Again, sorry for the long delay. Just got back in town a few days ago, and have been try­ing to get all my ducks back in a row, and being ducks, they tend to wan­der off. But I’m more or less back on it. As I was report­ing before, Andrew was doing the Olympic tri­als. I could write a lot about that, but the best bet is to go over to his blog here and look for the Olympic tri­als entries. Need­less to say, he rocked pretty hard­core. There was lots of fun had with all the var­i­ous peo­ple in town. I hung out with Alex quite a bit, which was the 3rd time I’ve seen him in the last 4 months. Con­sid­er­ing I’ve often gone a year or more, that’s pretty cool. We drank the polygamy porter, but it wasn’t all that good. Actu­ally, it was pretty bad. I was bummed. We went a few cool places, like the Great Salt Lake, where my Dad took this super cool photo.

The Salt Lake is pretty neat, and pretty nasty too. For one, there were lots of dead fish all over the place. I have no idea why. And then there were lots of dead brine shrimp, bet­ter known as SEA MONKEYS!! There were mil­lions of dead ones, every­where. It’s super gross. I have some pic­tures, but I’m not going to put them up. Trust me, it’s dis­gust­ing. Seri­ously. It was the Sea Mon­key apoc­a­lypse out there.

I also went ski­ing with Alex, his wife Xarah, his sis­ter Sarah, and old friend Evan. Alex and Xarah stuck to the bunny slope, and the rest of us did some fan­tas­tic ski­ing at Brighton. It was great, great fun. Silly ski peo­ple named one of the runs “Lone Star.” Why, I have no idea, I guess they thought it was Texas like. Here’s me about to go down Lone Star, which was seri­ously hard. Actu­ally the hard­est thing we did all day.

Need­less to say, Sun­shine was much more fun.

Every­one had taken off but my par­ents by New Years, and me, Andrew, and Jess went to a pretty cool New Year’s Party. It was hosted by a cou­ple who hap­pen to play in the Utah Sym­phony, so there were lots of musi­cians there to hang out with. I chat­ted with a few of the sym­phony guys, and asked them about what the gig was like, and most of them said they pretty much did it because it was a good steady gig (these gigs are usu­ally a decent salary, with health insur­ance. Things most musi­cians can only dream of.) The coolest part was there was a seri­ously good pianist there, who, along with a drum­mer, was play­ing all kinds of old time swing Jazz. When I told the host I was a pro­fes­sional gui­tarist from Texas, he told me I was wel­come to sit in, and I took him up on it. The com­bi­na­tion of not hav­ing played in a week, play­ing a ran­dom gui­tar, play­ing tunes I didn’t know, and try­ing to read over the piano player’s shoul­der in low light made me feel like I got my ass kicked a lit­tle, but it was still a boat­load of fun. We played stuff like Hon­ey­suckle Rose, Sweet Geor­gia Brown, Satin Doll, things along those lines. The piano player, whose name I believe was Tad, was great, and a blast to play with. He was doing a lot in the stride style, some­thing not many play­ers can do any­more. We almost played right through mid­night, but I checked my phone and noticed it was 11:55 just in time.

The next morn­ing I woke up and set off for Boul­der, Col­orado, to visit old friends the Rookeys, includ­ing Mira and Justin, and their kids Saman­tha and Vanyel. Really pretty drive, and I drove through most of the state of Wyoming, so I have another State line photo to add in:

Pretty cool to put the cow­boy right on the sign, right? It was a beau­ti­ful day and the scenery was great. None of my scenery pics came out too well, so you’ll just have to imag­ine it, ok? I did drive pretty fast most of the way:

It wasn’t all sunny and beau­ti­ful. I did hit some snow right after it got dark, and the heav­i­est wind I’ve ever been in. I actu­ally got shoved a few feet walk­ing to a rest stop. Pretty freaky. But I made it to Boul­der fine, and also got to drive through Ft. Collins, CO where my brother used to live and where I lived for a sum­mer in 1996.

I had a great time see­ing every­one in Boul­der. Saman­tha is now 9, and Vanyel is 6. The last time I saw them was about 2 1/2 years ago, so the kids are a lot big­ger and dif­fer­ent as you can imag­ine. They’re both totally cute, as evi­denced by these photos:

My trip to Col­orado included a visit to a but­ter­fly pavil­lion, a botan­i­cal gar­den all decked out in Christ­mas lights, a huge grave­yard, a roller rink, a children’s tae kwon do class, and Bucca Del Beppo. At the but­ter­fly pavil­lion, I took what might be my favorite photo of myself ever. I don’t think words can do it jus­tice, so I’ll post two pho­tos. The first is of Mira and Saman­tha, and shows you the set­ting. The sec­ond shows what we did with it.

Coolest thing ever, right? So after three days there, I set off home to Austin, with one 980 mile road trip. Pretty seri­ous drive. I did see a few cool things on the way. In far south­ern Col­orado, I saw a huge wind power farm. The pic­ture below really doesn’t do it jus­tice, as there were some­thing like 100 of these huge bas­tards. I tried count­ing, but kept los­ing track, as I was tak­ing pho­tos and dri­ving all at the same time.

Now here’s the coolest part. When I went to Cal­gary over Thanks­giv­ing, my first flight was from Austin to Den­ver, pretty much the same drive I just did. And in the mid­dle of that flight, I saw some­thing strange on the ground. After tak­ing a few pho­tos, I fig­ured out it was a huge wind farm:

The close up pics I have make it clearer that those things are wind tur­bines, but this is the best pic­ture. Any­way, so I’m sure I just drove through the wind field I saw from the air. Pretty cool, huh? I was psy­ched. Oh, and of course I added two more state line signs:

I really like the sec­ond one. I have a pic­ture of myself sit­ting on a sign just like that from about 10 years ago. For all I know, it might even be the same one. Check it out Bro!!!

So as I said, I’m now back in Austin, get­ting my semes­ter started. This entry was also going to be a 2005 year in review, but it got too long, so I’ll work on that and post it in the next few days. Till then!