Last month we took a short but exciting trip to LA to see friends and family.  Angela’s relatives recently moved there and it was really great to see them.  We hadn’t really had time to see them since our trip to Taiwan in 2004.

Since then I have been busy at work, and so has Angela.  Jabber is as goofy as ever.

I picked up work on a new project in my free time, eXPlainPMT.  We use the tool internally at work, and it’s giving me a good codebase to play with Rails again.  In fact, I just put up a demo environment for people to explore on.

After getting frustrated with not having proper inputs in my car for my iPod, I finally replaced my stock deck with a new Pioneer.  It sounds good and has a dedicated USB input that actually handles my 13000+ song library on my iPod very well.  It does, however, rely too much on the remote for navigation, so I’m not looking forward to the inevitable day that I lose it.

In the garage, we finally cleaned out our old crap left over from the move in 2006 and I put some shelving up.  I think we gained a good 2′ of extra garage space on each side.

Inside the house, I got around to painting the kitchen nook.  It looks much nicer now, and since the paint has set in it no longer looks like the old Kraft Mac and Cheese nuclear waste orange.  I quite enjoy it.

I’m rambling, I know, but it’s been so long.  Last weekend we had everyone over for the KU-UNC game, and it was a great win for the Jayhawks.  On Monday I met up with Ethan, Donald, and Jeromy to watch the championship.  Amazing game, and I’m still in shock over Mario’s last second 3.

Alright, it’s time to actually get some work done.

Last week we sneaked away to our vendor’s annual conference. This year it was in Orlando, and it was my first year to go. After some flight antics which I won’t bore you with we made it into Orlando and checked into our hotel, the Swan in Disney World.

The conference itself was a blast and we got to work directly with the vendor on many topics. I even presented some of the work we’ve done in our current project.We made it back safely late Wednesday night and were beyond tired. In addition to being at the conference, we had to keep things running back in Southlake, which meant very long days on top of the already packed conference schedule. I ended up sleeping through my alarm Thursday morning which was actually really nice. Hey, if you’re going to be late for work, you might as well be more rested!

This weekend we had a fun party with Annie, David, and Ethan. We debated which toxin was top (botulinum won), played Wii Sports, and enjoyed some tasty food. Today, Angela and I worked in the yard, finally cleaning up some old flowers that kept rising from the dead. We replaced them with some blue and purple ones, and I’m sure Angela has covered this better than me over at her blog.

We wanted to finish the evening up at our favorite local bar, Dublin Square (aka Beef O’Brady’s), but we were shocked to find that it had abruptly closed down! Vendor invoices were taped to the door, someone had hastily scratched the name from the sign, and everything inside was still intact. Tragedy ensued. We managed to pick up the pieces of our lives and head down the road to a just-as-tasty place (Chapps, for references), but we (a) cannot walk there and (b) it doesn’t serve alcohol. Sigh.

Angela and I decided to end the evening listening to the Thoroughly Modern Millie original cast recording. When I was at Starlight we opened the National Tour. I love that show! We also worked on blogging and watching America’s Most Smartest Model.

If anyone has tickets to this Friday’s New Pornographers/Spoon show, call me. I’m the only one in my group that actually got tickets early so I’m flying solo.

And, as promised, the photos from last weekend:

I’ve been twittering rather than posting and now it’s time to come back to the fold.

Two weekends back, Kat and Josh came up for a wonderful visit. They had planned on spending the majority of the weekend with Kat’s sister, Sarah, and Kat’s new baby cousin, Brandon. However, Brandon got a bit of a fever which meant we could steal some more time with the two of them. We had a fun time and caught “Knocked Up” which was freaking hilarious. Highly recommended for those of us who like their romantic comedies chopped up and fried with jokes about reproductive organs. I haven’t laughed that much at something other than myself in a long time. I just wish Angela didn’t have to work as much that weekend!

Last weekend, we made the trek down to Austin to see my folks. Cathy didn’t have much holding her in Houston, so she headed up, as well. Dad made brisket, the puppies played, and everyone had a great time.

