I knew when Becca and I got married some things would change. I would start eating better and she would start hiking and doing outdoorsy things. This is the arrangement that was understood. I knew it would be difficult to adapt to living with another person that is so close but I didn’t count on the whole actually enjoying doing things together. I thought I would come home and play my computer games and she would… I don’t know cook and clean some more stuff. Sure, we only have a one bedroom apartment, but I figured she wouldn’t have a problem with staying home all day and just taking care of my stuff. Boy was I wrong!

It’s our two month anniversary and it’s all I can do to keep her from playing my computer games all the time! And wouldn’t you know it, she practically pulls me up the mountains when we go hiking, and we go hiking a lot now. My parents have visited and Becca’s sister has visited (the “dreaded inlaws”). It was fun having people over.

We are still searching for a church, I don’t know what we’re going to finally settle on. It seems almost impossible that there is a church out there that we will feel comfortable at. There are just so many things that combine to make the right church. Some have quality preachers, with little emphasis on evangelism or salvation. Some are so enormous we doubted that we would ever see the pastor, like those brave souls who watched the image of the great Oz, we watched a church service on a video screen, the service could have been transmitted from the moon for all we knew.

Right now Becca is getting ready for a nice dinner at Carrabbas, we have a gift certificate to there. I highly suggest that you ask for dinner gift certificates as wedding presents. We have no money to go out to eat normally, so these make it really easy to get out of the house and do something we both love, eat.

Becca is still searching for a job, we are seeing that the job market in Colorado Springs isn’t exactly the most welcoming. We spoke with several people last night at a friends birthday party who told us stories about being in the same place. It would be harder to keep from being discouraged if I didn’t know that there were some great things in store for her. She has unique gifts that I’m sure will bring her some great satisfaction. One of the things that she is starting is volunteering with ISI. Internation Students Incorported, Becca has a real heart to serve interational college students and she is starting to really get involved with the people and activities that ISI has to offer. We hosted a foreign student for one night last week. It was interesting… she was from India, and very sweet, I’m really glad we had the opportunity to do that.

I’ve been taking so many pictures with our new camera. Every time we go hiking we take a few shots. I will have to sort through and upload some of the best ones. I still haven’t finished uploading the honeymoon pictures. Alright, time to wrap things up. If things go like they have been this will be the only post for the next 6 weeks. I always have so much I could say, but I never really feel like distilling it all at once.

It’s kinda weird to say it, but I have a wife now. Actually I’ve had a wife for just over 2 weeks at this point. It’s pretty freaking cool being married! I seriously doubt there are words enough at my disposal to express the joy and happiness that Becca and I have. There is always that nagging fear before the marriage that somehow the person you marry won’t be the same person that you have known up until that point. I believe that Becca (Rebecca Bendt, how weird!) and myself actually have a pretty good grasp of how annoying wonderful the other person can be. So, I am sure it will be quite an adventure doing this whole marriage thing for the rest of my life, but I am very confidant that I ended up with the right woman. And, I still feel pretty bad about that, I totall said that I would never want to put Becca through this whole “married to me” thing. But then we started dating… and well one thing leads to another… you know how it works.

So, the honeymoon was freakin’ sweet, we went to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. It’s like a tropical paradise where everyone has a southern accent and drinks sweet tea. Right after the wedding my parents gave Becca and I a new digital camera, it’s a Sony 7.2 Megapixel Cybershot, we have a ton of great pictures that are slowly being uploaded into the photo album.

Once we have the apartment a little more cleaned up I will start taking picutres of it so you can see what we have done. Well, it’s time to eat some cinnamon rolls that the Master Chef has cooked up for me and then off to check out a church.

Searching through the contents of McMaster-Carr led me to the idea that I should build a desk out of modular aluminum tubing and plexiglass. Ideally, I would use extruded acrylic, but I don’t know if I can afford that. I started designing this thing and building it in 3D in Blender. This is what I came up with.

