6 posts tagged “gunnison”
Well, on Saturday my parents helped move me down to Gunnison for my last year at the delightful Western State College of Colorado. Woo! Kinda weird to think that I'm a college senior. I don't really feel like it.
Anyway, moving in went smoothly, though I did forget to bring the power cable for my MacBook Pro. So after my initial freakout (I would have just gone and bought a new one but no place in Gunnison sells Mac stuff, apparently) my mom offered to leave her laptop with me for the week since I'm going home this weekend anyway for the Nine Inch Nails concert next Tuesday (!) So I'm on her old Dell laptop now, which is...interesting. It kinda sucks to not have my own computer, heh. Oh well. Anyway, on Sunday we drove up to Crested Butte and around Gunnison County a bit, and I got some pretty pictures that I put up at my Flickr account.
My apartment is largely set up how I had it last year (I'm in the same room I was in last year) so I don't feel too out of place and weird. I even tossed up a quick and random little "video tour" because I'm geeky. Pardon the swearing, inside jokes and other random comments that may or may not make sense.
I haven't really met anyone 'new', though I haven't really tried either. I don't do very well mixing socialization with school, as is evidenced by my rather abysmal performances freshman year and while I was in Spain, where I had about a 2.5 average GPA and was crazy social. Oops! Compare that to last year when I went reclusive and had a 3.75 in the fall and a 3.8 in the spring. So if I do meet some cool people to hang out with, great, but I'm not going to get all upset if I don't.
So...yeah. I have an hour until I have to be at my next class, so hopefully the maintenance guy will come soon and fix my bathtub drain which is plugged and my refrigerator which is not refrigerating (everything, even eggs and milk, is now in the freezer. Ew!)
I'm really not a fan of cold weather. I don't mind "cold" when it's hovering around freezing, even down in the 20s or teens. That's ok, I can do that. A jacket can handle that. A jacket can't, however, handle the -26 degrees that it is right now. More than a minute or two outside and the cold seeps in, though any more than about 5 minutes and you're too numb on most parts of your body to really notice. Nose hair freezes, the fug of your breath lingers in the air long enough to watch it waft 10 feet away from you. If it was even remotely possible that you'd be sweating, that would probably freeze too.
Even though I've lived in Colorado my entire life, every winter seems to spring up on me and surprise me with how very, very cold it is. Especially here in Gunnison. Denver isn't so bad, it gets up in the 40s and even the 50s some days in the middle of January, and the lows are around 10, 15 degrees usually. But in the mountains, and Gunnison especially.....It's the coldest part of the state, being at a kinda-high elevation (7703ft) but in a valley, and as we all learned in grade school, hot air rises! Cold air sinks! So Gunnison is basically a bowl where all the cold air sits. Crested Butte, 30 miles away and I believe about 2000 feet higher, is generally 10 to 20 degrees warmer than Gunnison. Apparently the other day Gunnison was the coldest place in the continental 48 states (shouldn't Alaska be considered "continental" since it's, well, on the continent?), and I've also been told that Gunnison has the coldest average annual temperature in the country, though I find that harder to believe.
BUT STILL. WHAT THE HECK. I'm very much a spring/early summer kinda girl. Anything between 70 and 90 is perfect.
Don't get me wrong though, I still love Gunnison. I suppose I take it for granted that I'm in a teensy little town tucked away in the middle of nowhere in the mountains. Most people go to college in bustling cities in big ugly concrete buildings and have to drive long distances to see something other than a highway and a mall. Gunnison is totally a little town straight out of a Christmas card. It's adorable. I love it but...I'd rather not have to go outside from December through the end of March, beginning of April.
Ok I'm done complaining. Time to brew some tea!
Yay Merry Christmas and all that jazz, even though it's a day late....been really busy the past several days, today was literally my first "day off" since I got home to Denver on Friday. I had a great Christmas though, hope everyone else did too! We had the family over for dinner and presents on Christmas Eve, as usual, then went skiing/snowboarding on Christmas day up at Winter Park. It was fun! I posted some other shit and pictures up at my LJ, and I'll probably have pics up on my Facebook sometime in the next few days/weeks/whenever I feel like it.
No real big "omg!" gifts this year, though I am finding it exceedingly painful to be IN POSSESSION OF Super Mario Galaxy and to have my Wii completely inaccessible until the 13th (or some date like that) when I go back to Gunnison. But, I guess I've waited this long for the virtual Wii sex that is Mario Galaxy, so I can wait a smidge longer, eh?
Speaking of Gunnison, it was brought to my attention that the new Alien vs Predator movie (or something, I don't have time to pay attention to shitty movies) "takes place" in Gunnison. After an alien spaceship "crash-lands in the forest outside Gunnison, Colorado," shit goes down and the townspeople get killed left and right and, I believe, a nuke gets dropped on the town. However, what amuses me the most is the "forest" that has moss all over the trees and is all foggy (hi, Colorado is dry. Moss? What's that?) Also in the trailer they show a shot of them dropping a bomb on the town, complete with dramatic aerial view from the plane. Only problem is the town looks to be several times larger than it actually is. Also, heavy rain in Colorado, especially the mountains, isn't all that common. It's not totally uncommon though, so I can let that slide, but still, AVP people, you fail. That is all.
Anyway, for some completely crazy reason, I don't yet have the 5th Harry Potter DVD, so I need to remedy that and get it at Target tomorrow. Along with Battlestar Galactica: Razor. Because, hi, it's Battlestar Galactica. With lesbians? Total win. What the FUCK with season 4 being pushed back to April though. That, and South of Nowhere, are really the only casualties of the WGA strike that affect me. Fuck you, giant TV networks.
