New Year's Day in Denver

We grabbed a latte at the Brown Palace coffee shop and headed out in 9-degree weather with 3-4 inches of snow on the ground to the Denver Art Museum. The special exhibit was "Whistler to Cassatt, American Painters in France." It was pretty cool, but so was seeing a whole line-up of Monet paintings in another gallery. A delightful discovery was the restaurant in the Art Museum, The Ponti (named after the building's architect). Fabulously interesting menu and really, really good food. How about an ancho (powdered poblano pepper) peanut butter sandwich with curried apple slices and all sorts of greens and cucumber on a thinly sliced, buttery-toasted sourdough?! And, our waitress was kind enough to give us a list of other fine food places, but alas we couldn't get into any of them tonight (our last night here). But for future reference, here's the list: Bistro Vendome, Rioja, Ultreia, Guard & Grace, Stoic & Genuine, and Tamayo. We had our "last supper" at the Palace Arms in the Brown Palace followed by a cigar and a drink in the Churchill Bar. Today's photos start here.

The Ponti at the Denver Art Museum

Palace Arms at the Brown Palace

New Year's Eve in Denver

We had planned to go to the Western Art Museum this morning, but alas, it was closed. It's right across the street from the Brown Palace. Turns out the Hours/Information page I went to didn't note that it was closed all this week, but another page, that I did not look at, did. Today's photos start here.

Western Art Museum in the Navarre Building

Ship Tavern, quite the sailing ship collection

High Tea at the Brown Palace

Snow! On our way to dinner at Henry's Tavern.

Happy New Year with a Marzipan Pig

One of Griffen's favorite New Year traditions is the Marzipan Pig. Having discovered this factoid only around noon, all the German bakeries in the area were out of them earlier in the morning, So, Fina made some! Looks like a good New Year's Eve at the Compound! More info on Marzipan Pigs for New Year's.

Little pink Marzipan Pigs in the centers.

The Capitol and a Church

The Denver contingent started the day at 1700 Lincoln, a bank building with Tuscany Coffee in the lobby. Then off to visit the State Capitol Building. After that, we visited the Methodist/Episcopal Church, built in 1887, literally across an intersection from the Brown Palace. We had a lite lunch at La Loma followed by a rest time then a wonderful dinner at the Palace Arms in the Brown Palace. Today's photos start here.

17th and Lincoln

By Governor Polis' office door

1887 Methodist/Episcopalian Church

La Loma

Palace Arms - all Napoleon memorabilia

Brown Palace Day 1

Lynn and Jamie picked up the Underwoods at the Denver airport and headed for the Brown Palace in downtown Denver for New Year's weekend! Our first dining out experience, which was great, was to Ocean Prime at Larimer Square. All the pics are here.

"Berries and Bubbles" at Ocean Prime

Near Larimer Square

Christmas continues...

Christmas projects and activities continue, including going to the movies, doing new art projects, building Lego projects, completing the Secret Santa project now that Remi and Griffen have returned from Wisconsin, and a trip to Air City 360! The post-Christmas Day photos start here.

Lexi does the Air Coaster!

Christmas Day

All the photos are here. They're worth almost 400,000 words! Griffen and Remy were off in Wisconsin visiting more of the family. We'll be having another gift exchange with them when they return. The kids organized a Secret Santa for that event weeks ago.

Techy note... I had my first smart card failure today after several decades of digital photography. I took about 550 pics during the day, reviewing now and then like normal to see what I got. When I moved the SD card from the camera to the card reader on the computer I got nada. Well, not entirely nada. I saw a folder structure of sorts with very jacked-up names. The hope came when File Manager/Properties showed that 8gb was "used" on the card. So $70 for software and a couple hours later I had my files back, all 550 photos. I happened to use EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard. There's also RecoverIt from Wondershare, and probably plenty others. The two I saw work the same way in that you can get a free trial version of the software that gets you to see that the files are there (even thumbnails of the image), but you've got to pay up to actually recover the files. That's fair. Were photo files worth $70 to me? Damn Skippy they were!

Had there been a "Best Homemade Gift" contest,
Fina would have won hands down.