January 03, 2009
My Life Since Argentina
written by Spencer Alexander on January 03, 2009 at 07:34PM in Random
Life has definitely been interesting since Argentina. To say the least.For those of you who didn’t know, or haven’t found out, I returned from Argentina in the beginning of November. While my original return ticket was set for early December, I had planned from the beginning to have a flexible departure date. Ya know, in case of a complete economic melt-down in the United States. In everything I did in Argentina, from housing options to gym memberships, I made sure to allow for both early and late departures from the beautiful country.
Colorado
After arriving back in Colorado, I spent three days in Colorado Springs before deciding that I needed to be closer to the job-hunting-action. I did a bit of craigslist browsing until I found a nice apartment in Boulder that would allow me to rent on a month-by-month basis.
I’ve been living in Boulder for the last two months and loving it. I have a cozy apartment on the north side of town, and a really fun roommate; considering that I found my roommate on craigslist, I feel quite lucky that he turned out to be such an easy to live with, awesome dude.
Passing the Time
While living in Boulder, I’ve been doing a lot of three things: job hunting, webdesign, and loving the outdoors.
Job hunting has been going moderately well; while I still haven’t found the right position, I’m making good progress. The company I’m most interested in working for is NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. I’ve managed to get in contact with an extremely nice woman who has given me a tour of the facilities and put in a good name with the hiring managers who are looking at me. I’ve been in contact with the HR department and the hiring managers for the engineering group, and things appear to be moving along; not moving quite as fast as I’d like, but moving none the less.
Webdesign has been really enjoyable. While in Argentina, I finished most of the projects I was being paid to do, and now I’ve been able to concentrate on the projects I’m excited about. While this gives me a ton of freedom regarding how I spend my time, it doesn’t pay. I’ve started my professional blog at www.nanogordo.com, set up a service to help manage your todo lists at www.todotrees.com, and begun designing websites for non-profit organizations at www.npdesign.org. I’ve been quite busy, and loving every minute of it.
Outdoors really is the hightlight of living in Boulder, or Colorado in general. Lately, I’ve really been enjoying climbing, and have signed up at a local bouldering gym. Snowbording, running, hiking, and enjoying the cold-air-plus-sun combination have all been a big portion of my week.
All was going quite well until about a week ago, when I dropped a tasty cliff in Vail, and felt an incredible amount of pain in my left knee: torn MCL, no running-walking-snowboarding-climbing-outdoors, 2-6 week recovery, no surgery. Could be worse. Much worse.
The Holidays
The holidays were great this year. I spent a bit of time in Vail before heading down to Colorado Springs to spend time with my family for Christmas. Santa treated me extremely well, and the time with my family was awesome! Nicole and her family came up, and Nicole will be staying with me for two weeks. No complaints at all.
With the knee injury, I’ve been spending a lot more time indoors, and I’ve been learning how to have tons of fun while at the same time minimizing the amount of walking I do. I have found it more difficult than I expected to stay away from all of my favorite past-times (running, snowboarding, biking, etc).
It was under these circumstances that I met, and fell deeply in love with, my younger brother’s Wii. For Christmas, Matthew (read: younger brother) was given Guitar Hero and Wii Fit, two very well thought out inventions. I spent plenty of time working on my guitar strumming and balancing on the Wii Fit board. I even went back and mastered Wii Tenis. Yey me!
Post Holiday Holidays
After spending a week in Breckenridge with Nicole and my family, my post-holiday holidays started, which consists of a week in Vail with Eric Max, and old buddy from Rice, and member of the infamous Team Mech. After a grueling two hour drive until 3am, we arrived in Breckenridge last night, and plan on continuing to Vail this afternoon. Wish us luck, and more importantly wish Emax luck with not breaking his Femur again.
Tags: life, colorado, injury, holiday and christmas
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Thank you for sharing!
Gracias intiresnuyu iformatsiyu
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i without a doubt adore your writing style, very charming.
don’t give up and also keep creating considering it just simply nicely to look through it,
looking forward to browse a lot more of your well written articles, regards :)
Hey, nice work with the NREL job — I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you, but I know you’ll do awesome anyway.
And yes, please do visit me in Cambridge — that would be incredible! :)
I know, I wasn’t to happy about the knee injury either, but I am enjoying my time here none the less.
The job hunt recently took a turn for awesomeness… after two years of applying with NREL, I’m finally being considered for a position. Hopefully it goes well!
Time is flying by, and soon enough, I’ll be visiting you in England! I’m so jealous after all of the photos you’ve posted!
Bummer about the knee injury! But glad to hear that life in Colorado is treating you well. Best of luck with the job hunting, and happy 2009. (Holy moly, where does the time go?) Missing you from Cambridge!