Rocky Mountain Wahoos

National Parks Travelogue

2011-10-24T21:48:00.003-05:00

I haven’t written a blog entry in almost a year, but I thought I’dfinally break the streak and get back in the game. Sarah and I took a vacation this Fall to explore American's National Parks out West.

The idea for this trip actually came from the 10 year UVAreunion we went to this Spring. On awhim, we hit up the UVA Travel seminar just to see what they had to offer. I wasn’t really planning on booking a tripbecause I knew we could save a lot of money if we did all the legworkourselves, and the $63,000 around the world trip by private jet is still out ofour league. However, I thought we could get some ideas for a cool trip that wecould do on our own terms. They had anAmerica the Beautiful tour of the Grand Canyon and other National Parks outWest. We had always talked about goingto see the Grand Canyon someday and going back to Colorado to do some of thesummer time activities, so we made our own itinerary to see four NationalParks: Grand Canyon, Arches,Canyonlands, and Rocky Mountain National Park. Our plan was to start in Phoenix and visit some of Sarah’s family nearbyin Mesa, drive to the Grand Canyon, then head to Moab, Utah to visit Arches andCanyonlands nearby, and then head to Colorado to see Rocky Mountain NationalPark and see some old friends in Denver before flying back to DC. Before I move on, I have to give a shout out to Fox Rent aCar for literally being $500 cheaper than any other rental car company for aone-way rental from Phoenix to Denver. They got piss poor reviews, but I read that the Phoenix location wasokay and really all I need from a rental car company is to get me a car thatcan get from Point A to Point B. Needless to say we survived, and really the Chevy Malibu we got wasstarting to grow on us.

To say Phoenix is hot is a fairly big understatement. It was 105 when we landed that afternoon andthe sun was intense. Despite the heat wedecided to take a go at the outdoor Botanical Gardens Museum because we had some time to kill after ourplane landed. It was pretty cool to seeall the different varieties of cacti, but at some point you just need airconditioning. After visiting with Sarah’s family, we headedon the road north to cooler weather. Ithink the cliché’s are correct; it’s hard to capture the sheer size andvastness of the Grand Canyon. Even whenyou’re seeing it first hand, some of the scenery looks more like a painting asthe layers and canyons keep repeating themselves.

Grand Canyon from South Rim

Weenjoyed hiking the south rim trail and watched the sun go down. The next morning I even got up early to catchthe sunrise. Our final Grand Canyonexcursion was to actually hike down a bit into the canyon to get a differentperspective. Although it was a heck of aclimb back up, the views down at Cedar Ridge where spectacular.

Next we headed North again for the 6 hour drive toMoab. To get there we drove throughsome of the most remote areas I’ve ever been to; small towns were as much as 90miles apart. We were lucky enough topass through some beautiful landscapes right as the sun was setting right nearthe Arizona/Utah border.

Sunset at the Utah Border

Trail Up the Rock Face

We spent the bulk of our trip in and around the Moab area,and we still didn’t get a chance to see everything on our list. After some much needed rest, we spent ourfirst day hiking through Arches National Park. The park gets its namesake from the many unique red rock formations thatadorn the park. The hike to the “DoubleO” arch was probably our favorite of the day: some cool rock scrambling up and around the rock “fins” with aspectacular viewpoint at the end.

To break up all the hiking and give our legs a rest, thenext day we did something completely different and rented a kayak on the Coloradoriver. For the trip we booked, we gotan inflatable kayak (basically a narrow mini-raft) and we followed alongsidetwo guided rafts. We got to enjoy the beautifulscenery and go through some small (Class I and IIs) but fun rapids. The best way to describe the difficulty is that our guide gave us helmets but didn't make us wear them, except during the rapids when they took our pictures so that she wouldn't get in trouble with her boss.

We spent the late afternoon at Canyonlands National Park. It’s like a massive version of ArchesNational Park, but we could only spend a small fraction of time there. We did yet another hike to watch the sunset to the aptly named Grand View Point Overlook.

For our last day in Moab, we went to see the most famousArch in the area: the Delicate Arch. It certainly lived up to its billing andprobably better pictured than described:

The Famous Delicate Arch

For the final portion of our trip, we headed out on oursecond big road trip to Colorado and Rocky Mountain National Park. After seeing a plethora of canyons and redrocks, it was a welcome change to see yellow Aspen trees and blue lakes. During the time we lived in Colorado, we didnot manage to go to the RMNP in the fall. The trail to Cub Lake the first day was ourfavorite, it had the perfect combination of snow capped mountains, fall colors,and a lily-pad covered lake.

Cub Lake

Althoughwe saw no bears at Cub Lake, there were plenty Elk around the park. It was easy to tell whenever wildlife was spotted: if an otherwise unexplainable mini-traffic jam occurred, you could bet there was some wildlife nearby. We hiked a few more trails to several other picturesque lakes to complete our journey around the park.

Our final destination was a short trip down memory lanearound Denver. We met up with somefriends for reminiscing, drinks, and dinner at one of our favoriterestaurants. Before our flight out thelast day, we had a fun time enjoying a beautiful day at Washington Park. In typical Denver fashion, there was avolleyball tournament going on and not just any volleyball tournament, everyonewas dressed up!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs Business Casual

To the Rally...

2010-11-24T23:14:00.001-05:00

Even though work has been super busy (unfortunately I expect that to continue for a little bit over the next couple of months), I’ve found some limited time to squeeze out another blog entry. As my topic this month, I have chosen a familiar theme for long time readers...the trials and tribulations of getting around DC. This time it involved getting to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Our story begins early Saturday morning. Several of us were planning on attending the rally, but there were some complicating factors. Our distinguished guests (Traci, Cassie, and Shannon, or “Trassinon”) were in town for the Halloween party, but had other brunch plans that morning before the rally. The first "Oh S@!t" moment occurred as I was dropping the brunch-goers at Vienna Metro. The line wrapped out of the fare gates all the way across 66 into the kiss and ride drop off point (if you haven’t been to the Vienna Metro, take my word for it that it’s a long freaking way). Luckily, I did remember that during big events, like the annual Cherry Blossom festival, the line is just for the fare card machines and not to actually get on the train. Unfortunately, not all of our guests had a fare card, so back to the house we went to scrounge for extra fare cards. Fortunately, we found a few extras that we could use and headed out again for trip #2 to the Metro. I wished them luck and made tentative plans to try to meet up at the rally (foolish though they were) and headed back to the house to pick the second crew (myself, Sarah, Sarah #2, Rob, Mike #2, and Amanda). We would never see the brunch goers again…at least until I had to pick them up from the Vienna Metro yet again much later that afternoon.

We strategized for a bit and thought that maybe Dunn Loring would be a little less chaotic than Vienna, so we decided to head that way. We were dead wrong. The Dunn Loring line was just as long, if not longer, and went around the block to the street. We took one of the few remaining parking spaces and headed to the station. There was something strangely satisfying in walking past the huge line for the farecard machines and walking right up to the deserted fare gates and into the station.

Our next challenge was getting on the train. We had some seasoned Metro goers in the group so we immediately headed to the very end of the tracks to get on the first car. The train was packed, but the first car actually had some room. This didn't mean that people were filling in the middle yet, but we were able to all squeeze on. The next several metro stops were like a game of Tetris...how many more people could squeeze into an already packed car. It was a good thing the general mood of the crowd was much different than a typical rush hour commute. People were generally jovial and entertaining; trading stories of how they got there, joking around about restoring sanity, and hitting on Rob’s wife. As the Metro Tetris game continued, our party ended up getting pushed into different parts of the car. Being freakishly tall, I had to serve as the chief communication link between everyone. At least one person decided, let’s just get out once we hit the district and walk the rest of the way. So, we escaped the sardine can and started the long walk to the mall.

We ended up arriving at the rally right around 12:00. The crowds were enormous and pretty soon we arrived at a logjam. People stretched way beyond the limits of the area set aside for the rally. Portions of the mall were blocked off, forcing everyone to squeeze into the walkways. People completely covered the roads and were starting to climb on anything they could: trees, street lights, and even the port-a-potties. Although it was crowded the many clever signs and costumes more than made up for it:

“Keep your hands off my Third Amendment Rights, No Soldiers Quartered in MY house"

“Don’t Blame Me I voted for Kodos”

"If a riot breaks out I'm grabbing an I-Pad"

“Hitler was a Nazi”

The Street Next to the Mall - Notice the Person on the Traffic Light
The camaraderie with the crowd was definitely fun, but it was very tough to actually hear or see the rally. Jon Stewart and the music generally came through pretty good, but not having the visuals made it pretty hard to understand what was going on and other speakers were much quieter. We didn’t get any visuals of the classic Stephen Colbert outfits, and were mostly confused with the Peace Train/Crazy Train bit. At that point we figured we had really seen all that we could see and decided to make our way around the back of the rally toward the Capitol and head to the Metro. We figured the DVR of the rally would make a whole lot more sense. Although Mike was really pushing to just go to Churchkey instead of heading back to the infamous Blades and Booze Halloween party, we ended up making the last, much less crowded portion of our journey and drove out to the far West of Northern Virginia.

I definitely thought it was a fun and cool experience, much more about the journey than the actual destination, but I do have some complaints. Comedy Central, your estimates were way off. I’ll even put you “On Notice.” I know these things are hard to estimate, but you were off by a factor of four (60k vs 220k) and that doesn’t include all the people who basically got stranded trying to get there. Here is aerial photo of the event, which you can see extends well beyond the original space:

The crowds ended up being about the same number of people as a normal DC workday. Transporting that many people just doesn’t work with 12 minute intervals between trains. As I understand it, Metro’s policy is not to run more trains unless the organizers of an event ask for expanded service and pay to provide it. You should have ponied up Comedy Central, it just wasn’t working.

Alaskan Travelogue: Part 2

2010-09-18T14:16:00.011-05:00

Just as soon as we got back to the ship from our Kayaking trip in Ketchikan, we got some surprising news from the ship’s Captain about our next stop. The tiny town of Hoonah was in the midst of a serious situation involving the perpetrator in the murder of two police officers who was still barricaded in his house. The coast guard had temporarily closed the port and our ship had to adjust its plans. Although it took them a while to tell us the details of our new itinerary, the first thing I wanted to do was call the independent tour companies that we booked our excursions with. We decided to book outside the cruise line because you generally got longer excursions with smaller groups for the same price. However, I never thought the cruise ship would change the order of the port stops! Luckily it all worked out thanks to some flexibility by the excursion vendors.

We ended up taking the long trip to Skagway instead of to Hoonah and just arrived at 8:30 in the morning before our bus tour with Chilkoot Charters and Tours to the Yukon was supposed to depart. We rushed to get off the ship, but luckily we ended up having plenty of time thanks to some flexibility by the tour company. The weather cooperated and despite the 60% chance of rain, it stayed bright and clear. The tour took us over the White Pass trail, through a small desert that appeared after a glacier lake receded, to the beautiful Emerald Lake. We even saw some real Alaskan sled dogs relaxing in the warm weather.

Emerald Lake, Yukon

Our next stop was the capital city of Juneau. We didn’t book an excursion and decided to just take a shuttle up to the Mendenhall Glacier and National park. The weather held out for another unexpected sunny afternoon, and although no bears were spotted we did see some spectacular views of the glacier. After taking a short walk to as close to the glacier as we could get, we headed to a 3.5 mile nature loop trail that showcased the types of vegetation that emerge after the glacier receded.

Mendenhall Glacier

The final port before the end of our cruise was at Icy Straight Point near the small town of Hoonah. The port had reopened after the Juneau Swat team stormed the house and arrested the shooter. Aside from the huge zip line (which we didn’t try after doing some serious zip lining in West Virginia the week prior), the main attraction in Hoonah is whale watching. We took the Glacier Wind Charters tour to Point Aldophus, which is the feeding grounds for about 30 whales. Although it poured down rain for a good hour of the trip, the whales were being very active. We saw several even do a complete breach. On the way back to the port, away from most of the action, we seemed to disturb a relaxing whale who surfaced right next to our small craft and then proceeded to leap right in the air behind us. It was pretty amazing stuff, I even got a short video of one of the whales jumping in the distance.

Next we saw what perhaps my favorite site of the cruise was and the main reason I was happy with our choice for the North bound cruise: the Hubbard Glacier. This glacier is about 6 miles wide and 10-15 stories high. The ship pulls right alongside it with the hope to see some serious calving. Despite our best attempts to make enough noise to shake up the glacier, we didn’t see any major ruptures. However, the glacier didn’t completely disappoint. Its normal activity was still very impressive and the slightly overcast sky really made the blue glacier ice stand out.

Hubbard Glacier

From the Hubbard glacier, we had one final day and night at sea before reaching the last stop in our cruise, Seward Alaska. Although we missed the seminar on how to fold towels and wash cloths into animal shapes, we did get in some more mini golf and ended up on a winning team in a quite windy volleyball tournament consisting of two teams. Luckily only two volleyballs were lost to the ocean. It ended up being an early evening since we had to grab a quick breakfast and be ready for the scenic train ride to Anchorage by 5:55 AM. Mainly as a matter of principle, one of my major goals of the morning was to figure out how to get my previously confiscated surge protector back. We eventually figured out we had to go to a separate table where all forbidden items ended up, most of which were Ulu knives (traditional Alaskan rounded blades that are big with tourists). We had no receipt to give them (very confusing for them) but we eventually spotted our contraband with our room number taped on. They had Sarah fill out a surprisingly long form but eventually the surge protector was ours again. Once on the train, I was able to get some nice pictures of what you think of as typical Alaskan scenery: snow topped mountains with glaciers, green forests, lakes, and even some wildlife. We saw some moose and even some goats up high on the mountains.

Our flight (which included the first meal that I’ve had for free in a flight in 6 years) got us to Seattle fairly late Friday night. We had a great time in our one day in Seattle. In the morning we walked over to the Seattle center and saw the Space Needle, and then went on a “Food Tour” of Pike’s Place market. The market is so huge and so crowded, the tour was really a great way to focus in on about 10 different shops and get to sample something from each. The tour guide provided insight and historical tidbits that also made it more interesting than a normal walkthrough. From garlic hot-smoked salmon, to seafood bisque, to chocolate covered cherries, we got a lot of good food. At the famous fish market, Sarah also got to be about as close as possible to the fish catcher without catching the fish with her face.

In the afternoon we met up with Marie and Adam at their place in Seattle. They were excellent hosts and we ended up deciding to go on the Redhook brewery tour and visit a nearby winery. Although it was close, we decided to go with beer and wine instead of the other kayaking options we discussed. It was a fun afternoon and after getting some dinner and eating some ice cream we rushed off to catch our red-eye flight back home. It was great end to a wonderful vacation.

Redhook Brewery Tour

Alaskan Travelogue: Part 1

2010-09-18T13:36:00.011-05:00

After working a half day on Thursday morning, the trip began with our flight to Vancouver from Dulles via San Francisco. By the time our taxi dropped us off at our hotel in downtown Vancouver we were pretty exhausted (it was 2am EST) and we went straight to bed. Even in our limited time there the next day, Vancouver was a fun city to explore. We walked through the historic Gas town district, Chinatown, and through the main shopping district. After walking around town all day and trying to stay dry, we eventually made it to the Vancouver pier at about 3:00 PM.

One of our unintended traveling goals is to get in an inconsequential mishap as soon as we enter another country. For Canada it ended up revolving around the surge protector. Several people before the trip had strongly recommended that a surge protector would be absolutely necessary for our cruise. Never having been on a cruise before it made sense to us; unfortunately, Royal Caribbean scanned our carry-on luggage and immediately managers were called to confiscate our contraband. More on this later when we attempted to get it back after the cruise.

When we first got on the ship, Sarah and I both had a moment of "what did we sign up for," but we actually mostly enjoyed our time at sea. I don’t think we’ll ever go on a cruise just to go on a cruise (well at least not for 30 years or so when we hit the average cruiser age group), but once we found out what we liked we found several ways to entertain ourselves. The “My Time” dining worked out really well for us. Instead of eating at the same time with the same people every night, we could choose any time for dinner and either ate by ourselves at a table for two or with a different group of people every night. The evening shows in the theater were hit and miss. One comedian duo was really good; the other comedian wasn't so hot. Sarah liked the Broadway musical type productions better than me, but overall they were generally worth going to. I was a little annoyed at some of the nickel-and-diming for cruise ship activities. We learned quickly to look for the ($) on the daily activities list that indicated an extra charge. We did splurge one night to pay extra for the specialty steak restaurant, and it was totally worth it. We liked the mini-golf, table tennis (especially challenging with the wind while the ship was moving), and even played volleyball the last day at sea. I actually went to the fitness center a couple of times (which was a very nice facility) and even won some money at the Video Poker machines in the Casino. We made it a point to attend each session of the progressive trivia game, and I thought we did pretty well for just the two of us (most teams had 5-6 people); we were in 5^th place at one point.

Even though we found some stuff to do on the ship, it was nice to get off when we arrived at Ketchikan. Ketchikan is one of the rainiest cities in the country and also very well known for their salmon. We saw our first Salmon ladder in Ketchikan; it was interesting to see the fish fight to go upstream first hand. Our excursion that day was a several hour kayak tour with Southeast Sea Kayaks near the Tongass National Forest. They took us by speed boat to the islands were we kayaked together in the area known as Orca’s Cove. We saw plenty of sea wildlife, lots of starfish and jellyfish, as well as two bald eagles. Sarah even held one of the non-stinging jelly fish in her hands. Although we got some rain, it was a lot of fun. The hot cocoa and smoked salmon they had waiting for us on our return boat trip was tasty and a great way to end the trip.

The Decision...

2010-07-11T21:47:00.005-05:00

[Note: I started this right after the announcement, but long days at work have gotten in the way of finishing until tonight]

As someone who follows sports pretty closely, I feel compelled to write something on the recent Lebron decision to leave Cleveland and take his talents to South Beach. In full disclosure, since Lebron timed his announcement right during my dinner plans with Sarah for her birthday, I didn't actually see the coverage live but saw plenty of highlights after the fact. There are several things that annoyed me about the whole situation. I respect his right to move to a different team, but his execution was all wrong. The whole thing was handled pretty poorly by Lebron's PR team. Since his PR team is basically Drama and Turtle from Entourage (friends from back home), I guess it's not too surprising.

The key thing that really pushed this over the edge for me was the hour long TV special on ESPN. When Lebron's camp sold this idea, they didn't seem to realize that this would be interpreted as a slap in the face to Cleveland. Lebron didn't show any empathy for the Cleveland fans who have basically worshiped him for 7 years, or show any loyalty to his team. It was like going to a fancy dinner with your long time girlfriend and then getting on one knee and proposing to the girl you met last week (all on national TV). Plus, did they really need the whole hour for what amounted to about about a five minute announcement. Kevin Durant just issued a press release. When you refer to yourself in the third person several times, the whole thing screams narcissism right at you.

The other big question is in the long run will it all mean that much? Joining another Top 3 player who has already won a championship certainly won't help his legacy. As many have noted, this is something Michael Jordan would never have done. How much it means in the end will depend a lot on what happens over the next several years. If Miami wins a bunch of championships, then the reaction to all this will fade and basketball fans will remember the Heat as a dynasty. The more interesting thing will be if this Heat team doesn't win for a couple of years or at all. Then the media will pile on Lebron for leaving Cleveland and not even winning a championship. It will be a lot like the Tiger Woods situation right now. The longer Tiger doesn't win, the bigger the story of his fall from grace. In the end, I think it will be an interesting NBA season next year and it will be fun to cheer against Lebron.

Enjoy some Anti-Lebron t-shirts.

A Walk in the City...

2010-04-25T14:11:00.001-05:00

Recently Sarah and I had our friend Anthony from our Colorado days come visit for a quick whirlwind tour of Washington. The original plan was to fight the hoards during the Cherry Blossom festival, but the early April heat wave caused the blossoms to come out a little earlier than expected. Even though we missed the cherries, that didn't stop us from cramming in a whole lot of DC into one Saturday and taking pictures of whatever trees were blossoming at the time!

The journey started at Arlington National Cemetery and ended at the Metro stop at L'Enfant Plaza. In between there was lots of catching up, picture taking, walking, and enjoying a beautiful Saturday in the city. For posterity's sake, I retraced the route and it looks like we got in a good days walk, at least 5.1 miles.

After strolling through parts of Arlington Cemetery, we crossed the memorial bridge and checked out the Lincoln Memorial and Korean War Memorial:

We headed through the FDR memorial to the tidal basin and the Jefferson Memorial. Although there were nothing but green leaves on the Cherry trees on the tidal basin, there were about 6 crab-apple trees flowering nearby. We joined the other tourist groups who came to see some flowers and took a few pictures of our own.

