The American Numismatic Association Money Museum is located on the campus of Colorado College near downtown Colorado Springs. Here, Timmy is looking closely at the “error notes”, bills with mistakes.
On a day off of school on May 1st, the boys and I took a short trip down to Colorado College near downtown Colorado Springs to visit the American Numismatic Association Money Museum. More »
The Western Museum of Mining and Industry is a fun 1/2 day trip in the Colorado Springs area. We learned so much! Here’s Timmy posing at a headframe with the Rampart Range in the background.
The boys had some days with no school in April and early May, so we did some sightseeing around the city. I have a list that I keep of things to do when the kids have no school, and this year we are working our way through the list quite nicely. It was a lovely day on April 21st, so we visited the Western Museum of Mining and Industry, which is right off I-25’s Exit 156, which is also the North Gate of the Air Force Academy.
It was a great time for Jacob to take the trip, since he is currently in the middle of his first research paper about geology. He had a chance to learn about the valuable minerals that exist in the Rockies, and what is done to extract them. More »
Standing at the top the Red Lady lift. The lifts at Crested Butte are named after former Colorado mines.
Our family took a Spring Break trip at the end of March to Crested Butte, Colorado. It’s home to Mt. Crested Butte Ski Resort, which is a family-friendly, classic ski resort, a far departure from the day-tripper-friendly ski mountains we’d been visiting this season. Enjoy the pictures I took with my brand new iPhone 5S’s kick-butt camera!
This is the last of my February catch-up posts. Thanks for bearing with me.
Last month three Trader Joe’s food stores opened in Colorado. Two are in Denver and one is in Boulder. They’re all about 1 – 1 1/2 hours from here, which is the closest we’ve lived to a TJs in a long time.
Long-time readers might recall that a store opened in Omaha less than a month before we moved from the area in 2010.
Because I’m a crazy lady, and because the boys had no school on the day the stores opened (Valentine’s Day), the day we visited the History Colorado Center in Denver, we made a short stop at the southernmost of the three new Trader Joe’s stores in Greenwood Village.
The Greenwood Village store.
The Greenwood Village store is in a rather well-to-do area of Denver. It was absolutely packed.
Grand Opening Tip: Bring a friend. As soon as you walk into the store, grab a cart and get in line. The store was feeding a single line around the perimeter. It was about 25 minutes in line. You and your friend need to take turns browsing the store while keeping the cart in line. I put the boys in line while I browsed the aisles nearby.
There was a line of people just waiting for a shopping cart. I grabbed a basket instead. We filled it up to the brim, and Jacob even offered to hold some of the larger items so we could fit more into the basket. He was such a trooper — of course, he loves Trader Joe’s as much as I do so if he could help the basket fit more veggie pasta and tortellini, he would do it.
I was pleased to be able to stock up on frozen goodies, which I hadn’t done in years. However, the Greenwood Village store doesn’t sell alcohol, so I needed to plan another trip up to the next closest one.
Jacob saw this and asked for it. It was…interesting.
A couple weeks later I had a reason to go up to Denver again, and this time I headed up to the downtown Denver store on Colorado Blvd. This is the one with a liquor license.
The downtown Denver location. It’s in a pedestrian-friendly part of the city. Parking was tricky.
Getting to this location took much longer than I had anticipated. I figured out some detours through residential areas that kept me away from the incessant traffic lights.
Even though this trip was about 2 weeks after grand opening, it was just about as crowded. Once again I had to grab a shopping cart and quickly get in line. I picked up a few items, but not much. The point of this trip was to pick up some Three Buck Chuck.
Colorado requires the alcohol portion of Trader Joe’s be in a separate store. So one has to exit the regular grocery store and enter the space next door. All I needed was some white wine, but this is what I saw:
Whoa….
There were Chardonnays left and that was about it for the white wines. I picked up a couple bottles and was on my way.
I’ll just have to try another time.
Yesterday it was announced that Trader Joe’s leased space in a nearby shopping center here in Colorado Springs. Oh happy day! The store won’t be open till 2015, but I’m thrilled at having a Trader Joe’s closer to me than the nearest commissary!
Yes, Timmy’s picking his nose. We tweeted this picture to @altonbrown.
