Vacation! with a severe lack of personal updates…

The blog is alive! Yup, I’m starting it up again. I hope it doesn’t get hijacked again, but it’ll be what it be, I suppose.

If I were to update everyone on everything that’s happened, it would be quite the overwhelming post. Even if I were to hit the highlights, it wouldn’t be much fun for anyone…

So, I’ll post some pics! I took my girls on vacation the 2nd week of June up to Montana to see family and then to Yellowstone for a couple of nights. We went to the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University in Bozeman. They had a really cool exhibit on DaVinci’s inventions. Did you know he invented a tank? It carried 8 men, 4 to run the wheels & 4 to shoot the cannons. The description said they chose not to have horses in it because “it probably would not be a good idea to have 4 men, horses, and explosives in such a confined space.”

I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped as far as playing shutterbug though. Most of the pics I got were in Yellowstone.

My girls got to see their cousins for the first time in 2 1/2+ years.

If you’ve never been to Yellowstone, it’s the freak show of all national parks. I highly recommend it, even though Old Faithful isn’t as faithful as it used to be. They had an earthquake back in 1959 that messed up the very regular eruptions it used to have. Maybe next time we’ll be able to stay at one of the lodges there. I’d like to stay at the Yellowstone Lake Lodge.

So on our way home I took a wrong turn. There are all of 2 ways out of Yellowstone into Wyoming and I took the wrong one. And once you get lost in Wyoming, there’s really no point in turning back. It’s usually easier to just keep going and find one of the 2 highways that’ll take you back home.

The good thing about the wrong turn was getting to see some of the Shoshone National Forest, which has some pretty neat rock formations. And talk about a lot of water! It seemed like hadn’t stopped raining while I was gone. All the reservoir's were full and the rivers were over their banks. And it got worse the closer to home we got (which didn’t happen until 10:30 at night…sheesh.)

It was sure nice to get away though. I don’t think I had ever looked forward to a vacation like I did this one and there is no way it could have disappointed since I was with my girlies.

Thanks for coming back!

We’ll end with more pics. Enjoy.

Sunday Random Update

Well, I haven’t been browsing the blog world much lately. A lot occupying my mind & time.

- Work has picked up quite a bit. Praise the Lord! In fact, it’s almost doubled in the last couple of weeks. I hired 3 guys back and considering hiring 3 or 4 more. I really really hope this is going to last. I’m sick of this crappy building market.

- Told my wife I’m going to divorce her and that I’m done trying to reconcile. If nothing else, it’s been an interesting psychological journey. I’ve learned a lot about how differently we react to, or just view, similar (or identical) situations. But that doesn’t get me past the fact that she’s kind of overwhelmingly needy. Overwhelming to me but not overwhelming to God. In a large sense, I hope a separation will force her to stop looking for a person to fill certain needs that no one on this earth can.

- The girlies are doing ok. It’s obvious there is some stress between their mom and I. I’m certainly not so diluted that I think we’ve entirely protected them, but G and A are doing great at school and after a spell of too many ‘yellow’ days earlier this year (green is good, yellow not so good, red is bad), they’ve been doing a lot better.

- G’s turning out to be a wonderful student. 100+% on most of her quizzes. If I could just get her to slow down when she writes. She’s starting out like I ended…which is not good. My penmanship is horrible.

- A’s still in kindergarten and while they don’t really test her ability to regurgitate information yet, her drawing abilities are progressing on track and she’s obeying the teacher better.

- About that ‘psychological journey’, I’ve been wondering a bit about people’s tendency towards exaggeration. Even between my girls there are differences in how, when, and to what extent they exaggerate. My wife has been saying extreme things for a long time now, about how I treat her and what she feels about things. I won’t really go into specifics, but it’s very interesting, especially when I don’t really care anymore that those particular statements are directed at me, personally. I’ve started explaining to her that those extreme statements are absolutely destroying our conversations. I hope someday she can see it.

- Haven’t seen a lawyer yet. I’m sure that’ll be interesting. Not fun, but interesting. I’m really curious to hear what the likelyhood is that I could get full custody of the girls. I’m sure it wouldn’t be cheap because she’ll probably fight it, but if there’s at least a 50% chance, I’ll go for it.

- Holy crap this sucks.

- I had lunch with my friend the other day. Who’s also my pastor. Didn’t get quite the ass-chewing that I expected, but he said what I expected. Good for him. Not so good for me as I’m pretty much choosing to ignore it by divorcing her.

- But there are some good things going on and this post is getting too long. Have a great day!

Great Inspirations…

Work’s picked up quite a bit…praise the Lord!…so I haven’t been perusing the blogosphere much lately. Figured I’d better get something out there and I thought the Friday 5 was a decent place to start…and then I tried to think of something to write…and failed.

