5 posts tagged “fort carson gym”
For those who don't know why I have this 'break' from school. My school campus is basically being used for the Democratic National Convention. Thus the reason why my school and Metro State and Denver's Community College started weeks before pretty much every other college in Colorado. For that reason, I decided to get away from Denver because of two main reasons:
1. I haven't made friends in which I can just call up on the moment to hang out. I sorta forgot to grab some numbers before the start of the break.
2. Everything's crowded up in Denver; you don't even know. Places are being blocked off. The main place being blocked off is my school's campus. I don't really know Denver's spots to hang so the campus is the only place I know where to hang out at the moment.
Anyways, so the break started for me basically when I headed off to the Springs.
Monday.
I woke up around 9 that day so I could make sure I could ride the earliest FREX bus to the Springs. 9 was a little late because I actually planned to wake up around 8 but I kept snoozing the alarm. As usual, I was waiting for the last minute to do everything. My clothes weren't packed yet and my room wasn't cleaned up. I had dirty dishes scattered throughout my room. Ray called me to come over for a short while to pick up some movies from me. He's the one that gave me the idea for just stuffing all my clothes into just one Hollister bag instead of bringing my huge red suitcase with me to the Springs. I ate a couple of fruits for breakfast and packed some of them planning to eat them for a small lunch before going home.
After Ray left, I started working on my Myspace profile for a little while and finally posted it up on my Myspace. This was my 2nd ever amateur level layout I made using mainly Adobe Photoshop to make and slice the layout. I checked up the times in which the FREX is running to the Springs. I found out that the only choice I had to choose from was the bus scheduled to leave at 12:40 that afternoon. The bus before that I had already missed. That bus left at around 9:30. I had basically no chance to catch that bus lol. When I checked the times up, it was around 11 o'clock so I still had time to spare. I was put on pressure though because not only did I start cleaning up and packing around 11:15, if I were to miss that bus at departing at 12:40, I would have to wait for the next bus which leaves around 3:30 later that day. I was not going to let that happen.
I finally got out of my place cleaned up, packed, and ready to go a quarter past noon. When I got downstairs to the lobby, I double checked with the front desk to ask where the FREX station was. She scared me because she said that the FREX might not be running that whole week because of the Democratic National Convention. Time was ticking because like usual, I was running late yet again. Apparently from the information I received, the FREX bus stop was at the Market Street Bus Station. That would mean I would need to hurry my butt up because the station from my place is about five blocks away. I was planning to ride the 16th Street Mall Shuttle to the Market Street Station, but that ended up not happening. It was beginning to get crowded as well because of the Democratic National Convention. The shuttles were running and I was in hope to ride one to the station. The problem was that all of the shuttles somehow to only be running south bound, which was going the opposite way to the station. SMH. With only minutes to spare, I power walked to the station to go ask for info about the FREX. So I found out that the FREX and RTD were run by different companies so the teller couldn't help me out, Eventually I went to a nearby restaurant and got helpful and specific directions to the FREX bus stop.
When I finally got to the bus stop, the FREX bus happened to just arrive at the same time. It was an experience to ride that bus. It was amazing actually. The ride was comfortable because of the shock absorbers for it as well as the nice cool air conditioning being provided. For $9 for a trip from Downtown Denver to Downtown Colorado Springs, that's not too bad. At first, I thought I was going to be the only person riding the FREX down south cause I was the only one to board at that bus stop. But eventually, by the time we got to the Alameda FREX bus stop, we had almost a full bus. It sucked cause I had to share my seat with some guy all the way until the bus stop at the Castle Rock Outlets. During that whole ride, I was hoping to get as much reading done as I can. Defining Memories, the book I was reading actually wasn't getting too bad as I headed near the Springs. Instead of using the free wifi provided on the bus, I decided to try and read the whole bus ride. I was sort of successful with that. I was able to read almost 30 pages. That may not seem much, but with how fast I was reading that book back in Denver, it was a huge improvement.
When I finally arrived at the bus stop on South Tejon near Downtown, my dad and my mom wasn't picking up. I didn't want to stand around at the bus stop. I felt tired and exhausted. So I rode the free downtown bus shuttle to Kiowa and Tejon. From there, I walked a block or two to the downtown's public library. I finished up reading as well as eating a couple of apples. My dad eventually came and picked me up. We went to China Doll to pick up a bunch of food from my mom and we then went straight home. There, I ate till I bloated and started stocking up on movies and everything I can download. I didn't really do anything else that night. None of the hanging out happened till the next day.
