2008: A Brief Year in Review

Let’s see.  What happened this year?  Quite a bit actually.

According to my 2008 annual report from Dopplr, I traveled 189,838 km (52% of the distance to the moon) to achieve an average “personal velocity” of 21.8 km/hr over the year.  And that doesn’t count my Nike Training Log totals for 133 runs (572 mi over 81 hrs 31 min).  I spent many, many hours coaching soccer, playing soccer, watching soccer or talking about soccer, but I still love it.  I shut down my business and opened up a new career chapter.  Bought a house, sold a house, then refinanced a house.  Hosted a family reunion for 13 and a Thanksgiving dinner for 13.  Crested 500 business connections in LinkedIn and 170 friends in Facebook.  Watched my investment portfolio crater, then shifted gears to take advantage of the market opportunity.  Grew my MP3 collection to more than 4,300 tracks (with many, many more CDs yet to rip) and converted 722 35mm slides to digital images.  I shoveled, mowed, mulched, weed whacked and leaf blowed a whole bunch.  Posted a rather lame 27 times on this blog.  Gotta do better than every other week in 2009, but not exactly off to a blazing start, am I?  I did fire up rockymtnfuller.com, so that has to count for something.

Anyway, a busy year with another on the way.

Now, I leave you with this: JibJab’s usual irreverent compilation of recent events encapsulated in their short film entitled What a @#$% Year! 2008.

2008 Fall Soccer Season Wrap

After approximately 40 practices and 16 games over 11 weeks, the fall club soccer season is finally over here in Colorado.  It was a pretty grueling run with 5 practices most weeks and a pair of games on Saturdays, but I loved every minute of it.  Hopefully in the spring I can wrangle a schedule with practices on the same nights instead of opposite nights.

How’d we do?  Well, my older daughter’s U9G team was pretty spectacular.  We went 6-1-0 (W-L-D) with an average margin of victory probably in the 5-6 goals range.  The single loss was due to a break down in goal keeping (coaching error, really).   Speed kills, as the saying goes, and this team was blessed with it.  Hopefully, the group will stick together in the spring as the other coach and myself are pretty set on moving up one notch in the competitive spectrum.

Dad coaching in the background

My younger daughter’s U7G team, on the other hand, wasn’t anything close to dominating.  We don’t keep scores or league tables that young, but I’d be surprised if we were even a .500 team.  But we were doing a number of things that teams in this age group don’t normally do, particularly an emphasis on positions in addition to the usual ball control work.  Some of this was influenced by the work I was doing with the older girls and hopefully it will pay dividends in the spring.

Next up? Basketball and indoor soccer!

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.

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.

The Beautiful Game

I’ve begun playing soccer. For several years, I’ve been coaching my daughters’ soccer teams. I never really played growing up in North Dakota. In fact, the first high school state championship was held in 1990, the year I was a freshman in college. Soccer was a sport you played in phy ed like floor hockey or dodgeball. It wasn’t a REAL sport. Today, I know how clueless I was since soccer is clearly the most popular sport on the planet. So when my kids got old enough and wanted to play, I volunteered to coach. I might not know what I’m doing, but I’m a better coach than someone that didn’t volunteer (if that makes sense).

Anyway, I’ve begun playing soccer. The club my girls play for has started organizing pick-up games for the coaches. So I tried it and I liked it. It’s fantastic exercise and very different from my usual work-outs. I think it will help my coaching as well since I’ll have a better feel for the foot skills and game flow (I suppose that was the point of the club organizing the games).

Just thought I’d share this new found hobby with the world. BTW… Rugby is still the best sport.