Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Flagstaff

My sweet best friend gave us a romantic getaway to Flagstaff as an engagement gift.
Actually-funny story. A few months ago Shannon sent me a text telling me "Saturday night you're both going with me to see Killswitch!" So Nick and I head over to her house to go see the show only to find out when she said "you're both" she had actually sent that text to me and another girl. My phone doesn't indicate when a text gets sent to multiple people :( So Nick gracefully bowed out and came to pick my drunk ass up later that night. Shannon felt really bad. Honestly, he didn't want to go because this was the same week that Guild Wars 2 and Borderlands 2 came out so he was happy to go home and game. At any rate an "I owe you one" was exchanged and it worked out nicely because we got engaged right before the Shannon found a Groupon for a Flagstaff getaway.
We headed up to Flagstaff Friday night after we got off work. We stayed at the Radisson, it was a pretty nice place. The Groupon included a few free drinks at the bar so after we brought our things in we headed down to the bar for a glass of wine. The bartender was a cool guy, we spent most of the night chatting with him and he recommended the next day that we go to Snowbowl and ride the ski lift up the mountain so we could see the trees changing color. A great suggestion. So we ended the night relaxing in the hot tub and the next morning headed out to explore. Breakfast was at a local place called Brandy's a restaurant that had been featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. The food was great but the coffee was even better! Definitely our go to breakfast spot anytime we're in Flagstaff now! After breakfast we headed up to Snowbowl. The drive was so pretty, all the trees were turning yellow and red. There was patches of snow everywhere. The ski lift took us up on a 45 min scenic ride. Here's a view from the bottom:
At the top, you could get off and walk around a bit. The whole area is actually covered in snow in the winter and people go skiing up there. Its really interesting to see it all with no snow on the ground. We plan to go back soon and try the skiing (or sliding down the mountain on our butts!). Here's a view from the top:
After snowbowl we found a great little wine bar downtown that not only had a huge wine menu but also a giant board game selection so we sat around playing board games and drinking wine before heading back home. All in all it was a great trip! 




Monday, November 12, 2012

What is your hope built upon?

Rainn Wilson has a pretty neat website called Soul Pancake, one of my new favorite websites. Its designed to open conversations about things as simple as whats your favorite this or that to your innermost feelings about life in general. I love when websites first start out because the part of the internet that goes there are the thinkers, the people that know where to find these things and like to spend time talking with other people like them before the rest of the world finds out and we end up with the likes that post on places like Yahoo Answers. So that's where Soul Pancake is right now and hopefully it can stay cool for a very long time.

Anyway, so someone posed the question "What is your hope built upon" and it made me think back to a time where I had no hope. A time in my life where I literally said to myself every single day "is this all there is?". I was in a terrible relationship, I didn't like my career and I was working three jobs only to never really make ends meet and my relationship with my family had deteriorated so badly because I hardly spoke to anyone. My "friends" were just people that I knew but I really didn't have anything invested in anyone, I really didn't know how to do that.

It wasn't until I made some real friends that I was able to take stock of what was going on and reassess my life. I moved out of survival mode and focused on relationships, not only making new ones but building old ones and cutting out bad ones. So with that I have to say that my hope is built upon friendship. Never underestimate the power of a good friend. When your life seems to be going nowhere, if you've got a network of people that truly love you to fall back on or just confide in then you're going to be just fine. Relationships give my life more meaning and hope that not matter what things will always be OK.