It’s not the greatest, and it’s still pricy. But I can get 8’x4’ plexiglass in town for $100 even. Plexi scratches easier than other things but… I don’t know, glass would be so heavy and brittle. The tubes fit together in specially made connectors that clamp down on the tubes, the surfaces are about .25” thick and would rest on the tubes, probably with some silicon caulk dried on top of the tubes to give it a little padding, and tackyness to hold them in place. The idea is this desk would be very light weight, minimalistic, and easy to take apart for moving.

Anyways, I will probably modify this design many times before anything comes of it.

My dream would be welded titanium rods for the frame, and polycarbonite surfaces.

I guess this little chapter in my life is rather short, and I don’t expect to remember it for long. I will be getting married in 3 weeks. I graduated from college and moved to Colorado Springs to begin my career as a web-designer about 2 months ago. I am very anxious to be married to Becca, but it still feels weird to think about the fact that I will soon have “a wife”. It’s a crazy thought, but exciting at the same time. Becca has been completely focused on getting each of the multitudinous items on her list completed before the big day.

So, I was wondering if this is technically my bachelorhood. I’m out of college, and living on my own, but I have felt so close to Becca for the past 3 years of my life that I hardly consider myself a bachelor. The balance between work and every other priority in my life will never be easy. Right now I have few immediate priorities. Becca and the wedding are certainly a priority above work, but there is little chance for conflict there considering the geographical separation between myself and upcoming matrimonial event..

Being so far from my fiancé is difficult, we have a long distance relationship with each other before, yet this time it feels much different. I feel a much deeper connection to her, and along with that comes a more profound concern for her well-being.

I suppose I have gotten on to this track in my mind because she should be here any minute. I am sitting in my our apartment writing this post and waiting for her, along with her parents, to pull up with fully loaded vehicles. We will be unloading massive quantities of her belongings into this miniscule apartment. We already have boxes stacked to the ceiling in the living room. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but there is one stack of cardboard cartons that brushes the ceiling. It’s truly the summit of the mountain that has only begun to take shape.

When you sort through your belongings during the process of moving, you feel like you are sifting through a record of your life. You see real tangible evidence to confirm the validity of your memories. I wonder if sometimes we find ourselves unable to throw certain belongings away because we feel like we might lose those memories. The line between memory and reality is only an instant wide. Therefore memory is often our perceived reality, what we would call the present may actually be nothing more than a vast set of memories encompassing the past minutes, hours or days. We tell ourselves that we live in the present, but the present is all memory. So, in reality, our thoughts are always processing data from the past, we are always thinking in the past.

To be continued…

Several Days Later…

The realm of thought encompasses our entire existence at the most basic verifiable level. Descartes held this as a part of his philosophy. He began with the assumption that scientifically could not prove any of his assumptions. He called into question the very nature of the universe, and ultimately his own existence. He was only able to recover from his precipitously close call with thinking himself out of existence, by realizing that they very fact that he is able to think is an indication that something must exist to think those very thoughts, and be conscious of them, therefore he must exist as a consciousness.

My philosophy professor would probably be appalled at rough interpretation what I remember from that class, but what I do remember serves to further the point I am attempting to reach about memories.

We live in the past, through our memories, always filtering new data to see if it is related to any of our memories, and then storing that new data as memories for future use. It’s a necessary and integral function of our brain. If I get caught up thinking to much about the past I start to doubt the validity of certain memories. I have feelings associated with some memories, and those feelings seem to lend a certain verification to those memories, but feelings are just feelings, less concrete that memories, but in so many ways more real. I think Becca doubts her memories less, and sometimes recalls things more vividly because of the strength of her feelings. She, like many women apparently, lives and thinks with her feelings more often than reason or logic. I sometimes wonder how she is able to function at all without the reason and logic that I find so necessary. Yet, her memory is far greater than mine, it may be unrelated, but I wonder if the strength of her remembered feelings adds a whole new layer to memory that I could never hope to experience.

Objects that we keep to remind us of certain events and people are very nice to have around, but are ultimately just clutter and most are useless. That’s the logic and reason talking, I think memorabilia stir up feelings more than memories and are therefore more important to someone that has strong feeling associations with memories. Everyone has some amount of objects that help anchor their memories in reality. Destroying or removing these objects is sometimes so difficult because it is destroying your own life. If you live in memory all the time, then keep-sakes are something that anchor your own existence in the reality that you perceive, and throwing out these things can seem like killing a small part of yourself.

