Some Denver Photos

By popular demand I'm uploading a handful of photos from our first week and a half in Denver. First, the view from my office:

I'm pretty sure I only got this view because someone left right before I got there, and this was the only available office. But catch as catch can.

Since we figured my five-speed Honda Civic wouldn't do very well being driven in the snow by someone who has never driven in snow before, we sold the Civic in California and started shopping for a used four-wheel-drive car when we got here. Dr. M found a great deal on a 2007 Subaru Forester, which a local Dodge dealership was selling at substantially below Bluebook value just to get it off the lot (apparently Dodges don't cotton well to foreign interlopers). When we got to the dealership there was another couple looking at it, but they passed because they didn't like the color. I don't mind the color, which is officially called "champagne":

If you look closely you can see the Colorado plates on Dr. M's CRV (or perhaps you can't in the shrunken photo). We're doing our best to assimilate quickly and start pouring our moneys into the Colorado coffers rather than California's.

Last weekend we participated in a photo scavenger hunt based in Berkeley, taking a bunch of photos downtown. I wasn't expecting the 16th Street Mall to be quite so jumping on a Saturday, but I was wrong. It was lively as all get-out. It was nice to see some trappings of San Francisco -- anyone who has spent any time at Fisherman's Wharf or the Powell Street trolley stop is familiar with people pretending to be robots for money:

Though I should say that this woman was technically a statue, not a robot, but it was the same basic idea. We made the makeshift flag so we could enter her into the "Robot Fourth of July" category. The sassy pose was her idea.

Other aspects of downtown were less familiar. For example, there are Scientologist recruitment centers disguised as stress test sites all over downtown San Francisco. In Denver, there was a large group of anti-Scientologists like this guy, dressed in similar outfits and handing out anti-Scientology literature:

There were also these two people, which I don't know what to make of:

They weren't preaching or prosthelytizing, they were just standing there menacingly with their Bibles, like two crocodiles watching a herd of zebras cross a river.

As for the cats, they've adjusted well to the move, though I'm still keeping them on their toes by pretending that I have superpowers. I convinced Pepe that I could control gravitational fields:

This picture was taken eight days ago and he's still sitting there.