Author: cosmo

Ahh, memories.

Tonight was the annual Skyline High School awards night. Alex received an invitation letter a couple of weeks ago, which means he was going to get an award (he didn’t know what it would be). So he and I headed over there tonight.

As it turned out, he was given an award for excellence in the engineering program, as well as a second award for maintaining a 3.75 GPA for three years running.

Clearly, he was pretty excited about these.

I have the AccuWeather app on my phone and tablet. Generally it’s pretty good: it’s easy to use and provides the basic information I want. Is it going to be sunny tomorrow? Cold? Rainy? That’s really all I need from a weather app.

For whatever reason, the AccuWeather people programmed some sort of crazy fearmongering mode. Every now and then, it goes nuts and pops up all sorts of alerts about horrific weather conditions I should expect. At times during the winter, it was a daily ritual to see a warning about an EXTREME WINTER CONDITIONS, when in fact a few snowflakes were drifting down.

Well, today it warned that Longmont was under not only a SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING, but a TORNADO WARNING. Holy smokes! I was in Longmont all day, and I’m positive that at no point during the warm, sunny weather did I feel in danger of a tornado swooping down from the sky.

Methinks a better name for this app would be FearWeather.

Alex came home from martial arts tonight and jumped in the shower. When he came out, he decided to see how much he could get his hair to stand up. It turned out pretty awesome.

Laralee thinks he should wear it this way for school tomorrow…

Wow, I just opened a new three-pound bag of Wint-o-Green Life Savers and took a big whiff. That’ll clear your nasal passages.

At the beginning of April, Brent declared that we would have a round-robin ping pong challenge. Everyone who wanted to participate had to play against everyone else; standings would be kept and at the end of the month the winner would be awarded a Valuable Mystery Prize!

As it turned out, April was a really busy month for me, so I was pretty focused on getting things done and didn’t play more than a handful of games over the weeks. None of them were “challenge games” so they didn’t count in the standings. But then yesterday Brent reminded me it was the last day of the month and I hadn’t recorded any games in the brackets. Everyone else had, and the standings were pretty close: both Brent and James were 3-1, tied for first.

Keep in mind that it’s pretty serious around here. Everyone but me has their own paddle– Brian, feeling left out by the other guys, just bought a new one for himself this week. I don’t mind the generic Zing paddle we have, but Brent pointed out that using a paddle just because I’m comfortable with it is akin to driving a Fiat in the Indy 500 because I’m “used to” the Fiat. Wise words, Brent.

So I made some time in my schedule yesterday and threw down the gauntlet. I had four challenge matches to play, and I went through them one after the other. Based on previous challenge matches around Christmas, Brent calculated handicaps for everyone– as arguably the worst player in the office I was on the low end of that totem pole. I dispatched Brian and Nick without even needing the handicap; Brent and James proved a bit tougher but I finished them off as well.

Done! I went 4-0 to take the April championship. Clearly Brent will need to adjust my handicap for May’s games.

And the Valuable Mystery Prize? Well, it’s a little rubber ice mold that will create the Death Star in ice.

With a little imagination you can see it’s the Death Star. Pretty cool.

Ahh, how I miss the good old days when I was the undisputed, undefeated ping pong champion…

At Zing we’re always on the lookout for an activity to do as a company. We’ve gone skiing, whitewater rafting, go-karting, and even enjoyed dinner in the Pope Room. So when Josh suggested we go bowling, it seemed like a great idea.

This afternoon five of us left the office a little early. We headed over to Centennial Lanes and played a few games.

Brent had the most consistency of anyone. Unfortunately he consistently put the ball in the right gutter.

Josh looks sad after this shot.

After the first game, Brent decided it was time to get serious. He started surfing bowling sites on the web and found some tips that really improved his game. The tips included things like “do not bowl if you have an arm injury”.

We all agreed that Nick had the best form, including the professional-looking “put your right leg behind your left after release”.

We also agreed that the shoes really made the outfit. Where else does thirteen bucks get you five pairs of hot-pink-and-fluorescent-yellow shoes?

I should point out that, despite not having bowled in well over a decade, I was the champ of the first game with a very impressive score of 140. Honestly I was surprised to break 100.

All in all, I’d consider this another successful Zing outing.

So everyone’s heard of “butt-dialing” where you get a phone call and hear nothing but strange rustling noises. The caller has their phone in their back pocket and accidentally hit speed dial or redial or whatever to call you.

Until the other day, I’d never received a “butt text” before. My friend, who shall remain nameless, started sending me a bunch of cryptic messages.

Until he sent the final one, I was wondering if it was (1) a photo or something that hadn’t been encoded properly, or (2) a secret code that I was supposed to decipher to find a prize. I was a little disappointed to discover it was neither.

When we go to thrift stores, we often look for unusual glasses. We have a set of standard 8oz glasses we bought at Walmart however long ago, but over time they tend to crack and break. Since we’ll never match them anyway, we’ve decided it’s more fun to have a bunch of random completely unmatched glasses. We have shot glasses, tall skinny ones, short fat ones, curvy ones, and on and on.

While in Utah a few weeks ago, we went to a thrift store and Alex, Zack, and I all chose glasses for ourselves. I found a sweet martini glass. We didn’t have any of those, so it seemed like a good fit.

It’s fun to drink my orange juice from a martini glass…

Shaken, not stirred, please.

Kyra’s been struggling a bit with chemistry of late, so we sat down this evening to work together on some problems for her upcoming test.

It’s been a long time since I did any serious chemistry, but I remember being quite fond of it. Balancing chemical reactions is very much like algebra, where you solve for unknowns and figure out ratios and so forth. Plus it’s called “stoichiometry” which is an awesome name.

So we looked at a lot of reactions like this:

We talked about molecular weights, limiting and excess reagents, theoretical yields, carbonates and oxides, moles and grams, and on and on. Fun stuff.

She wasn’t nearly as excited about it as me. I think I was just happy that I remembered how to do it. And hopefully I explained it well enough that she’ll ace the test now…