Blue Sage Realty in Westminster Sucks!

I also posted a review of Blue Sage Realty, Westminster CO at Yelp.

There are a few other listings for Blue Sage on the interwebs, so this is the one that he had this bad experience at:

Blue Sage Realty, Inc
8471 Turnpike Dr, Suite 220
Westminster, CO 80031
(303) 432-9898 Office

http://www.bluesagerealtyinc.com

Denver’s selection brings the high-profile political gathering to the Pepsi Center in August 2008 — exactly 100 years after the city hosted its first and only national party convention. About 35,000 delegates and journalists are expected for what business leaders hope will mean a more than $160 million boon for the city.

“There is no question that the West is important to the future of the Democratic Party,” Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said in a release. “The recent Democratic gains in the West exemplify the principle that when we show up and ask for people’s votes and talk about what we stand for, we can win in any part of the country. Additionally, we have a number of strong Democratic leaders in the West who will be a part of showcasing the vision of Democratic leadership for America as we introduce the next Democratic President in the Rocky Mountains.”

It seems like this place is starting to get a little bit trendy or something… I am pretty excited about it though.

I also have a brother-in-law in Kansas who works for the local power company as a journeyman, and last I knew he hadn’t been home in 7 straight days. Nebraska and Kansas seemed to receive the brunt of the ice storms, while Baca County seemed to be hit the hardest by the snow.

It warmed up very nicely in Colorado Springs and Pueblo on Wednesday, so you may think that the danger is behind us for the storm battered southeastern plains.

But analysts are saying that ranchers can lose $2 billion in cattle in this storm. And that’s just the cattle industry.

Factor in collapsed buildings, people trapped in remote homes, businesses shut because they can’t get deliveries and customers can’t reach them, and a terrible disaster is looming.

Volunteers on snowmobiles, eight national guard helicopters, and even two F-16 spotter jets were involved in Wednesday’s frantic effort to save the cattle, who’ve been without food and water for a week now.

Another storm is expected to hit on Friday. The prediction is for minimal snowfall. However, wind could cause a ground blizzard, once again covering the roads that have already been plowed.

Nearly 3,000 people are still without power near Lamar and Walsh because of downed power lines caused by the storm.

However, things are looking up. Both Govenor Owens and US Senator Ken Salazar are asking that Bush declare the area a disaster area to start getting Federal assistance, and the National Guard has made it’s way down to the SE corner to help get crucial supplies in. A friend of mine that I grew-up with is in the National Guard and was actually headed back down to that area from Denver to go help with the work going on down there.

A lot of volunteers have made their way down there, including snowmobile clubs and various people trained for this sort of disaster. They’ve also got equipment from everywhere from Pueblo to the Denver International Airport helping to clear snow, and food shipments are starting to make their way there as well. All that I can really say is a big thank you to all of those who are helping out. If I felt there was something I could do other than get in the way and I wouldn’t get stuck myself, I’d head down to lend a hand.

Some updated media coverage:

• Crisis looms in snowed-in southeast Colorado – Currently the headline story for the Rocky Mountain News. Be sure to check out the slide show too.
• Race to find, feed cattle swirls across Colo. ranches
• Baca County digging out – Several good photos of Springfield CO, which is about 18 miles from my hometown of Walsh CO and is the county seat of Baca County.
• Groups scour southeastern Colorado for trapped cattle
• Situation on southeastern plains dire – Streaming video with this one.
• Ranchers Racing to Feed Livestock – More streaming video coverage here.
• Grocery Stores and Cattle Both Lacking Food

Outside of that, its been fairly difficult to find any sort of welding training in Denver. However, I randomly stumbled across the Community College of Denver which offers Welding classes! Sweet! I’m fairly sure they are offered in the evenings.

Update: Yep, it looks like they are offered in the evenings for sure, from 5-8:30 PM.

As for news and general life updates, I’ve really been very burnt-out on school (yet again) lately and decided to take a long break from it. It eats up all of my free time and between it and work it makes me very one dimensional. I’ll eventually go back like I always do, but I really need a break from it for awhile. I honestly struggle with whether or not I should finish. Part of me wants to take a few more of my CS theory classes and call it a day, and the other part wants to finish-up the degree and for some reason consider grad school.

