Year: 2013

Happy 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510 Day!

It’s kind of a sad day. For years, my profile picture on places like Facebook has been some dude with a sweet afro:

But now, because I’m trying to be all professional and stuff, I have to change it to a far more boring one:

After all, potential new hires are looking at this as they decide whether Zing is the place they want to work…

What’s that old saying: the cobbler always has the worst shoes? It’s so true. At Zing we do web development all day for clients, but we never seem to find time to make our own site nice.

Well, after six months of work by Brent (our marketing director) and design/programming as we had time, it’s finally up and running:

zingstudios.com

It’s way better than our old site, and we’ll continue improving it. Hopefully prospective clients and potential new hires will be impressed.

Cool. That’s Earth, third from the left.

Background: on Tuesday I played ultimate on a slushy snow-covered field in 30-degree weather, and I was panting and wheezing. After the games– in which my team was trounced twice– I felt completely spent. Normally winter is kind of a slow time for me in terms of exercise, so I get a little flabby and out of shape. By mid-summer I rebound a bit because I’m back to ultimate four days a week, biking, and the occasional hike. Still, on Tuesday I felt like I was probably in the worst shape of my adult life. It was awful.

I vowed that it was time to get in shape. Seriously.

So yesterday I dusted off my bike and headed to work, even though it was about 25 degrees in the morning. I could tell it’s been a while since I was on the bike, because even my short 2.5-mile commute was kind of painstaking. It was a start, but I need to be better about exercising more regularly. Being out of shape sucks.

Today was a beautiful sunny 60-degree day. So yesterday, in anticipation of the unseasonably warm weather, I wrote to our pickup ultimate group:

To which Tall Paul responded with:

Michael followed up with:

And then Keffeler:

Finally Brad jumped in:

You can just feel the love from the guys.

Indeed, today was a gorgeous day and we had a pair of really close games. I still have an uphill battle to be “in shape” again, but I did manage to score the winning point in the first game (7-6). In the second game I did a down-the-line sprint to the endzone to block the other team’s game-ending point (although we still lost 2-3). Take that, hecklers!

Not me.

Zack has some gift cards for Barnes and Noble that he received for Christmas from Aunt Kari. He wanted to use them, so tonight he and I sat down at the computer to buy some books. We went to the B&N web site and he selected three books. During the checkout process he was filling out the address information and so forth, and came across the “first name” field. He paused for a moment and asked me if he could put “Popo” in that field. I said sure. So he did.

Popo

Then there was the “last name” field, and it was obvious that even though he’d already planned to use Popo as his first name, he hadn’t thought about a last name. After a moment, he added:

Twinkie

So in about a week we should be receiving a package addressed to Popo Twinkie.

Laralee says she just doesn’t understand Zack. I, on the other hand, think he’s hilarious.

I just got a call from an old friend who used to live in our neighborhood. She lives in Minnesota now, and was attending some home and garden show in Minneapolis. She called because while she was there, she was talking to another woman and realized they both knew Laralee. This other woman was Laralee’s roommate when she first moved to Denver, now lives in Kansas City, and for whatever reason was at the same home and garden show. I have no idea how they stumbled across the topic of “who do you know in Denver” and ended up with “Well, there’s Laralee…” So I talked to both of them for a few minutes and we all had a good laugh.

It’s a small world… and apparently even smaller when you know Laralee.

Two months ago. In a planning meeting at church, a group of us decided to host a variety show. Anyone who’d like to showcase their talents– whether they be singing, acting, playing an instrument, or just bringing some art or photography– would be invited to participate.

One month ago. In a different planning meeting with the teenagers in the church youth group, someone suggested that it would be cool if all of the kids (about thirty of them) created an act for the variety show. In the past, large group acts by the teens didn’t turn out so well. They have a hard time coming up with original material, and many of the jokes that seem hilarious at the time end up falling pretty flat. So I sort of cringed inside at the idea, but I put on my brainstorming cap and thought about how we might pull it off. Finally, inspiration struck and I suggested that perhaps all of the kids could get together and do a dance number to Michael Jackson’s classic “Thriller”. I had visions of YouTube videos (there are a lot of them) where the groomsmen at a wedding do the dance, or a flash mob springs up, and so on. They always seem really fun, and the dance seems pretty straightforward.

One week ago. My friend Talise volunteered to work on the dance and organize a practice. She’s very musically inclined and incredibly talented, so she was a natural choice. She found a web site called Thrill the World which is dedicated not only to teaching people how to do the dance, but has apparently become an annual event where thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands, of people plan to dance at the same time. Who knew.

Tonight. Thirty teenagers and about a dozen adult leaders– including me– gathered in the church gym to practice the dance. Talise went through all of the steps from the Thrill the World guide. It seemed like there were about two hundred of them. I had no idea “Thriller” was so complex. As you might expect, the twenty or so girls (including Kyra) picked it up pretty quickly and actually looked relatively synchronized. Meanwhile, the ten boys (including Alex) and most of the adults struggled to keep up and looked pretty lost.

A week and a half from now. We’re going to perform at the variety show. We’ve all been asked to wear dark pants, a white t-shirt, and (of course) a white glove with sequins. It will almost certainly be a night to remember. I suspect it’s going to look like thirty epileptics who are off their medication, lurching around, while Talise and a few girls do something relatively “Thriller”-like and everyone else can’t remember whether the next step is the “roar” move or a Michael Jackson “kick and point”.

It’ll definitely provide funny stories for a while.

Today there was a decent snowstorm, so we were all sitting around watching the snow fly and decided to play some games. We started with Ticket to Ride, and Alex trounced us pretty well. He manged to get several overlapping cross-country routes, and it’s hard to lose with those.

Then Zack and Alex insisted on a game of Axis and Allies, which we’ve talked about for a few weeks but never got around to playing. We’d attempted this several years ago– in 2008, to be exact— and it didn’t go so well. But now that the boys are older, I figured we’d see what happened.

I explained the rules and we played a few turns. I was the Axis powers, and Germany was rolling into Russia pretty well. I was threatening to take over the capitol, which of course is pretty serious. Japan had established a beachhead east of China, and the little U.S. base in Sinkiang was about to be destroyed (I’d already taken out the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, of course). All in all, it was looking like I was going to crush them. But then Alex took the British forces in for a surprise invasion of Italy, and Zack’s American research team developed heavy bombers. Ouch. The tables turned.

In the end, we called it quits because the boys were getting bored. It reminded me of the interesting dichotomy of Axis and Allies: it’s a very interesting (and historically accurate) game, but it takes bloody forever to play. In high school I think we regularly spent entire Saturdays playing a single game– five or six hours at a stretch. Yikes.

After dinner, Kyra and I played a couple games of Dominion. It was ugly; the first game saw me with 107 points to her 54, and in the rematch she scored 136 only to be bested with my record-breaking 154. She demanded that we play Mario Kart tomorrow, since that’s the game she can regularly win against me.

Good times on a blustery winter day.

A few days ago Zack drew the picture below. I have no idea what it means.

Who is Ant Man, the huge guy stomping around with an evil grin on his face?

What I like about this drawing is his meticulous detail. It’s hard to appreciate here on the web, but all of the little people are really tiny on the paper. Still, they have detail that makes it clear who they are. Cool stuff.