Poinsettia Bowl 2008

This is a snap from Peters seats. 45 yard line. Not to shabby, but see below why I settled for seats farther back.






TCU vs Boise St. with TCU squeaking out a win in the last two min.

We also had some tix for the Qualcomm box suite, so caught most the game up there. It was help yourself to the fridge.

Off the sidelines!

Well with all the turmoil were are hearing about in the markets, it may seem like a bad time to dabble in speculating. It probably is...
But, cash is king right now, and so with that, I opened a brokerage account last week to try my hand.
Ameritrade, with a month of free trades. Once that goes away, it's going to force me to pick longer term positions to cover my service costs since my investment size is still junior league.

fat dog - USC game

Saw this dog at one of the home games. Tried getting a shot with better perspective, but the dog was not standing, and everyone was kneeling down. Anyway, it was cool in person, and thought it was something fun.

Election day

Yeah I know it's well after the event, but for posterity's sake, here was the line in downtown long beach at 7am. Voting started at 7am btw, took about an hour and a half to make it to the front.

Football game last week

Here are a couple snaps of the good and bad that comes with game day.

Crazy large cork board

Was over at my bud Pecks place last night. He has this cork board in his studio for acoustics, but in my opinion the main benefit is aesthetics.

How many bottles of wine?

Santa Ynez

Here is a photo of Kirsten next to a sign for some wine tasting.

We went up with Kirsten's' dad Peter and his friend Brian for the day. We ended up hitting 9 tasting rooms, including a couple on tasting room row which is where this photo was taken.

The wine was great, we learned a thing or two about the region, and brought back a couple bottles for some evening in the future!

One interesting note, this area is where the fun film Sideways takes place. We visited the Foxen tasting shack where one of the memorable tasting adventures happen.

New Computer

Picked up this bad boy about two weeks ago. Dell XPS 630.

it's the first computer I have ever had that I didn't build myself. I just don't follow the latest specs as close as I used to.

What's strange is that I don't even know fully what functionality I have. I'm actually to the stage that, "Hey it works, great." I think this is probably a good thing for me though, it leaves time for more important things.

Anyway, it's fun and filled with all kinds of goodies.

Home season opener

USC vs Ohio State - what a way to open the season at home. The game of course turned out perfectly for USC by stomping the biggest of big ten blow hards.

Here is a snap from the TKE tent, my fraternity alumni. This year started off well, with a much needed upgrade in the quality of food. The actives brought some goodies as well, so everyone was happy.

The bad news was we did not get tickets to the game. Face was $75, and we had hoped to slow play until the 1st and by them for around $100. By the start of the 2nd, there were people all over the place walking around looking for tickets, and NO ONE selling. The game was the largest attended game in 15 years, so maybe we should have just sacked up, or maybe we saved $300 bucks.

TKE East

College football season is here, and I just happend to be near the USC campus yesterday, so I decided to check out the construction progress on TKE East.

I spent the better part of my college days in the old TKE East building, with plenty of good times and memories.

This new building is huge! I hear rumors of completion maybe this fall. I will keep you all posted, of course.

Married Man

Well a lot has happend in the past month. Plenty of fun pictures from our wedding and trip to Maui.

For now through, here's a shot of me enjoying paradise.

Friends and family

Group photo with the Fellas.

Were at 555 steak house in Long Beach having a delightful meal.

The Dark Knight

Kirsten and I saw the Dark Knight at the Arclight on Sunday. The studio had some of the costumes and gadgets from the film on display.



The Joker's set up



This is the new Bat suit.






And the new Bat vehic!



Kirsten next to a Batman trailer.

New board

I had been saving for a bit to buy a new surf board. Picked it up on Monday from Becker. This one is a 7'10'' with more of a fun board shape. Will be a lot easier to ride then my Flyer. The ride will be more stable, easier paddles, amd float me better because of the size.

Rode it once so far, waves were terrible, all blown out, so hoping tomrrow is sunny and smooth.

4th from Long Beach

These photos are from the Queen Mary 4th Fireworks show. Hey it's a free show I guess. Not the biggest show I have ever seen, but can't really complain watching from the balcony of our place. It's probably a 10-12 min display at maximum altitudes of 1500 feet.

Apparently a lot of people drive in to watch the show, because as soon as it was over cars started racing down the Pike parking garage. The horn honking volley soon followed.

Busy busy busy

Well this month has been mayhem at work, so busy I have not even had time to post here!

The other night we had a much needed work outing at a local grub site, here are some photos.

Weekend in the mountains

Mosaic recently had a men's retreat into the mountains close to Arrowhead. Heres a couple pix from the weekend.


Here we are at opening night



One of the events was an engineering challenge. Goal was to build a structure out of scraps that could lift the most amount of weight.


Another pic from the challenge.


Here is the winning design. Weight was lifted from the middle. Simple yet effective.



Hickson on the last day, giving us rides back to our cars.

Other fun activites were tug of war and zip line/climbing wall, but did not get any pics of that. Much love to Craig, and looking forward to the action next year.

Elijah's state record 800m run

The ring

Specs: Tungsten Carbide (an alloy with nickel binder)
Size: 11.5

Several cool notes about Tungsten and reasons why I picked this metal:

1. Tungsten Rings are the most wear-resistant rings available on the planet.
   
2. Tungsten is about 10 times harder than 18K Gold, 5 times harder than tool steel, and 4 times harder than titanium. Tungsten measures between 8 and 9 on the Mohs hardness scale. (Diamonds are a 10 - the highest.)
   