Ending stream of thought, Goodnight.

The title is my solution to my current graphics card performance problems. My machine isn’t exactly shiny anymore. I mean it’s a little long in the tooth, and isn’t performing up to my standards anymore. A new video card and updated drivers have done nothing to remedy the strange graphics card performance problems I have had since the last reformat. I don’t pretend to have the faintest idea why this has been happening, all I know is that I am seeing really bad performance problems lately, and I hope that it isn’t a hardware problem, because that means only one thing, replacing my motherboard. I just can’t afford to do that now. I have this laptop from work that is really good, but a laptop just isn’t a gaming machine. So that mean’s doing the old reformat dance again. Copy the entire My Documents folder to another drive, then reformat and reinstall. Or, as they call it at my new place of employment, “slick” it.

Sioux City is at about 1500 feet above sea level. Kearney is a little less than 2500 feet above sea level. My apartment is almost exactly 6000 feet above sea level. The altitude is a fact of life for people in Colorado. It makes the weather quick and unpredicatble coming out of the mountains, and it make physical exertion difficult at best. I am far from acclimated to this altitude, yet I went mountain biking at around 7500 feet today near Palmer Lake. I went mountain biking with professional bikers who go to races and such. They had pity on me. They pushed a pretty good pace at the beginning on an uphill climb through a state park. I had to stop after about 10 minutes and catch my breath. After that the couple guys who were really hard core mountain bikers split off on their own, which I was very thankful for.

I have never been mountian biking before, and I borrowed a bike from the boyfriend of a gal at work. It was a pretty nice bike. Once I made the climb up the hill It was great fun. Hurtling around corners and between trees about 4 feet apart, going downhill, then up-hill for a little ways, then downhill a long ways again. I became much more confidant of the bike’s ability to bounce off rocks and tree roots and still keep me in one piece. I think I only really fell down once, but I wiped out and knocked the chain off it’s sprokets several times. Rule #1: Any front brake at all while going down hill is very dangerous. We of course stopped to let me catch my breath several times, when I started turning white they told me it was OK to take 5 minutes and sit down. It’s not like I am a physically fit person that just happens to be adjusting to the altitude. I am a chubby lazy computer geek that is doing his first real excercise in a long time and trying to acclimate himself to this altitude. It was a blast, and it would be a ton more fun if I had a little endurance. I hope I can go again soon.

The weirdest thing about this adventure was that it actually felt good to excercise, I pushed myself and had a good time doing it. Not boring or monotonous like running, it was exciting and really hard work. I know my body will be reminding me of my stupdity for the next day or so, but I honestly feel like I was actually able to get some excercise that was fun.

Now, there are two directions I can go from here, remember the great time that I had and never really commit to this as a hobby. Or, I could possibly actualy find myself doing this more often, there are plenty of trails near-by. My biggest obstacle right now is my bike, it’s a little on the old and broken side. Completely rigid frame with no shocks in front or back, the brakes are decent, but need to be adjusted to work properly, and my gears are definately not adjusted properly, I can’t get into first without rubbing the heck out of the derailer. It was a bike my parents gave to me probably in the eighth grade, and it probably came from a department store. I need to go into a bike shop and find out if it’s worth my money to upgrade this bike or if it would be better to just get an entirely new bike. Or, if it would be wiser to just not excercise at all and save my money for more important things, like a honeymoon, and food…

Colorado Springs is a long ways from Kearney. It’s an even further distance from Sioux City. I knew these things before I moved here, but now that I live here and am travelling back to those places fairly frequently, I really KNOW these things. Six hours isn’t a totally horrible car trip but… well, actually it sucks pretty bad. I just rolled in from Kearney, I was visiting Becca there. It was really good to see her again. I really miss her out here, and I just really wish we could go ahead and get married already! Seriously, this engagement feels like forever. The trip back usually isn’t so bad, but it downpoured for an hour on the road. It was overcast and rainy for 400 miles of the trip, and then right as I enter Colorado Springs the sky clears up and the stars are out and it looks beautiful! This is rediculous. I’m starting to get the impression that the weather here is really nice all the time. I’m probably wrong though. Well, I’m tired, and my bed beckons.