As we headed toward the national mall, we stopped to take in a random Women's Rugby match underway. Although we were temporarily fascinated, there wasn't as much action as you might think. We reached the National Art Gallery to take in some fine art and hit up the hidden cafeteria, and then finished the day at the Air and Space Museum. After being out for about 8 hours, we decided to grab dinner downtown at Gordon Biersch. Being at the point of collapse made that first beer at Gordon Biersch taste even better and gave us enough energy for the metro ride back to Fairfax.

On a related topic, if you are in the market for fine art photography at a reasonable price, check out Anthony's website: http://www.flamiophoto.com/home for some great scenic photography in natural and urban settings. Even better, if you are in the Lambertville, NJ (the nice part near Pennsylvania) area he is starting up a Photo Tour business. He'll take you hiking, canoeing, or cycling to scenic areas to capture a postcard quality shot.

Adventures in Driving…

2010-03-14T13:19:00.003-05:00

After the last few months I propose the following equation: DC Drivers + Extreme Weather = Disaster

My first recent driving adventure occurred leaving the region before the actual snowstorm hit. Thursday night, we were heading to Wisp for a long skiing weekend. We were going the western route via US 15 North to avoid the beltway traffic which seemed like a good idea at the time. Eventually, traffic completely stopped and we figured it had to be an accident. We turned around and hit the “detour” button on the GPS which eventually took us down a narrow road to get back to 15. I took it as an ominous sign when we headed down this road and passed a car going backwards attempting to get the hell out of there. Apparently this road was back country enough that it had never been completely cleared from the last relatively small snow storm earlier that week, and there was still some hard ice pack on the surface. Luckily the Murano did fine on the first hill past a truck spinning out at the bottom. The next obstacle was a section only slightly larger than a car width plus an inordinate amount of traffic coming both ways due to the accident. There was lots of waiting and passing until we came to a complete stop. The next hill with some ice cover was causing all sorts of spinouts. A car in front of us stopped as cars coming in the other direction couldn’t make it up the hill. At this point we started to get some info from friends that the US 15 was closed for two hours due to some genius who hit a telephone pole. We didn’t know for sure if we were going to come out on the other side of the accident or if the road was even passable. Thank goodness we didn’t turn around! I ended up getting out of the car, helped push two cars out of the way and eventually got some intel that we could go north once we got back to 15. We were only 0.6 miles away from the highway, so once we played the good Samaritan we made it the rest of the way without incident.

The driving was expectantly difficult on the way back from Wisp on Sunday. The giant storm had hit Friday night and Saturday and most of the region had two feet plus. During our drive back home, I was wondering what causes the increase in stupidity the closer we got to DC: 1) Is it a familiarity thing - drivers don’t drive in snow as much the further south you go, 2) A culture thing - DC drivers have places to be, who cares if there are unsafe road conditions, or 3) A pure numbers thing - a lot more drivers means a greater chance that there will be some idiots among them which end up causing problems. For whatever the reason, the drive was pretty smooth with almost all dry pavement until we got back to Interstate 270. From there it was a bit interesting. A lot of people assumed that dry pavement would be the norm for the entire drive, which became an issue when one lane suddenly was mostly snow…several spinouts ensued. Most of the way on 495 and 270 had one shoulder plowed on the far right and one lane on the far left. The middle snow-covered lanes felt a bit like the Wild West: dangerous and fairly lawless. Luckily we made it back without incident with just enough time to dig out our parking spaces and make a path to our front door in time for Super Bowl kickoff.

Seeking some refuge from the snow we went on a trip later that month to the Midwest to visit Traci and Cassie. Unfortunately, we ran into a bit of precipitation during our trip there as well (I think it either snowed or sleeted the entire weekend, the only issue on an otherwise great trip). After arriving at Kansas City airport, we headed up north to Missouri in the middle of a pretty intense snow storm. We made it to St. Joseph without incident, but Cassie’s Ford Focus struggled a bit on unplowed roads in her neighborhood. Cassie’s house was at the top of a hill and we didn’t quite make it. Eventually I had to get out and push. That did the trick, but it was a little nerve racking to watch Cassie and Sarah drive off without me (I did eventually catch up to the car).

After all of this I think I’m ready for Spring!

Editors Note: This post was delayed in being published due to the writer’s computer having some issues the last couple of weeks. It had to be rebuilt, but it works now!

The New Bathroom...

2010-01-24T15:32:00.013-05:00

Our long journey with our first major household project finally came to an end a few weeks ago. When we bought our house we knew that the bathrooms were in decent shape, but needed reworking, especially the master bathroom. Instead of starting with the master bath, which would require much more work, we decided to try our hands at our other bathroom upstairs, also know as Mike's bathroom (not sharing a bathroom is a good thing for our marriage). The plan was to leave the shower alone and pretty much replace everything else: new tile floor, vanity, sink, toilet, mirror, light and paint job. It took a few hard weekends of work, but eventually we got there. Although nothing was really too hard, everything took a lot of research and was slow going. We did most of the work in October, and it was usable by Halloween, but we didn't end up doing the final touch ups and paint until over the holidays. Without further adieu, here are the before and after pics:
The Before Shot
Out with the old
The New Bathroom

Journey to the Alps

2009-11-28T19:50:00.002-05:00

For the final part of our European adventure, we took the scenic Golden Pass train to the land of mountains and lakes in Switzerland. From Avignon, we headed to Geneva and transfered to the Golden Pass line to a small town called Lauterbrunnen.
Lauterbrunnen Train Station
This little town served as our springboard for trains, gondolas, cable cars, and hiking trails into the alps. After gathering some supplies at the local Co-Op grocery store, we went to bed early to get an early start on hiking the next day.

The forecast for our first full day in Lauterbrunnen was mostly cloudy, something that was unfortunately common given the fantastic views. In the morning, we strategized a bit and watched the local weather channel with live web cams from several mountains and saw a clearing on the top of the Schilthorn. That was enough for us to change our plans and start with a journey to the top. This involved taking a gondola to a train, to two more gondolas through a lot of clouds and fog. Eventually, we pierced throug the clouds at 10,000 feet and had some great views at the top of the Alps with the clouds finally below us. Fun fact: the Schiltorn was featured in the James Bond movie "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." The chief villian's layer was actually the building at the top of the mountain.

View from the Schilthorn
More of the Alps
View from the Birg Gondola Station

Later that morning we headed down to lower (and cloudier) territory to take the North Face trail through a series of small Swiss Alp towns and farms. It took us a little bit to find the trailhead, mainly because there were three cows standing smack in the middle of it. Although the clouds were obstructing the higher mountains, we had a nice view of the valley as we winded through swiss farms. We had some excellent super fresh cheese along the way and even almost got hit by some wood being thrown to a wood pile.
Hiking Through the Cows

After eating a quick lunch with some food from the local Co-Op, we headed to another hike on the other side of the mountain (toward Jungfrau). Unfortunately, the clouds descended again and what was supposed to be one of the most scenic hikes was mainly spent in the clouds and fog. We returned tired and hungry for a traditional Swiss dinner. The cheese fondue was yummy, but it was odd that it only came with apple dippers and we were charged a dollar for each shot of tap water I drank.

French Wine Country - The Rhone Valley

2009-11-12T20:20:00.016-05:00

Our second day in wine country was spent in the Provence region in the Chotes de Rhone wine appellation with our home base in the city of Avignon. Since we were traveling by train, we decided to splurge and take a guided minivan tour of the region. Englishman Oliver Hickman (who now lives in France to grow his own wine) whisked us around the region to taste 18 different wines at three different estates in the region and teach us a bit about the different wine-making regions.

It was right in the middle of the fall harvest and a great time to taste some wine. The region is known for the reds, and we tasted some great and relatively cheap reds (finding those cheap reds in the U.S has proven more difficult).

We went to one winery in Vacqueyras in the morning where we got Olivier all to ourselves for our tasting. He was very knowledgeable, teaching us about the characteristics of the wine and providing lots of specifics on each wine we tasted. He was also very affable, very English, and just a fun guy to hang out with tasting wine all day.

At Vacqueyras Vineyard

After lunch we saw two more vineyards in the Châteauneuf-du-Pape region. The wines here have been famous ever since the Pope moved from Rome to Avignon in the 14th century and instilled wine-making in the region. Due to the interesting "terrior" which consists of vines growing through a meter of large stones with grenache grapes and 700 years of good marketing, it's the most famous wine in the region. Their reds have a nice blend of smoothness, with hints of fruit and spice; I highly recommend them. We shared the afternoon tour with three other slightly older couples (even one from Charlottesville), which was also surprisingly fun; after we were left alone after a tasting, they were the ones to start helping themselves to more samples for us all!

The Grapes and Stones of Châteauneuf-du-Pape

After getting back from Chateauneuf-du-Pape, we toured the city of Avignon, from its Palace of the Popes, the temporary Papacy in the 14th century, to the bridge to nowhere. All in all, one of our favorite days!

French Wine Country - Beaune

2009-10-28T18:01:00.001-05:00

Our first stop in the French Wine Country was in Beaune, the major city in the Burgundy region and not unexpectantly a town centered around wine. We arrived late in Beaune and started off by having dinner at a wine bar complete with Escargot. Sarah was pretty cautious about trying one of the region's signature foods, but I was able to finally convince her to try one. Everything cooked in a pesto garlic butter sauce will taste good.

As you might expect, our day in Beaune was centered around the region’s wine. That morning we took a short class on the essentials of understanding the labeling, production, and tasting of Burgundy wine. The upshot is that Burgundy wine is bottled and labeled by the area in which the grapes are grown. The more specific the area, the better winemaking conditions for the terrior (soil, drainage, micro-climate) and therefore, of course, the more expensive the wine. So for example, a Burgundy regional wine (with grapes from anywhere in the region) is less selective than a particular village "Gran Cru" with grapes only from the upper slopes of the area.

The Town of Beaune

Later, we did a tasting and tour the Bouchard Aine cellar estate. Our tour guide gave the tour in both French and English for us, and promised that her English got better the more wine she drank! The estate grows and bottles several red and white wines, although Burgundy is more known for their whites than their reds. It was fun and I was particularly impressed that they tasted their premier “Grand Cru” wine, made mainly from Pinot Noir. It was a very, very good wine, but it cost 70 Euros for a bottle so we reluctantly passed.

Tasting on the Cellar Tour

Adventure in Europe: Part Four

2009-10-04T21:15:00.007-05:00

On Monday we took the Metro straight to the Louvre to spend several hours touring one of the world’s largest museums. We had been warned by several sources that the Louvre can go on forever. Instead of trying to see absolutely everything, we decided to take a more targeted tour of the highlights of the museum. Thanks to a Rick Steves audio guide, we had some guidance on where to go. We saw the biggies: the Venus de Milo, Nike of Samothrace, the Mona Lisa, parts of the Parthenon, as well as the Italian Renaissance and large format French paintings. There was still tons of stuff to see, so after a lunch break, we spent a few hours walking through the German/Dutch painting wings, as well as the Roman, Egyptian, Greek areas. We had heard from guidebooks and others that Mona Lisa is soooooooo small that by the time we got to it, I was practically expecting a postcard. Our expectations were so low, we thought it was a fairly standard sized portrait.
Outside the Louvre
Next we headed across the city to the Arc de Triumph. Since we had the Paris pass, we trudged up the stairs to the top to see the 12 streets that converge into one big traffic circle. Not surprisingly, Sarah even witnessed an accident amongst the chaotic merging of traffic!

The Arc is bigger than Mike Diehl
From there we relaxed a bit at our hotel, and then ate a nice dinner sitting outside at a Parisian café at Le Soufflot Café near the Pantheon. One of the last Parisian sites we saw was the Eiffel Tower that evening. Our wave of crime almost continued when we almost jumped the Metro gate when a ticket machine broke down, but we decided to find a working ticket machine instead to finally end our criminal lives. At night, the Eiffel Tower is well lit with a sparkling light display at the top of every hour. We rode up to the second level (the top level was closed and supposedly didn’t have any better views anyway) and soaked in the Parisian landscape at night.

On our final morning in Paris, we headed to the last of the must-see sights on our list: the Orsay museum. In a manner of speaking, the Orsey museum picks up where the Louvre leaves off, with the rise of Impressionism in art. Sarah and I’s focus was here, as Sarah got to see several paintings she had studied in college by Monet, Renoir, Whistler, Degas, and Van Gough. That afternoon we said au revoir to Paris, and headed by train to French wine country.

Adventure in Europe: Part Trois

2009-09-28T20:35:00.008-05:00

On Sunday, we spent the majority of the day touring Versaille, one of Europe’s best palaces. We started by touring the vast Gardens and fortunately it was on a weekend the fountains were running full blast for a good part of the day.

After that, we soaked in the opulence of the Chateau and were glad that we had a pass which lead us straight to the museum without having to wait in a long ticket line. We also took advantage of the free Rick Steve’s audio-tour that I had downloaded to our MP3 players as we toured the spectacular rooms. We especially liked his insightful, but to-the-point commentary; plus it was free. After that, we took another short walk back through some of the gardens we had missed and then took the train back to Paris.

That evening we saw the very scenic Sainte Chapelle church. It’s not really a large or famous cathedral, but it has amazing stained glass windows that surround the entire sanctuary. It’s hard to capture on film (or a memory card), but it was impressive and definitely worth a visit.

That evening we got to see a whole different side of Paris. In a strange coincidence, Sarah had recently worked with an intern at Deltek who happens to live in Paris and before she left she invited us over one night to eat dinner with her family. They lived in a nice apartment on the North East side of town. It was hard to believe how narrow the street was to their complex, it was sized for at most a Mini Cooper. Aminata's family is Sengali, so we were treated to both traditional Parisian and Sengali dishes. Everything was yummy!

Adventure in Europe: Part Deux

2009-09-20T08:21:00.001-05:00

Our next day in Paris, we weren't actually in Paris very much. We took a day trip to the Loire Valley to see its famous Chateaus. Since we were traveling by train, we took the train in the morning to the small city of Amboise and did some wandering around their local Chateau and Leonardo Da Vinci’s final home.
City of Amboise
For the afternoon we arranged a minivan tour to two major Chateaus. The first, Chenonceau, was the most scenic. It had beautiful gardens and was actually built partially over the river.

Chenonceau Chateau

The second, Chambord, was huge and the area’s largest. It was sparsely decorated, but the guards were strict. Sarah was spied sitting on a ledge for a picture from afar, and we were actually scolded five minutes later in another room (our second “illegal” act in France if you're keeping track).
Chambord Chateau
Sarah illegally sitting on the wall

We had a nice four course dinner at L’Epicerie, which included something every meal should have, a cheese course. After dinner we had another fun moment. For some reason, I thought our train back to Paris left at 9:21 PM (I blame the 24 hour system that listed the time as 21:07), instead of 9:07 PM. I discovered this as we paid our bill just before 9:00 PM. I told Sarah to pretend that we were on the Amazing Race, so with ridiculously full stomachs we ran to the train station (there were no taxis around) a little over a mile away. Luckily we made it with two minutes to spare, and realized that it was the last train to Paris that evening!

Adventure in Europe Part I

2009-09-16T21:44:00.001-05:00

For the next several blog posts, I'm writing up our recent trip to France and Switzerland in travelogue style. Part I starts here:

Our trip actually started by visiting Madrid, the Madrid airport anyway. Our flight was on Iberia and we actually changed planes in Madrid in route to Paris’s smaller airport called Orly. After arriving in Paris, we decided to take care of some practicalities like getting Euros, picking up our pre-ordered train tickets, and buying a Paris museum pass. According to our guidebook (Rick Steves), a shuttle bus service called Jetbus was available to take us from the Orly airport to the Paris Metro closest to our Hotel. Even though it was still listed on the web, the Tourist desk at the airport told us that the shuttle was no longer running. Eventually they told us of a regular French bus that would run to the same metro station. We followed a circuitous route through a series of tunnels until we reached a door with partially shattered glass. This lead to a highway under an overpass with fast moving traffic. After we got to the highway, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a bus coming with the name of our Metro stop. Sarah and I sprinted the 25 yards (with all our luggage of course) and barely made the bus. Regrettably, we hadn’t read the section on how the buses work, so we were caught staring blankly at a stone-face French bus driver who obviously spoke no English. As we searched for money to pay (we had no coins anyway), the bus driver pulled on without giving us a second look. As we observed people boarding the bus, almost all already had a bus ticket which they validated/scanned against a ticket machine. Either the bus driver thought that in all our fumbling we were searching for our ticket, or he just didn’t care. Regardless, we left the bus quickly when it got to our stop and were thankful for the free transportation. Only one hour in France and we committed our first illegal act!

After our initial adventure, we didn’t have much time for sightseeing after checking into our hotel. We walked to Notre Dame and did the free tour inside. It was definitely worth it, but fairly typical for a European cathedral. For as famous as it is, I was expecting something more grandiose on the inside. We had some yummy Crepes that evening at a restaurant called La Crepe Rit du Clown as we struggled to stay awake until normal bed time.

View of Notre Dame

Our 15 minutes...

2009-07-12T20:25:00.001-05:00

In what has become an annual tradition, Sarah, Ben, and I hit the links last weekend to watch the AT&T National tournament in DC. More commonly referred to as the Tiger Woods tournament, the weather was perfect for a 4th of July weekend with temperatures actually below 90 for a change. The crowds were thick for championship Sunday, with a showdown brewing between host Tiger Woods and Anthony Kim in the final pairing. If you've never been to a pro golf tournament, or more importantly ever followed Tiger Woods, there are a couple of things you should know. In the AT&T National on Sunday, there were around 46,000 people present. If those people are all spread out among the entire golf course, then there would be no problem with great views of the action. Of course. in the Tiger Woods tournament with Tiger Woods in the lead, pretty much 95% of the people are going to try and follow Tiger. In order to get decent views, you have to either camp out on one hole for the entire day, or if you try to follow you have to jump ahead by 2-3 holes after seeing him. After meeting up with Duncan, Jeremy, and Matt in the morning, we went all in and decided to follow the Woods/Kim pairing in the afternoon.

Our big claim to fame that day was actually getting into the TV coverage. After returning home that evening, we searched the TV coverage in crystal clear HD and were able to find ourselves a few times during our quest to follow Tiger. Our onscreen time was probably less than 5 seconds total, but who said you had to get all of your 15 minutes in one chunk?

The first time we were caught on camera was a very small portion of the screen during a Tiger putt on #5. If you look very closely (I put in a convenient arrow) you can see us in the upper right-hand corner and a big reaction from Ben after Tiger misses his putt (you'll need to click on the picture to get the full view):

Although we didn't get on camera for this, probably the most exciting thing that happened to us was almost getting hit by Anthony Kim on the 6th hole. We were not even watching that hole and were probably 40 yards off the fairway in a grove of pine trees when his ball landed in between us and ended up rolling right next to us as we walked toward the 7th hole. We got a close up view of the action, and avoided getting kicked out of the tournament by resisting the urge to pickup or kick the ball. Unfortunately though, we were standing behind the cameras and didn't quite make the tv coverage.

In our second appearance on #13, you can see Sarah, as well as the rest of the crowd is very serious awaiting Tiger to putt. Ben's hat also makes an appearance below me if you look closely.

In our third and best appearance on #17, Sarah and I offer Tiger some advice on a tricky putt:

All in all a good tournament, and although it is postponed the next two years, I'm looking forward to the US Open in 2011!

Classical Music...

2009-05-13T11:19:00.003-05:00

Over the last few weeks I've been feeling a little nostalgic. It all started when I found a few sites with sheet music for Classic Nintendo video game themes. Although most of these tunes are very familiar, I always like hearing a piece before trying to learn the sheet music. Youtube came to the rescue, and really got me into learning some old classics.

I drew my inspiration mainly from someone known as the videogame pianist (also known as the blindfolded pianist). I will never be able to play nearly as fast as he does, but it's fun to try. Do you recognize all the Mario themes in this:

So, I devoted the last few weeks to learning the Super Mario Brothers main theme and starting to learn the Legend of Zelda theme. This kicked off a run on playing some old games on Nesticle and seeing how quickly I could beat the original games. The original Super Mario Brothers took about two hours because I forgot where the second warp zone was...

On a related note, I stumbled upon this guy during my searches on YouTube for video game music. I never would have thought playing a flute could be this cool. I'm not going to learn how to play the flute but this is freaking awesome (check out his Inspector Gadget remix as well (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59ZX5qdIEB0&feature=related):

On Facebook...