I’m almost embarrassed to talk about how I nearly missed this performance.
I’m a huge Alton Brown fan. Since his show Good Eats debuted in 1999, he has brought food science and geekery to the masses. Before the days of TiVo and DVRs, I’d make a point to watch the show weekly. Now that I can record the shows, I catch episodes whenever I can. More »
Timmy the catcher…again. His new coach’s son is also a catcher and his coach works hard on training them on techniques.
Yep, I’ve been scarce. I’ve been spending more time on my Facebook fan page than here, because I can pop up quick discussion items and engage with friends and fans that way.
That’s because baseball has started at the Vollmer house. And as the boys get older, their practice schedules become more intense. And as the practice becomes more intense, we are making more investments of time and protective equipment for them: new slider pants for Jacob, impact-resistant sports goggles for Timmy, a new catcher’s mitt for Timmy, a wheeled baseball bag for Jacob… More »
Making the right school decision in Colorado Springs can make you lose your mind.
As promised, here’s the rest of the story with our school choice.
The boys had expressed interest in the STEM schools in our district. This would be the Discovery Canyon Campus, a K-12 school about 9 miles away. Not unreasonably far away, and there would be bus service (somewhat) available if the boys got into the school.
You can go back to Part 1 of this diatribe about how the choicing process works.
In the months of January and February, each school offers a “choice night” where you can go to an information meeting and/or take a tour of the school. We attended both the Discovery Canyon Middle School and Elementary School meetings.
The middle school meeting was very informative. Jacob and I were pleased with the school’s methodologies and programs. The tour of the school showed us some of the classrooms and Jacob was pretty excited about it.
The following night we went to the elementary school meeting. The plan was to have Timmy’s second choice on his form be Discovery Canyon Elementary. The schedules would match up very well. Timmy liked what he saw with the school tour, also.
However, the very first words out of the principal’s mouth at the start of the meeting was “If you don’t live in the neighborhood, your student won’t be able to “choice in” to this school. We are overcrowded as it is.”
You see, the neighborhoods nearest Discovery Canyon are building at breakneck speed. The biggest planned community is called “Flying Horse” and many young families are moving in with elementary-school aged children.
Perhaps we should have left right then and there…but we didn’t. We stayed to listen to how the school distinguishes itself from the other (such as with their International Baccalaureate Primary Years program).
Timmy really enjoyed learning about Discovery Canyon, but was more interested in School in the Woods.
We submitted the applications in mid-February, and eagerly await the decisions about our sons’ futures.
This beautiful new facility opened in Spring 2012. It’s not completely full, there’s plenty of room to populate with more exhibits.
I’ve been remiss. 2 1/2 weeks since my last post. Things have been getting progressively busier in the Vollmer house as our boys have started their baseball practice with their new baseball program: Academy Little League.
The boys were out of school on Valentine’s Day, so we took the day and cashed in on part of the Christmas gift from my dear sister’s family: tickets to the History Colorado Center in downtown Denver. As I’ve written for the GeekMom blog, I love state history museums, and I’ve dragged our sons to the history museum for every state we’ve lived in since they were born. More »
Making the right school decision in Colorado Springs can make you lose your mind.
Earlier in January, Timmy came home from school and asked if he could apply to the “School in the Woods.”
I hadn’t really heard of “School in the Woods” (I saw a girl at the boys’ school wearing a “School in the Woods” hoodie every day and that’s it), so I had to interrogate Timmy a little more about what it was.
“It’s a school for 4th graders and you spend all your time outside studying nature.”
Hey — outside is good, right? More »
The snow, the views, and the lack of crowds makes Ski Cooper (not Copper) a local favorite!
Our family took two day trips over two consecutive weekends to Ski Cooper, a small resort just north of Leadville, Colorado. The lift tickets are very inexpensive, there were never lift lines, and we took advantage of the boys getting to take two full days of lessons through the resort’s “Panda Patrol” program.
I have to make clear here — such as what I put in the title — that we did not go to Copper Mountain, which is often what Google hands back to you when you Google anything like “skiing cooper” or something like that. Copper is a much bigger, more vacation-resort-type of ski area, but is only about 20 miles north of Cooper. That’s not where we went. More »
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