Talk About Your Best-Laid Plans Ruined

So I spoke to a stripper when I went out to the strip club Wednesday evening.  (I whipped it out on her.  She wasn't having any of it because it's not allowed in the club.)  She was easy to talk to.  Asked, as a boilerplate thing to start a conversation with, about what I'm doing there, to which I replied that I just got in to town.  We talked about what I was going to do; told her I had no plans, and that it's stressful to have a long list of things you want to do because you just get aggravated over how to do them all.

And that reared its ugly head, sort of, yesterday.  I was dead tired and went to bed at around 12:30, but got in a full night's sleep and woke up, naturally, around 8:30.  And then I was flummoxed over what to do.

Eventually I made a list of things I wanted to do in chronological order:

• Get a shave for the first time in a month, if not longer;
• Did you know that Denver has been the birthplace of many fast casual restaurants?  Last year, when I was here, I went to the original locations of Chipotle and Quizno's.  But both Smashburger and Qdoba were birthed here, as well.  I knocked out Smashburger because it was closer to the recommended place I got my (excellent) shave (oh, by the way, for the record, Noodles & Company was also born in Denver, but they closed down the original store);
• Hike a trail, because if you're in Colorado, you should hike a mountain, you know?;
• Go the Colorado women's soccer Match vs. Oregon.  If there was one thing I planned on doing, I'll be damned if it weren't this one;
• Go to a Hooters, catch the football game (and, come to think of it, the baseball game too), get a calendar girl to sign the calendar I brought from home and, come to think of it, since they started selling the 2020 calendar on October 1, buy one and get the girls to sign that one, too;
• And then I remembered I needed to write a communique to my alumni club.

Those series of things I had to think three hours to decide and put in order.  I needed to figure out if there were other things I should do or shelve till later in my vacation.  And then I needed to find the addresses and figure out how long it'll take me to get everywhere.  I could have just gone out and, you know, done stuff, but I hate that because, if I don't do what I want to do, I'll kick myself for not sitting down, thinking about it, and planning it.  So I got out of my hotel room at 11:30.  Three hours up in the morning?  Doesn't matter if I got eight hours of sleep -- I was ready to go to bed again.

Regardless, I had forgotten that the traffic would ruin my plans.  I've seen a lot of back-ups here, but the strangest and most hellacious one happened just as I was starting.  It took me 20 minutes to get on an on-ramp and take a right.  Why?  A lane just after the on-ramp was closed due to construction (I think), and somehow that squeezed all the traffic coming off the highway as well as that coming through that street.  Moreover -- and I'm not complaining too much about this -- but I was given such a luxurious shave that I was there almost 45 minutes.  I feel great and I look great; shoot, this guy razored down my sideburns and the back of my hair, and I've never had a shaver "clean and tighten me up" like that.  But it pushed back my schedule.

I was done eating at Smashburger at 2.  I thought I was making good time in the less-heavy afternoon traffic on my way up to Boulder.  But once my parents' Garvin said I would get there around 3 -- a half-hour before the soccer Game was to start, and I wanted a bit of time to walk around -- it was obvious I couldn't hike.  And since I have no plans on going back up to Boulder, I'm not going to be able to hike up there.  And that saddens me that my best-laid plans have been ruined due to careful planning, traffic, and too-thorough service.

That's all I got.