My work day on Friday ended in an excellent way – with a wine tasting! I had a pretty frenetic work day up until then, but it was really nice to know that there was a hard stop to the day. This event had fifty people, and I did a class on the basics of wine tasting, then we tasted a variety of Coppola wines.
I had actually visited the Coppola winery when I went to Sonoma years ago, and it’s a really cool place to visit! However, I have to admit that the wines are not totally my favorite 🙈 Nonetheless, I planned the tasting around them, and it went really well, even though I ended up skipping some of the videos I had planned to break up the presentation. We had a lot to talk about! I really had a lot of fun leading this tasting, and I’d love to do more… maybe for some of my friends in the neighborhood.
After the tasting, I was definitely feeling the wine, but headed down to the gym for a Peloton yoga class. Honestly, the wine made it kind of nice and extra relaxing – and with something like a casual yoga class, I didn’t have to worry about form being off and getting hurt! (I would definitely not try a strength class after wine, for example.) But my drinking was not over yet for the weekend – my date came over and we headed to meet my friends Chris and Mark for dinner at Tequila Y Mezchal down the street. The service was unfortunately not very good, as they were extremely short staffed, but I don’t blame the restaurant. It’s a tough time for all restaurants right now, particularly with the expanded unemployment benefits leading a lot of people to decide not to work. I will definitely be happy when those ease up! Regardless of the service, the four of us had a really nice time, and I ended the night out on my deck at home sipping some rosé – relaxing!
Saturday was a really fabulous and fun day. I woke up far too early, at 4:30am, but read in bed for a while. The novel I was in the midst of (The One You’re With) was rather frustrating – it’s about high school sweethearts who split up for one summer in college, then got back together, married, and had kids. Eighteen years later, a girl shows up on their doorstep claiming to be the husband’s daughter, from that summer they were apart. The wife and the entire town are acting like he did something wrong, but all I could think of was Friends: “They were on a BREAK!” But even with my frustration at the story line, I still wanted to keep reading and see what would happen 🙈
When I finally got up, I had a super relaxed morning – my date and I took our dogs over to Moxie Bread in Louisville for coffee and pastries (and some bread to take home!), and I got an avocado toast that was really delicious. After breakfast, I came home to get cleaned up (oops, no workout yet), then headed to downtown Denver to meet back up with my date and his college friends who were visiting from out of town. We had a lovely afternoon walking around Confluence Park / LoHi, stopping for ice coffee, and then heading to a fudge shop in Arvada that also had delicious ice cream. Yum! Finally, I headed home to get on with the healthy part of my day – a salad to balance out the ice cream, a 20 minute core workout, a 20 minute spin class, and a 20 minute chest and back strength class. I liked breaking the workout up into three short segments like this; it kind of reminded me of an Orangetheory class. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of split workouts like this, but they’re broken up all throughout the day; I definitely prefer doing it in one shot rather than having it loom over me.
Finally, I ended the day meeting up with my date and taking our dogs up to Twin Lakes dog park, a new-to-me spot next to Avery Brewing. Twin Lakes is a giant 75 acre dog park that has (obviously) two lakes in it, and we thought it would be fun to see if either of our dogs would want to swim. We both adopted our dogs in the last year, and hadn’t taken them swimming yet, and with how Sadie hates baths, I had no idea how this would go. She ended up wading into the water a little bit, but didn’t want to get her chest / face wet; she was much more interested in the tall grass around the edges of the dog park, where I’m sure all kinds of critters were hiding. I just hoped she wouldn’t find a snake!
After the dog park, we walked across the street to grab dinner and drinks at Avery, where my friend Heather was meeting up with us. Unfortunately, Sadie still isn’t great with chilling out at breweries… though in this case, I understood why, as there were prairie dogs popping up in the parking lot across the way from us. Yikes! I had hoped that the dog park would tire Sadie out enough to relax, but no such luck.
However, I relaxed myself by getting a Quinntiki beer – a rum barrel-aged imperial blonde with pineapple, coconut, orange, and nutmeg. It was so tropical and delicious, but… it was also 16.2% ABV!!! So dangerous. To go along with it, I also got a fried chicken sandwich and fries (waistline be damned), which were absolutely fantastic and exactly what I was craving. We had a really fun night, and I was grateful to get to spend so much time doing so many fun things with my date!
On Sunday, I tried my hand at taking both dogs for a run together. While I was initially nervous that the two of them together might be more pulling than I could handle, Sadie and Hazel actually seemed to temper each other a bit, and running with both of them was really nice. I quickly realized that sometimes one dog would see a rabbit that the other dog didn’t see, but rather than the dog who saw it working the other dog up, the calmer dog seemed to soothe the other one. It was great! We only did a short five miles around the neighborhood sidewalks, as I didn’t want to go much further with Hazel (who typically only runs 4-5 miles), but it was lovely.
When I got home, thinking of the day before, I had avocado toast for breakfast with my date – yum! And then once he and Hazel left, I was happy to have the rest of the day ahead of me with no real plans. Unfortunately, I didn’t get quite as much done as I would have liked with that free time. Story of my life lately, huh?
But in the evening, I finally got hit with a burst of productivity, and took care of a house project that had been plaguing me for week – taking the vertical blinds down from my kitchen sliding doors, and replacing them with a new curtain rod and curtains. They looked great, and I wish I had done this years ago!
Unfortunately, I had gotten my burst of productivity so late that it left me running out of time for my other big chore: mowing the lawn. By the time I finished the blinds, it was 8:30pm and just starting to get dark, so I debated whether that was too late at night to run the mower. I decided that I would just mow the back lawn, which needed it more, and which would only take ten minutes. But then less than 30 seconds into mowing, I ran over the extension cord with my lawn mower, severing it. That ended my lawn mowing for the night! Serves me right for trying to mow so late; I had a good laugh after, and I’ve learned my lesson for next time 🙈