Halloween Celebration in Olde Town Arvada

Trick Or Treat Arvada. Olde Town Arvada has done it again! This charming and historic downtown Arvada offered a successful evening of family fun! For only $5 per family, kids of all ages could enjoy a haunted house, costume contest, hayride and treats from local merchants all around Olde Town. I was surprised how busy it was at 5:30pm. Rob and I first walked up and down Grandview and then up Olde Wadsworth. I can’t resist the great costumes that people come up with! The kids were cute and excited! The D-Note actually transformed into a spaceship. That was their Halloween costume and the workers enjoyed decorating their venue. Read the rest of this entry

Teachers serving ice cream at Coldstone Creamery? Yes, it is true. Although, many of the teachers in attendance do not plan to quit their day jobs, they did have fun serving ice cream for the evening. At Lori Masdin, manager at the Arvada Coldstone franchise on 55^th and Wadsworth invited the staff at Secrest Elementary to scoop ice cream for the evening as a fundraising event. Katy Irvin, art teacher at Secrest, organized the event and reports that Secrest made about $258 dollars from helping at the event.   Read the rest of this entry

One of the trademarks of Arvada,Colorado neighborhoods are the beautiful green lawns.  Sadly, it’s that time of year in the metro area when we all have to think about Sprinkler System Blowouts.  In this tough economy, I imagine a lot of people, like me, are trying their best to learn how to repair and maintain things around their homes on their own.

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Cheers to Living in Arvada. Either Arvada is getting better with age or it just seems better with my own age.  My wife and I have now lived over half of our lives in Arvada, Colorado. While we near the empty nester stage of our lives,  I can’t help but to reflect on what Arvada was then, what it is now and how it continues to grow with our tastes like a fine-aged wine. With kids out of school and out of our hair most of the time,  the splendor of Arvada seems to offer us an endless number of new things to see, explore, do, hear, taste, smell and enjoy.  This is the now, but don’t get me wrong – then is a place I wouldn’t trade for anywhere else in the world.

I don’t need a scrap book to still see the miles of trails, two parks, lake and mountain views. This was the backyard for raising our two kids in the Lakecrest neighborhood just south of Standley Lake on 86^th and Kipling. Two walking trails just yards away from our front door, circled a park lined with plenty of green grass. I can still see our faithful lab, Ginger, leading my wife and kids to the green grass below for a game of Frisbee. Around the park, were two places to walk or jog; an inside trail and an outside trail which we aptly named, the Llama path due to the fact their really were Llamas being raised on the sprawling, scenic ranch behind the trail. I remember how those strange animals use to look back at us with a blank gaze on their face as we stopped on the trail to observe them. I can still hear the giggle of my 4 year old son when I asked the Llama if he could answer a simple math equation. When Ginger wasn’t chasing and catching Frisbees she was usually accompanying us on those walks around the park; occasionally spotting and chasing a fox if she happened to get off her leash at an opportune moment. The creek along the sidewalk was a great place to catch crawdads. I remember coming home from work and finding two pet crawdads crawling on our basement floor. At other times, we would take Ginger and the kids 6/10ths of a mile to the west to the Michael Northey park on 86^th and Simms. We called this park, the ‘orange park’. I think our toddler-aged daughter named it this because most of the play equipment swings and bars were painted orange. A number of years later, when the park was painted blue, we continued to call it the, ‘orange park’ and still do. Read the rest of this entry