Delicious

I am very excited to announce that I am one employed lady in Denver. Not too bad for arriving less than two weeks ago! J is on his way towards steady paychecks, too, and is doing an exciting-sounding temp gig at a gallery next week. Next step: find an apartment. And a car. Ug. Hey, do you have a free car you'd like to give us?

Being so busy with getting settled in, I haven't really had the chance to visit with my friends here as much as I would have liked. Part of it, I'm sure, is the feeling of permanence, a feeling that we're here for the long run and don't have a rushed schedule, so there's no reason to cram a bunch of visiting into a couple days, like we usually have to. But at the same time, I know now I'll have to make more of an effort to get out and seek people out. Because otherwise that's how people become locked up recluses, right?

I had a big bought of missing New York last week. I realized I left all my really close lady friends on the east coast (and one on the west coast, but she technically left me), and got pretty sad. That plus being unemployed in your parents' basement on a weekday isn't the most cheering scenario. But luckily, some friends called and we ended up trolling the streets of Denver during their big First Friday celebration. All these little galleries open up along a big stretch, and tons of people come out and have a big arty party. It was good to see the city come to life.

You know how we lived in Sunset Park and our whole neighborhood was nothing but little rolling carts of ladies selling tamales, shrimp chips, and ladling horchata out of murky buckets? We lived there a whole year and a half and never bought any of that horchata, mostly because it looked very much like something you shouldn't be ordering out of a big dirty bucket on the street. But let me tell you something: we were so wrong. So, so wrong. I've already had horchata twice since arriving here, and I can't believe a beautiful drink like this has been absent from my life thus far. The moral of the story is weird bucket juice is sometimes delicious.

Hmm, that seemed really random, but we did, in fact, drink some horchata after looking at all the galleries that night. The next day we continued our artsy ambitions and checked out the opening of the new Denver Art Museum. It's a really interesting building, though I felt a bit dizzy the whole time I was inside. From the outside, it looks like a big ship; from the inside, a monochromatic Escher painting come to life.

So, we're still here. Not in New York, where little planes are still finding their way into buildings, which terrifies me. On the news, Brian Williams started by saying, "We're here in New York..." and for the first time in a long time, I realized it was he that was in New York, not "we" anymore.