3. Due to their extreme hardness, Tungsten Rings will hold their shape and shine longer than any ring on the market.
   
4. Tungsten rings have been referred to as "Permanently Polished Rings."

I bought it from these guys, http://www.tungstenworld.com/, but drove into their local HQ to pick it up and try on for size.

Price is about 1/3 of stand alone jeweler such as Robins Bros.

Teeth

Recent check up with the dentist, five cavity's.

Hard to smile when the dentist will be drilling in there pretty soon.

A couple of those are from previous fillings that now are busted, apparently from a shoddy job the first time. So, I'm at a new dentist.

Terrible pain though, every time I eat it hurts. Good diet plan.

I know typpically the point of posting something here....

is to share something of common interest to all.

Yeah... well I don't have that today. It's big news for me, and I guess I wanted to date it somewhere for my own records.

Dropped under 220 this morning for the first time since probably freshman summer in high school.

Granted I went for 10 min in the sauna after running for 35 min, so I squeezed out all the water I could, but I have been hovering in the 221 range for a week now.

I Started around 260 last year, thinking 220 would be a good goal weight, but now that I am here, 210 is probably more of a healthy range.

Any one read to the end? Ah well, I wouldn't either.

Lasik eye

I usually have a photo to go along with my posts. In this case, it's such big news that the information itself may be interesting enough to stand alone.

I had custom wavefront lasik with interlase on my eyes this past Friday.

No longer any glasses!

The whole operation is so fast, and not scary at all.

I'm taking a bunch of eye drops, but otherwise everything is done.

Theres about a two week healing period, and around the three month period fully healed.

It's pretty amazing feeling to go from glasses or contacts all my life, to not needing those items any longer.

New bad boy in town

Specs: 61" DLP LED SAMSUNG

Running GTA4 here via PS3 at 1080p over the HDMI input.

......It's just to Sweet!

Were still running on that ghetto old TV stand, but all things in time.

Thanks again to MARK, early wedding present with the TV.

I'm still fiddling with the settings, apparently it's important to run some calibration DVD's to get the colors just right.

Blue Ray looks absolutely amazing, and with the size and distance from the TV, it feels like your sitting in about the 15th row at a movie theater.

GTA4

Got it!

Now just need to hook up the PS3 to the HDTV.

That arrives Friday.

I went to a soccer match?

Two shots from the Chivas/Galaxy game this past Sat.

Decently fun time, can't say I really followed the game, but there was plenty of scoring which kept things interesting.

Buddy of mine had some extra tix, so, I guess that's why I went....

Bad pic, funnier story

Here is a fuzzy photo of Kirsten's leg. The background is more so whats important. SF airport, hours and hours of looking at the walls of SF airport.

We got all checked in around 3:15, and walking to our gate found that the plane was delayed by two hours.

The Southwest flight before ours left at 3:30, and the Southwest flight after ours left at 7:10. With the new delay our flight was going to leave at 7:05.

At that point, nothing to do but spend a beautiful Sunday near the city sitting in a airport.

Had we bothered to check beforehand, there are two other airports Southwest uses each about the same distance away from our starting point as SFO.

Oh well....

In the City (at night)

Here we are all dressed up that evening outside the event. (good hair).

That's Kirsten's boss and her husband.

This is a snap from inside the event located at the Palace of Fine Arts. What I was really trying to capture in this moment was the platters of shrimps, thousands, no exaggeration, thousands. Yeah I was all over those, stacking 20 at a time on a plate. Yeah yeah, fatty fatty, but events like this don't happen often, so theres my excuse.

In the City

Kirsten's work had their annual event, hosted by the Nor Cal office. I always look for an excuse to get up to the city, and nothing beats a free party.

We did some of the typical site seeing activities Sat morning, those pix are listed in this post.

This first photo is of us crossing over the bridge into town. We drove up from Walnut Creek that morning, after visiting Heyne and Kathrine.

We hit the streets as soon as we arrived, and here is just a snap near union square. The sun was out in full force this weekend, and so were the people!

We rode the trolleys from the square to the wharf. This was the last stop on the line.

I'm relaxing in the sun after a ice cream sundae from Ghiradellis.

Riding the side board of the trolley looking tough and stuff. bad hair.

Sunday morning, but I didn't know where else to put this pic. We were driving around looking for the entrance to Golden Gate park, and went up some small side road. This old building was at the end. It looks like it was some sort of manufacturing plant at one time. The building is seriously straight out of some 80's vampire movie. The graffiti, the broken out windows, the giant brick entrance, all the important basics are there. Oh, also a mobile police command is stationed in the front entrance behind several layers of fencing. I guess the city is trying to reign in this local hot spot.

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Zach + Christina in Long Beach

Zach and his wife Christina visted us for the weekend. Great times, we went all over long beach and parts of Orange.
Here are some snaps from Sat afternoon near the light house in the marina.
You can see our condo from one of the pics, the other is a cool tree lined walk way the wraps around the light house mini peninsula.
Quite a change in weather from snowy, cold Sandy Oregon for those two.
Zach and I went out surfing one morning, but maybe the high point of the trip was the first afternoon where we went for some half yards and grub at the yard house.