In four years, the UNC Bears have improved from a 4-24 record to win the Big Sky conference championship and get their first ever spot in the NCAA tournament.
This is a shout out for the Greeley home team. Good luck in the big dance!
Category: Greeley
Wash Bar banning Greeley Residents
Not sure how I missed this one, but it’s a doozy. Washington’s Sports Bar and Grill – a long time favorite in downtown Fort Collins is banning Greeley residents on Saturday night. This is to solve their gang problems.
There’s always been tension between Greeley and Fort Collins, highlighting the worst stereotypes. People in Greeley are lower-class cowhands; people in Fort Collins are snooty. And so on. The latest dust-up came when brothers Jason and Shane Jackson of Greeley went for a night on the town in Fort Fun, hitting Washington’s Sports Bar and Grill, according to the Greeley Tribune.
Once at the door, they were turned away by a bouncer, citing problems with gang members from Greeley and Evans. The Jacksons are far from being gang members, but the bouncer made no exceptions, leaving Mike Peters at the Tribune fuming.
According to an article in the Coloradoan the policy is working and the number of fights at the Wash are down.
I want to change my Gym
Any of you who were Friends fans (and who hasn’t been at some point in the last 15 years) will remember the episode where Chandler wants to ‘quit the gym’. The episode is a bit over the top with extremely attractive membership personnel who keep everyone from successfully canceling their membership. While this doesn’t really have any basis in reality (at least not in my experience), but changing Gyms is a bit of a traumatic experience.
About a year and a half ago I changed gyms. My old gym was a long time local establishment. Great facility, but it had it’s drawbacks, mostly in the service area. The pricing was a bit high, there were lots of days the facility was closed and the staff spent the last two hours of the day vacuuming and cleaning. I typically went from 8-10pm, which were always the hours they were cleaning. I finally got tired of paying a premium price to listen to vacuums and get sprayed with bleach, so I changed facilities.
My new Gym is a 24 hour facility, lower priced than the previous place, but it has it’s drawbacks. First off it’s small, only about 10 cardio machines and a handful of weights and machines. That’s not really so bad, but they also don’t have locker rooms. There are two unisex bathrooms, so if you want to show up without your workout gear on, you have to wait for one of them to be open. The other thing I don’t like, and this may sound funny, it’s not very busy. Back when I was working in an office, I liked it when the gym was quiet. Now that I’m self employed, work from home, and just hang out with the dogs all day long, I kind of crave human company. Not nearly as much fun to go to an empty gym.
So here’s my dilemma. The city I live in offers some very good facilities. They include a pool, great workout facility, basketball courts and locker rooms. Pretty much full service, and actually $5/month cheaper than my current membership. Downsides? I don’t know how busy they are. That might be annoying. Also, it is about 5 minutes further away from my house than my current gym. The other thing is it’s a public facility. There has been a recent debate about how the facilities are losing money and have to have tax dollars to stay open. So is it evil of me to join the cheaper, tax funded location than to support the independent (well franchised) facility? Is it fair to independent facilities when the city provides a better service at a loss so they can be cheaper than their competitors? Is it right that independent businesses have to compete with these publicly funded gyms?
I don’t know, but I think I’m going to change.
Young’s, Walrus gone in Greeley
Looks like Greeley has lost a couple more small businesses recently. Not sure how long they’ve bee
n this way, but the signs are gone both from Young’s Cafe, just off 10th by Walmart, and Walrus Ice Cream in the King Soopers Parking lot off 35th Ave.
While I personally did not patronize either establishment on a regular basis (prefer the Wonderful Inn to Young’s, and really, who can go out for Ice Cream that often), but both were quality and I enjoyed their products when I did go there. Always tough to see Greeley any business, especially independent ones like these.
Tribune provides Road Work map
Here's a handy idea from our local newspaper.
The Greeley Tribune is using Google Maps to a list of local area road work.
Greeley BBQ
Last wednesday long time Greeley restaurant Bubba's Bar-B-Que closed. The IRS seized Bubba's due to unpaid taxes. To many local residents this wasn't a surprise. Bubba's had been trying to re-invent itself for some time with a redecorated interior and a bar.
For me there were three reasons why Bubba's ultimately failed. The first was pricing. Bubba's was a buffet and not particularly cheap. The problem was nothing on the menu was much cheaper than the buffet. It wasn't a place where I could stop and get a $5.00 quick lunch. In fact, everytime I ever went to Bubba's I came out stuffed – which brings us to the second cause for failure. Bubba's encouraged patrons to partake in their 'all-you-can-eat' buffet. For many of us who are attempting to watch our wieght, buffets are a large temptation. Personally, I avoided Bubba's for that very reason. The final reason fo Bubba's demise was the food. I love BBQ and used to love Bubba's, but over the last few years the quality of the food just wasn't there. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't great. The combination of (at least percieved) higher prices, lower quality and the temptation to gorge myself made me avoid Bubba's. I probably hadn't been in there twice over the last 12 months and appearantly most Greeley residents hadn't either.
