Lemonade from Lemons

CWs: food, alcohol

I’ve kept saying this phrase lately, that we’re “making lemonade from lemons,” so let’s go with it. We have overall had a nice weekend, but it was not without its ups and downs. We have been planning for months now to have my parents visit and see us for a few days. We basically booked tickets to the Colorado Rockies (baseball team) “Star Wars Night” game for ourselves and my parents, and built a trip around that to have them come see us. They were very excited to see us, and likewise for us. We have made sort of a tradition of going to the Star Wars Night games each year since about 2018, with few exceptions, and my parents went with us last time back in 2022, so why not again? I had a busy week leading up to it, and was very grateful to have Friday and Monday off.

My parents booked a flight that would get in at around 4:30am on Friday, which is quite early, but I didn’t mind getting up early to pick them up. I went to sleep relatively early the night before and hoped my alarm would wake me up properly. I planned on waking up at 3:45am so I could get out the door about 4am to go pick them up. I woke up a few minutes before my alarm, checked my phone, and saw texts from my mom saying that their flight had been cancelled and wouldn’t be rebooked. I was really disappointed and upset (and my parents were too, of course), but nothing to be done about it. So I went back to bed, or at least tried to, and slept fitfully.

Some backstory: sometime Thursday afternoon, we heard that my parents’ airline was having troubles and what we thought at the time was a temporary outage. I thought it would be resolved quickly. Nope, it was a worldwide outage causing problems not only with flights, but with computer systems everywhere. The cause of the issue? As far as I have heard, it was a malfunctioning update in software by a company called CrowdStrike (yikes, what a name). So this is what caused not only my parents’ flight to be cancelled, but plenty of other people’s flights and such. I was really glad I was not working Friday, too, since my work was somewhat affected by the outage too.

My mom was really upset about the situation, understandably, and we were too, as it upended many of our weekend plans, but ultimately there was nothing any of us could do to change it. We’ll sort out a time down the road where we can get together again, but I need to let my vacation hours recharge, as we’ve taken a lot of time off already this year. It’s OK. So again, “lemonade from lemons” has been the phrase of the weekend.

Of course, we always planned on going to the game no matter what, so it didn’t change our plans in that regard. However, we decided to stay the night in Denver after the game, and booked a hotel for that, since I preferred not to have to drive home after the game, even though it’s not super far. We decided to make a weekend out of it and have a nice little “staycation.” We had a pretty chill day on Friday and relaxed, then I had to get up earlyish yesterday for a 9am haircut (which was badly needed).

We had a fairly leisurely day yesterday, and hung out for a couple of hours before leaving for Denver. We almost always park at a park and ride and take the light rail or a bus into the city, which is a must because I really don’t like dealing with parking or driving in Denver in general. We were able to check into the hotel early afternoon, and hung out there for a bit, which was nice. We packed light, of course, since it is just an overnight. From there, we ended up going to a brewery near the ballpark to get a beer, which was nice, and eventually walked over to the ballpark and got in line to check in with our tickets.

One of the cool things about Star Wars Night is that you get a special t-shirt, if you select a certain ticket package, to commemorate the game. I think we have 3 of them now (!), and they are all very nice. This year’s is especially cool since it has Grogu (“Baby Yoda”) from The Mandalorian on it. We got our shirts, and even got the shirts for my parents, since of course we paid for their shirts as part of their tickets. We’ll send the shirts to them in the mail as a surprise!

In any case, it was pretty hot early on at the stadium, and we wanted to get a drink or two there as well. So we went to the brewery (that’s right, a brewery!) inside the stadium, which is called “The Sandlot.” It is the birthplace of “Belly Slide Wit,” which is the inspiration for the famous “Blue Moon” beer! And the beer is so good. I got one of those to start with, my spouse got their “hazy” IPA, and then I got a blackberry lemonade beer and my spouse got the Belly Slide Wit. We hung out there for awhile and just enjoyed the atmosphere, after which we decided to start making our way to our seats since the game was about to start.

It was a good game and we had a fun time! I don’t much care about sports in general, but baseball is fun to watch in person at least, and it was entertaining. The Star Wars aspects of the game are fun too, and it’s just exciting in general. Once it started getting darker and cooler, that was really nice, and it is lovely to see the city lights and the mountains in the distance. It really is a pretty view. Happily enough, the Rockies won the game, and it was a quick game as well, just a little over two hours! Near the end of the game, it started raining and thundering, with lightning cracking above, and many people left at that point. We weren’t really getting hit by the rain, since we were mostly under cover, so I didn’t mind at all. We got up and started getting ready to leave the stadium and head back to our hotel. My spouse briefly mentioned that they had ponchos for us that we could use, but I either ignored it or shrugged it off. (Bad idea)

We started walking out into the night, and all of a sudden the skies opened up above us and started raining buckets (urceatim, as the Romans would have said!). I really haven’t seen rain like that in Denver. It was really like Florida rain, a torrential downpour, with lots of wind, thunder, and lightning! And we had almost zero shelter around us we could wait it out under. My spouse checked their phone, which said it was supposed to last for four more hours! That wouldn’t do. We could’ve probably taken a Lyft or something, but we ran into others who were having trouble sorting out rides. I figured, the only way out is through… Denver has a “free mall ride” bus that goes up and down the 16th St. Mall, which is one of the touristy areas near the ballpark, and we were staying not too far from there, so I thought as long as we could get to the bus and take it most of the way, we would be OK.

We found a mall ride bus stop and ducked under the overhang of a building to wait out the rain. By that time we were soaked through to the bone, all our clothes and shoes wet, and the paper bag that we were holding our shirts and other stuff in was drenched and coming apart. We finally got onto the bus, which took us to within 2-3 blocks of the hotel, and walked into the hotel, dripping wet, and up to our room. I was extremely happy we had chosen to stay the night, as I would have been very annoyed if we had to get back to the park and ride that night in the rain. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a lot of places to hang our clothes in the hotel room, and just did the best we could to dry everything off. We both showered and felt better after that, and eventually crashed.

Still had wet clothes in the morning. Did our best to isolate the wet clothes we weren’t wearing, and just made it work. Very grateful Pixel phones are very water-resistant as my phone was in my shorts pocket and got very damp, but it seems perfectly OK. We were going to go to a museum this morning, but decided to cancel that in favor of just going home and cutting our losses, y’know?

We stopped by HMart (a Korean supermarket with all sorts of awesome Asian and international foods in general) on the way home, grabbed some stuff, and also stopped at Tous Les Jours, which was right next door. It is an Asian bakery which has delicious pastries, coffee, and all sorts of good stuff. We went there for the first time on one of our last HMart trips, and did not regret it at all. So that was nice. We also stopped and got breakfast bagel sandwiches at a local place on the way home after that. It’s not a bad drive home from there and we got home a little after noon.

It was nice to change into clean clothes after getting home. And I’ve just been relaxing since then. We still have another day off after this, for which I am very grateful (good planning!). Even though we didn’t get to see my parents, it’s OK, we still had a lovely weekend and I’m happy overall. I just wanted to write about my experience and share it with y’all. I’m really trying to avoid doing what I call the “Xanga thing” and writing every minute little detail of my days or whatever. I used to spend hours doing that and I don’t have the energy for it, nor do I think anyone cares to read it, so I am all about details, sure, but not painstaking details. Working on reining it in for sure.

Anyways, thanks for reading, friends, and I hope all is well with y’all too <3