Three months.

What a fantastic couple of weeks. To start with, Sheida arrived two weeks ago. Some highlights from the five days that followed: spending hours upon hours perusing books downtown, running at the reservoir, belly dancing, racing tricycles around one of Boulder's best dive bars, hiking in the mountains around Mitchell Lake up in Ward, building an evening campfire in Nederland, staring up at millions of stars and having deep conversations about our futures, seeing Hubble at the IMAX in Denver, surprise salsa dancing, filming yet another original movie (which can be viewed here, for the curious), tooling around Pearl Street, and of course, eating lots and lots of delicious food.

After she left, I had about a day and a half to breathe. Then my dad arrived. Drove up to Ward again, this time to hike the Isabelle Glacier trail around Long Lake. Incredible. He was nice enough to have my ailing car repaired, so we spent one day exploring Pearl Street and the rest of downtown on foot, poking in and out of shops, bookstores, the beautiful library, and of course, restaurants. We visited the Museum of Science in Denver, saw Hubble (yes, again) and a planetarium show, and drove up to Nederland to watch the spectacularly clear Perseid meteor shower. Another day, we went hiking at Chatauqua Park and stumbled upon one of the most incredible natural phenomena I've ever seen: the Royal Arch. It's an enormous stone archway that frames an amazing panorama of Boulder, the Flatirons, and the rest of the Front Range. The trail made for a fairly taxing hike, but in the end, it was so worth it. Spending so much time with my dad was certainly something new, but it was really great to reconnect. I know he wasn't thrilled about returning to Rhode Island. Both he and Sheida seemed to really love it here. But... let's be honest, it's hard not to.


(here's why.)

Now I have a couple of weeks to regroup and relax before my next series of visitors arrive. I really love having people come out here, but it will be nice to have some time to process everything that has been going on. Apparently life doesn't stop while you're busy entertaining other people... who knew? I'm currently in the midst of starting my applications for grad school. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm incredibly excited, but I'm also a bit overwhelmed too. Not that it's a bad "overwhelmed". In fact, it's the same kind of "overwhelmed" I felt last spring when everything suddenly aligned to push me out here. I'm not terribly high on the idea of having to move back east, but I finally feel like I'm on the right path. Honestly, that's worth all the flat topography in the world. What's funny is that professional contacts have kind of just been falling into my lap lately. It will never stop amusing me, how things just seem to work out sometimes.