Tuesday.
The lechon and the sinigang from last night had me stuffed. I slept good because of it. I didn't anything much other than sit at home and go on the computer. Around noon, I went over to Dennis's house to hang out before he had to go to class. We sat around and socialized for a couple of hours. He also showed me a HUGE spider that I thought looked like a brown recluse spider, which so happens to be found in Colorado. Just looking at the spider was scary enough. Woah. Dennis got hungry. So as we were watching the movie Arachnophobia, Dennis made a nice looking chicken sandwich with sharp cheddar cheese while I ate a thick slice of that same sharp cheddar cheese. It was pretty tasty.
Once I headed out, I went back to the house to chill and relax for a little while before heading to $1.25 Scoop that night. I went there to meet up with Jon first at Target. There, I went to look around for a little before heading to Baskin Robbins. I was looking to see if they had rim replacements for my bike. A day or two before I headed to the Springs, I caught yet another flat while I was biking around the Cherry Creek area. I eventually found out my fact of the day. So I had a feeling that I needed the long strip of rubber on the inner most part of the rim to prevent my tire from catching a flat because it helps keep the inner tube in place. So I figured I probably have to go to a dedicated bike store to pick something like that up which I will have to do within the next couple of days.
On the way to Baskin Robbins, we met up with Keanan and Matt. I got some cherry jubilee ice cream on a cone and Steven got a scoop of vanilla ice cream in a cup. We chilled in Baskin Robbins for a short while before we went outside. It was so weird because we were having the most random and not-so-normal subject during our two hour long conversation. We talked about things from dreams all the way to things like the different ways to pick out your wedgies without catching any attention. We finally called it a night around the time Baskin Robbins closed. I gave Steven a ride home before going home myself. At home, I did the usual things like download movies and surf the net. I also did the beginning processes with my third Myspace profile layout on Adobe Photoshop CS3. I stuck with that as well as watching a movie on TV while chatting online with some friends before finally calling it a night.
Wednesday.
I started the morning chilling on the computer and staying in the house. Brian came over a little later to hang out for an hour or two. We socialized for a little while before he headed out and I left to the Citadel Mall to meet up with Joy. Prior to leaving, I took a shower and got ready as well as ate a delightful lunch. I ate a bowl of rice with some corned beef. I ended up running a little late to the mall because of that. When I got there, I met up with Joy at near Aeropostale. She apparently walked and browsed through five different stores while she was waiting for me. I need to seriously get better with my time management because all week, during my stay in the Springs so far, I've been running late most of the time. Anyways, for about an hour or so, I helped her out with some shoe shopping. It took us a while for her to finally choose something at Lady's Foot Locker and Journey's.
After the mall, Joy wanted to drop by the Wal Mart down the street because she was looking for a planner. I guess what happened, what that UCCS, the school Joy goes to, didn't give her a planner at all. I was assuming that they were going to give her one during her freshman orientation, but I guess they didn't. Again, it took us a short while for Joy to choose what to buy. She debated between numerous planner until she finally chose one lol. During that time, we also picked up snacks and food for her to bring during class. I tried helping her out by choosing to buy in bulk so she could save money. She was choosing to buy the individual lemonade packets instead of buying a huge pack of lemonade powder for almost the same price. Joy argued about convenience over price. SMH. Anyways, after Wal Mart and the mall, we parted ways and said our goodbyes.
I then drove to Steven's place to pick him up so we could hang out. We decided to go to my house to plan what to do that night. There, couldn't figure out what to do for hours and hours. We sat there watching TV and staying on the computer before Jon finally called me with plans to go to the Ft. Carson gym to go play some racquetball. I thought I was going to drive. But what ended up happening was that Jon, along with his mother and his brother, Tim, came to my house to pick us up. We first went to go to Steven's to go pick up his ID because he forgot it. Right after, we went to Darlene's place to go pick her up before finally being able to get on post to the gym. We got there around 9. The gym was to close in about an hour, so we had to be quick about playing. I went and changed into my gym clothes and went straight to the racquetball courts.