2009-04-19T14:35:00.007-05:00

Several months ago, I finally caved to see what this Facebook thing was all about. For myself, I think the results have been mixed. I definitely went through an initial addiction phase where I was on a lot and amazed about the amount of information out there on people I hadn't seen in 10 years. I was able to “catch up” with them without any effort at all, which was addicting in a voyeuristic sort of way. I even was able to help gather a mini-reunion amongst a few old friends. I really like it as a photo sharing site. It is very user friendly and it's easy to post pics on there for any of your friends to see without worrying about who to email them to. I’m not really a fan of status updates (“Mike is a writing a blog entry…”) and I have never actually posted one yet. I liken them to “reply all” in email, it can serve an important (or at least interesting) function, but it can also get incredibly annoying. Hearing about your kids potty training is really not something I'm interested in hearing about. Part of this is my fault, as I know there are ways on Facebook to customize and filter such that I could eliminate a lot of annoyances and hear from only those who post “good” status updates.

I definitely take advantage of the privacy settings and essentially “lock it up” as restrictive as possible (as they set everything to wide-open by default). It amazes me that the next generation doesn’t understand privacy. Even high school students were quoted in a recent Washington Post article that they didn’t think that school security and local sheriffs should look at students Facebook pages to gather evidence. If you’re dumb enough to 1) post pictures that incriminate you in a crime, and 2) not restrict them so that law enforcement can’t freely look at them, then I have a rock that can keep away tigers that I’d like to sell to you.

Here are a few choice quotes from the Washington Post article:

"I think it's an invasion of the student's privacy," said Sarah Steinberg, 18, a senior at Robinson Secondary

"It's not really [their] business to be looking at students' profiles," said Eleni Gibson, 15, a freshman at Robinson. "Because they might see something that students didn't want them to see."

"It's crazy, the things they put on there," Loudoun County Sheriff Stephen O. Simpson said. "They seem to think they're invisible."

Facebook has been fun and we’ll see where it goes. It’s a nice tool, but it hasn’t taken over my life yet. I have many other ways to communicate with friends, and I’m still using those a lot. In the meantime, don’t take it personally if I don’t accept your friend invitation...

Aloha and Mahalo...

2009-02-16T19:31:00.000-05:00

Sarah and I are back from our trip to Hawaii. It was very relaxing and we loved seeing my Uncle and Aunt again on the Big Island; they were happy to see my Mom and Dad again who wouldn't have made the trip without going with us. We also explored Kauai for several days, which was a great side trip midway through the vacation. We didn't really get a tan (sun screen is your friend when you skin tone if best described as pale), but I thought I'd share a few highlights from our trip:

Hiking: Sarah agreed to take one day out of our relaxing vacation to go on a long hike with me on the North shore of Kauai on the Napali Coast. I had read and heard that this was generally thought to be the most beautiful area in the world. We're not really into the camping thing, so our best option to explore the 11-mile Kalaluu trail along the Napali Coast was to hike up and down the coast two miles until you get to secluded beach and then two miles inland along a stream to a majestic waterfall.

Highlighted Trail Map

For an 8 mile hike, it is fairly challenging due to several major stream crossings and the fact that this time of year the rock climbs are slippery and muddy. At some point you just embrace the mud and plow right through. The last part of the hike is not really marked so there are lots of opportunities to get off the trail; at one point we thought we were at another stream crossing but suddenly saw people walking 25 feet above us. Despite all that it was a very unique hiking experience and having plenty of water and bringing the right equipment (crocs for stream crossings were great) made it a great hike.

At the Falls

Roosters: If you haven't been to Kauai, a strange but interesting fact is that roosters (and chickens) have taken over the island. It's sort of weird...imagine if you went to someplace local like the Reston Town Center with nice restaurants and shops and also found like 15+ wild chickens running around. Our first night sleep on Kauai was cut a little short thanks to some added COCK-A-DOODLE-DOS much earlier than dawn.

Lava - We did something that we missed out on last time due to not planning ahead and relatively poor conditions, we got to see the lava at dusk. We grabbed our flashlights and walked down a small trail to the viewing area. What a show! It is hard to do it justice in words but here is picture at dusk to show you the entry point and a video once it is a little darker that gives you a feel of how dynamic it was:

Turtles - We spent a lot of time snorkeling and and we saw several giant sea turtles at several different snorkeling spots. Sarah now has a mini-fascination with turtles, so here is a cool turtle picture from snorkeling on the big island with one of those disposable underwater cameras.

No more bowling...

2009-01-13T20:46:00.002-05:00

What I didn't I do this past week you ask? One thing I didn't do last week was watch the BCS "Championship" game. I finally reached the breaking point with college football and decided not to watch the bowl games this year. I love college football in general but if your team isn't playing in the game (which wasn't a problem for me thanks to UVA tanking right when it looked like they might make a run) I find the bowls really unwatchable. A lot of this is driven by my continued frustration with the BCS system and the lack of a championship for an otherwise great sport. I almost watched the Penn State vs USC Rose Bowl, but in a strange but true twist, I ended up being entertained by a robotic dinosaur instead (if you're curious ask Mike P.)

I'm assuming most everyone has heard the basics of the playoff vs BCS debate...hell, even Obama has talked about it several times to advocate a playoff system. I don't want to repeat too many of the standard talking points but I will rebut two of the most cited arguments by the University presidents and big conference comissioners who support the awful BCS:

1) A playoff system would be infeasible and make the college football season too long. Let me throw the B.S. flag right off the bat for this one. Interestingly enough, every other level of college football (I-AA, II, and III) has a simple playoff system every year without a hitch. As far as season length, no one in the college football establishment had a problem extending the season from 10 games to13 games delaying the bowls until Jan 8th.

2) The college football regular season is so important that every week is like a single elimination playoff (and therefore a playoff would eliminate that fact). This one is even easier to argue. Just ask Utah from this season. They won every week, finshed undefeated, and won their BSC bowl game. For doing that Utah was rewarded with the coveted #2 slot in the final BSC poll despite being the only undefeated team. Florida and Oklahoma somehow missed the memo and despite being eliminated earlier in the regular season "playoff" played for the title.

So I'm continuing my boycott of Bowl games (it's easy to do from mid-January to December) and encouraging other like minded individuals to do the same while hoping that Obama will tackle College Football right after the Mortgage Crisis, the Credit Crisis, the Middle East Crisis, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Energy Policy...

Thank You Mr. Policeman...

2008-11-17T17:31:00.002-05:00

Editors Note: The extreme tardiness in posting a blog entry caused the backdating of this post, not because I control the fabric of time.

This is my official thank you letter to the police officer who pulled me over after returning from a basketball game at UVA. Thank you for not giving me a ticket and continuing my streak without a traffic violation (14 years and counting). Thank you for taking pity on a 30 year old family man with his wife and 3 young'ins in the back of his SUV (Ben, Traci, and Cassie). Thank you for being a basketball fan, which gave us something to talk about while you contemplated whether to give me a ticket or not. Thank you for making it extremely obvious that my problem was a faulty odometer. Thank you for reminding me that cruise control is my friend, pretty much anywhere on Route 29 in Virginia.

Jeckell and Wahoo???

2008-10-13T18:40:00.008-05:00

I have witnessed two football games in the last 10 days that have me very confused. I saw one in person, so I have reliable evidence that the event did actually occur (see the photo on the left as proof). Yes, I'm talking about the aberration that is the University of Virginia football team. If you haven't been following the UVA football season, I'll get right to the point: WE LOST TO DUKE 31-3. Let me repeat that for you: WE LOST TO DUKE 31-3. This was a record breaking achievement (but not in the good way):

Duke's first ACC win since Nov. 13, 2004 (vs. Clemson) snapping a 25-game conference losing streak.
Duke's largest margin of victory in an ACC game since a 49-16 win over Maryland on Sept. 3, 1994.
Duke's largest margin of victory against anybody since beating Northwestern 44-10 on Sept. 12, 1998.

That loss put UVA sitting at 1-3 after the first four games of the season with some rather dubious distinctions:

UVA was ranked 119 out of 120 teams in total offense. Take that Florida International!!
Dead last (#120) in scoring offense
Ranked 82nd in total defense
This is an unofficial stat, but most players leaving program while not graduating: 10. This included smoking ganja while on probation (QB Peter Lalich), leave of absence for personal reasons (DE), and the UVA unique getting kicked out for honor code violation (DE Fitzgerald).

Take a look at the UVA game by game stats up to this point:

1) USC: L 7-52, 187 yards on offense
2) Richmond: W 16-0, 295 yards on offense
3) UCONN: L 10-45, 219 yards on offense
4) Duke: L 3-31, 304 yards on offense

This all set the stage for a strange evening last Saturday night. I watched the UVA-Maryland game on ESPNU HD (thank you FIOS) and everything went perfectly. UVA won 31-0, Verica, our former 3rd stringer QB before academics and the aforementioned ganja bumped him up to starting job, went 16-19 for almost 200 yards and accounted for 3 touchdowns...in the first half!! It didn't stop in the second half; UVA held on for the shutout. It was a big enough blow out that the Washington Post almost decided not to print the story. (For those who don't read the Washington Post, a UVA win gets Column C on page 7, Maryland wins get front page of the paper).

When I went down to the East Carolina game on Saturday with my family, I had no idea what team to expect. Would this be the team that crushed Maryland or got crushed by Duke by the same amount? While it certainly wasn't as perfect a game as Maryland, UVA looked pretty good for most of it and came out with the 35-20 victory. The offensive load was carried by Cedric Peerman (the Rev) with two long touchdown runs (79 and 60 yards) and 173 total yards on the ground. It was a tense third quarter, but we held on with the best fake field goal I've ever seen.

All of a sudden we are putting up 30+ points and 420+ yards of total offense with regularity (we are now #98 in total offense). Why the change? It's hard to tell. I think it's a combination of UVA playing much better at home (Duke and UConn were away), having Peerman back full-time in the lineup, and a young QB learning from a few tough drubbings. I'm slightly less embarrassed to be a UVA football fan...sweet. We'll see what happens next week, bring on UNC!

Gooooooooooo....Sandstorm!

2008-09-01T10:28:00.000-05:00

I am going to have to brag a bit here on a recent volleyball success. Our coed fours team, Sarah, Bruce, Colleen and I, kicked some butt last week and won the tournament for our outdoor sand league! To give you a little background, pretend for a second we are doing a NBC style Olympic preview of our team....

<Montage of us practicing in the indoor racquetball courts, strategizing using salt and pepper shakers at IHOP, and someone slamming a ball into one of the Donohues' faces>

<Quick human interest story of Bruce constructing his own outdoor volleyball court out of spare lumber>

Bob Costas would talk about our initial struggles on the Dulles Volleyball circuit, advancing to the playoffs but failing to make it over the "hump" due to some inconsistencies and then throw it over to volleyball analysts Chris Marlowe and Karch Kiraly...

This season due to a tough schedule, (we only play 7 out of 19 teams and played most of the best ones) we barely made the playoffs. Our team was like the college basketball program that schedules a bunch of quality teams; we had a few more losses than a lot of other teams but we were battle tested. We entered the last match of the season with a 9-9 overall record (each game or set within a match counts toward your overall record), and our hopes of making the playoffs hanging on a thread. To make matters worse, Sarah was out sick. We played the team 3 on 4 and won all three games to improve our record to 12-9. That was enough to send us to the playoffs as the 8th seed facing off against the #1 seed.

We were down early by 5 or 6 points after some tentative play, when a timely time-out (one of the best timeouts for team Sandstorm ever) awoke the "thin beast" inside our team. Our defense kicked it up a notch and our opponents started to come unraveled pretty quickly. After a huge comeback win in the first set we rolled to a second set victory. I personally was about to collapse, and I don't think any of us was feeling particularly fresh after our huge comeback. The league organizer at the tournament that night was like "if you want why don't you go ahead and play the semi-final match on a free court" The other team had been resting for our entire match and we had to roll right in still trying to catch our breath....wonderful. Luckily, we continued to play at a high level and won the first set of the semis comfortably. Set #2 didn't go so hot, mainly because we were just getting too exhausted. Thank God the final set was only to 15 points; we played well enough to escape and made it to the finals. Fortunately I was starting to get my second wind and my hitting was coming back alive. After winning the first set handily, we were closing in for the win. We were up I believe 23-20 and we had a mini collapse. I won't say who hit a serve into the net, but they still owe us some beer :) The opposing team squeaked out a 27-25 win, and we had to settle the match in another tie breaker to 15. Luckily we went on a pretty big run and coasted our way to the championship.

I've reconstructed the playoff bracket below so you can see our historic run:

Randy Pausch...

2008-08-04T23:21:00.000-05:00

Who was Randy Pausch? He was a professor in the field of virtual reality who passed away from pancreatic cancer just over a week ago. He lead an amazing life and become internationally known for a talk he gave on achieving your childhood dreams. I won't repeat his bio (you can check out wikipedia for that), but if you haven't seen any of the following I strongly encourage you to check them out:

1) His lecture given in a Carnegie Mellon "Last Lecture" series after he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer: The Last Lecture. He achieved all of his childhood dreams, even playing in the NFL (at least in practice) after the Steelers organization heard about his talk.

2) His lecture on Time Management given at the University of Virginia (he used to teach there, which was how I originally heard about him). More pragmatic than his inspirational Last Lecture; I love his point on time as an even more valuable commodity than money: Time Management

3) Although I haven't read it yet, I'm guessing his recently published book, The Last Lecture, would be an excellent read: The Last Lecture on Amazon

A multitude of small projects...

2008-07-13T21:34:00.000-05:00

One of the main things I've been up to this summer is a slew of small household projects. I haven't yet gotten up the nerve to tackle anything that involves wanton destruction of pieces of our house, but I've been steadily expanding my horizons. Some of these projects were things Sarah and I wanted to improve, but others were put high on the priority list because they involved things like massive amounts of water in places where water shouldn't be.

1) Kitchen Sink Pipe Break
I had the privilege of being introduced to plumbing when I discovered the aforementioned several inches of water under my kitchen sink. Sarah asked if it was a leak; as you can see from the picture, it is incorrect to call something a leak when all the water from our garbage disposal ended up on the floor. The plastic tube that connects the disposal to the waste water line just completely broke. Unfortunately the part that broke was the standard part size, and not wanting to repeat the same mistake twice I tried a couple of creative solutions. Unfortunately, neither of my first two attempts really worked (although they were very creative involving plastic pieces and rubber connectors). Thankfully, the Lowe's near where we play volleyball had a slightly larger plastic piece that fit much better.

2) Kitchen Makeover
On top of having water under our sink, we had more unwanted water entering our kitchen via a bay window leak during one of the recent violent rain storms. After all that, we decided to repaint the kitchen. We never quite understood the previous owner's "checkerboard" pattern for two colors above and beneath the chair rail, and the water damage on the window sealed the deal to begin the repainting. As the family art major, I left Sarah in charge of both choosing paint colors and getting slightly obsessive on painting straight lines in places where no-one will ever see. We survived the painting and I was pleased with the results, I think the before and after speak for themselves.

BEFORE (notice the tan is on the top and bottom on the two walls):

AFTER:

3) Programmable Thermostat
Not hard, but our heat pump with auxiliary heat has lots of wires to connect. Couple that with the fact that our old thermostat had some letter markings that were hard to decipher, it took some time to put the new version in. However, we are very happy with the results and we have learned that we can not turn up the A/C during the night as energy star suggests.

4) Clogged Master Sink
Now that I own the pipes in the place I live, I'm finally listening to the advice not to just pour chemicals down them to unclog obstructions. The master bathroom sink had pretty much been clogged since we moved in and finally, 10 months later, I got around to unclogging it. Did I mention that seeing what gets stuck in your pipes is pretty friggin gross? Anyway, our sink does much better now, and I will never get those two hours back.

UPDATE: And just when I thought I might be done with random house maintenance, I just discovered yet another leak in our house :(
The master bath tub/shower drain is leaking....

Doubles...

2008-06-17T20:00:00.000-05:00

I reached another volleyball achievement a few weekends ago: I played in my first doubles tournament! (I think it should be worth at least 20 points for my Volleyball Gamerscore...). The tournament was actually held all day on Saturday the weekend before last, which meant it was pretty much the hottest day of the year with plenty of extra humidity. The temperature reached 98 with a heat index of a scorching 105! It was a charity tournament called Side Out for a Cure, which benefited cancer research. You can still donate from our team page.

A little background information. A doubles (or really any) volleyball tournament works like this. Each division divides up into "pools" of 4 to 5 teams. In our case we were in a ten team division that divided up into two pools of 5 teams. Each team plays two games against every other team on that net, and the teams with the two best overall records advance into a bracket style playoff against the other teams in their division.

Did I mention that this was my first time playing doubles ever? Well, the first game was against a pretty good team (they ended up placing first on our net) and I didn't quite have down the differences in strategy for doubles play. There tends to be a lot of open court on doubles, but I kept hitting it right at their best player (not your best strategy). After losing our opening match 17-10 (usually games would be to 21, except the organizers shortened the games due to the excessive heat), we completely turned it around. With a little better strategy and some of our best play of the day we smoked them 17-10.

As the sun burned through the morning fog and haze, it actually felt cooler for a couple of hours due to the drop in humidity. Despite the support of some great friends who endured the ridiculous, (Meghann, Duncan, Traci, Traci's Mom, Cassie, Colleen, Sarah, and Jeremy's tent for some much needed shade) we didn't play our best volleyball and ended up losing both games in our next match. They were a good team, (who incidentally ended up winning our entire division after placing 2nd on our net) but we should have taken the first game (lost 17-15). After that we took turns staying cool, reffing other matches, and winning our last four games. The competition wasn't as good, but we started playing a lot smarter as well.

All in all we finished one game out of the playoffs (third on our net), didn't suffer heat exhaustion, had a couple of celebration beers, and generally had a lot of fun. Really our only causality was that BOTH of Bruce's shoes completely broke on the same play.

Symmetrical action shots courtesy of Colleen:

A Strange Commute...

2008-06-05T21:41:00.002-05:00

I had a rather interesting journey home last night that was noteworthy enough to justify my return to blog entries after my month long hiatus. My tale begins with me spending yet another day working for the man. I've been quite a bit busier recently, so I was actually working just after four o'clock when I got a call from my lovely wife that our two volleyball matches for the night (one at 6:30 and one at 7:30) were canceled. It wasn't too surprising as we had already had a strong storm roll through Arlington complete with close lightning strikes and even a brief power outage. I moseyed down to the metro at my normal time of around 5:15, thankful that I didn't have to go outside in the pouring rain. After passing by the "Escalator Modernization Project" at Clarendon which is apparently an excuse for Metro to rebuild an escalator from scratch, I noticed my first sign that something might be amiss. A train had just let out, as I could see the people streaming up the escalator, but the platform was still extremely full for the Clarendon station. A new train was arriving as I made it to the crowded platform, but luckily I'm pretty adept at metro "sardining," so I was able to squeeze into a car after making a last second decision to avoid the car with parents with two giant strollers. My second clue that this was going to be a strange commute was that the driver soon said "this is the Orange line to East Falls Church." Since I live and park at Vienna, that was going to be a problem. Eventually, I learned that a power line was down between the East and West Falls Church stations, and that Metro was providing a shuttle bus between East and West Falls Church as an alternative. Unfortunately, simple math told me that the metro station would get backed up pretty quickly unless they provided 8-10 buses every five minutes. Did I say backed up? I meant it would turn into a human parking lot.

At about the time I joined the human parking lot I got a call from Sarah. The powers that be un-canceled the volleyball matches, and we were back on. Using my secret talent of being freakishly tall, I was able to see about 1,000 people in a giant mass waiting for the buses. Then, I had a great idea: Trassie lives right next to the East Falls Church station.

What are the chances that I could hang out there or even get a ride to the next Metro stop from Trassie? What's the chance that Cassie got off work early because of the impending storm? What's the chance that I could actually make a phone call because all the people stuck were jamming up cellphone service? Luckily everything fell into place. Cassie was home early from work, had access to a car, and was reasonably sober. After some strategic maneuvering and fence jumping, I was on my way to my personal shuttle...the Mini Cooper. Cassie and I made a fairly quick jaunt to the West Falls Church metro, while Cassie got a good lesson in driving during rush hour when they were a lot of annoyed people on the road. When I finally made it to the train at the West Falls Church station, I had to keep my smile to myself as the other passengers traded war stories of their 3+ hours commute (little did they know of the free Mini shuttle).

I finally got in touch with Sarah as I was driving back home to find that our 6:30 game was off (which I just heard about from Colleen) because the other team couldn't make it in time, but that as far as she knew the 7:30 game was still on. I changed into volleyball gear, grabbed a drink and some snacks and was back on the road in about four minutes flat. It was still raining hard in Vienna, but by the time I got to Chantilly the sky actually looked pretty clear. I pulled into the Dulles Sportplex lot at about 7:20 and headed down to the court.