We saw Pirates on Saturday night and I have to say it was much better than Dead Man’s Chest. I heard a bunch of grumbling online about At World’s End, but I loved it. The thing with these movies is that you have to take a complete departure from analyzation. You cannot infer anything extra into the movie. It is completely to be taken at face value. The minute you try and dig into why something is happening, you might as well be looking for philosophy in Pod People.

Alright, that’s all for now.  I’ll update soon about WWDC.

Jabber did alright but was clearly confused by the whole event. She didn’t want us to leave and showed her first round of seperation anxiety since we got her.

After dinner, Jord and I headed back over to his Dad’s house for some 360 goodness. H3 beta all the way. I really wish I had an invite – that way I might not suck at it as much. Either way, we woke up to more rainy fun.

After lunch was eaten and Cathy was all set we hit the road for DFW, except this time we got to experience the famous Houston traffic the whole 40 miles out of the city. After that, torrential downpour the entire drive home. This evening, though, we were given a break in the weather and had a beautiful sunset to walk the puppy in.

Now, this weekend wasn’t without casulties. Angela managed to pick up another fun cough that she’s (hopefully!) going to be over tomorrow. Good luck with that, honey! As for me, since I cannot fathom going to bed before midnight, I’m continuing on by quest to rip all of my CDs. I started this task years ago and gave up, but for whatever reason I suddenly felt like picking it back up after listening to all of my old Napster/Hotline/AudioGalaxy-era bad music downloads from 2000.

Next weekend, Cat and Josh come in town to see the new baby and say hi to us. I guess I can rest easy knowing the weekend is four short days away.

After we got back in town, Angela and I both came down with a resperitory virus that’s been going around DFW. I had to quarenteen myself from the office for a few days, but were are both doing a bit better with some occasional coughing fits.

I have uploaded all of the photos to the site finally. The “blog” for each day, along with descriptions of everything we did are all in the photo gallery.

There are also two videos I took around the Bund in ShangHai. Video 1. Video 2.

I hope everyone enjoys!

Houston was a lot of fun, even though the beer at the park was about $7 (boo). Oh yeah, and a guy proposed there. At a preseason game. Against the Royals. Sad. I REALLY hope his fiance enjoys baseball.

More recently, we had a freezing Easter weekend, complete with snow. I’m not a religous man, but when we have snow in April I begin prepping for frogs.

This weekend, we made the trek down to Georgetown to drop off (very sad) our puppy since I doubt our tour will enjoy out energetic puppy tossing her toys up and down the aisles of the plane at 35,000′. I should explain something first.

On Friday I worked from home (WFH in acronym parlance) in the afternoon to get the puppy groomed. Around 5p, as I was typing up a BRD, I noticed that it was dark outside. Very dark. And then, the sirens came on. Evidently, I was in the path of a potential tornado. Now, in case most of you don’t know me very well, this was awesome. Yeah yeah, death and destruction of property. But they were predicting tennis ball size hail! This was great!

So, I put on the never-watched-except-for-bad-weather local news. We have local news in HD, we even have CW local news. They all suck. Especially with bad weather. Oh well, until NWS dishes out 5 minute radar, I’m stuck with the TV. They said the cell had split in two and one was heading right down my street, the other was about 1.5 miles south. Thankfully, or unfortunatly, the one south of us produced the tornado. We got large hail, lots of rain, and a confused dog. Angela, who was at the doctors office about a mile east of the house, got nothing. Zero. I live in a house where it often rains in the front yard but not in the back. We must be on top of an indian burial ground. It would explain the good price we got for the house. And the chanting at night. And the arrowhead I found on my pillow….

Anyway, back to Georgetown.

We drove down through awful weather and finally made it in. We had a great time with the family, ate some terriffic smoked chicken thanks to Dad, and headed off in the evening puppy-less. Last night was very quiet, and this morning was odd not having the crazy mutt scampering around.

Right now we just realized that it’s almost 4, and our flight for LAX leaves at 6:45, so we should probably get going. I’ll be taking an ungodly amount of photos (see the Taiwan pics for examples) and we’ll be arriving back in DFW next Tuesday at 5:30a.

Talk to you all in a week!