We played three games in total. Everyone that came except Steven and Mrs. Pugh played that night. The first game was me and Jon vs. Tim and Darlene. The two of us came out as victors. The second game I play with Darlene as my partner. Darlene and I came out as victors for that game. The last game we played, I had Tim as my partner. Jon and Darlene came out of this game as the winners. During that whole time, I ended up getting hit by the ball a lot. I got hit on the back of the head and on the arm. Darlene got hit or almost hit by the ball many times that night, somewhat because of me lol. Jon had it the worst though. During the second game, I think, he tried going for the ball running towards the front wall. He ended up slipping as he jumped on the wall and he banged up his knee pretty bad. This night of racquetball was filled with injuries. It was pretty bad, but was also extra fun and exciting.
The night didn't end there though. After we dropped off our borrowed equipment, me and Steven got dropped off at my house to pick up my car while the Jon and his family went to go drop off Darlene and go home. I got a couple of downloads ready and had a short conversation with Dennis before heading out to Jon's house to hang out for a little while. When we got there, we ate a piece of pizza and chilled for a while. That night too, we had more weird topics during our conversation. Tic Tac and Tator, Jon's dogs were also wild as usual. Jon was showing us how Tator smarter than Tic Tac. He showed us how Tator responds to "ball", while Tic Tac pretty much just followed Tator and did whatever he did lol. It was a fun night. Before we headed out of Jon's place, we also played three games of Super Smash Bros. on the N64. After dropping off Steven and going home, I relaxed and stayed up till around 4 before passing out to sleep.
The title pretty much explains what happened throughout my day today. I woke up around 8 that morning to answer texts from Jon and Jeff about our status on going to the gym. Even though I woke up and responded to them them pretty fast, I fell back asleep. The next hour, I got a call from Jeff that they were on their way to my house to pick me up. It sucked cause I ended up laying in bed for another couple of minutes before actually getting up and getting ready. I went straight to the bathroom to brush my teeth and got dressed. Usually I would go on the computer to do some quick check ups on some stuff, but that didn't happen that morning. As soon as I got dressed, they arrived. So I quickly made a sandwich consisting of ham and pepper jack cheese and headed out in my slippers.
When we got to Garcia, the gym in Fort Carson, we all got our rackets and googles and went straight to the courts. We played a couple of doubles games. But as I found out, two weeks without playing any racquetball had an effect on me. My serves were really off compared to a couple of weeks ago and everything. We all concluded that each of us were off than usual because of it being early and all haha. We played all that way till about 11:30 that morning. After I got dropped off at home, I didn't really do much. I ate a meal and then fell asleep.
When I woke up, I had a huge headache. It really sucked ... Steven called to hang out. But he didn't call me back, so that didn't happen for me. I ended up just sleeping the whole day and through most of the night. I woke up around 11 and luckily my headache went away. I ended up just typing up some blogs and chatting with some peoples on Yahoo Messenger.
Nothing special really happened Wednesday. That morning after eating and organizing more pictures, I actually drove the first time in like two weeks to Garcia Gym in Fort Carson to play racquetball with Jon and his mom. We started playing around 2:30 for about an hour. The games we played with all three of us were actually pretty intense. The last game with Jon especially was one of the hardest games I've played since I started playing racquetball. I went one on one for a last game for the day with Jon. After learning and playing racquetball so many time with him, I've learned to become a not so bad player. Still though, the game was intensely close. People had the courts reserved, so we had to keep our game short. We tried to have the game to a race to 11 instead of the usual race to 15. Towards the end of the game, we stayed in a draw because no points were being awarded because of change of possession. In result, with the score being like 13 all, we decided to call the game a draw because there were people waiting to play in the court.
Right after that, I drove back home to drop off my car to pick up my bicycle to bike to Sinton Park for our planned hang out. Before I left, I packed a ham and pepper jack cheese sandwich just in case I didn't go straight home. When I arrived at the park, I thought I was going to be late. Surprisingly, I was only the second person there. The only other person there was Steven. It was crazy for this guy cause he had to walk all the way from his house. Yahh, that's pretty far. More people started to show up, but unfortunately, no one brought a basketball. Keanan showed up, Then Robert and his cousin showed up. Still no ball though. Finally, Anthony and Amanda and Matt showed up. Both of 'em brought balls so because of that, we were able to start playing a game and shoot around. We play all the way till around seven. I had to wait for a while before I was able to bike home because it started to rain really, really hard. Once the rain slowed down, I biked home and that basically concluded my Wednesday. I stayed at home and finished the night looking through old picture albums and scanning a lot of those pictures.
