Life

Brad . . . if you’re reading this, I really am working today . . . honest . . . Yes, yes video drunk-dialed lazy monday (from chris)

Greg Galanos, one of the Mobius partners, likes to joke around by creating tee-shirts with people’s images superimposed into a theme. He created an extremely amusing Jack Bauer tee shirt for Brad (see Brad’s post on it here), which reminded me that I had been meaning to post my own Greg tee-shirt. This is me as the angel of death. I’m a bad-ass <g> Be sure to click the image to see it in all its glory. Thanks Greg

A friend of mine (and Stanford alum) proudly sent me the following link to the Stanford Engineering Puzzle (apparently a regular feature on their web site).  Despite neither going to Stanford, nor frankly having had any shot of even getting into the school should I have thought to apply, I found the puzzle rather amusing. I think Macalester is the Stanford of the mid-west . . . or something like that. Thanks to Chris for the link. (ok – just spell-checked this and am humbled to let you know that Stanford is in the TypePad dictionary while Macalester is not)

I imagine you’ve noticed that I’ve been silent over the past few weeks – taking some time off from work and blogging over the holidays.Not to gloat (WARNING: I’m about to gloat), but Colorado is a great place to live. In the same two week period I was skiing in deep fresh powder (multiple times), snowshoeing and cross country skiing with amazing mountain vistas and (here’s the really great part) mountain biking (in shorts!). Unbelievable. I love this place!

Last week a few of us played a little joke on our colleague Chris by putting a 6 foot tall inflatable lighted turkey in his driveway for him to find late one night as he came home.  He returned the favor a few days later by leaving it on my desk (fully inflated) early one morning. See the pictures of what we’re now calling the ‘giant turkey’ below. All this spurred a few turkey haiku’s which I thought in the spirit of the season I’d share with you (these were authored by me, Chris, my wife Greeley and friend Laura): great turkey surprise oh where will you show up next in some neighbor’s yard gobble gobble great turkey arrives each…

I love the way the mind works. I spent years studying cognitive psychology, which was my college major (I was the psych geek who paid you $3 to sit in front of a computer for 10 minutes and take a test where what I told you I was testing for was not what I was testing for . . . ). My dad sent me the following link, which is pretty fun. http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html

By all measures my “date” with Ben Casnocha was great (see my original post here, his here). As he points out, you skip a lot of the get-to-know you bs when you’ve had such rich interaction before actually getting together (particularly reading each others blogs, which really do provide nice insight and context). If you’ve ever read Ben’s blog, you already know that he’s light-years ahead of most high school students and remarkably well rounded and thoughtful. From the start this was all pretty apparent (he actually bought my coffee, which sounds like a small thing, but I can assure you probably wouldn’t have crossed my mind when I was in high school). We had a wonderfully wide ranging conversation…

I’ve had a couple of experiences in the last month that have alternately made me feel good about the human condition or wonder why people can be such jerks. First the positive experience which essentially involved two strangers going out of their way to help me out. One in particular was pretty inspiring. My car battery managed to die i  the parking lot of the Safeway up in Fraser on a recent Sunday night. I had just picked up a carpet steam clearer (the kind that doesn’t work very well, but I still feel compelled to rent every once in a while). I was in the process of walking this up the hill back home when I was passed by a car who turned…

My daughter reached an important American milestone yesterday – her first credit card offer.  Four months shy of her 2nd birthday I’m not entirely sure she’s ready to handle the responsibility, but I did send the response card in to see what would happen (I circled her date of birth and indicated her occupation as ‘pre-school student’).  I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve had a few frustrating things going on this week and my attitude around them forced me to remember an old adage that I used to use when I was guiding back-country hiking trips (when inevitably we’d get rained on or someone would have forgotten something and people would get upset). It’s either fun or funny. Choose. Depending on my mood my response can range from laughter to “fuck you – it’s neither and I don’t want to play this game” (talking to myself, of course). Of course most times it really is either fun or funny (or feels better when put in one of those categories) and when forced to choose it typically puts me in a better mood.