What I Love about being a 0027

Last November we moved to the area directly East of Boulder. We are renting because we aren’t sure exactly where we will end up. It is expensive here, but it is expensive everywhere. Except for Mississippi and I don’t really see myself in Mississippi. I just escaped hot, humid and buggy, I really don’t want to go back. I like hot, dry and not buggy. Actually I like cool, dry and no buggy, but in a world spinning hot, that is a big ask. For the moment that is here. There is a lot to like, including the last 4 digits of our zip code. Which feels like a wink and a nod to the world’s most well-dressed spy.

Of course there are differences between 007 and 0027. He likes his martini’s shaken not stirred and we like our beer on a patio with a Rocket dog. He likes his fast European cars and we like our fast California e-bikes. We will forgo the Tux any day for the ever versatile light weight merino wool jacket and socks.

Regardless of the differences, both 00s are cool.

I don’t know about you, but I never lived where someone showed up to my house peddling fresh milk. In Dallas all that was peddled was pest control, lawn maintenance and roofers offering to fix that hail damage that seemed to roll around at least one to three times a year. Here, a person from Longmont Dairy came to my door with samples in cute bottles. They were all delicious, and I got to keep all the samples. He left a cooler for us to switch out bottles in. Again, hot planet. We get our milk and half & half in a cooler with ice. The glass bottle exchange feels old fashioned in the best possible way. I am not adding to landfill and it might be psychological, but things just taste better out of glass. Coke, Fanta and most certainly milk. I know the mountains should be my favorite thing about living in Colorado but the half and half is a pretty close second. Drinking coffee out is expensive and really can’t compete with what I make at home with fresh cream.

It is a good thing 0027 is full of open trails because with four breweries in this zip alone, I need to work off my weekend Louisville Lagers. My husband (John) and I haven’t even tried all four. We basically found a beer and an outdoor area we liked at Crystal Springs Brewing and stopped looking. There was an outing there yesterday in fact. In response to the hotter than usual summer, they installed misters. Misters are a staple in Dallas where we moved from. They have been fine tuned and timed to ever so lightly dust the air, adding a coolness without even getting your shirt damp. Misters are obviously a new add here. This was more like sitting in a tropical rainforest than Colorado. My curly hair grew 5 inches. Children ran into the mists like adventurers exploring the Congo. One little fellow spotted the absolute mistiest of the misters and ran to be right beneath it. It didn’t intimidate him at all that a man was already sitting there. He stared him down until the man moved to another seat at the table. He proceeded to hang out with the man and his wife until his horrified mother retrieved him. But they didn’t mind, 0027 welcomes spies big and small to their gatherings.

In fact, it was through the beer mist filter that it dawned on me that 0027 kids must be some of the happiest in the world. Babies and toddlers are being chauffeured about on their parents’ bikes and e-bikes. Their tiny helmets bobbing along streets and trails. Tweens really have it made. They roll around in small gangs on their throttled bench-seat e-bikes. John and I debated for months whether or not to spend the money on e-bikes. They average around $2000 apiece. Good thing our kids weren’t tweens here, they would have been trying to keep up with the gang via their own battery power.

Perhaps the only kid hardship is the line at Sweet Cow. Which happens to be right around the corner from Crystal Springs Brewing. I suspect even James Bond might go rogue sitting outside, drinking beer, having a Chicago dog delivered to him and finishing it off with a scoop of cookies and cream from Sweet Cow. Though we wouldn’t fault him if he opted to drive off into the sunset in his Aston Martin DB5. I imagine Honey Rider has a bungalow in one of the higher-altitude, less-cool Boulder zips.