"Blizzard"

So, Denver thinks it has a blizzard on it's hands. Granted, 10+ inches has fallen today in the Metro area, but I was used to that at least once a week in Breckenridge, so I don't see what all the fuss is about. Work closed at 1 p.m., along with every other business. So, instead of a 40 min drive home, it took me two and a half hours! The Governor declared an emergency, highways closed down, schools were not in session and there were hundreds of accidents. We had a about 9 inches at the house. In the long run, the storm is good. Denver has had about 7 inches of snow all winter and barely any rain. So we are dry as a bone and need the precipitation, wet or frozen.

MiHiMuFu

The Mile High Music Festival is returning to Denver for its second year packed with two days of music. The lineup was announced this morning on KBCO. The official website lists more information. Check back for more updates over the next few months.
Here is the 2009 lineup so far:

Photo Shoot

Finished up my photo shoot for the January '09 issue. We shot it in front of the Bistro Vendome restaurant in downtown Denver. The subject is Exit Planning for Boomer Businesses. Also took some shots back at our photographers studio. John Johnston takes some great photos and also creates the New Belgium Brewery ads (see his blog for an inside look at how he creates those). Some low res, raw photos from the shoot are posted below. You can check out more work from John HERE.

Coldplay in Denver

Melissa and I went to the Coldplay concert at the Pepsi Center on Friday evening. Amazing show! Our seats were up near the nosebleeds, but the sound was great and we could see everything. They had a couple large screens with video that showed everything that was going on. What an amazingly talented band. From the music and lyrics, to the performance and lights, it was all spot on!
Coldplay.com

Coldplay plays Yellow for their encore. >>



You can see more video clips from the concert HERE.

Finally!!

Living in Denver is much different than Breckenridge when it comes to the first snow. Breck got it's first weeks ago. Here in Den, the weather guys have been talking about snow the past week, but it never happens. Each morning I wake to green grass while Breck is blanketed under powder.

Finally this morning the grass was no longer green. It had a fresh white coating on it and the flurries were still dropping as I drove to work. Winter is here, for a few hours. It will soon be all gone as the temps rise into the 60's and 70's.

Guess it's time to head up to the mountains for some skiing!!

What was Brewing this weekend?

This past weekend, we decided to go on a Brewery Biking Tour through the Denver area. We picked out a few locations and headed out on our bikes. Our first stop was to be the Hops of Cherry Creek Brewery. We biked along the Cherry Creek bike path for about 6.5 miles and found that the brewery was closed. Most likely due to the rising cost of hops around the world (read more about Hops prices here at the Boston Globe). So, instead we stopped by the Cherry Cricket, a popular sports bar in the area and had some food and a pint of some other local Colorado craft brews.

Next, we headed back north on the bike path to Pint's Pub. This is an English brewery that has 12 beers made on location. Two of them are "Live Ales" which are cask conditioned, served at cellar temp, hand pumped instead of CO2 and still have their live yeast cultures in them. I had the Dark Star Ale and Melissa had the Lancer IPA. Tasty!! They also serve some great Crisps. Pint's is also word-known for having the largest selection of Single Malt Whisky outside of Great Britain. Very cool Old English atmosphere. We will be back again to try some of their other brews.

For our third and final stop, we cruised over to the Great Divide Brewery, near Coors Field. Here we tried a few of their craft brews and also took a short tour of their facility. I had the Samurai and Melissa had the sampler and a very dark and heavy Oak Aged Yeti Imperial Stout. They have been in business for 14 years and distribute to almost every state and outside the U.S. as well.

Full of beer and food we peddled back to my place to finish our 15 mile Brewery Biking Tour. Melissa now has 30 breweries visited in Colorado and I have 28 out of about 95.

See my photos of the Brewery Biking Tour.

One a side note, we worked off the beer on Sunday morning with a 5k road running race in Arvada. I ran a 25:30 and got second place in my age group (20-30yrs). Melissa ran a good race finishing at around 30min.

And, I'd like to mention that I am sorely disapointed in the Patriots performance on Sunday. There is no excuse for losing to the worst team in the NFL, even if you don't have Brady. They better bring their defense into San Fransisco in two weeks because they forgot them in the locker room this past Sunday.

DNC Obama Acceptance Speech

(Click on the headline to see photos from this blog)
Melissa, her friend from work TC and I were fortunate enough to get tickets to Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the DNC. The speech was at the Denver Bronco's Invesco Field, about three miles from my house. The stadium holds 76,000 people and there were upwards of 80,000 there for the event. Many celebrities and media from all around the country.

The line went on forever and it took us about two hours to get in through security. Only one entrance for 80,000 people! The security was similar to what you find at the airport, but with many more police and snipers around the top of the stadium. Our wait was much shorter than it was for many others who stood in lines up to six miles long! Click here to see the route of our line to get inside.

Once inside we found our seats in section 526, but soon were upgraded, thanks to Melissa's connections, and found ourselves in section 135 about 10 rows up from the floor level. Were were behind the news tents for NBC, CBS and ABC, so the view was a bit obstructed, but the atmosphere made up for it.

Click here to see a video of the crowd doing the wave.

We saw Sheryl crow and Stevie Wonder play and heard speeches from Al Gore and Joe Biden. There were celebrities all around on the floor and we saw Martin Luther King III walk by and Samuel L. Jackson was seated just a few rows in front of us.

Click here to see a video of Stevie Wonder.

Then Barack came out to a huge roar. Click here to see a video Barack entering. He is an amazing speaker and goose-bumps came more than once during his talk. Personally, I feel that we need an organizer like him to change this country for the better. As he said, "8 is enough!"

Click here to see a video after the speech ended.