effort to save anything recyclable from our trash can which is pretty enlightening -- before throwing anything plastic out I check if it's 1, 2, or 5...anything paper I toss into a seperate bag (even egg cartons). We don't have recycling pickup at our place, so we have to drive out to the Boulder recycling center, but like everything else out here it's only about 10 minutes away. There were a good amount of people at the center too which was a pretty good feeling.

The moral of the story? Try recycling too -- or more precisely try to recycle everything! I think the next step is to try composting, but I'll probably have to run that one by the landlord first. Anyhow I thought Gael would appreciate this and hopefully someone else will be inspired by me -- a lazy bum who can still make a difference.

So that's all fine and good...you know "one man can make a difference!" but maybe not so realistic. It got me thinking about what we could do to encourage not just self-motivated individuals to recycle (and in general be good to the environment), but businesses and the general public as well. It seems that perhaps more than just a good feeling should be at stake, maybe we can start offering tax breaks or incentives for "green points." Every environmentally friendly decision a company makes would be rewarded (or lack of green points could be penalized). It just seems so crazy that any time you stop in a fast food joint you have no option but to send your "waste" to a dump. There are so many better options...recycle the paper, plastic, and foil...send to food waste off for composting, use biodegradable plastics. With a bit of financial incentive we could finally speak in terms that corporations understand. I bet this has been thought of before, but it would be pretty cool to see it in action. Any Green Party candidates out there?

more pictures, as jee requested

here is a lovely one of eric and me. i could be a model.

so, i got a job. i'm working at a chiropractor's office as a receptionist. it's pretty interesting. i get free treatments there and i've never been to a chiropractor before. he's also a nutritionist of sorts. he has most of his patients on some kind of whole food supplement or another. i've started taking them as well because i apparently have parasites.




things are going pretty well out here. we've been doing a lot on the weekends and kinda staying in on most weekdays, considering we both get up pretty early nowadays. this weekend, we just putzed around town on saturday, did some shopping for the house, etc. we headed out around 4:30 to go to the Erie town festival with heather, andrew, jeff, lauren, emily, joe, and liz. these are all people that eric works with. heather and i were the only non-webroot people there, but they're all pretty cool. and surprisingly young. eric took a particularly flattering picture of me in front of a giant coors can, which is where we hung out for the entire time we were there. we then went to erie's only blues bar and hung out there for a bit. it was a pretty good time, all in all. but erie reminds me a lot of carrollton, so i don't think we'll go there very often. it was interesting, though.

on sunday, we continued the tradition of heather and andrew coming over to watch sopranos and big love. this time, they brought us food. it was pretty delicious. we also made s'mores at our fire pit on our porch. it was pretty cool.

here's a pic of our backyard a couple days ago during a storm. pretty awesome, huh? we thought so, too.

hope everybody's having a great week.

So it's been a while...but we're finally getting into the swing of things.
Phase I
Saturday was our second trip to the Boulder Farmer's Market, but our first trip on a nice and sunny day. Needless to say it was packed. The market is definitely far superior to the Atlanta one in Piedmont Park -- I'm basing that mainly on head count, number of stalls, variety, and delicious all-natural zero-waste food court (breakfast and lunch items).

I scored some local goat cheese coated with rosemary, organic tomatoes, a bag of spinach, peach jam, and radishes -- all from different vendors. And before all of that we got some fresh cooked (they had some sort of portable kitchen) breakfast burrito type things. They have this idea of a zero-waste system where everything is either recyclable or compostable (and most of the cups/strasws are actually a biodegradable plastic). Overall I'm definitely impressed. And did I mention this is all in downtown Boulder on a blocked off street next to the park and Boulder Creek?

Phase II
We heard about this pretty awesome place to go to called Estes Park (pronounced "ess-tiss" by the locals and if you pronounce it "ess-tees" you get laughed at...we got laughed at). From what we heard, it's supposed to have crazy wildlife and awesome views. What we learned through our research is that the name is misleading. It is not, in fact, a park, but a town...near a park. Rocky Mountain National Park to be exact, which has a supposedly amazingly cool road to drive on, which turns out to be closed until Memorial Day, due to the fact that they never know what kind of weather they'll get out there. We decided to take the Peak to Peak highway out there, which is the longer, more scenic route. There were some incredible photo opportunities, but that curvy mountain road inhibits picture taking.

We started in Boulder--elevation 5485, drove up to Nederland, our nearest mountain town--elevation 8350, hopped on the Peak to Peak and nearly made it to an elevation of 10,000 in a town called Ward, which had an awesome church up on the very top of a cliff...we didn't get a picture of that, there was nowhere to stop. We finally cruised into Estes Park, which is in a cool little valley. We caught the tail-end of their jazz festival which was taking place in Performance Park, which is about the size of a little league baseball diamond. We sat next to their creek and picnic'd. It was getting chilly and starting to rain, so we headed back home. On the way home, we had to stop at a "historical landmark" to snap some photos. We ended up back at Nederland, just in time for a delicious meal at a restaurant called the Pink Flamingo and then coasted back down Canyon towards home. All in all, a productive day.