If you read this site, wish that it was updated more, and wonder why I don't post much anymore, you are not alone. I wonder those same things too. I think that at least once a day for the past two weeks straight I have thought about this site, wanted to write a post, but just have nothing to write about. I feel like I haven't been creative for a long time now. I haven't drawn, painted, photoshopped, coded for fun, anything like that since probably last year. And it's June. I feel like I used to do that kind of stuff all the time. I have been able to relax quite a bit now that the wedding is over, and all the thank-you notes are all sent out and everything, but maybe I have been relaxing too much. I've thought about redesigning this site, but with no good content, it seems like a waste. I tried to revive some old greasemonkey scripts I wrote but the changes made to greasemonkey since I stopped following it's development make it difficult to work with. I'm glad Nick has got internet access in his condo now, it will be good to be able to chat with him in the morning and evening. Sara, Nick, and I have started trying to figure out the weekly Filmwise Invisible quizzes over email and we actually got all of them this week. That's all for now, I'll get back to working on how to make this site interesting again. "How can a train be lost? It's on rails." Labels: life
Friday night I drove down to my friend Todd's apartment in Parker to see Tyler who was in town from Durango for a friend's wedding. It was actually south of Parker, roughly the last turn before you get to New Mexico. Todd, Tyler, Jeff, Jason and Dean were all there when I arrived and so was an old dorm-mate from CU, Aleks. Aleks is a Russian kid I met my sophomore year at CU. He was 21 at the time and could therefore buy alcohol, a vital role in the college dorms. He was a Junior that year. I ended up living on campus my sophomore year because I didn't have that many close friends after my freshman year and not being a huge fan of Boulder at the time, I didn't want to live by myself. I hadn't seen Aleks since probably a year or two after I left CU, so that was pretty cool to get to hang out. Late into the night, after some thimble sized jello shots and metal puzzle games, Aleks and his cousin went to the store and bought some Tostinos pizzas. The problem was Jeff and Todd's oven doesn't work. The broiler did though. And so did the microwave, the toaster, and the bar-b-que. The first pizza, they decided to cook in the turned-on-it's-side toaster. It was pretty burnt, I didn't have any. The second pizza from the broiler was burnt with some gooey dough, I didn't have any of that either. The third pizza, however, that was cooked on the grill, thrown in the broiler, and finished up in the microwave. I had some of that and despite the burnt cardboard and charcoal taste of the rock hard undercoat of the crust, it was pretty good. It was a pretty fun night hanging out with everyone, telling old jokes, listening to Tyler put down other's career decisions in order to defend his married life, waiting an hour for Jeff to mysteriously come out of his bedroom, watching Jason finally separate two pieces of a metal puzzle, and finally seeing Todd's place. I just hope this isn't the last time I see Tyler for three years. Labels: life
If you ever decide to visit Scotland, namely Edinburgh Scotland, I have one piece of rock-solid advice for your trip: do not go to the "Scotch Whisky Experience." The Scotch Whisky Experience is a tourist attraction, right outside Edinburgh Castle on the Royal Mile. Let me give you the highlights. You go in, pay like £9 ($18 USD) per person and then wait in a room for the tour to start. After a while, a nice Scottish lady comes in and gives you a shot of Scotch, in our case it was the exquisite and rare Dewars (yes, this was Jon Favreau's drink in Swingers). Then you watch a video produced in 1994 of an American "tourist" (you know he's a tourist because he keeps taking pictures of crap with a gigantic camera with oversized strap) who takes a sip of scotch to be transported back in time to see how whisky is made. That goes on for a while. The second part is the tour guide pointing out parts of a diorama with a wand. The third part is another hokie video of a "ghost bartender" who floats out of a bottle of whisky projected onto a piece of glass to give the ghost effect. But the finale... the finale is a theme park style ride where you sit in a whisky-barrel-mobile cart that goes on a track at 0.25mph through "the history of whisky." It was like It's a Small World but with whisky. The whole thing was like it was made for a 7 year old, but you had to be 18 to drink any whisky, it was just awful and lasted forever. So there's my Edinburgh advice: don't go to the Scotch Whisky Experience.