Can you guess what happens next? Well, first off there is only one other team at any of the three courts (and even they are a player short). I don't think we were scheduled to play them tonight, but we've had so many games canceled, we probably needed to play them anyway. We agree to their proposal to scrimmage to get at least some volleyball in for all our trouble. Once the score is 4-2, a few hard and quick rain drops come down. We all head to leave but then it stops and Bruce convinces us to play on as he can see a sliver of light through the clouds that appears to be coming closer. On the next serve, the heavens open up. It was one of the those rains where you are already soaked in the three seconds in takes to open your umbrella. We give up and decide to head home. The drive home wasn't awful but very slow amongst the giant puddles and many tornado warnings on the radio. I arrived home and figured that I got two things out of the three hours of commuting I'd just finished. Ten minutes of volleyball (that by the end of the season will probably have cost me about $30) and a story to write about. Hope you enjoyed the story :)

New York...

2008-04-27T09:38:00.012-05:00

I decided to mix things up a little bit for our fourth anniversary with the promise to whisk Sarah away on a “secret” weekend getaway. I did a pretty good job keeping the location a secret from Sarah, although I finally slipped up a week before the big announcement. I chose New York City, somewhere neither of us had been in several years and somewhere we have never been to together.

Given the short time we had up there, I planned the hell out of this trip and I probably could have generated an hour by hour schedule if the need arose. We left work early on Friday to head up to the Big Apple. I picked out a hotel in the Financial District downtown. It was close to some touristy things I wanted to do, cheaper than Midtown, and more importantly nice and quiet when you wanted to get some sleep at night. We arrived on Friday and headed to our restaurant reservation in Midtown at Becco. It is an Italian restaurant that had two nice features: a prix-fix menu of all-you-can eat home made pastas and a full selection of wines only $25 a bottle to encourage experimentation. The food was great and after getting a free glass of wine simply by being clutzy enough to break my glass at the end of the meal , we waddled over to Rockefeller Center. We headed up to the Top of the Rock, the observation deck on the top of the 70-story 30 Rock building. It wasn’t quite as high as the Empire State Building, but I liked the observation deck better – unobstructed, 360 degree views from the very top.

On Top of the Rock - Empire State Building in Background

Saturday was the day of walking, and thus we were glad the weather was perfect. We started by walking to the Ground Zero site. There is not really much to see there yet, just some construction cranes, but it was something I wanted to see to remember what happened. Next we took the subway to Brooklyn (Saturday wasn’t all walking) and then walked back to Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge had great views and was an impressive engineering feat as well. After our walk back to Brooklyn we lunched at the first pizza place in North America: Lombardi’s in Little Italy. It was quite yummy.

Brooklyn Bridge Overlooking Downtown NYC

Our next stop was at Broadway to watch “Spamalot.” Being as uncultured as I am, it was my first trip to Broadway, although Sarah is an experienced theater goer. Spamalot, based on Monty Python and Holy Grail, did a great job of recreating some of the funniest scenes from the movie, but also was different enough to not just be a rehash. It was a lot of laughs and a really impressive production.

After an early dinner that was good but expensive, our final activity of the night (yes, I packed this trip full) was to go dancing at Swing 46. As we learned earlier in the day, the ultra convenient subway stop 50 feet from our hotel was closed on Saturday for track maintenance. So, we took a different line which put us about a mile from the club. Apparently after four years of marriage Sarah and I can still have communication breakdowns, because the message of how far away the club was never really got from me to her :) Anyway, a mile of walking later (with one us wearing high heeled shoes), and we were ready for some drinks. The club was a lot of fun; the small dance floor took a little bit of time to adjust to, but by the end of the night Sarah and I were cutting a rug.

Our last activity was to take the Staten Island Ferry from Manhattan to Staten Island on Sunday morning. We weren't that interested in seeing Staten Island, but since the Statue of Liberty tickets were already sold out, the ferry was a free way to get some great views of the Statue like below:

After that, it was back to the airport to give up the New York lifestyle and return to the Suburbs.

America's New Tanker...

2008-04-07T19:48:00.001-05:00

The recent award by the Air Force of the KC-45 Tanker to Northrop Grumman over Boeing has been controversial by all accounts. This story has stayed in the business news an amazingly long time, so I'm finally going to chime in. It hits pretty close to home, although whatever happens probably wouldn't have much affect on me. I don't actually know a lot of the details, but I wanted to put a few facts out there and highlight some of the ridiculous statements made by some members of Congress. The back-story is basically this:

The Air Force fleet of tankers used to refuel jets in mid-air is getting really old.
In 2003, the Air Force tried to give the contract to Boeing to lease the Air Force new tankers. A major scandal erupted when Darleen Duryun, the chief acquisition officer for the Air Force was investigated for inflating the price of the tankers while negotiating a position at Boeing and ended up pleading guilty. Boeing executives were fired and Druyun went to jail. the contract had to be recompeted.
Northrop teamed with EADS to take on Boeing for the new contract.
Northrop and EADS won the competition. According to initial statements by the Air Force, they won by a big margin.
Congress members in Washington state and Kansas (places with the largest concentration of Boeing workers) go ballistic.
Boeing files a protest, and the GAO is currently investigating.

Now my collection of ridiculous quotes by the Boeing supporters:

From Forbes:

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., echoing the thoughts of many congressional Democrats, sees McCain's role in a less positive light. She said the earlier tanker deal was 'on course for Boeing' before McCain started railing against it."

Wow...blaming McCain for taking away the earlier contract from Boeing. In a sense, that's true, but perhaps you could blame the ethically-challenged Boeing executives and AF officials for destroying the first deal and not the person who found them cheating.

"The person that stopped (the tanker) from going to a U.S. company was Senator McCain," said Emanuel, "and now we are going to send major high-paying jobs overseas"

I'll be first to admit, I don't really know how they come up with job creation numbers, but the latest estimates from both companies are now relatively even on the number of jobs created for both tankers. I'll agree that this would move jobs from Washington and Kansas to Alabama, but no one ever explained what jobs would move to Europe. Plus, Northrop is a U.S company!! I mention this because after all the misinformation, some of my parent's neighbors thought Northrop was based out of France...

From the Kansas Star:

"I continue to believe the Air Force's shortsighted decision is a threat to our national defense and the future of America's aerospace industry," Murray said in a statement.

I don't understand the threat to our national defense argument, as this statement and others talk about military technology going to France. The Northrop plane would be assembled in Alabama from parts made in the US and around the world, but the militarization steps (like say integrating command and control software) would be done by Northrop in the US.

Also Friday, the Kansas state Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling on Congress and President Bush to block the contract award to Northrop-EADS. "This is an aircraft that should be built in the U.S.," said state Sen. Mike Petersen, R-Wichita.

Great, too bad no modern airplane is built completely in the U.S. The Northrop offering is estimated to have 60% American made parts, which exceeded the contract requirements. The Boeing offering does have more American made parts (estimated 85%), but I'd like to see how they will fly it without a fuselage made in Japan or a tail made in Italy.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, my guess is that there won't be enough evidence of anything improper to change the decision. However, when politics get involved, it's anybody's guess what will happen.

March Sadness...

2008-03-18T20:17:00.000-05:00

It's the time of year when my favorite sport shines its brightest, and the whole country takes notice of college basketball. Unfortunately this year, my beloved Cavaliers of Virginia shockingly didn't get selected to the NCAA tournament; alas when you finish 5-11 in the ACC you don't typically have a lot of things to put on your tournament resume. The year started off promising, with an early win against Arizona, at Arizona. Unfortunately UVA had a horrible stretch during the middle of the season in which they lost 7 in a row and basically sank to the bottom of the ACC. Maybe the UVA football team used up all the availalbe karma when it broke the NCAA record for most number of close wins this past season, because the basketball team caught the brunt of several heartbreaking loses. Several losses came in OT, and a total of 7 games were lost by 4 points or less. Injuries certainly didn't help during this stretch, but several of our players never really seemed to "get it" or play with much heart. Sean Singletary, our star player who decided to come back for his senior season, looked tired trying to carry the team on his back. Things started to turn around a bit during the end of the season, Singletary was finally completely healthy and Lars Mikalauskas, who wears his emotions on his sleeve, gave us a spark on the inside. That was enough to win a few games at the end of the season (4 out of our last 6), and to win Sean's last game at JPJ while getting his jersey retired. As an added bonus, that last win essentially eliminated Maryland from the NCAA tournament (if I'm going to be suffering, might as well have Terps fans in the same boat).

The final redemption for UVA has come as a result of an age old adage: you can never have too much of a good thing. Although my Econ 101 professor Kenny Elzinga might disagree with that adage, we now live in the era of three post season college basketball tournaments. There is the famous field of 65 teams that compete in the NCAA tournament every year, the teams that at had an argument to make it on Selection Sunday that play in the NIT, and finally introducing the College Basketball Invitational or CBI. Selecting the best 16 teams in America, after the NCAA and NIT get the first 97 picks, the CBI doesn't even let records tarnish the image of its teams and doesn't have any restricting requirements on "winning" records (just ask 13-18 Cincinnati). UVA takes on Richmond tonight in the inaugural matchup, and if we can't get excited about playing in the third best post-season college backetball tournament in the land, well then I guess we're normal...

Top of the Mountain...

2008-03-11T16:42:00.015-05:00

Yesterday was the day we conquered the mountain...Bruce, Dave, and I went to the top of Breckenridge today. I'd like to chart out what we did because it was an amazing day on the mountain, and I was able to do a lot of terrain that I haven't done before.

Even if you have been to Breck, the rest of the entry will be a little hard to follow unless you have a map. I highlighted the Breck map with all the trails and lifts we took, so that you might have a chance at understanding the next paragraph.

After the walk from our rental house to the mountain and a painfully slow lift ride, we ended up on Peak 9 and did a warm-up run (I went on American, I think Bruce and Dave went down Gold King). We then started toward our final destination. We headed down Volunteer and then down Shock to catch the Peak 8 Super Connect at the mid-load station. We did a quick run on Frosty's Freeway to Chair 6. Then it was now or never to the Imperial Lift up to the top of Peak 8. What a view! It was an unusually warm and clear day. The temp at the bottom of the mountain was near 40, and at the top, a balmy 25. Bruce did the final hike up to the very top, while Dave and I did a run down the Imperial Bowl (I have to give props to Bruce for doing the final hike up, I didn't have the energy and we didn't really know how we were going to get down from there). Dave and I did a second run down Imperial Bowl, and fortuitously met up with Bruce. We headed up the Imperial Lift to the top again. Our plan was to ski down the ridge line and head into the North Bowl, but that area was mostly closed. We ended up heading down Pika, then through a tree section and down Northstar all the way down to the base. What a run! Looking back up to the top where we just were was incredible, especially thinking that we hadn't been on a lift for a long time. We ended the day doing some of the Peak 8 Blacks that I'd never done before. We survived and headed back home triumphant.

Here is the top of the mountain in the distance from one of the lifts:

At the bottom of the Imperial Express lift looking up:

Dave and I at the elevation sign:

Bruce on the very top:

Blame Halo 3...

2008-03-02T17:26:00.006-05:00

Sarah and I attended competing guys and girls parties on a recent weekend. The guys played Halo 3 all day (even getting some participation from Atlanta with Dr. Fancysocks and his silent guest with the flower icon), while the girls were doing things like watching movies and knitting. Shortly thereafter, I found this fitting clip on YouTube, which was good for a few laughs (I think the girls will appreciate it as much as the boys) mainly because it hit fairly close to home. I particularly appreciated the fact that the host of the party last weekend, Jeremy is expecting his first child. Now I won't say that Jeremy would miss the birth of his child due to Halo 3, but I'd rather not put him into that kind of dilemma...

Guitar Hero Rock Legend...

2008-02-18T13:14:00.001-05:00

I figure this is the right forum to make my big announcement that I'm officially retiring from Guitar Hero. Oh sure, I'll still play an occasional song for fun, there may be a reunion tour in the works, but my professional career has come to an end. I feel like I accomplished a lot in my career, I started out as lead guitar for the up and coming band "Ben and the Diehls", working my way up to the big time. First we beat all the songs and face-offs on Easy, and then Medium. With some work, we could rip off 5-stars on every song on Medium and Easy, unlocking new characters and guitars at every turn. Then the pressure starts to get to you; they don't call the difficulty level "Hard" for nothing. I didn't turn to Heroin Hero, but I started having nightmares of the last few songs on Hard. I only had three songs left to beat on Hard, but my brain refused to process what appears as a solid series of notes coming towards me rapidly. Thinking about the time required to beat those three songs seemed a bit too daunting, and I took the easy way out. That coupled with a heated naming dispute on whether our band name was really "The Diehls and Ben" was pretty much the end of my run on Guitar Hero.

Given the popularity of Guitar Hero at big events (it took over New Year's and the Wisp ski trip a few weeks ago), I'm sure I'll probably participate at the occasional gathering. However, in general I'm letting the next generation of rock legends take the mantle.

P.S. You have to watch the South Park episode on the same subject. If you can't catch this episode on Comedy Central reruns, check out this link to watch the episode: http://www.southparkzone.com/episodes/1113/Guitar-Queer-o.html

Happy New Year...

2008-02-03T15:15:00.000-05:00

After taking an unplanned month and a half sabbatical from blogging (I think my current status is disappointing on Penrock's blog) I find myself in a familiar predicament. Namely, I've got ample topics to write about but most of the events I want to write about are long since passed. I could hope that you haven't checked here in the last month and a half, backdate several entries, and pretend that nothing was amiss. However, I'm going to try a different approach; I'm going to talk about the past today, and dare you to criticize me.

That being said, Happy New Year!

I wanted to share some pictures from our recent New Year's party at our place. It was by no means a huge gathering, but Penrock managed to defy conventional wisdom and stay past midnight(barely). It must have been his stint on the exercise bike that let him go the extra mile:

Note that Yuengling is a key ingredient to any training regiment.

It was a fun evening, we had way too much food and drinks, and the usual shenanigans were afoot, as taking a simple posed picture turned into a challenge:

How did Ben end up in every pic??

Long Ride Home...

2007-12-17T21:39:00.000-05:00

I recently went to Colorado Springs for nine days to oversee an install for work; most of the time I was stuck beneath a mountain in a computer lab, but I did have one adventure that I wanted to tell. The context is that since I was in Colorado over the weekend, I decided to go skiing at where else, but my favorite resort, Breckenridge.

2:40 - I've been skiing for several hours. My legs are tired, but I'm just starting to get into a rhythm, and get out of the "my first time skiing all season" feeling. I decide to do one more run to get practice on the rapidly forming moguls on Peak 8 before returning to Peak 9 to return my rental equipment. At this point I notice that the snow storm has picked up earlier than the predictions from this morning.

3:35 - I make it to my car in the parking lot after taking the bus back.

4:05 - I have driven the 10 miles to get to from Breck to Frisco to merge onto I-70 West. I quickly notice that the traffic is almost at a standstill. Commercial trucks are instructed to pull off to the side to put on chains.

The drive for the next 13 miles to the Eisenhower tunnel was the most difficult of my life.

4:20 - I pass an electronic sign that states the drive to the tunnel is taking 1 hr and 10 min. Traffic started moving at about 5 mph, over a series of climbs up steep grades. Five to six inches of snow has accumulated on the road and no plow has been able to come through due to the intense traffic. I see a pickup truck spin out and begin to slowly fish tail across the three lanes of traffic. In order to maintain momentum, I have to move to the far left and accelerate past him. My basic strategy was to follow in the tracks of the car in front of me to maintain traction and speed. The problem was cars kept fishtailing in front of me, so I had to continually change lanes to avoid getting stuck and hit. Thank God my Ford Taurus had traction control! I ended up in the right lane at one point and another truck spins out in front of me and goes basically off the road. I then had nothing but untracked, messy snow in front of me and my traction control light started going crazy as I began to spin out. I barely managed to make it over to the left lane. At some point I passed a section where two cars were stalled and only one lane was getting through (double tractor trailers had to merge around them). This was apparently one of the major choke points, as I actually started to get some momentum before slowing down again. I probably saw at least 5 cars spin out, 5 cars stalled on my way up the mountain, and one SUV with a guy pushing it from behind!

6:00 - I made it to the tunnel and the last major up hill section!!! The sign was wrong; it took over an hour and a half to get this far. At this point we are starting to move downhill which is a welcome change, and I can barely make out snow plows far ahead of me.

6:30 - I make it to the town of Georgetown. At this point my next crisis arrives; my windshield wiper accumulates enough ice to not actually wipe my windshield and it's beginning to get hard to see. Luckily all I'm focusing on is the headlights in front of me, but I'm getting nervous again. There is nowhere to pull off except for a small shoulder covered in deep snow. So of course I pump up the defrost to 90 degrees and then proceed to drive while reaching out my window and knocking of the ice when the wiper comes close enough (thank God for go-go gadget arms!). I manage to clear enough off to have a partial view.

7:00 - I come to a complete stop outside of Idaho Springs. I think I'm in the clear once we start moving again, but there are two more tough sections remaining. First another steep uphill, although this time traffic is moving at about 30. Again a few cars can't make it and stall or spin out, so it gets interesting but it was piece of cake compared to before. Finally a series of long, ride your brakes, down hill sections, to keep my nerves on edge.

7:45 - I see the sign: one mile to I-470. Finally a new road after almost 4 hours! I start the 26 miles on I-470. I ignore the common courtesy to only pass in the left lane because damn it, the left lane is the one most clear of snow and ice. I'm moving about 40 mph now, but a few SUVs are flying by me on the right.

8:30 - I make it back to Denver and merge onto I-25 S. I contemplate stopping to relieve my steadily numbing driving leg, but decide to push on. The going is relatively easy as there is not much snow falling at this point and the road is pretty clear. I probably average about 50 mph (the normal speed limit is 70).

9:45 - I see the Arby's sign two blocks from my hotel, and decide that man cannot live on trail mix alone. Only the drive-thru is open, so all feeling in my leg is lost.

10:00 - I pull into my hotel with my beef and cheddar and curly fries in hand. I hobble to my hotel room. Total drive time is just over 6 hours. I vow to stay in my hotel room all day Sunday!

B&B X the recap...

2007-11-10T23:50:00.000-05:00

It's the time of year when I get to recap the infamous, 10th annual Blades and Booze Halloween party. Sarah and I put in much less effort than previous years, but still managed what I think were good (not great) costumes right out of the pages of your mythology book (hint: she is Medusa and I'm Perseus):

Since it has been a while since I've been a judge at the Blades and Booze party I figured this year for my post-party entry I'd give my own slate of somewhat non-conventional awards:

1) Most Costumes that are essentially a T-shirt: I'm not going to name names, but I think the evidence speaks for itself...

2) Most Innovative Costume not Present: Jaime R. apparently went as Admiral Spaceship from the SNL short Laser Cats. He didn't actually attend the party this year, instead favoring something closer to his neck of the woods in Seattle. Regardless, until actual pictorial evidence of his costume surfaces, we'll have to go with this artist's rendition.

3) Most Self-Deprecating Costumer: Rob S. did go as a Flower this year...yes, a flower. A bit of an inside joke, but the gist of it is that Rob semi-jokingly suggested going as a flower a few years ago. I and a few other friends of the male race thankfully stopped him that year. It has become quite of a joke, but I still can't believe Rob actually did it.

4) Most Costumes Imitated at a B&B Party: Not to toot my own horn here, but not only have I had a cat named after me, I've now had two people go as previous costumes I've worn. Can you tell the differences...

We caught up with old friends, we drank a lot, and we stayed up super late despite not having that extra hour to fall back -- all part of the recipe for a successful B&B party!

Painting Time...

2007-10-20T10:30:00.000-05:00

The painting is finished! And when I mean finished, I mean we are finished painting for a while. Is all the painting finished that we want to do?? That's a big hearty NO. However, we did complete Phase I of house painting, the main level. We finished the foyer and the living room, so our main floor finally feels livable. We are taking a hiatus from painting to concentrate on other important things like:

Recovering from ankle sprains: Unfortunately I randomly turned my ankle during volleyball practice that sidelined me for a couple of weeks. The good thing about widely spaced blog entries is that I'm better now and back to volleyball!
Halo 3: Trying to keep up with Mr. Fancysocks (Mike P's screen name) Halo 3 skills is a full time job. I think since he doesn't have a full time job he has an unfair advantage.
Halloween Costumes: Crazily, another B&B party is approaching faster than Milhouse can say "jiminy jillikers." We don't quite have our planning up to par compared to previous years, but we'll see what we can put together.

As promised in my last entry, more before and after photos! This time we went with a light green called "Celery" to replace the overwhelming yellow.

BEFORE

AFTER

Our New Home...

2007-09-12T21:41:00.000-05:00

We've been busy, so I'll make this a short entry. We moved into our first house about two and half weeks ago! It's been really fun so far, but a lot of work. The first thing I noticed about owning rather than renting is that when you rent and notice something you don't like you either live with it or call maintenance. When you own the first thing you do is calculate how much work and how much it will cost to fix -- a completely different mindset. Needless to say our lives have been full of projects large and small. We started with things like unpacking, then moved to work like buying furniture (read: all day IKEA trips) and shaving doors so the would close. However, our first big project is painting. We are transforming our main level and I get to post my first before and after pictures for the blog. There were giant mirrors and yellow paint in the dining room -- now the yellow is not quite so overwhelming (the entire main floor is yellow) and we don't have to watch ourselves eating! We had to remove and dispose of mirrors, put up new crown molding, and repaint everything. Here are the results:

BEFORE

AFTER

The Commute...

2007-08-13T23:19:00.000-05:00

I have returned to the "normal" DC area commute since starting my new job in Clarendon. I say normal in quotes because although it is a tad long for me, the DC area is repeatedly near the top of the rankings in terms of average commute times and it seems pretty normal for these parts. If you have already glanced at my nice graphic breaking down my everyday commute, you can see that I have embraced public transportation for the majority of my daily trip to work. The main reason is the dreaded 66 HOV restrictions inside the beltway for all lanes between 6:30-9:00 AM in the mornings and 4:00-6:30 PM in the evenings. It basically means I'd have to leave my house by 5:30 to beat the traffic and HOV restrictions. Luckily, we happen to live almost exactly 1 mile away from one of the main bus stations (known as the park & ride) in Fairfax County. So I can actually take the express bus from the park & ride to West Falls Chruch metro, then take that a few stops on the Orange line to Clarendon. Our building is so close to the metro station that there is actually an underground tunnel directly to our building check in. I hate getting up early and I hate driving in heavy traffic, so the public transportation route was a fairly easy choice. How long does it take? Well I haven't been timing it quite as often but going in takes an average of about 50 minutes (45-55 minutes) and coming back in the evenings takes 55 minutes (range from 50 - 60 minutes). Both the buses and the metro trains come pretty much continuously in the morning, but both come slightly less frequently in the afternoon. The bus is always faster in the morning because there is a "secret" exit from the park and ride to the highway, but unfortunately no secret entrance, which means you have to go through a few stop lights in heavy traffic on the way home.

That being said, sometimes public transportation blows...

Buses are damn hot in the summer: combine tons of people with spotty air conditioning and 90+ temperatures and prepare yourself for a sweaty bus ride. Never, ever sit on the back row on the bus in the summer - the engine is directly underneath the seat cushion. At first I was like "this isn't too bad its like the seat warmer in fancy cars", except this one goes to about 150 degrees and you can't turn it off
Being a Metro Sardine. It doesn't always happen but sometimes there are mechanical problems and every train is crowded or you just don't feel like waiting another 8 minutes and squeeze your way on...in any case less crowded are just more pleasant.
The Metro crazy guy. Why did I assume he was crazy you ask, well he did take the metro advertisement out and started writing (a monologue I presume) in long flowing cursive on the back. He also occasionally made strange grunting sounds and knocked on the ceiling and asked if anyone was there. Not something I usually do on the metro, but to each their own I guess.

Business Time...

2007-07-23T22:30:00.000-05:00

Flight of the Conchords is a new HBO show about the self-proclaimed "formerly New Zealand's fourth most popular folk-parody duo." Generally the show has been pretty hit and miss and I can't really say that I like the show, but sometimes the songs during the episodes are hilarious. This is my favorite, and doesn't require ever having watched the show...

Almost there...

2007-07-15T14:18:00.000-05:00

We are getting closer to being home owners by the minute. I don't think everyone knows the whole story so we'll play a quick game of catch up and recap:

1) We made our third offer on a townhouse a couple of weeks ago that was in a neighborhood we really like and was priced to sell
2) Intense negotiations ensued on things like the asking price, closing date, and if the fridge had an ice maker (surprisingly the fridge does not have one)
3) The sellers proceeded to change their mind about three times on when they actually wanted to move out, which left us with this complex agreement: closing on July 31st with an offer to pay our rent for August, plus they want to stay in the house until August 13th and rent back from us during that time.
4) Once the closing date was all of a sudden very soon, we began hustling on things like getting a loan, inspection, and insurance
5) Our home inspection revealed an interesting problem in the roof. As with many townhomes and condos built in the early 1980s, the roof contains plywood treated with a fire retardant chemical (called FRT plywood) that was designed to reduce the spreading of fire among adjacent units. Unfortunately, someone forget to check if attic temperatures over 120 or so degrees would cause the same chemical reaction to occur and essentially break down the plywood without a fire present. So half of our roof has plywood that is breaking down (apparently the sellers got gypped when getting a new a roof in 2002 because they were shocked as well), but it sounds like they will replace the roof
6) And finally we changed our lender at the last minute, to take advantage of less fees from a local lender on some good advice from our real estate agent - this was a pain to do but worth it for the extra $$.

In a nutshell, we are really close to finishing this up. Here are two pictures showing off the nice hardwood floors from the entry way and the back brick patio attached to the walkout basement:

An American Tradition...

2007-07-01T13:17:00.000-05:00

Switching gears a little bit from previous posts (another housing update will hopefully appear soon), I was inspired by this post the other weekend after Ben pulled ahead of Rob and Sarah for most times spending the night in our apartment. One morning, we ended watching what was perhaps the greatest gladiator themed show of our generation, American Gladiators. Thankfully American Gladiators comes on Saturday morning on ESPN Classic, allowing us to continually enjoy this American classic.

We got to see a two of my favorite events:

Powerball - the idea of this game was to insert balls into one of several cylinders before being killed by a gladiator (they were two players, three gladiators, and 5 cylinders). The hits in Powerball were pretty crazy: the tended to either be a vicious body slam or a shoulders and above hit. Check out the link to see Jazz rock in the woman's event.
Assault - This was like the ultimate Nerf game. The player dodged tennis balls fired from a giant air cannon, and had to use various "nerf-like" weapons to try to hit a target. It always looked really fun to play, and you almost never saw a player hit the target.

While doing a little research for this article, I did stumble upon a game called Gauntlet, that I only very vaguely remembered seeing. I think this may prove to be a key clue to the origin of the game Gauntlet (or more like Super-Gauntlet) that we used to play in our college apartment that contained a long, narrow hallway. Instead of the one-on-one version we used to play, it was one player versus 5 gladiators. If you check out the video here you'll notice that some of the pads look strangely like a vacuum cleaner once used in the seldom played version called Super-Gauntlet.

Just one more clip that perfectly captures the cheese factor. If you never watched the show, I think its spirit is best summed up here:

Strike One...

2007-06-20T22:04:00.000-05:00

Our quest to secure a residence in the Northern Virginia area has been temporarily stymied. We made it to the second major step in the process after spending several hours with our new best friend Stan (our friendly Real Estate agent) putting together what I thought was a fair offer on a townhouse in Vienna. Since much of the DC area is clearly a buyer's market, we smartly asked significantly less than the asking price. However, when we finally got the counter-offer back, we were a little weirded out. They came down a little bit, but also added two strange things: 1) they stated that the fireplace came as is (apparently there had been a chimney fire that they never repaired) and 2) they scratched out the home warranty.

It was a little disconcerting that they never got the fireplace repaired. It sort of gets you thinking what else is broken that they never repaired, and how are they going to respond to our home inspection if anything is wrong. The home warranty removal just didn't make sense period. At this point in the negotiation we are still $20K apart, why start quibbling on something that's only $400?? Even with those warning signs, we went ahead and countered, moving up the same amount they went down. When they came back a second time they wouldn't budge, so we countered with "see you in hell candy boy" because we have many more options to consider buying.

This would have been our living room as seen from our dining room if things would have worked out differently:

House Hunting...

2007-06-05T22:21:00.000-05:00

As many of you have probably already heard it looks like Sarah and I are going to stay in the Northern Virginia area. We’re excited about staying in one place for a while, although Colorado still seems to be a possibility one day. I ended up accepting an offer for a job in the Clarendon area just a short while ago as the “permanent” job after my rotation program. It’s still with the same company I’m at now, just on a different project with a different customer. We’ve decided that we are ready to buy a place to call our own, and start building some equity. Given that I’m now going to work in Clarendon and Sarah will remain at her job in Herndon, we’re starting to zero in on Vienna as a good area to concentrate on. It just about splits the difference for our commutes, it’s metro accessible, and it’s not super ridiculous to buy a place there (at least for a town house). It will be a little more of a trek for volleyball outings, but I’m sure we won’t let a little bit longer drive get in the way of our volleyball fix.

As we dive into the real estate market, we are learning all sorts of new meanings for things like points, arms, and co-ops. I think we are starting to get the hang of things, but nothing beats the experience of doing something for the first time. We went on our first house hunting trip with our realtor just a few days ago and looked at seven townhouses in the Vienna area. Nothing struck our fancy so far, so we'll continue the search.

We’ll be in touch once we need people to help us move!

Vegas Baby…

2007-05-22T20:02:00.000-05:00

I finally made it to the city of sin, and returned to tell the tale. Sarah has been working extremely hard over the past few months helping organize her company’s user conference in Las Vegas at the Venetian. Given the prospect of a free room at the Venetian for a couple of days and unfettered access to around the clock gambling…how could I say no??

All of my knowledge of Vegas so far has stemmed from seeing Casino one too many times on cable (the dubbing guy worked for his money on that movie) and occasionally reading the Sports Guy’s Vegas adventures on ESPN Page 2. Previously, anytime I got caught in conversations regarding Vegas, I had zero context for understanding the story…my mind would inevitably wander to something akin to the black and white cartoons that go through Homer Simpson’s brain. Now that I’ve finally taken the trip I want all my friends to repeat any Vegas stories previously told with me around, so that I can finally jump in with my own understanding and opinions.

Other Impressions:

- The environments are so tightly controlled and so precisely engineered at the Venetian that you start to lose touch with what the outside feels like. If we ever build a colony on the moon, we should build it like the Venetian
-The theme of Vegas appears to be boobies, money is a close second, but I have to go with boobies based on my time there
-If you’re cheap like Sarah and me and don’t want to lose lots of money, but actually want to play a game with some thinking /skill involved…Video Poker is the way to go. You can play for a long time on Video Poker with $10 at a quarter a hand. Plus you still get the free drinks! I think we lost more in 45 seconds failing to get the Super Spin on the Wheel of Fortune slot game then we did in probably 5 hours of Video Poker playing over the course of the weekend
-I believe that the time to get from Caesars to the taxi line to the Flamingo (this involves at less one hidden elevator and 2 scary hall ways) is still less time than waiting in a 100+ person taxi line in front of Caesars
-The fountains in front of the Bellagio are cool

-Does it seem odd to anyone else that that there these replicas of great artifacts from Italy, Greece, and Egypt just plunked down in the middle of the desert?

I think overall we liked it, although we ended up pretty exhausted by Sunday morning; we stayed up too late and our alcohol to water ratio was too high. We’ll probably end up going back someday (at least as a starting point for the Grand Canyon), but I wouldn’t say it’s one of our top destinations.

In Memory...

2007-05-11T14:48:00.000-05:00

Sarah and I lost a good friend that many of my readers knew or at least met at one time or another. Matt Hodges died late Wednesday night after collapsing during a flag football game. He had a hereditary heart condition known as a thickened heart (or HCM). We were able to visit with his wife and family last night for a few hours before Sarah flew out to Vegas this morning for work; they are doing as well as can be expected given the circumstances. Please keep them in your thoughts and prayers in this time of shock and sadness.

Although its impact is now bittersweet, when I think of Matt, I think first of this picture when we showed up at a New Year's party wearing the same outfit and had a good laugh...

Outsourcing: The Next Generation...

2007-04-20T12:00:00.000-05:00

Outsourcing is an interesting subject these days, typically referring to the the practice of American corporations using labor provided in other countries to perform some of their operations; exploiting the differences between the American economy and third-world nations to get services cheap. I don't want to get deep into this issue and whether the trade off of cost versus quality is beneficial to the end consumer and if it is really amounting to the loss of US jobs, because frankly that is not what this blog is about (if you want some commentary on outsourcing from a good non-validated source, I recommend wikipedia). What I thought was interesting was a Washington Post article I spied a couple of weeks ago (I started this entry when the article was fresh, but Mike P constantly cut into my blog writing time to play Halo2 on Live). It deals with the convergence of outsourcing with our entertainment culture.

The article talks about how you can now pay a third party company called IGE in Hong Kong to boost up your character in World of Warcraft. I must admit I'm commenting on this issue without direct experience playing this game. I played my share of the early Final Fantasy games, but there were more definite goals to achieve and this was before the subscription based model for all-human players in a universe came to fruition (in the so-called Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game genre).

On one level this seems rather ridiculous: you're buying a game to entertain yourself, then you actually pay someone else to play the game for you because you're not having enough fun. It's sort of like buying a baseball glove and paying someone else to break it in. Although maybe the payoff of the level boosting in WoW is a more than a broken-in glove, you'd think you'd enjoy the game enough to actually play it.

This genre of games essentially creates a virtual life for users to progress through, and just like real life it's more fun being rich, powerful, and having the prestige of a high level as opposed to someone weak, poor, and who gets beat up a lot. In this case you can pay someone to move you up to the next caste fairly quickly, and then you can enjoy your increased status without having to go through the pain to achieve it. Essentially you can skip past high school, and move right into all-night parties in college.

The interesting thing is that the game-maker doesn't want you to use these services, and will actually kick you off if it notices something fishy going on. I guess since they make oodles of money on the subscription services, they don't want anyone short-cutting the process. Why would Blizzard want to you to be able to finish your journey faster, and thus perhaps cancel your subscription. If you could get to the high level 10x faster, then you may also get bored with the game 10x as fast.

The Big Island...

2007-03-11T14:15:00.000-05:00

In case you didn't know, Sarah and I recently took a big vacation to Hawaii. We stayed on the Big Island for our entire trip and put over 1000 miles on the rental car during our stay. The Big Island (also known as Hawaii) is the bigger than all of the rest of the Hawaiian Islands combined. Considering we took over 700 photos (thank you $20 2GB Memory card) and probably 25 videos, I think a photo tour across the island is in order:

1) We started at my Aunt and Uncle's house, a nice one-story house in the town of Waimea. It was great having a home base and expert advise on everything we did; this greatly outweighed having to put in a few nights getting used to the air mattress (plus no lodging expenses!!). In a testament to Hawaii's near perfect climate the house had neither a heating or cooling system (other than opening windows).

2) The Luau at Mauna Kea resort was a lot of fun. Think of a big buffet of Hawaiian food, including an entire pig that had been roasting underground all day, plus a Hula show and fire dancers. And yes fellas, the dancers were wearing coconut bras.

3) Hiking to Pololu Valley. Our first hike to the Pacific Ocean was pretty cool. We started in green covered valley and steadily descended to a black-sand beach. The views were breathtaking, including a few authentic surfers taking advantage of the rough surf.

4) Rainbow Falls - This aptly named waterfall, although not exceedingly tall, is located in a near perfect backdrop of exotic plant life, and it gets its name from the readily visible rainbow created from its mist.

5) Helicopter ride to Kilauea - The helicopter ride was actually fairly disappointing; especially compared with other more enjoyable, less expensive alternatives. Our flight was canceled in the morning due to cloudy/rainy conditions and even though it was rescheduled, you guessed it, it was still cloudy and rainy. Viewing steam rising from lava flowing (unfortunately the lava flow was entirely underground during our stay) into the ocean was impressive...flying through thick clouds isn't really.

6) The walk across the Kilauea Caldera - One of the most unique experiences I've ever undertaken; we did two 3.5 mile hikes across the two main craters of the most active volcano in the world. The trails were marked by piles of rock, sulphuric steam was rising all around us, and if you wandered too far off the trail the ground seemed a little unstable (and I did get us somewhat lost at one point). The terrain itself had an eerie fascination, especially since the non-overlook trails were basically devoid of people.

7) Super Bowl Sunday at the Hilton - We spent one night in the fancy Hilton resort to get a real bed and some alone time. This also happened to be the day of the big game, so we actually ended up watching bits and pieces of it while downing island drinks at different outdoor bars. We ended up having a nice romantic dinner of fresh Ono (also better known as Wahoo!) and finally got a nice Hawaiian sunset pic.

Calling Ron Mexico...

2007-01-25T22:56:00.000-05:00

I've been waiting to do a sports themed blog entry for a while, so I figured I would start with the ever-controversial Michael Vick.

What makes Michael Vick a fascinating character?
-He's a news-maker
-He's controversial and polarizing
-He's the best running quarterback of all time
-He's a "coach-killa"
-He has the IQ of a zucchini
-He occasionally masquerades as Ron Mexico when he gets treatment for herpes

As a disclaimer I have to mention a few facts about my background, given that Vick attended Virginia Tech:

-Yes I'm a UVA graduate and fan
-Yes, I've never actually rooted for Virginia Tech in anything...ever, even when they are playing Maryland (unfortunately that match-up is not satisfying not matter who wins)

Do I take the UVA-Tech rivalry too seriously? I don't think so:

-I have many friends who go to Virginia Tech
-I've recently kept very quiet about the rivalry as we have gotten spanked in Football over about the last 5 years, and I am really worried that Tech may actually be better than us in basketball

So I think I can give a least a somewhat unbiased look at the issue:

Is he a good Quarterback?

I guess that depends on how you define good. I must say I don't think there is a definitive answer, but I'll look at three interesting statistics:

1) Quarterback Rating - Check out his official stat page on NFL.com, his career passer rating is 75.7. A great passer rating for a season is around 95, a good about 85, a 75 typically puts Michael Vick around 20-25th in the NFL. That means is typically worse than 2/3rds of NFL starting quarterbacks.

2) Wins and Losses - Michael Vick certainly fairs better in the wins/losses category than pure passer rating. During his tenor with the Falcons I think he is around 39-28-1, which is certainly a respectable winning percentage in the NFL. Although I wasn't able to get hard data on this, it certainly places him among the top 10 of active quarterbacks. The thing is, although I can't argue that QB is the most important position in football, I still don't think he deserves all the credit or blame for wins and losses. Great quarterbacks have lost on bad teams (Dan Fouts) and mediocre ones have won on good teams (Jim McMahon, Trent Dilfer). The thing I get annoyed with Vick apologists is they tend to give Vick all the credit for Falcons wins, but blame all the losses on the rest of the team. Note that the Falcon receivers, although you'd think would lead in the league in dropped passes for all the attention they received, were average in the league for number of drops (I feel like they need to hire a physiologist just to work with the bruised egos of the receivers as each drop they make gets replayed again and again).

3)Rushing yardage - No argument here...Vick is the greatest running QB of all time. He just broke NFL records for yards per carry and total number of yards by a QB this year. His athletic ability is almost unparalleled (I have to give Landian Tomlinson and Reggie Bush props here too) and he's clearly a cut above any other quarterback.

My take is that he is below mediocre QB in terms of decision making and passing, but potentially the best of all time at running. That puts him at a mediocre NFL QB because most offenses rely much more heavily on the pass than the run (although he was a great college player, where running QBs are more the norm). Can Atlanta eventually find a way to use his talents at the QB? I personally doubt it, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out. I also think his zucchini-level of intelligence will continue to get him in trouble one too many times, and eventually (like his brother) he will be out of football and give SNL more material like this:

Working Hard or Hardly Working...

2007-01-14T21:00:00.000-05:00

So what's my excuse for the sabbatical from blog entry writing - this time I'm going with "working hard." However, in an ironic twist, I'm basing this particular entry on the excuse for my latest layoff from blog writing. There are a few points about working hard that I have to make. First off, I've been very fortunate thus far in my almost 5-year career to essentially set my own hours and I've never been pressured to work more than a standard 40 hour week. As a salaried or exempt employee I don't get compensated for any hours I work overtime anyway on most projects. My general rule of thumb is as long as I am meeting my deadlines and goals and my managers aren't asking me to do so, there was really no need to put in needless extra hours. Doing a quick Google search (http://www.bls.gov/opub/ils/pdf/opbils09.pdf) the average Male aged 25-54 in the US works for 44.1 hours a week. Counting holidays, appointments, and vacations I'm probably about or slightly below on average throughout my career.

My current project has been a little different, I've been asked to work weekends, holidays and put in long hours to meet some hard deadlines. I've been working more like 50+ hours a week, and although that doesn't sound like much more let me see if I can logically get back to my original excuse. Upcoming deadlines require a series of rather tedious tasks, and it hasn't been my choice to work longer because I've been "asked" to do so. This extra hour+ a day is spent working hard and efficiently on tedious stuff that I didn't want to do on my own. This requires an equivalent amount of "decompression" time when I get home from work (as Sarah likes to call it). Each extra minute past my normal baseline work day (a 9 hour day or less) causes an extra minute of staring at the TV blankly when I get home. Thus I have a least an hour less to devote to blog generating ideas and writing entries, and here we are back to my original excuse. The silver lining in all this is that it shouldn't last forever (deadlines are approaching) and this project will actually pay me for overtime. Otherwise I'd be in the same situation as Alice here:

Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), I appear to be getting somewhat more used to the longer hours (I certainly was able to do this during my college years), so I hope to get more back into the swing of things regarding blogging.

I guess it could be worse, according to the National Science Foundation if I had a PhD and worked at a university, my average work week would be 50.6 hours. This is opposed to 47.6 hours for PhDs in industry/self-employment, and 45.2 hours for those in government. Hope they get paid overtime...

Link Updates Part 2...

2006-12-03T22:43:00.000-05:00

It has been a while since I last updated the links found over here on the right, and I think it's time to update them:

OUT:

Say goodbye to Wade's blog. He retired it a few months ago, so even though it a great hit percentage in terms of quality posts it's time to retire it from my list.

IN:

So there are two new blogs by friends of mine that both came out in the last few weeks, and I only have one spot for them both. So which one to choose...hmmmm

Based on the initial entries, both blogs accurately reflect their author's respective personalities. Traci's is a late night stream of consciousness, so the topics will include everything from college basketball to prime-time TV to the latest happennings of her and her roommates. A blog by Mike P is going to contain at least three things: biting satire, the absurd, and multiple references to me and my blog (and not usually the good kind of references). I guess to be fair, I'll put in both links because I think you'll likely enjoy them both. Just don't beleive anything you read on Mike P's blog, I think he's been smokin something.

And of course don't forget about Ben's picture page, he just put some cool fall pictures over the last few weeks.

P.S Mike, I finally put that reciporcal link you asked about in.

Need for Speed...

2006-11-27T21:41:00.000-05:00

So I got my first speeding ticket a couple of weeks ago. Somehow I have avoided achieving this feat since I first earned my license at age 16 until now as I come to the twilight of my mid-twenties (I'm a young 28). I have found, in those 12+ years, a series of rules that coupled with a lot of luck have helped me avoid the trap of a speeding ticket.

1) Know the Speed Traps: As a teenager there was basically only one in-between Forest and pretty much anywhere you would ever want to go in the "city." This allowed me to do stupid teenager things like go 85 on the road on the way back to my house when I was going to miss curfew, but still slow down on the downhill section where the cop was always staked out.

2)The "9-over rule." We humans tend to really like round numbers. Why was it crowded with hikers on Sarah and I's 14er hike last year...mainly because America never adopted the metric system and a 14er sounds cooler than a 42.67er. In the mind of a cop with a radar gun in Lynchburg, Charlottesville, or even Denver going less than 10 over never seems to get a look. Notice that I didn't mention my other primary place of driving, Northern Virginia. In NoVa, the corollary to this rule is that if traffic is actually moving, the "14-over rule" and even occasionally the "19-over rule" applies. It all depends on how fast those few people in the left lane are leaving you in the dust.

3) Respect Greene County. The one source of revenue for the Greene County police force is speeding tickets on Route 29 (for those that don't know this is one of the big counties between the University of Virginia and the Washington DC area). Cops are out on nights, weekends, holidays, and all throughout May. Most of my friends have gotten busted on this popular route at one point in their lives. The only way to avoid it is DON'T SPEED IN GREENE COUNTY.

Unfortunately, my fail-safe system all came crashing to an end when I received this bad-boy:

If you look closely at the ticket you can see my violation: going 19 in a 10. Yes, my first speeding ticket was in my parking lot at work! They have temporarily closed the back entrance to the garage that is closest to my building (it's a three buidling complex), so I have to enter through the other garage and pass by this 1/4 mile stretch with VIP parking. Are their speed-bumps you ask? No, they actually have the guards hide behind a dumpster and use a radar gun to ticket violators. They actually pull you over in the parking lot, and give you the "talk." I had to use all my will power to stifle laughing out loud at the absurdity of the whole situation. The streak is finally over, so I've added another rule: pump the brake a little the next time you pass a dumpster in a parking lot (you never know who could be hiding back there).

Blades and Booze IX...

2006-11-13T22:18:00.000-05:00

Another B&B Party is in the books. The costumes were great and after Sarah and I put probably the most work ever into a costume, at least two full weekends and several nights shopping for supplies and making most of our costumes, we scored with the 3rd place prize (if you're interested in the other winners you'll have to check the webpage once its updated)!

Sarah as the most dangerous woman in the world, with a dodgeball and myself as White Goodman, someone who always takes the bull by the horns, literally- two of the key members of the Globo Gym Purple Cobras
Last year I gave props to my favorite non-winners of the costume contest in my post-Halloween entry. This year I want to recognize three individuals who never have won any prize at the B&B party, although not because they didn't have some of the top costumes, only because they prefer to remove themselves from the contest and perform a sacred party tradition - drunk costume judging.

Rob as two-face from Batman (great makeup and effort to sew two suits together), Eric making a frightingly smooth transition to a red demon from Hell (easily his best costume to date) and Bruce with a solid Vampire costume that doesn't require any red-eye removal.

The party itself was a blast again, the post-party report indicated that we had just under 50 people despite the rather out of the way location. The ice luge was a big hit as always and there was plenty of rumple to be had by all.

My last post offered some advice for party goers, but nothing for party-hosters. After this party I have only one small piece to add for Meghann and Duncan (our gracious hosts), remember that you're risking the threat of red body/face paint on your wall, on your steps, in your tub, on your towels, on your sofa, on your sofa cushions, and probably on many other places that I didn't see.
Who was pouring ice luge shots all night?

The Countdown...

2006-10-12T20:33:00.000-05:00

The weather is changing (although mostly to rain around DC), the leaves are changing, and the Blades and Booze party is quickly approaching. First off, all your party info can be found at the party homepage updated again this year by the tireless organizers Rob and Bruce. Second, if you read this blog then yes, you are invited. If you're interested in coming, send me a note and I can hook you up with directions and details. As an attendee of every party, former half host, and bio page owner, I feel I'm qualified to offer up some sage advice on the B&B party:

1) Start Early - If you don't know yet what your costume is, close this browser immediately, find something to write on, and begin brainstorming. If you know what you're going to go as (bravo), then (excuse the engineering dorkiness) prototyping your costume is always important. It'll quickly show what works and what doesn't and give you more ideas on how to complete your costume. Prototyping could be the difference between Marvin the Martian and a Flower Costume...just ask Rob.

2) Not your typical costume
Most at the B and B party don't go for the typical zombie, Frakenstein, or Ghost (although Otto almost went at the last minute with a frilly sheet and wisely thought otherwise). I think the best costumes have been something out of movies, television, and even cartoons. Not saying that we haven't had great "typical" costumes, but being creative is key. You don't want to be the third superman with a white collared shirt and blue superman t-shirt underneath.

3) Reserve a bed early -- You're going to get wasted; the plethora of alcohol options pretty much gurantee that you will be drunk even before the Rumplemintz shots start. Needless to say, a lot of people sleep over...this means call that premium floor space near (but not too near) the bathroom or that cute girl early. As an alternative you can always reserve a bed at you're neighbor's apartment, then pass out there while everyone else is still at the party and wake up in a pillow full of dried-up blond hair dye...not that I know anything about that.

If you don't reserve your space early, in a druken haze you could end up next to this cutie

4) Have Fun - 'Nuff preaching. Even if you design your costume on the day of the party, and its not that creative, and the sleeping arrangement is less than ideal -- you will still have a blast!

See you there...

Back on Track...

2006-10-05T21:45:00.000-05:00

First I must apologize...I haven't written a blog entry in about 3 weeks. If you go back to the beginning of this blog, I set out to write an entry about once a week. I know I get frustrated when I click through my favorite blogs and find nothing new for a period of time like three weeks. I don't even have a good excuse (we've already moved across the country and officially settled in a month ago); that's why I'm biting the bullet and plunging into the blog entry even though I don't really have a topic.

Sure we've been busy, our sand league Volleyball team had a fairly large turn-around to end the season; our first half record of 3-9 improved to 8-4 for the second half of the season. Incidentally, this was enough for us to make the playoffs and despite my absence, almost won the first round of playoff games. I happened to miss the playoff game because I was down in Charlottesville, a common occurrence recently. The reasons have been varied, but it always seems to include eating dinner with Ben Darling. Let's see, I saw our team lose our homecoming game (you know the one that is intentionally scheduled against a super weak team) to Western Michigan, played beer pong with friends now back in grad school who are still living the undergrad life, and then had to go back to recruit UVA students for my rotational program at work (in a strange coincidence I recognized at least one guy from beer pong the weekend before). We also went through Charlottesville again in a road trip down to North and South Carolina to see various family members, and attended our niece's first birthday party in Richmond. Add all of that up and you've got a pretty busy stretch.

If you don't buy the busyness excuse then too bad; its not the truth that matters but the truthiness (at least that's what my gut tells me). I could create an article on Wikipedia proving that busyness is the reason for my blog dry spell, I just need to find some time to do it...

The Season...

2006-09-10T15:15:00.000-05:00

I am now the proud owner of season tickets so that I can witness UVA's worst season in almost 20 years. In 1986 Virginia finished the season with the stellar record of 3-8. Since that time the only losing record we've had was in 2001 when current coach Al Groh went 5-7 in his first season. After watching the first game last Saturday, in which we ended up beating the mighty powerhouse Wyoming by virtue of a missed extra point in overtime, I'm thinking we'll probably win 4 games this year and will definitely flirt with tying that 20 year nadir. Our only real shot is that it looks like that this may be the weakest the ACC has been in years: Florida State squeaked by Troy (I'm not sure if that's one guy or a whole team), NC State lost to Akron, and UNC and Maryland have looked equally pathetic.

Not to get you completely depressed, there are a few positives to look at as well. We have very good 50-yard seats (albeit very high), I get to hang out with my family a bit, and we do play most of the weaker ACC teams home (i.e., thank God I won't have to watch us get pummeled by Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, and Florida State).

I just hope the UVA coaching staff realizes very soon that this is a rebuilding year and instead of starting a senior QB with no years of eligibility left, we actually give a young quarterback some experience and give the team a chance for next year. If not I'll begin supporting coach Al Groh with the same zeal as Don't Fire Al Groh.

Same Difference...

2006-08-31T21:55:00.000-05:00

You knew it was coming...a blog entry highlighting a few of the differences between Denver and DC:

Some call it the building block of life, I call it difference #1, water. I'm definitely going in two directions with this, the first being that although there are a few reservoirs and some lakes in Denver, it's basically a desert. DC, on the other hand was built over a swamp right near the Potomac. On one hand, hanging out on our friend Alex's boat for a late night cruise with National monuments in sight and plenty of rum on board is a lot of fun. On the other hand, the humidity is RIDICULOUS. Even late at night for an evening game of sand volleyball, your shirt can get soaked with sweat before the 5 minute warm up is done.

Touring the Potomoc

That brings us to difference #2. I have returned to the heart of the Atlantic Coast Conference. No longer does UNC mean University of Northern Colorado, no longer do Big 12 games fill up Saturdays during football season, and wearing a UVA shirt doesn't necessarily become an instant topic of conversation. I've seen more UVA ball caps than I can count, several Virginia Tech lanyards, and even a disgusting stuffed Hokie bird. But with the good (getting to go to UVA football games live again), I'll take the bad (insane amounts of Maryland sports coverage) and the ugly (the aforementioned Hokie bird).

We're back...

2006-08-27T14:57:00.000-05:00

Wow...so much to write about over the last month. It's been just over a month since we were living in Denver and the craziness hasn't subsided one bit yet.

Sad goodbyes to good friends in Denver (we even played volleyball our last night), many work related goodbyes for both of us, moving across the country, seeing family and friends again, only having a three day volleyball break before starting again on sand courts with Bruce and Colleen, seeing my best friend growing up get married, helping my best man move away, parties to celebrate birthdays and a housewarming. Oh, and did I mention unpacking?!?

So I could go into more detail on many of these (and hopefully I will over the next few weeks), but I'm starting off with one last Denver post, almost a tribute really. Even though I claimed the other night while getting a little tipsy on a waterfront bar in Georgetown for Traci's birthday, that they (and all of our friends in DC) were making it very difficult for us to miss Denver too much...it was only a half-truth.

It is certainly nice to be back "home," but I have to point out a few things that we'll miss about Denver:

1) Denver introduced us to the addiction that is volleyball

We played in two indoor 6s leagues, an outdoor grass 4s, and countless pickup games on Thursdays and Mondays in Washington Park. It's a a great way to stay in shape and a lot of fun to learn a new sport. During our going away party, our 6s team that won the final tournament ended up giving us the actually cool looking plaque that now hangs in our new apartment:

Of course we're continuing to play fairly regularly here, but its not the same.

2) Denver gave us some great friends

Much like other addictions, we ended up making a lot of friends through volleyball. It became a tradition to play until we could barely see the ball on Thursday nights, and then go grab a beer and maybe some grub at a nearby restaurant.

Although not everyone of the gang made it on our last Thursday, here is a shot of a typical Thursday night outing right before we flew back to DC:

3) Denver gave us a great church.

So when you move to a new city and don't know anyone within probably 1000 miles, we ended up starting to go to a great church called Pathways. It ended up being a great place for Sarah and I, and was really the lynchpin for #1 and #2. I was very impressed with their commitment to transforming the Denver community through service and outreach. We had a chance to help out a Denver youth shelter called Urban Peak and sorting medical supplies going overseas for an international Health Care organization called Project CURE. When we first starting going to services, to try to meet people we ended up going to the church picnic, playing volleyball, hearing about the summer's weekly schedule and the rest was history.

So it ends...

2006-07-18T22:16:00.000-05:00

I just have time for one last quick post before the computer is going to be broken down...this will be the last entry from Colorado! The packers are coming tomorrow morning, our stuff and cars will be shipped on Thursday, and we will make our return to DC on Friday.

What a great year...full of experiences we'll remember forever. Although we're excited to be going back to more familiar territory with much easier access to family and friends, it's very tough to leave. IF you've been keeping up with the blog, you already know about the grand, freakishly tall, adventures of the past year. If not, please check out the archives and see for yourself.

The blog will continue, although you're probably safe not to check for new entries for at least a couple of weeks to get the computer shipped and back online. I figure I may modify the name but I've actually liked blogging and am planning to continue.

Bon Voyage!!!

The List (Part 2)...

2006-07-16T11:25:00.000-05:00

The gripping conclusion of the List of Colorado stuff to do before we leave...

4) Climb a 14er - DONE
For those who haven't heard, a 14er is commonly referred to in these parts as one of 53 mountains over 14,000 feet in Colorado. We ended up missing our chance to climb one last summer because the season for 14ers is so short if you don't want to deal with too much snow (mainly late June, July, and August). This year I was determined to do one before we left town. For our hike, we choose the standard route to the top of Mt Bierstadt, about 6.5 miles (round trip) with ~ 3000 feet of elevation gain. Despite being one of the "easier" 14ers, we had to stop a lot when the climbing got steeper and the air got thinner. Even though we followed all the rules as far as starting early, the weather (hail storm and some rumbling) came early, when we were almost on the summit at 11:00am. We scrambled up the last 200 feet or so with whatever remaining energy we had left, we looked around for a few minutes, took a few pictures, and then quickly headed back down the mountain to avoid any danger. By the end when we reached our car, the storm was getting pretty close and violent - a nice time to say goodbye to the great outdoors and head home.

Mt Bierstadt (On Right Side)	About 2/3 the Way Up
The Final Stretch	On Top of the World

5) Go to a Rockies Game - DONE

Denver is a big pro-sports town, yes you hear about college sport teams now and again, but it is really the professional sports that rule. We've been to a Broncos game, we've been to a Nuggets game, but we'd never seen the Rockies. All that was cured on the July 4th fireworks game.
The Pitch on its Way

We had pretty good seats, the crowd was into it, and the Rockies ended up winning pretty big. All this meant that it was a lot of fun, except of course the big rainstorm that came rumbling through around the 5th inning. Minus the 1 hour and 47 minute rain delay huddling with hundreds of other people to find shelter on the upper deck, it was a cool experience. It was one of those instances where you've just about made up your mind to leave, and then they announce that the game will be back on in 30 minutes. We stuck it through till the end, and even though they were a bit late, the fireworks show was pretty cool.

6) Go to Casa Bonita (or the Broadmoor) - DONE

Sorry Mike, but Casa Bonita doesn't look like its going to happen. I ended up winning the grand prize raffle at my company golf tournament, which was a rather large gift card at the Broadmoor. So, instead of going to Casa Bonita (the kids place where everyone gets sick off the food) we ended up being pampered and getting free food and drinks at this incredible 5-star resort. It was certainly the fanciest hotel we have ever stayed at; it was almost annoying how "helpful" everyone was being...you couldn't carry a bag 10 feet without being tackled by bellhops and other attendants. It was amazing how much money you could blow in a place like that...two fancy meals, a few after dinner drinks, and one golf shirt went through almost $800!! Casa Bonita will have to be motivation for us to move back...

The Grounds at the Broadmoor

The List (Part 1)...

2006-07-02T21:11:00.000-05:00

The countdown has begun. We are leaving Colorado soon and may never be here for an extended amount of time again. You know what that means, squeezing every ounce out of Colorado before we leave. And since I'm a "To Do" list kind of guy, here are the few remaining things we want to do before our time's up (and because I've been so busy crossing things off of the list, I'm just going to go over the first few...)

1) Visit Rocky Mountain National Park - DONE

I've heard that Rocky Mountain National Park was beautiful, and even though we've been to the mountains many times, we've never actually made it to the park. The hike was rather impressive, essentially several lakes nestled among ridges of mountains.

My only issue was with the guide book that I bought - our original plan was an 8 mile hike, however doing the calculations on the way back it was really 11.5 miles and we were almost dead on our feet after 7.5 hours walking around. The elevation gain wasn't too bad (~1500 feet), but the last mile or so there was basically no trail - it was all covered in snow banks! Mind you we hiked this on June 17th and were comfortably wearing shorts. It was definitely a cool experience, but a few sections became quite slow because you were either worried about sinking down a lot or slipping on the hard-packed snow.

This last stretch was a little nerve-racking because as you can see the snow pack actually covered the river at that point with nothing to stop you from falling through.

2) Visit the Ski Resorts in the Summer - DONE

This was something I thought about doing for a while. We had spent so much time at these places over the winter that it seemed fitting to go back and see what was going on in the summer time. It ended up being quite a fun day...we randomly ended up eating lunch at a BBQ festival in Frisco (right on the way to Breck). Plus Sarah saw her first pig race, quite an accomplishment for her. Then we went to the Peak 8 fun park at Breck. There was a lot going on for kids, but we just wanted to ride the chair lift up and do some hiking on the ski slope (it was free with our ski passes). It was actually pretty entertaining to see the same ski slopes that we were used to with more runoff, spring colors, and bike trails than actual snow.

We hiked up a fairly steep slope to a bunch of expert trails and got a kick out of taking pictures in front of the trail signage (the trail signs seem so high without the base):

3) See a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre - DONE

Red Rocks Amphitheatre is essentially an open air concert venue between 3 giant red rocks just outside of Denver. Supposedly it had some of the best acoustics for music anywhere. It was definitely a cool place to see a concert. There wasn't a whole lot of time to pick out a show but Sarah loves Rob Thomas, so we ended up watching a Jewel/Rob Thomas concert there just last week.

See the final list items in an installment next week...

The New Place...

2006-06-19T23:38:00.000-05:00

As I alluded to in the last post, we have a new place to live. You can find it about here,

just south of Herndon off of Sunrise Valley Drive.

The apartment searching seemed like it took forever, mainly because the first four places we talked to had zero availability close to the time frame we needed it. It was interesting to look back at how our emotions affected the whole decision process. The first place we found that actually had an apartment available, seemed so great at the time because we were getting so desperate (even though it wasn't all that nice). Then, by the time we got to the last place at the end of the day, we were getting so tired that we didn't even give it a chance. At that point we sat down at a Starbucks, laid everything out and decided on Woodland Park Apartments.

Even though its only been a year, life will certainly be different than the last time we lived in Virginia. Many friends have moved on (or soon will move on) to other parts of the country. But, we've had a lot of good practice meeting new ones this past year. We are certainly a lot further away from "the action" in Arlington, but I'm not sure that we necessarily want to be that close to "the action" anyway. I'm not sure I even know what I mean by "the action," but apparently it deserves quotation marks, which means it must be cool. Looking at this map of coolness index (I was having too much fun with Google Earth), we are now sitting right smack of the middle of the not so cool zone.
I guess now we'll treat going out to Arlington/ Alexandria just like going from Arlington to DC before (Jumping two coolness zones in one night is a big step). We'll have to depend on our remaining friends in Arlington to keep this married couple in the burbs hip. Despite the loss of coolness, we did get a place that is a lot cheaper, a lot nicer, and a lot closer to work; so I think we're pretty happy with our choice.

One Wedding and a Beach Trip...

2006-06-12T00:20:00.000-05:00

I've dropped the ball on blog entries recently, but Sarah and I have remained pretty busy the past two weeks. The problem is what to write about - I think I'll go with chronological order and start with...

Devon and Dan get hitched in Charlottesville: It was a beautiful ceremony, Deborah hit a home run on her first wedding homily and everything went great. There was a mini-reunion, as even though it was a fairly small wedding, Sarah and I got to catch up with more than a few old friends that are much harder to see in Colorado.

My only complaint had nothing to do with the cermony, more to do with the timing of the event itself. On one hand the timing was great, only one set of plane tickets served three diferrent purposes for us, and the wedding was conviently on our way to the beach. On the other hand, I was pushing to get down to the beach that night to avoid traffic, and in general not waste a half a day driving. You would think Devon and Dan would consider our priorities a little bit more (especially considering world-class nature photographer Ben was carpooling with us) but they scheduled the wedding for 3:00 and the reception didn't move quick enough, as several of the cool things happened after we had to leave. That brings us to ...

Beach Week at Nags Head: We made it down to the beach house just before beer o'clock (slightly before 2:00 am) had a drink from the keg and promptly went to bed. I think the main thing to say is that it went way too quickly. We kept ourselves busy: beach volleyball, drinks in the pool, mini-golf, eating seafood in restaurants, drinks in the hot tub, Halo, spraying Kenroche with the kitchen sink hose, cooking our own seafood, Jockey's Ridge (giant sand dune) drinks in the house, football in the ocean, X-men 3 (although an entertaining movie, not as good as X-men 1 or 2 IMHO) reading on the beach, and of course Gallon Day.

Jockey's Ridge

Currituck Sound

Unfortunately, the blame lies solely with me that Gallon Day participation was down 33% this year. All I can say is, I'm planning to return Gallon Day to all its glory by making sure that I drink a gallon of beer on one day at Beach week next year.

I'll go into the details next time, but as a teaser let's just say that Sarah and I have an apartment in the Reston/Herndon area with a lease starting on July 22nd of this year...

Picture Tour of Colorado...

2006-05-19T23:13:00.000-05:00

The clear motif of Ben's whirlind visit of two weeks ago was, not surprisingly, pictures. Ben clocked in at 565 photos taken, and we weren't really that far behind with 346 of our own (Sarah and I got caught up in the moment I guess, and Ben was showing me how to use the manual settings on my camera).

With that in mind, I've decided to tell the story of Ben's visit in pictures:

First we hit the zoo, which was pretty cool and we saw (I apologize for the cliche)

and

Then we went to the Springs to visit Colorado's most famous red rocks:

Next free beer was on our list (all it cost is listening to a hour long commercial for Coors)

On Sunday, we decided to step up the elevation a bit - and made it the top of Pikes Peak

Finally we went for a hike - to Crags Mountain near the end of the day on Sunday. This meant there were no other people on the trail and hence ample opportunities for picture taking (even with the tripod)

Link Updates...

2006-05-12T18:01:00.000-05:00

Its been long overdue to update some of my blog links. For the sake of history, here is the now out of date list:

Contemporarily Insane -> Rob's Blog has earned the right to stay at the top of my list, especially now that he is posting regularly again.
why.I.hate.dc -> A few months ago this blog was great (this month's are a good example). The guy who wrote it had sarcastic sense of humor that I really liked. When I lived in Arlington, it was especially easy to relate to whatever he was mocking. Unfortunately, he moved to Seattle several months ago and let someone else take over his blog. You guessed it -- the new guy sucks.
Dave's Trail Journal -> I really enjoyed Dave's Trail Journal, I eventually read every entry. But, he's been back for almost 8 months -- if you haven't made it there yet I don't think you ever will
The B&B Party -> Always a classic - with lots of stuff added near Halloween time. It definitely stays.

Now the new stuff:

Ben's Picture Site -> Ben has turned himself into quite a talented photographer the last few years. Some of his best shots are available on his brand, spanking new website (including some Colorado shots soon thanks to his recent visit)
Wade's Blog and Holly's Blog -> Two very different styles, but I enjoy reading them both. Holly is certainly one of the most dedicated posters out there (usually daily) and Wade has a lot of creative stuff on his site. Check them out.
Fark -> A collection of funny news stories from across the Internet, updated every day. Its hit or miss, but its a good way to kill some time.

Missing Rubber...

2006-05-02T20:31:00.000-05:00

Sarah and I had an "incident" this past weekend which mainly involved our tire coming to pieces. Speaking as someone who hasn't had this happen before, let me just say that when you have large chunks of rubber missing from your tire, its difficult to maintain much pressure (not much over 1 atm at least).

Luckily Sarah was able to pull off the road safely; she is our designated "extreme" conditions driver-having driven through a snowstorm all night on the way to the mountains. Unfortunately, we were on Highway 25 N and the shoulder we pulled off on was very narrow. Cars were whizzing by at 60+, so there was no way to change the tire without putting my life in danger. I called a tow-truck, we got towed to the next exit and were able to change the tire to the spare in the safety of a parking lot. We weren't deterred from getting in some volleyball that afternoon thanks to a ride from a friend.

Now we are the proud owners of 4 new Michelin tires!

Here is what was left of our tire:

The Last Snow???

2006-04-25T22:53:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking this will probably be the bookend to my first snow post last year. It was 80 degrees this past weekend, and yes the high temperature on Monday was 35 with just over an inch of snow in the early evening. This crazy up and down doesn't really surprise me any more, but I still think its incredible that its been about 6.5 months since that first snow. I'm betting that this is our last snowfall of the year, but I guess you never know in Denver...

Pictorial evidence from our balcony:

Two years and counting...

2006-04-22T23:02:00.000-05:00

Despite all odds, somehow Sarah and I have made it through two years of marriage. Our actual anniversary (and yes I did remember) was on April 17th. Since this fell on a Monday, instead of doing one big thing we ended up doing more of a progressive anniversary weekend. It actually started out on last Thursday when we went out to try some swing dancing at the Mercury Cafe.
As is typical at these places, there was a large group lesson beforehand followed by a DJ led dance session afterward. I was impressed by a few things that night. For one, the overall level of dancing at the place was the best I've seen. Most people who went to the lesson (clearly some beginners) didn't bother to stay for the dance afterwards, but everyone who showed up at the final dance were really good. Sarah and I were certainly holding our own though, as we remembered and got back into the swing (no pun intended) of it quicker that I thought it would take. My main thing that took a while to get back was leading, or communicating to Sarah what move I wanted her to do without actually saying it out loud. Luckily there was only one gentle fall due to mis-communication!

Although mainly related to my desire to get back into golf after a long ski season, and not really having anything to do with the progressive anniversary celebration -- Sarah and I did play golf for the first time this year on a Par 3 course. Usually this would not involve anything important enough to mention, but Sarah decided to continue the party by getting a hole-in-one on the 9th hole. I don't think I've ever even known anyone personally who has made an ace even after many years of playing, but Sarah despite around 12,000 to 1 odds came through with a five wood from 147 yards out!

The next phase of the celebration brought us to Bear Creek Lake for a picnic and a short jaunt around the lake itself. The picnic was certainly the highlight of the day, provided by the "Specialty Foods" section of Whole Foods. Fresh bread, cheese, deli meat, sun-dried tomoatoes, fresh olives, and roasted red peppers provided us with a delictable picnic menu. It was a sunny, hot day so we cut the walk pretty short but still had a good time.

Finally, on our actual anniversary, we went to a fancy dinner downtown at one of our favorite seafood restaurants in Denver: Willie G's. It was a nice evening and great way to finish the multiday celebration.

A Farewell to Skiing....

2006-04-12T23:31:00.000-05:00

It was interesting when it finally hit me - "I don't want to go skiing anymore." Skiing is available, but I would rather do other things with my free time. It reminded me (of course) of a Simpsons quote:

"What's happening to me? There's still food, but I don't want to eat it. I've become everything I've ever hated!" -- Homer Simpson

I don't think I've quite became everything I've ever hated, but knowing that I won't have this opportunity next year..its tough not to go. On the other hand, its also tough to think about skiing as the temperatures turn to near 80 degrees for most of the week. I'm sure I'm not getting anyone's sympathy with my complaint about TOO MUCH skiing, but I promise you'll only have to hear about it for a little longer.

Skiing in Colorado
A look back at the 2006 Ski Season

Part I: The stats

Number of resorts visited: 5 (Brecekenridge, A Basin, Keystone, Vail, and Copper Mountain)
Number of times skied: 23 for Mike, 19 for Sarah
Number of trails skied at Breck: I could only count 52 (out of their total of 147). It seemed like I had done more than that but there are a ton of blacks and double blacks (and some greens) I never got to.
Number of times snowboarded: 1 for Mike, 1 for Sarah
Number of times fell while skiing: ~30 for Mike, ~15 for cautious Sarah
Number of times fell while snowboarding: At least 50 each(including two minor injuries)

Part II: The Pictures

Solitude at Breck	Sarah at Vail
Snow Diving
Sarah with Giant Mound of Snow	Mike at Vail
1st Time Snowboarders

Part III: The Lessons

Breckenridge starting as number one and certainly ended up as our favorite resort. We tried snowboarding with fun but relatively painful results. I never got to try shirtless snow diving (jumping into the snow, then back in the hot tub), but I'm not sure that having skin that feels on fire is a sensation I want to have. We never really got the hang of moguls, but we did venture on several different black diamonds. We learned never to forget your facemask on a January lift ride. We had a great time this season, and with that I bid skiing farewell...for this year.

V...

2006-04-02T17:52:00.000-05:00

I can certainly count on one hand the amount of times I've been to the movie theater this year; mainly because nothing has really seemed worth the money and effort. However, I was recently persuaded to check out V for Vendetta because of strong word of mouth and generally good reviews (now in the top 250 at imdb). I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I think its main charm is that it's so hard to put in any one genre. It's based on a comic book (maybe I'm not PC but I refuse to call a comic book a graphic novel), but it doesn't feel anything like a typical comic book movie. Its tone is dark, its story is complex, and its overall setting in a futuristic totalitarian state is frighteningly realistic. There are only a few action scenes (one is particularly violent, that I enjoyed but Sarah did get a little squeamish), so certainly the main focus is on the story and the complexities of the two main characters: V and Evey. Despite the fact that V wears a mask, Hugo Weaving (remember Agent Smith from Matrix or perhaps Elrond) does an excellent job with the many sides of V. Natalie Portman does a great job as well, although she loses some of her hotness with a shaved head.

I don't want to give away any more of the plot, because I personally like going into a movie with as little knowledge as possible. I do recommend checking it out if you have the opportunity, I'd give it a solid 8 out of 10 and I think many of you would enjoy it.

March Madness...

2006-03-24T22:23:00.000-05:00

Even though this year has probably been the least amount of college basketball I have watched in years, March Madness has instantly sucked me back in. First off, thanks to Traci for organizing a ESPN pool again (although of course she's winning again). You can check out my bracket here. I didn't really get that much time to think about it due to the ski trip the week prior, which may have been good because it's usually best just to go with your gut.

Let me describe the events of Thursday to give you a good picture of how awesome March Madness can be...

Get home from work, immediately turn on the Duke-LSU game (now that I'm used to them, 5:00 MT start times work out pretty well). Although this was by all accounts a pretty ugly game for both teams, I was getting quite a kick out of LSU's defense really frustrating Duke and their star player JJ. When LSU finally won, not only was I happy to watch Duke choke its way to another early tournament exit, but I also picked LSU in this game to beat Duke (double score).

Next up the tournament for the winter session of Sarah and I's indoor volleyball league. We finished second during the regular season and "got invited" to the big dance. After a tough first round bye, and struggling (but still winning) in the semi-finals. We went out to face the #1 seed in the championship match. Luckily, we really turned it on and won two close games to take the title. Although it wasn't that great of a league, its still nice to win.

We actually made it back home right before the end of the UCLA-Gonzaga game, and I got to watch Gonzaga blow the rest of my bracket (I had them all the way to the final game) by somehow losing at the end. Thus is life in March Madness, you make one good (lucky) pick but then get burned by another, unless your name is Traci...

The adventures continue...

2006-03-20T22:31:00.000-05:00

So its been quite the break between blog entries, I could take responsiblity for my own actions but there are many things to blame - our first overnight vistors, ski vacations, march madness, and of course Sarah's drinking problem.

The good thing is my brain has recorded lots of bloggable material over the past several weeks, so stay tuned as I rapidly get back on track with blogging.

First things first, the Adventures of the Freakishly Tall will continue, but it looks like I won't be able to call the blog Rocky Mountain Wahoos any more. As some of you may have already heard, I have more or less come to terms for my 3rd and final year long rotation with my company. Yes, Sarah and I will be making our triumphant return to Northern Virginia by late July. Certainly I'm glad to have found what sounds like a good job, and it will be really nice to be close to family and friends again. I definitely think its for the best, but there are some bittersweet parts. I do enjoy the mile-high city a lot, having remarked at least on one occasion "why can't everyone just move out here." And, of course, I'm not looking forward to trading Breckenridge for Wintergreen.

The job is in Herndon, so relatively soon Sarah and I will be figuring out where to live (to best avoid the dreaded DC traffic) and planning for another move - its only about four months away. I'll plan on keeping everyone posted...

The Opposite of Brrrr...

2006-02-26T23:16:00.000-05:00

As a testament to the up and down weather of Denver, while spending last weekend worrying about power outages coupled with below 0 temperatures; this weekend Sarah and I played our first game of volleyball outside in near 70 degree weather. Yes that's a jump of over 70 degrees in eight days. Pretty crazy huh...

The mountains were still relatively cool (mid 30's) as we embarked on our usual weekend ski trip. Only in Denver can you ski and play in a park in shorts during the same weekend.

We had two-for-one lift tix to Copper Mountain, so we figured we'd give it a try while we're out here. It was a really nice resort, the only problem was that it was obvious we're in peak season for skiing. Lift lines were long (+20 minutes) which meant that although we probably skied about the same number of runs as usual we were on the slopes all day. We had a great time, but the extra standing in the sun provided us with pink faces and sore calf muscles.

It was such a clear day that our pictures came out great:

Brrrr...

2006-02-19T19:38:00.000-05:00

So last Friday afternoon, after a long week at work, I stepped outside my office and was smacked in the face with a 2 degree temperature and a 10 mph wind. You know its cold when it feels like your sinuses are freezing within a few minutes of being outside. There were record cold temps this weekend in Denver, somewhat strange given the fact that 60 degree weather was not unusual in January and early February. It dropped to about -12 Friday night, and we were greeted with a power outage Saturday morning. Apparently demand was so high that the local energy company had to perform rolling 30 minute blackouts across the entire Denver metro area.

Editor's Note: Recently I posted a comment to Rob's blog on the fact that Colorado winter like DC's isn't very consistent. Subsequent to this post, DC winter attacked Rob with 8+ plus inches of snow...and now Colorado winter takes a shot at me. I guess I'm flattered that the forces of nature take an interest in this and Rob's blog.

It's amazing how quickly my usual penchant for going out and doing stuff disappeared when it's that cold. Also due to the fact that Sarah and I were both getting over some minor illnesses, it was a relatively quiet weekend. Luckily, extended Olympic coverage provided Sarah and I with some of the magic of Curling. It was interesting for a while, just trying to figure out what's going on. Eventually, as you might guess, it gets a tad bit boring when they get to round 8 of 10. I figure if this whole engineering rotation program doesn't work out, I can always learn to sweep ice in front of large stone...

Ski Rage...

2006-02-14T23:40:00.000-05:00

Although slightly less well-known than Road Rage, I recently read about one instance and witnessed another just this past weekend. In the first incident a little girl gets hit by snowboarder, the enraged father starts attacking the snowboarder, who although wearing a helmet turns out to be a 16 year old girl. It was the classic hit and then get pummeled by an angry 52 year old. I guess I just don't understand people who explode like that. Yes I can see getting angry -- but hitting a teenage girl?? Who does that?? You're skiing, you're supposed to be having fun, and accidents do happen. I know a little girl made an unexpected turn in front of me a few weeks ago, and I almost hit her -- was I close to getting into fisticuffs??

The second incident was more disturbing, although only because I was an eye witness who may have even contributed to the problem. To set the stage, this past Sunday morning I was at Breckenridge (surprise, surprise). Sarah was still getting over a cold (she's finally on the mend today), so I ended up going by myself. After a great morning of skiing, I was in the parking lot getting ready to head home. It was about lunch time, so my plan was to go ahead and eat in the car before hitting the road. A Dodge Stratus saw myself and another skier across from me getting our gear off, and appeared to be waiting to take one of our spaces. I was thinking don't wait on me, because I still have a lunch to eat, but my powers of ESP failed. After about a good 5-10 minutes, I noticed another car behind me also waiting. As you can imagine the fireworks were about to start. The second car pulled into the vacated space across from me, and the Dodge starting laying on his horn. The guy jumped out of the Dodge, started yelling at the other guy, and they both were in each other's faces. The Dodge guy pushed the other guy over his car, but no one took a swing. Eventually, I guess the second car guy relented and moved his car for Dodge Stratus guy.

Two observations on this: 1) This guy was basically the same as the Will Farrell SNL skit yelling "You do not talk to me like that!! I work too hard to deal with this stuff!! I work too hard!! I'm a Division Manager in charge of 49 people!! I drive a Dodge Stratus!!" Apparently he and his Dodge Stratus were way too important to lose a parking space. 2) He had a car full of passengers (presumably his wife and kids). How could his wife not be embarrassed and the kids not be completely screwed up. It amazes me that a complete asshole can have a family...

Take my stories as a warning, Ski Rage could break-out at a ski slope near you...

Cool idea, but...

2006-02-07T23:02:00.000-05:00

First and foremost, I've been getting a little lengthy in my posts. I think I'd rather not make you read a book each time I post, so I'm trying to implement a new strategy. Keep 'em short, but keep 'em coming more frequently.

Now, to make a quick transition to my point, I thought I'd share a cool idea I discovered: The Internet Archive. Its pretty straight forward - one problem with searching the web right now is that you only search through the latest version of the page that the search engine cached during its crawl, and of course you can only navigate to the current version. In most cases this works out fine, but wouldn't it be cool to have a time dimension to web searching as well. I think its a pretty good idea, BUT its still a few years before it becomes useful. I was trying to find out when Darrell Hammond from SNL came to UVA to figure out if Sarah came with me to see him or not (I could see if it occurred during our "break" period...just kidding Sarah). I thought it would be really cool if I could win this argument (Sarah claims she didn't think he was funny, I'm not so sure she was even with me) using the Internet, and I came upon the Internet Archive. It seemed like the perfect way to answer my question: this is information that wouldn't be on the web now but would be before the actual event happened. The problem is you can't just add a date range in addition to the key words of the search, you have to know the URL you're looking for and that proved cumbersome. In the end, I didn't necessarily win the argument, although I bought tix to see him when he comes through Denver anyway. My advice is check out the Internet Archive, remember it, and come back in 3 years when its combined with Google -- it will be awesome.

Rating the ski slopes...

2006-01-31T22:25:00.000-05:00

At this point of the ski season, I think its time to look back and give a midterm report on Colorado Skiing, including the overall slope rankings. In case you may have forgotten the Colorado Ski Pass that Sarah and I purchased gives us access to 5 mountains: Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone, Arapahoe Basin, and Breckenridge.

5) Beaver Creak (Zero Times) - The trail map actually looks pretty cool and I'm sure we'll make there at some point, but the problem is that's 3o miles further than any of the other resorts. Its very tough to stay on I-70 for another 30 miles when you already been on the same road for 70 miles.

4) Vail (One Time) - It gets a lot of hype, but after our one visit I'm not sure exactly why. They don't give you free parking, you have to park on the side of the road rather far away. Then, instead of a direct bus (a la Breck) you stop at like 8 different condo areas before you actually get to the resort. Then, you have to walk through a bunch of shops and restaurants just to finally get to what you came for -- skiing. The snow is the same, I don't think Vail gets different snow from all the other resorts that are less than 10 miles away. The trail map is frankly the most confusing I've seen -- its a bit strange to me when a green trail turns into a black half way through. The other issue is that Sarah and I, while we've gotten a lot better, still aren't experts by any stretch. Everything seemed a little bit tougher at Vail-- the greens we went on looked pretty much the same as blues at other resorts. Despite all that bitchin, we're going to give Vail another shot, probably sometime this week.

3) Arapahoe Basin (Two Times) - Certainly the smallest of any of the resorts, and without all the bells and whistles (no fancy restaurants or amenities). However, its actually a pretty good fit for day-trip skiing. We usually don't ski more than 4.5 hours in a day, so how many different trails can you really do in that amount of time anyway. Plus its the only one where, especially if you get there early, you can park right next to the first lift -- no shuttles needed. Its skiing at its most basic, but sometimes that's all you need to have a good time.

Clear Day at A-Basin

2) Keystone (Three Times) - This was a tough choice between 2 and 3, but Keystone edged out A-basin. Its got a pretty simple layout, with most of the slopes on one, gigantic peak. I describe it as a spaghetti plate of trails that gives you endless combinations of slopes to ride down from top to bottom. Its also the closest of any of the slopes which of course makes it appealing to the weekend warrior (as they call skiers like Sarah and I). We have had some run ins with moguls there, but overall its been a lot of fun.

1) Breckenridge (Six Times) - For skiers at our level, I can't think of a better place. Relatively easy to get around for its size, great variety in slopes, big enough that even when its crowded it doesn't feel crowded, and of course it was our first experience with Colorado skiing. Our affinity for Breck is partly due to the fact that we know it much better than any of the other places (although there are still many slopes that I haven't yet hit). We know exactly where we're going and exactly what to expect on most of the slopes no matter what the conditions. Breck has good trails to warm up on, good trails to have fun skiing through trees, and pleny of challenging trails as well.

View of Breck from Keystone

Mind Games...

2006-01-22T23:22:00.000-05:00

I have re-learned the effects of confidence and mental outlook in a number of different areas recently...

1) Skiing (its been a few entries since I've mentioned skiing) - As I believe I've gotten better this season from going skiing at least once a week since Thanksgiving, its amazing how much the mental mindset it starting to come into play. I've started going a lot faster and on more difficult terrain than I usually do, but for whatever reason I had a bad day skiing about two weeks ago. I haven't fallen too many times this season, but on that day I had my worst fall of yet. I was going fast and somehow my skis got crossed, and I immediately hit the ground hard. I wasn't injured, but it certainly shook my confidence a little bit. Later that day, that little chink in my confidence coupled with my legs starting to get tired, caused my whole skiing to go down the toilet. My balance was off, I couldn't turn, I fell some more, and in general it wasn't very fun. My next time out, it still carried over -- I was really cautious all day and I think I was letting my mind play tricks on me a little bit by overthinking what I was doing. It reminded me of this book I read in college that talks about trusting Self 2 (unconscience thoughts/actions) instead of Self 1 (conscience thoughts) in sports. The basic theory is that in most sports activities, if consciously thinking doesn't help that much if at all, your best comes out when you get to the point where you can just react. Fortunately by the time Sarah and I went this weekend my confidence has returned and I was trusting my instincts more -- which made for much more fun skiing.

2) Volleyball -- We started another volleyball season (in a different league) and we have had quite a contrast in our first two games. In the first game, to be blunt, we played a team that just plain sucked. Most times the opposing team could barely get the ball over the net, so the level of competition was considerably out of whack. After it was obvious that we should have no trouble finishing off this team, it was amazing how quickly I mentally checked-out. For our whole team, we really were (excuse the sports cliche) playing down to the competition. I was missing serves and spikes that I'd normally hit, and without the usual adrenilane rush I wasn't even hustling. We won all three games, but they actually started to come close in the last game because of our sloppiness. Our game last Thursday, was the complete opposite. We played great and the other team was really good. We won 2 out of 3 close games, and there were several intense rallies. The sloppiness from last week was gone in an instant, just based on how much better the other team was.

3) Football Prediction - Apparently my mental outlook for my prognostications last week was a little off. I was 1-2 (I'm still counting my Denver over Carolina Super Bowl pick, it would have been right had things gone differently), missing both games on Sunday. My theory on this is that Football games are much more random than anyone in sports would ever admit. Certainly there are some teams that are clearly better than others, but it most cases I'd say a win or loss is at least 20% luck. Case in point with turnovers, probably one of the biggest indicators of a team's success besides points scored. A week ago, the Broncos beat a good New England team, mainly because of 5 New England turnovers, 3 of which were fumbles that could have been recovered by either team depending upon which way they bounced. The luck went Denver's way and they collected all three fumbles. On the other hand, yesterday the Broncos couldn't get a break and lost two key fumbles. When you combine turnovers, with the randomness of refs (especially this playoff season), and many other factors...I didn't make poor football picks, I just got unlucky.

Football Fever...

2006-01-18T00:39:00.000-05:00

I must admit, although I've always been a big football fan, I can't remember a football seaon that I've been more emotionally involved in than this year's playoffs and bowl season (and those who know me well know that I don't get emotional about many things, especially disney movies). Since we got back to the Rockies after Christmas, I actually watched most of over 10 games in the past few weeks:

First the Bowl Season
1) Virginia/Minnesota - Even though I can't remember the name of the bowl, it was still nice to see UVA win
2) Virginia Tech/Louisville - Missed the Vick cheap shot, which would have been the highlight for me :(
3) Notre Dame/Ohio State - Its just fun to watch Notre Dame lose, since they were given a BCS slot just because they are Notre Dame
3) Penn State/Florida State - How is it that Flordia State can never recruit a decent kicker? 3 missed FGs and an extra point!?!
4) Texas/USC - One of the greatest college football games I've ever seen. And it was really nice to see Texas pull it out in the end. It was certainly obvious that USC hadn't lost in years by the post-game comments: "We are the better team, they just made a few more plays than us" - Matt Leinert

And then I get hit with the NFL playoffs, which have had my two teams (Washington and Denver), and a surprising number of exciting games. Although the Redskins are my original team, I have to admit that they haven't provided much in terms of excitement (I mean that offense is painful to watch), and I've been really jumping on the Broncos bandwagon. Denver is certainly more of a sports town than DC, and with all the excitement around here I'm certainly coming down with some Broncos fever (luckily no rash yet)

Here's my playoff watch list:
5) Washington/Tampa Bay - An ugly game, but the 'skins do have a good defense
6) Pittsburg/Cincinnati - Sans Carson Palmer (out on the second play), Cinci had no chance
7) Washington/Seattle - I thought the Redskins may pull out another ugly one, but man that offense sucks
8) Denver/New England - What a game, the world champs get shut down by 5 turnovers
9) Pittsburg/Indy - So I only heard this one on the radio on the way back from the slopes (more on this later)
10) Carolina/Chicago - The Thomas Jones UVA connection had me rooting for Da'Bears, but alas there defense fell apart

To illustrate my emotional attachment this year, I'll recount two plays that were so incredibly bizarre and stupid, I was stupified.

#1 - Denver leading 10-6 over the Pats in the 3rd quarter, its 3rd and goal from about the 10. Brady is pressured, throws to the end zone, and CHAMP BAILEY INTERCEPTS THE BALL. He takes off, dodges a few tacklers, and races past everyone with a pack with blockers. But WAIT, after running 90 yards he pulls up to a slow jog and then BAM he is pumeled by a Pats player at the one yard line. There are two things that annoyed the f--- out of me on this play. Although Champ said he ran out of gas, he is an all-pro NFL cornerback. Are you telling me that he can't run a 100 yard dash without pulling up!?! The New England TIGHT END who weighs 60 pounds more than you ran the whole length of the field just fine! Secondly, what the f--- were the blockers doing, one of which was looking at the sideline (did he think a fan was going to jump out and tackle Champ)? This was not a pacing exercise, you're supposed to see the opposing team members and BLOCK THEM.

#2 - Pittsburg is leading Indy by 3 with just over 1 minute left (Denver would get another home playoff game if Pittsburg wins). The Steelers just sacked Manning on 4th down on their own 2 yard line. Indy still had all their time outs left, so I agree they had to run a play to try and get the touchdown. They hand the ball off to Jerome Bettis, and instead of perhaps holding two hands over the ball, OR even holding the ball close to your body, I'll just leave my right arm hanging out there in front of someone else's helment and BAM...fumble and Indy's running it back. Good think Big Ben R, made an incredible tackle, and the Indy kicker choked on the field goal. Sarah was having a relaxing nap on our way home from the ski slopes when suddenly she is rudely awakened to my screams of agony when I hear that Bettis fumbles.

OK, I've calmed down now...thanks for letting me get that off my chest ;)

I'm looking foward to the games this weekend and I've even got a few picks for my faithful readers:

AFC/NFC Championship Games:
Broncos 27 - Steelers 17
Carolina 30 - Seattle 21

Super Bowl :
Broncos 33 - Carolina - 31

We'll check back next week to see how I did...

Ullr Fest...

2006-01-05T22:26:00.000-05:00

So, I had to pass along this article that I read in yesterday's Denver Post on Ullr Fest. In case you don't know, Ullr is the Norse god of snow (duh!). In the 60's, the town of Breckenridge decided it would be a good idea to get wasted on an annual basis and they needed a good reason; hence a fake festival. And while, I appreciate the uniqueness of this particular celebration, I was even more entertained by two of the best stories about people drunk off their ass that I've heard in years (Note: as I've gotten older and married, I don't hear these types of stories with as much regularity). Here's a gist of the two stories from the Denver Post article a few days ago on Ullr fest - with a few comments from yours truly.

#1) In 1985, a guy [you just don't hear too many great druken female stories] caught his trousers on fire and then dove into the nearby Blue River to extinguish the flames. Which would have been a great idea in June... but it was January, the Blue River was frozen solid and the man ended up with still smoldering pants and a big lump on his head from hitting the ice [only when you're drunk can you almost get the right idea, but miss that one minor detail]. Friends rolled him in snow to put out the trouser fire, and the party went on [who lets a simple trouser fire stop a decades old celebration to drinking?]

#2) A year earlier, another guy with a head full of beer passed out in the parking lot near the bonfire. When his brain's neurons began firing again after midnight, the temperature had plunged to 15 degrees below zero, and he realized his face was frozen to the parking lot [Note: Always go for the bathroom floor when passing out]. After being alerted to the screams, the Fire Department arrived and freed the man's head with a combination of warm water and a chisel [is this something covered in the standard training for Breckenridge's fire department? I'd like to think so, because that would be cool.]

Sarah and I might make it up for some of the festivies this weekend (unfortunately, the bon fire is during the week), and of course I'll keep my eye out for anybody frozen to inanimate objects.

The Broncos Game...

2005-12-31T23:15:00.000-05:00

A la my two week vacation from work, I've taken a bit of a siesta on the blog recently. In lieu of this, I've decided to play a little bit of catch-up on some happenings of the last few weeks. The first, that I will tackle today, is that Sarah and I made it to our first NFL game a few weeks ago -- the Denver Broncos versus the Baltimore Ravens.

Outside of Invesco Stadium
We got great seats from one my co-workers who has season tickets -- very close although they were off to the side of the endzone. We had a great view when the action was near our endzone, but we basically had to watch the jumbo-tron to see what was going on toward the other end of the field.

Close up Action Near Our Seats

It was a lot of fun and we liked the stadium, but the game itself turned into a defensive struggle (This ESPN headline pretty much sums it up: Flat Broncos manage narrow win vs. hapless Ravens). The Broncos won 12-10, but they never made it past the 40 yard line on our side of the field. Our best view was of a "what-the-hell-are-you-thinking" interception thrown by Ravens QB Kyle Boller in our corner of the endzone (I personally felt that I could have ran on the field and caught the ball before any Raven's WRs could get there).

Although Sarah and I certainly support the Broncos, they still come in second compared to our loyalties to the old hogs, the Washington Redskins (finally a playoff team again today).

More Skiing...

2005-12-12T22:25:00.000-05:00

The freakishly tall adventures (on skis) have continued in full force. I think the old cliche "the third times the charm" holds true in Sarah and I's skiing trips. After our initial trip to Keystone (with the giant moguls), we hit Breckenridge the week after Thanksgiving. It was a powder day, which presents quite the duality for us. On one hand powder is cool to ski in, on the other we don't have powder skis and we still haven't quite grasped the subtleties of powder skiing (i.e., we suck at powder). It also meant that the road conditions were not perfect from the heavy snow the night before; however, the Puma (thank Bruce for the nickname), was more than enough machine to handle the snowy conditions. Breckenridge is always nice, but not everything was quite open yet so I didn't get that green slope to warm up on, plus I had boots misadjusted for the first few runs and the powder made all the slopes pretty choppy. We had fun, but certainly not our best day.
A little over cast at Breck
Trip #3, on the other hand, went a lot smoother. We decided to hit up Arapahoe Basin (or A-basin if you're a local like me), and although its the smallest of the mountains on our pass, it only has 69 trails, we had a great time. We found a lot of trails we liked and there was more than enough variety to keep us interested. The trails were mainly packed-powder, but you could also go off trail in a few places to practice powder skiing. We didn't attempt the moguls again this time, but we're getting closer to building up our confidence again.
Clear Blue Skies at A-Basin
It was a gorgeous day, and really the only negative was the 4:00pm skiing traffic. I had some horrible flashbacks to rush hour on 66 in DC, as we averaged about 10 mph for 40 miles of highway traffic. The trip to A-basin took just under 2 hours, the trip back took just under 3 hours.

Next up on the ski horizon is Vail...watch out Vail you're on Notice!

Giving Thanks...

2005-12-04T23:25:00.000-05:00

Due to the recent holiday, I missed blogging last week; watch out though because I'm coming back full force this week (hopefully). Sarah and I made another trip back home to Virginia to play another game of how much family time can we squeeze into one four-day weekend. Here's a quick breakdown of our iteneriary:

Thursday
1) Get up at 4:00 AM - Thanksgiving Day
2) Catch 7:00 AM flight to Dallas
3) Eat traditional Thanksgiving meal at Airport Chilis
4) Fly to Reagan National, arrive at 3:30 PM
5) Eat Thanksgiving dinner #1 at Nate's house (Sarah's sister, Dawn's boyfriend) with the Wyses.

Friday
6) Drive to Richmond to my brother's house that morning
7) Meet Caroline Rebekah Diehl, our first niece
8) Eat Thanksgiving dinner #2 with the Diehls

Saturady
9) Christmas shopping
11) Watch UVA come painfully close to beating Miami
12) Drive back to Nova

Sunday
13) Fly back to Dallas - sitting through 45 minutes of turbulenance
14) Land on what we're not sure was a real runway (Sarah's comment: Why are we landing this way, when all the runways go that way)
15) Finally make it back to Denver late that night

It actually was a pretty good trip despite all the traveling. But now we're back to good old Denver where the high temperature tomorrow is going to be 4. That's right, the high is going to be 4 degrees. At least the skiing is good...

Ski Season Begins...

2005-11-20T23:10:00.000-05:00

Before I go into our first adventures of skiing this season, I'll cover a few other miscellaneous topics. First off, I got to go back to Virginia last week as part of a "business" trip. It was a lot of fun, I got to see family, old co-workers, and of course many Arlington friends at the house of Traci, Cassie, Christy, and Emily (or Emitrasisty for short). Now I just have to figure out how to continue to visit every two weeks...still working on that one.

And for your Volleyball update, our league team made the final four...translation, we won our first playoff game in a 7 team league. Although, we now have to face off against the number 1 seed, so its anyone's guess if we can keep this playoff run alive.

Back to the point of this post. Sarah and I did in fact make our first ski trip of the season at Keystone. Only about half of the mountain was open, but it was still pretty cool. One "run" consisted of going down the equalivent of 4-5 regular slopes all the way from the top of the mountain to the bottom (3.5 miles). Once we got our ski legs back everything was going great, I personally loved my new skiis, so then I came up with this great idea: "let's try this other blue slope that we haven't looked at before." Can you say "Worst Decision...Ever" (in the voice of Comic Book Guy).

We started going down, the snow wasn't groomed and a little choppy but everything was fine. Then you make a right turn and huh, there are lots of moguls for the next half a mile or so. These actually went ok, we were both being cautious but these were navigatable. Then it evens out and another right turn and...BAM, 3-5 foot high moguls for the next two miles (at an even steeper slope). Our legs were alrighty burning as neither of us really knows how to ski moguls, and this pretty much finished us off. We eventually made it down, but not without a few tumbles. To add insult to injury, the moguls got so high that a few small trees and even a rock or two were pertruding out of the "valleys." So our brand new skis even got a little scratched up.
We didn't actually bring a camera to capture these precious moments, but here is a picture from keystone of the top of this evil slope. As you can see, it looks fine at the top...

Not to let the mountain beat us, we actually did do one more long run on more normal slopes and quickly regained our confidence. So, if we block out that one long and painful memory, it was actually a lot of fun.

Blades and Booze...

2005-11-11T00:10:00.000-05:00

Yes there were blades(some real and some plastic that caused a little stir when I tried to bring them in my carry-on bag), and oh yes there was booze (a keg of Satan's Pony, ice luge, rumplemintz, and even a pack of O'Doules*). With those two ingredients in place, the B & B party VIII was as successful as ever. Families were reunited downing shots over a large block of ice (who knew both McDevitts would be there), obscure movie and tv characters were again given a stage, and best of all no incremenating pictures were taken against the wishes of said people:*

It was a great party from start to finish. Sarah and I got to catch up with a lot of our friends, and get drunk in the process. Throw in a little Halo 2 playing and you pretty much have the perfect weekend.

Since I wasn't a judge this year, and although I would never question drunk judging, I have to recognize my favorite costumes that were eligible but didn't win a prize this year (thus eliminating Rob's masterpiece as Optimus Prime). In no particular order my favorite non-winners: Ben as Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite (Ben is definitely in the running for the "Most Good Costumes without Ever Winning" award), Sarah B. as the bar wench (DON'T call her the bar bitch), and Bonnie and Alex as Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Thanks to the planners for all their hard work and I can't wait till next year (you can check out the actual winners and many more pics at the B&B website).

*We may never know who took this photo, or who the man taking the ice luge shot was

Where the Buffalo Roam

2005-11-07T22:54:00.000-05:00

Well it certainly was no party to arrive at work at 4:45 in the morning, but my day visit to Casper, Wyoming was unique. On my drive to work, I’m pretty sure I saw a wolf as I pulled out of the apartment complex. It could have been one of those dogs that looks like a wolf, but according to my coworkers, it’s actually possible it was a wolf.

My wildlife sightings did not end there. Along the drive up we saw quite a few herds of antelopes and of course, horses and cows. I asked my coworkers if I would see any buffalo, and they laughed out loud, called me a city girl, and told me that we wouldn’t see them along the highway. Well, low and behold, on our drive back, we saw a herd of buffalo along the left side of the road (behind a snow fence, they weren’t going to roam onto the highway).

The buffalo sighting was quite a thrill for me, but seeing 4 over-turned tractor trailer trucks along the side of the road, was chilling. The cause of 4 over-turned trucks you ask? – WIND!! The wind was a steady 65 miles an hour that day and I’m sure there were much nastier gusts. It didn’t seem like anything unusual to the Wyoming folk, but it was uncomfortable to feel the car being pushed around by the wind while driving 80-100 miles an hour down the highway.

14 hours and 600 miles after I left for work that morning, I was home and happy to have returned to Colorado.

Beer!

2005-10-23T23:12:00.000-05:00

One of Sarah and I's recent activities that's a little more unusual than our staple of hiking and volleyball, was our visit to the Coors brewery (the beer aroma smelled great even from the parking lot). It was actually pretty fun, we got to learn about beer, see the beer making process first-hand, get indoctrinated into drinking Coors, and then, best of all, drink beer! I was impressed that they actually gave you three glasses of any of the beers they make, including some good stuff like Killans, Blue Moon, and a not bad darker beer called Winterfest. All in all, a pretty fun trip.

Our volleyball season rages on. Its funny how competetive you get when you are placed in a league setting with refs, standings and the like. Our team is actually doing decently, we're in the middle of the pack at 7-8. But, we lost all 3 (each night you play the same team for 3 games) to one of the better teams a few nights ago. Man that really puts you in a bad mood compared to when you actually win a few. However there is one cure to the volleyball blues, an ice cold Coors brand beer!

Let it Snow...

2005-10-10T21:19:00.000-05:00

Well, as you might have guessed from the pic, we experienced our first Colorado snowstorm today. Although, I have to admit this is a half truth, when Sarah and I were apartment hunting on MAY 1st it snowed a little in the morning...but, it's the first real snow and certainly the earliest I've ever seen snow in my life. We got about 4-5 inches of wet snow but the roads were pretty clear. As you can see in the picture from our balcony, the leaves just started turning colors and haven't even had a chance to fall off yet.

The only other thing I'll add is that on Saturday it was just over 80 degrees and sunny, and Sarah and I played volleyball outside all day. We had a 50 degree temperature swing in two days!!