Brian and the boys went to see the Rockies second game of the season last night. They took on the Arizona D-Backs.

The D-Backs have a new logo and colors this year… I liked the old ones!

(more…)

Dar’s mom “Nana” got to spend the week with us. And boy what a busy week it was! Dar was doing her typical breakneck workweek, and Brian had the Upward Basketball and Cheerleading video to finish up on top of other graphics duties for church. If that wasn’t enough, they were both in the Palm Sunday pagent at church, involving rehersals and late nights. So… thank goodness for Nana’s visit.

Nana and the kids played cards

(more…)

Papa David (Dar’s Dad) was in Denver on business and drove up to see us for the afternoon and evening yesterday. The weather was amazing out, so we all played a little catch while we waited for Caden’s school to let out. Papa also played the kids’ favorite game, “tell me the answer for a dollar.”

We went and grabbed some good old red meat at the Texas Roadhouse.

Naturally, the kids had to wash that down with some ice cream!

Luckily, the Coldstone Creamery is in our Super Target… so we got to “kill two birds with one stone” and buy some essentials while the kids (and this moniker includes Papa David) had some ice cream.

Soon after the kids had sufficiently drained Papa of all of his greenbacks, we bid him farewell. But not for too long, since he and his brother, Uncle Ron are coming to see us next month. Dollar bills will be flowing!

Wednesday I got an email from Logan’s COVA teacher asking for any more last-minute volunteers for a scheduled tour of our local CBS news station on Thursday morning. How could I refuse? Field trip!

We arrived a bit early and met the other COVA family we were to do the tour with. Three other families called in sick, so it was just us.

The kids all waited patiently (and quietly) in the lobby, while a bevy of waiting business people made a big ruckus with their chatter and banter. We were glad to see them ushered past the “gatekeeper” after hearing them carry on and on for ten minutes! Soon enough it was our turn to be let into the mystical confines.

(more…)

All this month I have to make some major repairs and maintenance on Da Big Bus to get it “road worthy” for our upcoming trip to the Bay Area. Sunday I went up to Harbor Freight to buy a mongo impact gun to take off the lugnuts. I lucked out on a big 1″ gun with 1,450 ft-lbs of torque on clearance for $99. I also needed a big hose and big sockets to take off the big lugs. To run the kind of air the gun needs in copious quantities, I also had to rig up a punk take to send the air en masse to the beast.

Several hours later, it sounds like a NASCAR pit stop in our back yard, and the bus nuts are whirring off the wheels and the compressor is straining hard to make air between brief clatters from the gun. Ten lugs per wheel. Maybe ten minutes, and the outside dual is off.

Logan just had to give it a go on the inside dual. I held the gun while he pulled the trigger… but not before I snapped this pic that makes him look like he’s doing this single-handedly.

Who needs a GameBoy when you got big bus toys??!

Here’s our latest project… bring Logan’s book, The Ugly Wormling to life.

Logan wrote the book during the very neat, COVA Build-a-Book Workshop last December. Here’s a link to photos from that day when all of our kids were enrolled in COVA. I think Lo did a really nice job on the storyline and illustrations, so I put him in front of the camera to record him reading his book… sorta like the Reading Rainbow show on PBS. We also recorded some clean voice-over of him reading it, and then I scanned in all of the pages to animate it in After Effects.

So…. Stay tuned for the next blockbuster: The Ugly Wormling.

Last week I reserved us a spot on Half Moon Bay State Beach for six nights during our upcoming Bay Area blast in April. I went to great lengths to get a site that offers me a windshield view of the mighty Pacific. For some reason it’s important to me.

Six nights came in at exactly $157.50, or $25/ night + a small reservation fee. Darlene commented that this was pretty expensive. (?!) I should point out that the Ritz Carlton a few hundred yards up the Bay from us is $300 per night. Obviously, we forgo the heated towels, mud baths, chocolate on the pillows, et al for moonlit strolls on the beach, seagulls and roaring breakers lulling us to sleep, and pretentious-free solitude. Check out the video below for our beachside digs:

The image of HMB SB used for the above video is courtesy of Ken Adelman’s amazing California Coastal Records projects.

While we’re at it, let’s see some past “windshield views” from our travels…

OK, that last pic makes it look like I have this pressing desire to turn the bus into a boat!

As an early Valentine’s Day gift to Bria, I spent a few hours tonight assembling some pics we took this week of her and Clifford (THE Big Red Dog, of course!). He’s actually not so big in his present incarnation… a stuffed animal from her kindergarten class at Longmont Christian. Every kid in her class gets a chance to take Clifford home for a week and do things with him… then journal or scrapbook about the experience for that week’s “show n’ tell”.

Well, I don’t “journal”… I blog. And I’ve never scrapbooked in my life (my Mom does all of ours *yeah!*), so I decide to try to scrapbook with Photoshop… e-scrappin’ I guess you’d call it. And who knew it would be fun! I Googled “Photoshop scrapbook backgrounds” and you should see the hits it came up with. There’s a lot of scrapbookin’ being done in PS out there. Who knew?! Anyways, I bought a little “girlie” page pack for $2.99 (yes, just three bucks!) that had a bunch of nice hi-rez papers, cutouts, and objects… some in JPG some in PNG from this place. They have a ton of papers, themes, and do-dads out there on the Net. Impressive!

A little drag-and-drop with their artwork, then I made some paper frames myself with the noise filter, quick mask a few brush stroke selections to “tear” the edges, stroke some rounded edge frames on the other page… and I made two pages in two hours. Not bad for an e-scrapbook newbie. Check ‘em out…

The secret to the “look” of most e-scrapbook pages I’ve seen, just like with much of the “grunge” look vector work that’s trendy in motion graphics right now: use a lot of non-orthogonal layers, create some separation between them with drop shadows and bevels, and make everything as organic as possible. Plan to look un-planned.

Tomorrow I’m going to e-mail these to the Walgreens photo lab down the street and get some nice glossy 8×10’s to insert into the notebook full of other kids’ experiences. And Bria will take Clifford and these pages back to school on Valentine’s Day. Scrap on!

Col. Dan E. Straight, a retired Air Force pilot and veteran of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam died yesterday. Col Straight was the Grand Marshall of 2005’s Longmont Veteran’s Day Parade.

I shot this photo above of Col. Straight in that parade. Dar’s dad, a Vietnam vet, was visiting us, so we pulled the kids out of school and took them downtown for the parade. It’s a shame to me that kids have to go to school on Vet’s day (mine never will!), when they should be out honoring vets.

And here’s a video I put together of the parade that year…

I never met Col. Straight, unfortunately, but he sounds like a very colorful man, involved in many local charities and causes. Our WWII vets are dying off at an alarming rate. Never pass up an opportunity to thank a Vet (of any war). There are heroes all around us.

Here’s today’s article on the passing of Col. Straight.

Logan competed in his first Spelling Bee today. Since he’s in the Colorado Virtual Academy, they grouped a bunch of students together and held a regional bee out in Windsor, CO, about 30 minutes north of here.

Logan was very nervous, and was bumped-out in the first round. He was nailed by the word “staple”… and very upset at himself, but quickly bucked-up to watch the rest of the competition.

It only lasted a few rounds, and the winner won on the word “yearning”. I guess she was yearning to win this thing!

Speaking of the Bee, if you haven’t yet seen the amazing film Akeelah and the Bee, so yourself a favor and go rent the DVD. Barring just a few bad words, it’s suitable for age 8 on up to 108, and it’s an amazing story of triumph and humanity. My boys loved it.