The Great American Road Trip: Days 10 and 11

Still puttering around Denver/Littleton. Although we've been experiencing near constant rain the past few days, we're thankfully in a place that is on higher ground and away from creeks/rivers so my biggest concern has been muddy dogs and trying to remember which streets are closed when I venture into other places around town. That said, please keep sending good thoughts this way, a lot of people are dealing with very severe problems from the unbelievable amount of rain and flooding.

It felt a little like driving backwards in time as I ventured down Hampden Ave towards SMA, the school that I attended from 1st-12th. A lot of my teachers still teach there, a few favorites have left, a few classmates and other young alums have been hired. I was marveling at some of the changes that have happened since I last was in town - the development with the Target store that I helped open is now an enormous retail/entertainment village, new construction under the Santa Fe overpass, etc - when my car started dinging and reporting low tire pressure. Didn't I just have them filled when I left Tucson? I spotted the Goodyear up ahead and pulled into their back parking lot, grabbing my ever-faithful tire gauge and silently thanking the sky for a break in the rain. Sure enough, all of them were a lot lower than they were in Tucson, and one was a few psi below that. So off I went to the garage bay. A friendly, burly man greeted me and asked how he could help. He waved off my request to borrow a compressor and told me to just pull my car up. He checked and filled all of them ("It's this crazy change in the weather we're having") and refused payment but did say he would accept cookies when I offered a trade.

With renewed confidence in the generosity of human-kind, I continued on to SMA. By this point it was back to downpouring, I put my bag over my shoulder and then slipped on my raincoat while I was still in the car, and dashed over to the entrance. I could probably go on for paragraphs about the feeling of being back in high school - an environment detested by so many, but for me one that was actually pretty nurturing and supportive (especially seen in hindsight) - but I'll refrain. The short of it is that it was a lot of fun to sit and chat with everyone, making the transition from student to...respected adult? is kind of a bizarrely amusing thing to experience. I did realize that in the past I've always been very willing to share what I've been up to, but this time I found myself glossing over my events a bit in order to ask them about their lives, kids, spouses, work. When you're a student it's hard to picture your teacher having a life or identity outside of the one you see every day, and I love the feeling of surprise and discovery as these former teachers start to allow me to see those other parts of themselves.

Another happy moment was visiting some of my elementary school teachers. Ms. Lorenzo taught me Spanish when I was in kindergarten (20 years ago) and then had me again for homeroom and several subjects in 4th and 5th grade - the look on her face when she saw me was simply priceless, as were the first words out of her mouth, "you look just like your mom!" Made both of us smile when I talked to Mom on my drive home :) Some of my favorite middle school teachers were off on some kind of camping trip with the 6th and 7th grades (in the rain, what fun!), so I'll probably go back again sometime next week to catch them.

I try to be a lady of my word, so when I got home I pulled out my stack of recipes and got started on some biscotti! I love that I'm now familiar enough with the Reilly kitchen that I can bake and know where everything is instead of having to open every single cabinet and drawer. Based on ingredient availability I went with almond-cranberry, with chocolate chips of course, and I think they turned out wonderfully.

Yesterday I didn't have much planned beyond delivering the cookies to the car place. Kerry had mentioned making chicken noodle soup, and I thought that making soup sounded like an excellent idea with all this rain! We decided on chili. Have I ever made chili? No. Watched anyone make it? Probably, but not that I can remember. Hmm.

What does one do in this kind of a situation? Rope in a friend and hunt through cookbooks, of course! Caitlin let me drag her around to deliver cookies, and then since we had magically found ourselves eating frozen yogurt at Pinkberry we decided that we were now close enough to justify going to pick up her holds at the central library and shop in the Art Museum gift shop. I didn't buy any at the time but I think I need to go back and get a few of the 3-D art cards they had - they're about the size of a postcard but you unfold them into a viewer box and the artwork suddenly looks like it's popping out at you. Pretty neat!

It was delightful to be back in the main library again, particularly in the company of someone who works there and was able to immediately go up to the right floor and section to find the cookbooks. We plopped ourselves on the floor and I started reaching for whatever I could grab, got a couple of different ideas, and then we went shopping and kind of threw things in until we decided that, yes, all of these would go together and might even taste like chili. While we didn't try it this time, I do want to give the pumpkin chili a go at some point - doesn't that sound like it might be really good?

Having never made chili before it felt a bit like a trial and error experiment, but in the end we had a very tasty turkey and three bean chili with corn, onions, bell peppers, and half the contents of the spice cabinet (hence we will never be able to replicate it perfectly, it was an "add more of that one over there, yeah, that's better!" operation). Along with some cornbread and a batch of raspberry-lemon bars, it made a wonderful dinner for the four of us :)

The days in photos: