Pumpkin carving 2007

The kids all got together for the annual October pumpkin massacre. We had such a great time! Cali had her first shot at actually doing some damage, she poked the tools into any and every pumpkin surface she could get her hands on.

Spencer and Nathan carved their very own designs this year but poor little Cassidy was sick. She made an effort but had to bow out about half way through her design because she started feeling sick so her enthusiasm was a little low this year. Get better sweetheart, we love you!

I can’t describe the gratitude I have for these sweet children in my life. They make me so happy and give me so much to live for and look forward to.

Thanks Erica for the awesome photos!

Weekend Fall photo

I took this at Sugar House park yesterday and I think this is just a great picture. I do have larger versions on my computer that look much better but the blogosphere gets the 400 pixel version. I may even frame this one.

Oh, the intellectual heights you can reach with text messaging!

This is a conversation I just had with Lance via SMS using Verizon’s vast wireless infrastructure.

Lance: Let’s get together, put on leather helmets and club each other to Yanni’s greatest hits.

Me: I agree with all of that except for the part about Yanni’s hits being great.

Lance: It’s a comparative way of ranking Yanni’s songs differentiating his master works from lesser filler efforts within his wide, all encompassing catalog. It’s not a personal assessment of Yanni “the artist’s” degree of suckitude.

Me: Well, if the ranks are based on the scale of suckitude then greatness is relative whether good, bad or suckish. His greatest suckiness would indeed be considered great among the greatest of sucks.

Lance: Well, sure. That’s a given. I’m not arguing that. I’m simply saying that I have the helmets and clubs right now.

Over the river and through the woods

I got my first cold of the season and took a day off of work last Friday. While I was home I got a call from Lance and we decided to cruise on downtown to Big City Soups, a perfect meal for the sniffles. The chipotle black bean soup was superb.

I had my camera and a couple of hours so we drove east through the mountains for some photography. The day was clear and spectacular and I got some really nice shots. The aspens have amazing character and with a touch of photoshop they really make some nice framed art. Please enjoy.

Breathtaking, literally. Try doing a couple squat thrusts up here!

A little photoshop action to the same picture

Tiny Homer made an appearance. Doh!

From bad to worse…

Have you ever had one of those days? The day where just as things can’t get any worse…they do?

For example, you’re a mouse going for that morsel of cheese and just as you think you’ve got your hands on the catch of the day…BAM! The steel trap of surprise, humiliation and spinal damage slams down upon your neck. And, as if it can’t get any worse, you feel Jack Manson, the town mouse rapist, creeping up behind you for a little of the old in-out, in-out while you’re stranded and suffocating.

I thought Job had it bad until I saw this.

Kids dancing in black & white

The kids got their boogie on this weekend in the front yard. What a bunch of amazing little people they are. It’s so inspiring and fulfilling to watch them have so much fun together. Of course I took some grin-grin, snap-snap while they danced.

Happiness

It’s up to us whether we will be happy or not. Our surroundings, our environment, our circumstances…they are all secondary to what we feel inside.

We can choose to be happy with what we have, or not. If we don’t like what we have then we are faced with a choice. The choice is to change those things or remain with them. If we remain with them and we are unhappy then we have chosen to be unhappy.

I choose to move forward and pave my own way. I choose to set my mind on the light ahead rather than the darkness behind me. Life is a journey and should be experienced with enthusiasm and anticipation for what’s coming around the next corner. The unknown is as scary as it is envigorating so I’m going to jump in with both feet and make my mark on this world and my fingerprint is uniquely mine.

Future generations will determine what my residue has created and I anticipate the day I can look back from wherever I am and see the groove I’ve carved and the wave I’ve made and how powerful my life has been as it has intertwined with the lives of everyone else on this big blue marble.

Random photos with which to crack you up

The world wide interwebs continue to provide masses of unexplainable, yet hilarious photographs. Look and laugh.

Um, is that guy putting his pants on or taking them off to get the party started?

Sacking the QB takes on a new meaning

Good thing he brought an umbrella

Deviance of biblical proportion in the jungle

Keep those hands down, always remember the fundamentals of soccer

I believe this guy set the new projectile vomiting distance world record

He zigged when he should have zagged

Hillary is building the big American teet

Hillary Clinton is off her damn rocker. Anyone who believes she is what America needs is also off their own damn rocker. We all went through the original Hillary-care proposals during the Clinton administration of the 90s and had to put up with her abrasive droning on and on about how it takes a village and how she will help the government coddle us from cradle to grave. I wanted to poke her eyes out with that proverbial ten foot pole every time I saw her on TV over stepping her role as first lady and trying to power her way into the administration. Who the f*** voted for her? Not me, not my neighbor, not you. But we still had to listen to her propose salvation.

Now, here we are in 2007 having to hear it all again, but it’s even worse than before. Not only is she proposing Hillary-care, albeit sugar coated this time so she doesn’t appear quite so leftist, but she has offered $5000 to every new born (she floated it that one to the Congressional Black Caucus as ‘an idea’) and a government sponsored 401K plan.

Her 401K plan is a real doozy. It’s another Robin Hood plan to tax those who own estates worth more than $7 million and match investments of up to $1000 yearly for those who earn under $100,000. She proposes encouraging employers to enforce direct deposit on the employees who would be participating in the plan.

I’m no historian and I’m no scholar but this, to me looks a hell of a lot like communism and Hillary is clearly working to rub out the class differences — see Stalinist. If she is allowed to get into office and push forward with these big government baby stitting plans then the good old USA is on a slippery slope to the gray days of the hammer and sickle.

I can’t believe people actually call themselves Americans and, at the same time agree with her ideas. Americans do not need the government to manage their lives. We need the government to protect our borders and security so we can live free and prosper according to our own free wills.

Hillary is an evil woman drunk with power.

Matt Drudge cracks me up!

Look what he posted today. I shot Diet Mt. Dew out my nose when I saw this. Drudge rules !