Lately, I’ve been reading books about some pretty extraordinary people. Even did a bit of a study on John Calvin. Most of the people I’ve been reading about were scholars (‘were’ as in ‘long been dead’.) Some are businessmen and entrepreneurs, like Dale Carnegie.

Reading about these extraordinary people is a little daunting for me. I find myself quite unremarkable in almost every way. I can make some very pretty children, but that’s about it. It’s not that the stories make me feel inadequate, I just have a hard time putting myself in their shoes, so to speak.

I’ve wondered about the way I react to their stories. I enjoy them. I appreciate the struggles they went through, although I’m sure I don’t really get it most of the time. But I can’t say I get very inspired. The Dale Carnegie courses seem to revolve around using other peoples stories to inspire yet more people. And his courses are very popular. But do the majority of people react that way? Are you inspired by hearing and reading the stories of great people? People who overcame huge obstacles to get somewhere? What do you do with that knowledge?

Maybe you’re like me and just tuck it away as a story to tell to someone else as a means to inspire them, even though we may not have taken much inspiration ourselves.

Maybe you can take the ideas from those stories and can easily apply them to different circumstances in your life. That takes some imagination I suppose.

So how about it? Do the stories of great people inspire you? And if so, anyone in particular?

Noob writer here…

So how do you write an article on something that you’re very familiar with, but certainly don’t feel like an expert on, and on a subject that’s been written about a thousand times?

I guess the first place to start is the audience. I’ve been requested to write an article by an industry colleague but am not entirely sure as to whom the audience is going to be. Is it a ‘lateral’ audience? or are we trying to educate customers? both?

Another thing is the venue. I think he’s going to post it on a professional networking site (the name escapes me right now.) The idea is that the article is posted and industry peers can comment on it. Not exactly sure how we’re supposed to direct our customers to it though.

I guess I’ll have to find out, huh?

Is there anything else I should consider?

Dale Carnegie class – Update

Kinda of sick of it. I’m not a very energetic person and it seems this class is hell bent on ‘improving’ me in that aspect. While I accept that I could be more energetic and probably be a more effective leader, I don’t really appreciate their tack of taking it to the extreme in the hopes that we’ll retain at least a little of it. I don’t wanna jump around! I think it’s creating the opposite effect.

We have these 2 minute talks to give every session. There are 32 of us. The 2 minutes usually rolls over into at least 2 and a half minutes. That’s an hour and 20 minutes of just the students talking. The whole class period is only 3 and a half hours long. Last session they also added 1 minute talks about something else. So now we’re at 1 hour and 52 minutes of student talking. Over half the class time.

I didn’t know this was a public speaking course. I didn’t really want to spend $1,700 on a public speaking course. Even if it wasn’t my own money…

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I shouldn’t gripe and should just appreciate the opportunity to learn something. I do. I do appreciate that I can go to this class and at least ‘freshen up’ on some leadership material.

But honestly…the drive isn’t worth it.

Getting Excited!

I’m a gamer. Well, to be more precise, I like to play video games. Some video games.

I suppose the definition of ‘gamer’ is not exactly fixed in stone. I’m not an avid gamer, not a well-rounded gamer, not even a good gamer, but I like to play first person shooter video games.

Halo: Reach is coming out this year. Supposedly the last installment of the Halo franchise. I don’t know much about it, but I guess Bungie, the game developer, will become part of another studio after they’re done with Reach.

I am a Halo fan. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all of the different iterations they’ve made bajillions on since the first, Halo: Combat Evolved. Some of the most fun times I’ve ever had were playing in LAN parties with my friends, yelling at each other through the walls.

Halo:Reach is absolutely gorgeous.

If you didn’t already know, you play as a Spartan, which is a genetically enhanced human sheathed in some awesome armor.

And for you ladies, there are even female Spartans. Not that you can really tell the difference…

I haven’t been following the development of Reach much so far, but I think it’s going to my one of my regular interweb stops now. Just saw a developers video and it looks fantastic!

The online beta demo comes out on May 3rd this year. And since I bought Halo 3: ODST, I have an invitation! They haven’t set a release date for the game yet.

Woohoo! Can’t wait!!

Testing & Trips

Just testing out a new tool. I’m using Windows Live Writer to create and publish this post.

The family and I went up to Estes Park in Colorado last Saturday. It was a very short trip but we got to see a herd of elk and some nice vistas.

 

And I just found my new blog writer! It still doesn’t let me insert pics using the link from my Google Photo Albums, but if I keep that sync’d with Picasa, it should work fine.

What I like is that it doesn’t automatically insert the picture at the top of the post like the Blogger writer does. It puts it at the cursor, like everything else in the world.

They have this cool map thingy too:

And can’t forget the girlies: