Dazbog Coffee

I finally found a really good local coffee spot. Picture an old repair shop converted with big garage doors making inside and outside mesh seamlessly, and sitting amidst leafy trees and flowers in a historic neighborhood. Now picture 75 degrees in the shade, an almost perfect iced mocha and chill, relaxing music. This combination makes for one happy vagabond :)

Yesterday I drove to Boulder and spent the afternoon walking the shops in downtown. Pearl street is brick with countless specialty and art shops... a perfect place for people watching. Boulder would be to Denver what Bellevue is to Seattle, or what Lake Oswego is to Portland. An overpriced but nearly perfectly beautiful town where most of the upper crust suburbanites choose to live. I picked up a real estate magazine where I quickly realized that 600k-1 million was the most common price range... and this was for pretty average houses. A run-down 1200 square foot rancher was being advertised as a ‘starter home’ for $325,000. Something I really like about this area is that bikes are almost as common as cars, and the streets are very bike friendly for the most part.

This leg of the journey has introduced me to the art of ‘dumpstering’. Most people I know, just like myself, would cringe over the thought of getting food out of a dumpster, but I’m blown away at how much perfectly good food is thrown out for the sake of being too close to the expiration date. I was shocked to learn that the wasted food from grocery stores totals almost 50% of their inventory, yet most of them have policies against it going anywhere but the locked dumpster! With the amount of starvation in the world this makes me rather sick to think about. It is illegal to dumpster in Denver, but with various food producing corporations located here, Terese and her housemates take the risk and subsequently pay a very minimal amount on grocery bills. I ate a meal with all of them on Thursday night that was surprisingly good, and I was shocked to discover that only about 25% of the ingredients were actually purchased. Last night was a really cool example as well. There is a liberation outreach in Indonesia that they feel strongly about, and in order to be able to help them financially, they sold burritos at a fundraiser. I helped assemble the burritos... they tasted just as good as one you would get at many restaurants. It cost 30 bucks to make close to 50 good sized burritos! It’s amazing to me how we’re conditioned from birth to view things certain ways, and how much of those conditioned views really need to be questioned. These people live life totally on the edge of society, and it actually feels more right than being a part of the ‘norm’.
Here again there is community, much like that in San Francisco, but instead of it being a church, it’s togetherness for causes that their passionate about. The common thread would be several types of people and personalities all under one roof being stretched and forced to work through things. They are in a common practice of loving and supporting one another in daily life. I like this, and I think that more of this is needed in the world...