Julie got us up in the morning with some pancakes. We were in the car all stinking weekend and had only a few hours sleep and the sweetheart was up and making pancakes. She rocks.

I had to login to class for my first day back from a 3 week break, so it was already decided that Thursday would be designated a chill-out kind of day. I got the first week's assignments knocked out and went out to Target. I picked up some frames and went to Kinkos to have some 5x7's printed as a gift for Scott and Julie. I was really impressed with the Sony print stations at Kinkos.

Back at the apartment, I napped a bit and took it easy. I still hadn't heard from Martin, so I called and left a message. Craig called shortly afterward, wondering if I'd heard from Martin and if I was still interested in working with his company. Once again, I had to tell him to wait. That really pissed me off. I got a call from Martin finally late that afternoon, with the message that they hadn't decided yet, and I'd know when they did no matter what the decision was.

My mind was quickly being made up for me.

On Thursday night, Scott and I went to Buckley AFB to pick up some parting documents. There's one place I never thought I could say I've visited, but yep- I've now been on base at Buckley. Wild. We drove over to the restaurant that Julie works in and had dinner. Julie treated us, which was really nice of her. I had a buffalo burger, which tasted sweeter than ground beef. After dinner, Julie left work and joined us for a smoothie at Lollicup. There, they introduced me to Boba (a tapioca-based, gummy-like ball that tastes great in smoothies). We went back to the apartment and chilled out for the night. We were still kind of tired from yesterday's trip.

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On Friday, I got up and knocked out some more schoolwork. Scott went to work while I caught up on some news. The Peterson case, yadda yadda, Kobe, yadda, yadda, gay senator resigning, yadda yadda. When Scott was home again, he and I headed South to Colorado Springs to see the Garden of the Gods.

Along the way, we passed Castlerock, CO, which is aptly named from a rock formation on top of a hill that looks like a castle.

I had full bars on my phone, so I called a few people. Craig was next on my list at 4pm. "Let's do it." I told him, eagerly interested in starting this new career. It was a good feeling to ultimately just decide on the jobs based on their merits, not on promises of merits. I'm glad I came to this decision, and hope that several months down the road, I'll be able to read this entry and agree that this was the right path to take. (More on the job later...it's a whole separate entry)

We arrived after a bit of traffic and got out of the car to walk around the Garden of the Gods. It originally was land that the owner wanted to use as a beer garden. A friend of his told him it would be a garden fit for the gods, and the name stuck. The 'garden' is really a series of unique rock formations, jutting from the ground. It's really impressive looking around at the sheer red cliffs of unique formations like that. It was a fun trip.

On the way out of Colorado Springs, we saw NORAD right in front of us. Pretty wild to think that we were minutes away from one of the nation's largest nuclear war facilities, buried inside the last of a really impressive chain of mountains.

We got back into Aurora and went to Lollicup again for another Boba smoothie. We dropped one off for Julie and came back to the apartment. It was time to nap. The big trip of the vacation was about to happen.

Yellowstone, Baby. Yellowstone.