So, while Bubba's is gone, but RJ's is back!
RJ's BBQ opened last spring in the old Dunkin Donuts building on 10th St. While the Barbeque was good, and the prices OK, the parking, seating and service languished. A couple months ago they closed, but last week they re-opened. Now they are across the street in the old Qdoba location. Not only that, but they also have a lunch sandwich special with a 10 minute guarantee. Looks like they are trying to fix some problems.
I hear many Greeley residents complain about big chains moving in and small businesses being pushed out. While this is true to a degree, sometimes it's also just time for businesses to change. The BBQ restaurants in Greeley are in flux right now, and while we've lost Bubba's we have gained RJ's. Let's all get out and support them.
Take a stab at it
As if Greeley didn’t have enough problems right now, with the recent gang violence, now we’ve got university football players stabbing each other for starting spots. UNC second stringer, Mitch Cozad stabbed the starting punter in the leg.
Funny thing to me here is what was this kid thinking? What could possibly be a good outcome from this? Did Mitch think he would be able to look his victim in the eye when he was standing on the sidelines in crutches. Just proves that everyone that goes to college isn’t smart.
Local restaurant for sale
Rick Scharf, current owner of Bubba’s Bar-B-Que has decided to let his 12 year old kid try and sell his restaurant on ebay. Looks like they have a bid, so who knows. Changes may be in the works for Bubbas.
When is it litter?
I’m pretty sure if I went and dumped trash on somebody’s front step I would get in trouble. The owner of the house would probably call the police and I’d get a ticket for littering. There are signs on the highway warning about fines for dumping. So why is it that people can just come along and leave their trash on my doorstep? Doesn’t seem fair.
About once a month our local newspaper, the wonderful Greeley Tribune, sends somebody around to dump a ‘free’ paper on my step. Now this paper is some syndicated thing with celebrity gossip that’s two weeks old called Extra. Now, would somebody please explain to me how it’s even legal for a newspaper to hire people and dump trash on my doorstep. I don’t subscribe to their paper, I’ve never been their customer, but somehow they think it’s OK to hire somebody to drive around our city and dump TONS of newspapers on people that don’t want or read them. What a waste.
If we are all so worried about foriegn oil dependency, global warming and saving the planet we should put a stop to things like this first.
‘Small’ town living
Greeley is such an odd place to live in. On one hand it's a (relatively) small town, at least for Northern Colorado and the front range (although it's difficult for me to call anyplace with a popullation of 84,000 small). Much smaller than Fort Collins or Longmont and somewhat smaller than Loveland. We are also east of the I-25 corridor which seems to isolate us a bit. Fort Collins is fairly tech savvy, recently added to some list as a tech friendly city (saw it on www.ncbr.com, but can't find the article now). Greeley on the other hand is just a little backward, at least in the tech and retail sectors. All of the big retail chains that move in here build half a store and wonder why it doesn't do well. Restaurants close early and wonder why nobody comes. It's just insanity.
Along those lines, we have only a handful (3 or 4) furniture stores. There was a La-Z Boy store in Evans, but it closed. The owners of the local Concepts store retired and closed the store when they couldn't sell it. One of the most recent casualties in the retail sector is Greeley Furniture downtown. As report in the Tribune, Greeley Furniture was owned by it's current owners for nine years and closed recently.The building was for sale at 1.8 Million USD. I'm no real estate guru, but this is one of those old rambling furniture stores. The location has been a furniture store for a long time and it shows. You can see where the owners bought neighboring businesses and consolidated them into a much bigger store. I was actually only in there once, last year. It's interesting how out of touch the owners of the store appeared to be. Most pieces were very traditional, I saw little that I would even want to buy. Prices were higher than I would expected. For such a big rambling location it seemed like everything was the same.
A couple years ago I visited some family in Kearney Nebraska and visited a furniture store there. It was similar to Greeley furniture in layout, but there were actually items there that were reasonably priced and quite a large selection. One of the owners of Greeley Furniture is working on re-opening, which is good news for both the downtown area and the city as a whole. Hopefully he will make some adjustments in service, selection and price to be more successful. I know there are residents that can afford quality goods, from furniture to electronics, but many of us make trips to Fort Collins or even Denver because there just aren't local businesses offering what we want.