That next morning, I had to wake up around 9 because I was gonna join Dennis, his two cousins, Sydni and Joe, and Megan to the Valley High Swimming Pool. I really didn't know where this place was at, but when we arrived there, I quickly recognized the pool from my childhood. When we got there, we came like 40 minutes too early. So what we ended up doing is we went to a local Walgreens to pick up some stuff. When we got back, that's when we started to swim. To my surprise, compared to the weather from the other night, that day turned out to be a pretty nice and hot day. It stayed really sunny for about a couple of hours before it started to get cloudy. We left the pool after it started to get really cold and it started to rain. I kinda passed out in Dennis's car on our way to his aunts house for dinner along with Joe and Megan. When we got to his aunt's house, we stayed and chilled there for a little while before eating dinner, which was nachos with a bunch of different stuff on it. They also had two really big dogs. One of the dogs specifically didn't like Dennis. He was like bipolar or something though. It was funny because after he would bark at Dennis, all of sudden he come up to him and start licking his hand lol. Once we finished that, we ate some cherry chocolate ice cream. That tasted really, really good ayy. After dinner and dessert, we all started to play this karaoke game on PS2 consisting of 80's songs and many recent pop songs. The highlight of the night for me was when both me and Dennis hit the high note in the song Take on Me by A-ha. We stayed playing that game for hours before we actually headed out. After we left and dropped off Megan, we went to Tinseltown to pick up our tickets for The Dark Knight showing. That's basically the started of my weekend right there.
I didn't really get up to do anything till like noon. Around 1 or 2, I finally got my ass up to go to the Old Town Bike Shop in downtown on Tejon to go fix up the gear cable on my bike. It was pretty sweet to look at the different types of bike that they had. I learned a lot from looking around at that shop. Basically to have a quality bike, you're gonna need to drop some big bucks on it. To sum everything up about bikes, titanium framed bikes>steel alloy bikes. Anyways, the repair guy did a great job repairing my bike. The service there was great and everything; I recommend going there if anything happens to your bike. Well after I got home, I ate a tuna sandwich and I packed an extra "triple stacked" tuna sandwich for dinner on the go. So after, I left to go bike to the gym and get a quick weights workout.
I wanted to go on base on my bike to go meet up with Jon and Jeff, but as I was approaching the B Street Gate, the sign basically concluded that they would not let me in without a safety reflector vest and a bicycle helmet. So what I ended up doing was biking all the way back home to go grab my car. I thought I was going to be late meeting up with them like usual. Fortunately though, they were the ones late because Jeff left his ID lol. We ended up going to the Waller Gym since the other one we usually go to closed earlier. The racquetball court there was slightly different compared to the other gym's. The ceiling was higher and the walls seemed closer. Like the first game we had seemed really frustrating because everything for me was going too long in my serves. After a while though, I started to kill it. After that day of racquetball, I started to really like this game a lot. I mean, I can finally say that this is much easier compared to tennis now lol.
When I got home, Julie and I went back to Fort Carson to watch some firework near the park formally known as Iron Horse Park. The fireworks were pretty nice from the view that we had. After those 20 or so minutes of fireworks, we drove to Giane's to meet the others up. We missed a huge event though at Tinseltown. So something happened I guess with the movie Hancock, so they started to give away free tickets. Maybe I should've went and got some lol. Well after sitting around trying to figure out what to eat, Giane, Mav, and I went to King Soopers to go pick up some candies and pizzas and fruit punch while Julie, Kevin, Alex, Steve, and Art stayed at Giane's. When we got back, we watched an episode or two of In Living Color while the food was cooking. When the pizza got done, I ended up eating about six or seven slices haha. Well we finished the movie watch the movie 23 with Jim Carrey.
I started the day going to Fort Carson's gym to play some racquetball with Jon and his mom. After a couple of hours, a bunch of us met up again to attempt and watch the whole Saw series. That didn't really happen though lol. We ended up watching just Saw 1 and 4. We stayed there for a pretty long time. After the movies and the dinner provided by the Pugh Family, we jumped outside on the trampoline for a little while before we all left to go home. On the way of dropping off Keanan and Darlene, near Southgate, we drove by a huge crime scene. It was pretty crazy. There were so many cop at one place. Apparently though, there was a huge shooting that took place there.