I’ve started back up again on some minor projects around the house, and would finally like to start restoration/performance work on the Z in the Summer since I don’t plan on being back in school for at least a year. Lately I’ve also been poking around in Django as well as starting to browse through a Java certification book in my free time. I’ve been working in Java fairly exclusively (finally!) for a couple of months now and find myself enjoying it a lot more than doing scripting despite all of the falsehoods about how it’s “dead” now. Maybe it’s just because it’s a new tool, time will tell, but I find it actually enjoyable because of the tool support for it. That and I’m dealing with fun Computer Science problems like connection pooling and thread blocking rather than “can you make that phone red?” type boring bullshit.

Right now I’m on a needed two week break from teh works and am getting caught-up on a lot of things that I’ve been needing to get done.

Anyhow, I doubt I’ll write too many posts like this in the new blog as it keeps the stalkers a bit too informed. Not to mention, this isn’t a LiveJournal.

Oh, one other fleeting update after pulling an all-nighter to get this blog setup– it snowed.

As for myself, I seem to end-up in a lot of old Kerouac haunts for whatever reason.

I don’t regularly post about when I go out, but I think the following experience warrants a post. After the concert we grabbed a few drinks in Uptown, then did a classic post-drinking breakfast at Pete’s Kitchen. Pete’s was busy as usual and we ended-up taking seats at the counter. Shortly after we got there a guy in his mid 60′s sat down by us and proceeded to give the conversation of a lifetime. Essentially he was a single wealthy guy who grew-up in that area, and hadn’t had to work in twenty years because of financial windfall. Some of the quotes include:

“I wish I had a time machine so I could go back to the late 60′s with my money, some extacsy, and some viagra!”
“It was great back then, anything you could catch from a girl could be cleared up by a shot.”
“I used to have a Jaguar back then that only cost $5000…. girls would always ask to go for a ride in it. Eventually my first question was ‘do you give head?’”
“… I once got 4 blow jobs in one day in that car”
“My son only needs an Audi to get laid”
“My son set me up with a computer, and I don’t do much with it other than surf the internet for porn”
“I’m going to vote for gay marriage to piss people off. I think they have it good right now because they don’t actually have to get married because of what all of us straight people have done to fuck-up marriage”
“I went to Rocky Horror Picture Show once just to be entertained by all of the people there. I was way too old to be there, but I just took some Scotch and took two shots each time everyone else smoked a joint”

He had us rolling. He was obviously a bit off of his rocker, but you could tell he’s lived an awesome life and spoke fairly eloquently yet vulgulary funny. Especially to be his age and out eating breakfast at 1 in the morning. I hope I have a life half as fun as his. It was definately a good way to close a great night.

Good times.

Well, I’ve finally completed a long trail from end-to-end. This is the third time I’ve done the Cherry Creek Bike Trail– the first time I had to turn back because of inclement weather, the second time I didn’t quite make it to the swim beach because it was already dark and I had to make the long ride back home (it was hard to tell how much further the trail went to get to the res.. it was only another half mile or so.. d’oh!).

The Cherry Creek Trail from start to finish s basically from the downtown REI in Denver all the way out to Cherry Creek Reservoir (I know people who think that takes several days to drive, much less bike). According to my Cyclometer, it was a 29.68 mile roundtrip, and my top speed was 26.5. After some rough calculations, it appears that I burn about 1500 calories on a bike ride like that– sweet!

The trail is /much/ better when it’s dry, and it certainly has a lot of nice scenery when it’s busy too. I took a few pictures along the way just for fun which you can check-out here. I took my time making it up to the res since it’s a slight uphill climb and I also wanted to take pictures, but I only stopped once on the way back to get some dinner and hang-out with Lindsey for a bit.

I knew something about the show seemed oddly famillar, but I finally put the pieces together in the “gay” episode when they shot a scene at Fontano’s (an old lunch haunt of mine) and during the same scene an RTD bus went by (and you can also see the Chipolte behind them, which is on the other side of Fontano’s). Following that scene, they also film something similar at the Magnolia Hotel.

I also noticed that a few scenes from Trigger Happy TV were filmed in Denver as well (links to typical Trigger fodder for your viewing pleasure here, here and here).