2007: A Brief Year in Review

On the Eve of my 38th New Year, I find myself camped out in a Scooter’s Coffeehouse in Bellevue, NE catching up on e-mails and pondering what the next 365 days will bring. It’s been an interesting year with family time spent, a business venture built, new friends made, old friends found, soccer seasons played, frequent flyer miles accrued, road trips executed, coffee drank, XM radio enjoyed, pounds gained and lost, miles run, chores completed, more dark hair converted to gray and blogs written. And a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember right now (I was up until 2:00am last night enjoying a few barley pops with my father-in-law Bob).

What will happen in 2008? Hopefully, more of the same. I’ve enjoyed life in the last year tremendously and cannot wait to see what’s next. To my loyal readers (all 3 of you!), I’d like to wish the best of luck in 2008 and may one day always be better, at least in some little way, than the next.

And I leave you with this: JibJab’s usual irreverent compilation of recent events encapsulated in their short film entitled In 2007.

Desktop Tower Defense

I saw a brief review of this game in WIRED and decided to try it out. DTD is dead simple, but addictive. The objective is prevent swarms of various kinds of land and air critters from cutting through your territory. You have some money to deploy a few weapons, then get more money for each critter terminated. Some weapons cheap, but low performing. Others more expensive. Some weapons work better than others depending on the critter (the little, black bat things are really tough). Kill and build or be killed.

It’s a little like the early PC-versions of WarCraft: Orcs & Humans in terms of interface and rough strategy. Play this game at the risk of developing an obsession that will throughly annoy friends, family and co-workers… until you can suck them in too. There’s not a multi-player version or this game would be even more problematic to productivity.

Avast, ye scurvy dogs!

Pirates of the Sonora

Season’s Greetings

Tis’ the season, as they say. Normally about this time of year, I’d be drafting an annual recap to include in our Christmas card envelopes. This year, I thought we’d leverage technology a bit and announce the goings ons for the Rocky Mountain Fullers on-line.

As usual, we start with the youngest. Erin turned 5 this past October and is in the midst of her second year of pre-school at Bal Swan Children’s Center. While she claims school is boring, she comes home each afternoon bragging of new knowledge gained. She’s become a proficient swimmer and made great gains on the soccer field, while continuing to show a flair for performance with impromptu Hannah Montana impersonations breaking out constantly. Her top priority at the moment is some day making it on American Idol, much to her mother’s pride (huge fan of the show) and her father’s chagrin (not).

Meanwhile, Grace turned 7 in August as she entered 2nd grade at Aspen Creek K-8 School. Grace loves school especially those study units that emphasize science. She remains a sports fanatic and enjoys any game with a ball and running at high speed, particularly soccer where this past season she played up and down the field as a forward, defender and goalie. Grace is also a rock hound and was in heaven during a recent trip to Utah and Arizona, returning home with several pounds of new samples for her collection. She currently aspires to be both an archaeologist and geologist when not playing soccer professionally.

As the kids’ activity levels have accelerated, Julie continues with her volunteer work at their schools. She’s maintained her leadership role for the Bal Swan Ball Decorations Committee while taking on the Board Secretary position for the Aspen Creek K-8 PTA.

If you’ve been reading this blog the last year or so, you may have picked up a few things I’ve been up to. First, there was building a new business that included a great deal of travel around the US (California, Texas, Michigan) and a couple trips to the UK. While in the UK, I managed some quick excursions to Edinburgh to see my younger sister Corey. Along the way, I’ve threaded in coaching activities for both the girls’ teams as well as taking a Board position with the Broomfield Soccer Club where I’m responsible for Technology. And of course, I’ve been blogging.

Somehow with all the school, sports, work and volunteer activities, we managed to squeeze in a week on Maui, HI (both girls learned to snorkel in the Pacific Ocean!), made our traditional early summer run to Omaha, NE to see Julie’s family and capped it off with a Thanksgiving week trip to Sahuarita, AZ to see my folks. Busy year.

Finally, 11 year old Sam the Dog keeps his time filled with sleeping and trying to relax more. His big achievement this year was establishing his own web presence on Facebook. If you have an account, be sure to look him up.

BONUS: The Rocky Mountain Fullers make fools of themselves… CLICK HERE… it’s a little slow to load so be patient.