Just a quick post to say that I am getting married today to the most amazing woman in the world and I am incredibly excited. I'd better get ready for the wedding tho. And not forget the rings. Can't forget the rings. Labels: life
As the "holiday" weekend comes to a close I am feeling very accomplished. I got a lot done and thought I'd list what I did. Sara and I cleaned the house. It's not very out of the ordinary, but it makes my list bigger. We cleaned it so we could have Jared Sarah, and Quin over for dinner, which, yes, was lovely. We met the photographer at red rocks to go over some good photo-taking areas and ideas with him. One shot we decided on will feature me posing bare-chested with an axe. After going to two other pastry shops and being completely disappointed with their willingness to make our cake the way we want it, we came across Child's Pastries who had the best price, taste, and design ability and we ordered our cake. Every time I decide to wash my car, I find out that it's going to snow within the next couple of days so I don't end up washing it. This has lead to me not washing my car for about six months. By this point, you could scrape the magnesium chloride off with a spatula. Well, I bit the bullet and got my car washed, waxed, vacuumed and was actually amazed by how good it looks. Friday night we decided we should do our taxes so we can get any possible refund before our honeymoon and right now they are done, sealed in an envelope waiting to be sent out. Combined we will receive a very descent refund which will help us with our soon-to-be-incurred wedding-and-honeymoon debt. Even though we finished watching Love Liza about three and a half weeks ago, it has been sitting sealed next to the TV since then. This weekend I realized we haven't actually returned it and will be sending back the movie tomorrow morning. I now realize that I *am* Netflix's business model. Finally, for no good reason, we started going through all the boxes in our storage room tonight. By the end of the night, we had cut our storage volume in half. Thankfully, there is a bunch of stuff going to goodwill, but sadly, there are tons of VHS movies going to the dump including but not limited to One Crazy Summer (thanks michael), fightclub, office space, a few star wars trilogies, a few indiana jones trilogies, and many more. Sad to see them go. Labels: life
Tonight we finally got a home phone number. We have been in this house for over a year and have never needed one, but sometimes our cell phone coverage (my cell phone coverage) is spotty within the house and drops all the time and rarely works at all in the basement. So I suppose we did need a land line. The problem is we couldn't justify $30+ a month for something that we wouldn't use too much. After talking to a coworker, we decided to get a home phone through Skype. It works just like a regular VoIP phone does, but there are all kinds of other cool benefits to having it tied to a regular Skype user account. So for the first time in 7 years, I have a home phone number and because it only works out to about $6 a month, I am pretty pleased.
Do you want to cancel your phone book delivery? Stop the yellow pages from being delivered? So did I but I couldn't for the life of me find out how. Our phone books go from the front porch to the recycling bin in the back, never even stopping in the house. With the Google, GOOG-411, and all the other non-out-of-date ways to look up phone numbers I have no need for a big phone book that wastes tons of paper. My sister-in-law, Kat came through for me. She found the phone number for Yellow Book that you can call and request to have phone book delivery stopped for your house. The number is 1-888-492-8721. I had to be transfered to the distribution department but I talked to a nice lady who removed my address from their delivery system. She also informed me there was no way to stop delivery online, you have to call. Hopefully this information is helpful to you and if you don't use your phone books, save a few trees, stop the delivery for them. Labels: life
I am thrilled to say that late Thanksgiving night, my brother and sister in law had their third, beautiful daughter, Lexie Grace Husson. So Kat (my sister-in-law) was supposed to be induced on the 3rd of December, but by the time we got to my parents house on Thanksgiving, Kat was there and she was already having contractions. By 9pm or so, the contractions were escalating and so they left for the hospital. By 10:18pm the baby was born. Now that all sounds really nice and quick until you realize they didn't have enough time to give Kat the epidural. That is just about the most awful thing I can think of. I suppose they didn't want to waste it either, so they ended up giving it to my brother. It seemed to calm him down. Sara and I got the good news a short while after and visited them the next day. Sara was banking on a blond-haired baby since they have a brunette and a red-head, but it turns out that Lexie Grace has dark black hair, and a fair amount of it. I am thrilled to have another awesome niece, this one is the youngest like me, and look forward to watching her grow up. It was pretty neat to actually be there when Kat knew it was coming and know what was going on. You can see some pictures of Lexie on my flickr account and some more on my brother's.
Actually, Dash is forced to be more brave than I, because tomorrow morning, we are taking him to the vet to be neutered. While it may be just what Bob Barker always dreamed of, rest his soul, it is something that makes me feel so bad and so sorry for our little buddy. My friend Jared had a great idea that I am hoping to benefit from. He was hoping right before they took their dog to get neutered that the dog would do something bad, like pee on the carpet or chew up something so they could tell it what a bad dog it was and take it directly to the Vet. He would never do anything bad again. Here's hoping. Dash has also been in puppy training the past 4 weeks and is doing alright, but is a little more distracted than some of the bigger dogs there, which is every dog. The rest of the class are labs or retrievers. I think it will take a lot of work and hopefully we can be patient, but I think we can help him be a great dog. I also went to a wedding last week in Sonoma, California. My cousin got married there and it was a really nice wedding. We were able to fly out to San Francisco and see my sister, and see the rest of my extended family, who are all really fun to be around. My cousin got engaged after we did and already had her wedding. Makes me scared to think of how much work we still have to do and how quickly it will come.
I want to post, but I don't have anything to say and I only have 4 minutes left on my battery, so here is your 4 minutes worth of posting. I didn't want to post anything about the iPhone, but I will (because, like I say, I don't have anything to write about). The hype is ridiculous, but that's all it is, hype. Remember the PS3? Yeah, and the Wii had nearly no hype at all before it came out. Take that for what you will. I would love to have one but don't think I will get one. I am constantly justifying *not* buying one. I think that's a bad sign. Even tho I claim I don't want one I can't shut up about it or stop asking other people if they are going to get one. Alright, battery's dead, plugging in. That was short. I am trying to get back into the habit of writing on this blog and I think that means that you will get some posts on here that are pretty uninteresting like this, but hopefully things will get better and pretty soon you won't be able to live without knowing what I did on a Tuesday night because even my mundane posts will be unbearably hilarious and remarkably poignant.
Thursday while at work I heard from a neighbor that the power was off in my neighborhood at about 1pm and that our fence in the back yard was not in great shape. After work we came home to a house still without power and saw that our back fence was now standing at about a 20 degree from where is should be. Luckily, a couple months earlier I had mended the other side of the fence since it was in bad shape because had I not done that, we wouldn't have a fence. After getting back from the titanic exhibit at the museum (I'd give it a B-) at 9:30pm, our neighbors power had returned, but ours and the rest of the houses north of us were still dark. It made for a kind of fun night with candles and drinking some sort-of-still-cold-from-the-refrigerator ciders. We went for a walk at 10:15 or so and saw a news crew filming in the street. We thought they might know when power would be restored. When we got close we saw they were filming a house who's tree in the front yard got uprooted by the microburst wind storm and fell over on the house. It was pretty amazing. We found out their estimate was midnight for the power to come back. A half a block away from our house, we also found this. It was pretty amazing.   p.s. power went on again at 3:10am and everything in our house turned on. It was kind of funny because we were expecting it.
I can't sleep. The funny thing is that I was incredibly tired all day, more so than I have been in a really long time. All I wanted to do was sleep. Now that I am trying to, I can't. At least that means for you, the loyal /mark reader, you get a life update. I left my job at the start-up. It was incredibly fun/challenging/crazy while I was working there, and if I had to do it again, I probably would, but another opportunity came up that I thought I would like better. That opportunity was being offered a job at a company in Denver that is pretty cool. I don't know their blogging policy, so I will just say that I now work for a popular mapping website based in Denver who's name rhymes with flapquest. I am a front-end HTML/CSS/javascript/Java programmer there working with a really great team. I have been working there about a month now and it is awesome. The amount of respect and support they give their employees is incredible. Working in downtown Denver is actually one of the best parts of the job (there are many best parts, mind you). Sara and I carpool in the morning and I have a plethora of friends to meet up with for lunch at one of the hundreds of places to eat on the 16th street mall. This is a welcome change from having to drive 10 minutes+ to get anywhere in the tech center. I love being downtown and working so close to home. If you are ever down there, call me and I can probably meet up for lunch. So the Husson kids + significant others (that is such a stupid term) are planning what I'm sure will be an awesome trip to Vegas in July. I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to being in Vegas with other people (if you remember, the only other time I have been I was alone on a business trip). And the fact that it is all with family will make it that much cooler. We have never really done anything like this. We will probably stay at New York New York and see Cirque Du Soleil's "Love". Other than that, we will just party together. It will be awesome. Finally, I wanted to say that because I enjoy chocolate milk, I decided to try some Peanut Butter Chocolate Milk (made with Reese's Peanut Butter Chocolate Ice Cream Topping, not it's intended usage, I know) and it is delicious. Though it does not dissolve in milk as well as I had hoped.
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