I ended up digging my car out of the snow, grabbing some Taco Bell and heading on up to the mountain for a totallyridiculous day of snowboarding. It was so gloriously snowy, so powdery, so amazingly awesome. Omg! It wasn't even really all that cold (well, I didn't think so until I went to the bathroom and realized that my ass was numb) but it was awesome. And damn, I'm good! Haha. I haven't been snowboarding in a year, and that was only once, so I haven't been like, snowboarding snowboarding in almost two years, so I was expecting myself to be rusty. But nope! I handled the powder and moguls just fine. Powder is nice unless it's more than like a foot thick, and then you're screwed unless you are going fast and are under control. If you fall in deep powder, it's one hell of a workout trying to dig yourself out. And moguls SUCK on a snowboard, though most of the ones I encountered were spread out enough that I could carve around them nicely instead of having to do that damn "falling leaf" thing where you just kind of ease yourself down gradually.
But WTF with all the people?! Crested Butte is having a "ski free" thing until sometime this month (the 12th I think? 15th? Something) and there are PEOPLE EVERYWHERE. There was like a 15-20 minute wait sometimes for the lifts. Hella lame. Hopefully once the "ski free" thing ends and all the Texans go away, it'll be less crowded. I think CB is trying to get more "on the map," since most people go to the ski resorts west of Denver on I-70 (Copper, Vail, Keystone, Aspen, Breckinridge, etc) and CB is way out of the way and not really near anything except Gunnison. Which is...well...Gunnison.
Though, speaking of good ol' Gunny, I was driving back today and when I got back into town, it was dark, and everything was so cute covered in snow with little Christmas lights on all the trees down Main St, and little wreathes on all the street corners. It's totally like a little snowy village from a Christmas card, and I should appreciate it more.
Show us an owl.
Anyway, dead owls aside...
I'm all moved into my apartment, and it's rather strange. I haven't lived alone for a year and a half, so to have all this....space...to myself...is kind of...cool? As nice as it is to be able to blast Sigur Ros and eat leftover eggplant Parmesan in my underwear at whatever hour of the night I desire, it's going to take a bit of getting used to. I haven't met anyone new, though I have seen a couple familiar faces around campus (and talked to...one of them...and that was my RA who I was in theater with freshman year.) And speaking of freshman year: everyone thinks I'm a freshman! I've been asked countless times if I'm here for freshman orientation, or if this is my "first time in Gunnison" and how I like the town and whatever. No, people, I'm a junior, I've lived in Gunnison before, I know what the "freshman ditch" is, and yes, I know that Garlic Mike's is the best place to get Italian in town. I know. I think part of the reason is that I'm with my parents, which still confuses me because everyone I know of who's moving up is having their parents come and help them move in. So, what, do I just look that dorky and awkward, that they think I'm a freshman?
Anyway. My apartment is nice, it's just a one-bedroom but seeing as I am, well, one person, that's even almost too much, hah (my living room is already starting to show a bit of my personality, while my bedroom is rather...bare. Though I did put the Deathly Hallows poster I got from the midnight release at Borders up by my bed, so I can dream sweet Harry dreams). Speaking of my bed though: I have decided to overcome my fear of lower bunk-beds and sleep on the lower bunk and use the top one as storage. It's too hard to get up to the top bunk without some sort of dresser to stand on, and in general my life will just be made easier (and my nights more frightful!) by sleeping on the bottom. I hate the bottom bunk, due (I think) to an occasion when I was younger when I was at a neighbor's house being babysat and we were sitting on the bottom bunk, and the top fell down on us because we were horsing around and I think someone made it fall on purpose. But, still, traumatic childhood events = fear of lower bunk beds.
I also think the bathroom was designed with midgets in mind. The shower head comes up to my shoulders so I have to slouch to get my head under the water, and I have to bend waaay over to wash my hands/face/teeth/etc in the sink. I'm 5'5" (average height for a girl, I believe), so I don't know what the fuck.
We walked around town a bit, there's a big car show going on (omg I want an old Corvette or Mustang...so sexy. Like woah) so that was neat. I actually am starting to fall in love with Gunnison again, I forgot how small and cute it is. It's totally a little hick mountain town that's stuck somewhere between the 1950s and the new millennium. I'm also really looking forward to going snowboarding up at Crested Butte this winter.
Anyway, my parents leave to drive back to Denver in the morning so I'm getting up at like 8:30 to have breakfast with them and bid them farewell. I actually feel kind of bad for leaving, right now when there are so many problems and issues going on within the family. I just feel like I should be there to, you know, offer various forms of support and stuff. :\
Not that anyone knows of this show to really give a shit, but the third season of South of Nowhere premiered tonight, and The N is actually kind of cool in that they put the two-part first episode up on their website. Hopefully they'll put it on iTunes soon though, it's a small show and I want to support it as much as I can. Anyway it's starting out way better than the second season, so I'm excited. Spashley 4 lyfe!!
Two weeks from today (Friday) I'll be moved into my apartment in Gunnison. I'm excited. I really need to get out there and...you know...meet people. Heh. It's going to be interesting going back, the last time I was even in Gunnison was May last year, so it's been a while. Plus after Barcelona I sort of feel like I've grown beyond the whole college party scene. Not that I won't go to parties and enjoy them, I'm just not sure how I'll feel about everyone wanting to go to parties for the sole reason of getting as fucked up as possible. I guess we'll see.
The family drama is relatively low right now, compared to the past (and compared to how it's going to be in the future). My mom's having some medical issues, piled on top of everything going on with my grandpa and sister. :| This summer has definitely sucked, in many ways.
Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" totally rocks my face off.
