With college kids arriving in town by the truckloads and Labor Day quickly approaching, one gets the sense that summer is winding down. If there was any doubt, all you had to do was go to Fort Collins’ City Park on the 15th of August when the pool was being shut down. FC has a particularly unusual way to mark this occasion: they allow people to take their dogs off-leash to let them run amok. Swim amok, too.
“Hey, look at that dog!” Leah exclaimed. There were about a hundred here, but the one she was wagging her finger at was not hard to identify. This is because it was wearing a bikini. Continue reading »
We were walking towards Gallery Underground to kick off First Friday Art Walk when we noticed something was a little different about Old Town Square tonight. Instead of its usual mix of musicians performing live or kids hopping on bear statues with a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone, there were a couple people bent over tying their shoes. No, wait, they were doing down dog. You know, one of the basic yoga poses. On yoga mats. In the middle of the square.
“Hey, take a picture,” I exhorted to Leah while handing her my cell cam. I jumped in while doing a similar pose. Not sure if my five seconds of yoga did me much good health-wise. But it did get me in an even cheerier mood for viewing art. Continue reading »
Blasting music from one’s college days at home all day might not seem all that remarkable, even if the songs became popular around the time of Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration and Miley Cyrus had just popped out of some woman’s womb. But what is noteworthy in my case is that I had only discovered these “ancient” bands very recently, even though I should have been bobbing my head up and down to their beat in my old dorm room as a frosh. You can call it “music Felix should have been listening to in college if he had not been so busy studying and working every moment of the day that he forgot how to turn on the radio.” Continue reading »
My friend Tori was out of town for a week and needed me to take care of her cats daily, so naturally I looked at this as a training opportunity. We live on opposite ends of Fort Collins, meaning that a trip to her place and back is a good 29 miles — a good distance for cycling or ultra-running practice. The key, then, was to find a good route because the most-direct car route on Shields St. — while doable on foot or two skinny tires — isn’t exactly the most pleasant with cars whizzing by all the time.
An inspection of Google Maps turned up an alternative, including several roads with wide bike lanes and even a few recreational trails. The highlight of these was the Mason Trail. I had last ridden this three years ago when writing it up for a now defunct local publication, so I looked forward to revisiting it. Continue reading »
“What do the beer fairy, the queen of Wal-Mart, and Spiderman have in common? And what was this odd assortment of characters doing running down the streets of Old Town Fort Collins today?”
These are questions Alene posed in her ultrarunning blog. The explanation is that it was the 3rd Annual Human Powered Brewery Tour — as organized by Scott and Celeste — and this year, a bunch of us wore costumes to draw greater attention to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. We hoped that people who saw superheroes and cowgirls running or biking down the street would ask us what we were doing and offer to make a contribution to the ALS Association. Continue reading »
After celebrating the last two New Years with my buddy Bandy in California, I made a point of returning to my hometown of Fort Collins to kick off 2010 with Tori. While hanging out with my BFF pretty much guaranteed that we would not be belly dancing or getting drunker than Charlie Sheen, we looked forward in particular to the city’s annual First Night Fort Collins celebration. Even if no Elvis impersonators were scheduled to perform this year.
There was, however, a juggling unicyclist, a balancing act involving hoops and balls of the type you might see in a Suzanne Sommers infomercial, and a bunch of men tooting brass instruments to tell the story of Peter and the Wolf. Continue reading »
 "Part of the group in the third annual Human Powered Brewery Tour at Fort Collins Brewery. (Photo: Alene)")