I’m in the heart of my second week of work, and I still really like my job. I only have a few minutes to post something today before I dig into a fresh batch of projects but I thought I would share how the transition from College to the work-place is going. My suspicions have been largely confirmed. Working 8 hours a day straight through isn’t so bad when you can go home after those 8 hours and just relax and have nothing else to do. I am far busier in this job than I ever expected to be. I’m not at the same level of stressing out with a million different things to take care of, that I was at in school. Instead it’s just kinda nice to know that there will always be something for me to do.

At Offut last summer things were pretty slow and low pressure. I don’t think I had any concrete deadlines the whole summer. In this position I feel the pressure to get things done in the fewest hours possible to save budget, and my deadlines are usually the same day that I first find out about a task. A lot of this is because I am at a point where most of what they are willing to give me are small tasks that only take an hour and a half.

The support aspect of this job accounts for probably 70-80% of my time each day. I answer a few phone calls and lots of e-mails. Today will be my third day using GTDTiddlyWiki a very cool wiki that is helping me keep free form todo lists with some simple formatting. The most powerful thing about a wiki is that it allows for quick and easy cross referencing using WikiWords or forced links using the [[ ]] brackets. So whenever I see an e-mail or take a call I throw a new bullet into the tiddler for todays support items. I put it under the “to do” heading and at the end I have started putting a link to a 5 digit number that I am cycling up. This is my own way of tracking support tickets. I know there are advanced support ticket systems out there, and even some free php/mysql ones too. But I haven’t really looked at them yet and I don’t know if I need to when I am pretty much the only one tracking support issues formally. Everyone else just looks at the emails as they come in and looks to see if someone else sent out a reply. I felt the need for something more structured, but not as confining as a controlled database.

Anyways, it’s only day nubmer 3 for the wiki. We’ll see how long I stick with it.

The coffee they have here at the office is really bad. Oh, and we use these cool CISCO IP phones, and they happen to be the same phones that CTU uses on 24! Now if only I could figure out how to make them ring like the phones on 24.

I finally have internet access again. I always feel a little deprived when I don’t have internet access at home. I just cant stand the lack of information flow when I sit at home by myself most nights. So finally I have internet access. This summer I opted for Adelphia Cable internet, as opposed to Quest DSL. It looks like I’m getting 1.5 Meg download. Sure, I’m paying for 4 meg service. But still, this seems a little bit faster than Quest. We shall see how it works out. I also hooked up a wireless router again. When Becca gets here she will actually be able to use her wireless on the laptop. And I will be able to use wireless here if I get to use a laptop from work.

So, my computer set-up is approaching coolness, and I’m only a few years behind the curve.

Work is really cool. I would have thought I might not necessarily need high-speed internet here at home since I spend all day on the computer. Yet, I see now that being on the computer at work is completely different than being on at home. At work there is a lot of pressure and time constraint. I don’t have time to just browse around to websites for fun at all, unless I spend my lunch break at my desk. So, having internet access for fun is really nice. And even better, this is real internet access not the crippled service that the University stuck us with. Yay for online gaming!

In conclusion…. I have alot of stuff to catch up on, I will fill this space with info about my life in general a little bit later.

Ignore some of the info that I put in that previous post. I’m actually moved out to Co Springs now and that is not really my address. So anyways, I’ll fill you in on it more later. I don’t have internet access at home yet, so I am just throwing this up to let you know that I am not quite dead yet.

Update: 2 things.

I just found out that my new address will be

3645 Rialto Heights #230

Colorado Springs, CO 80907

And if you want to watch my Commencement ceremony on Friday at 10:00 AM you can do so through a web-cast here.

I had written a big long rant for the site about everything that has happened in the past few weeks. That unfinished document is still sitting on my personal computer, it got kinda personal and I decided to turn it into my speech for Alumni Charge, which was… over a week ago. Man, time flies!

So, yeah, I am an alumni in Pi Kapp Alpha. I graduate from UNK this friday. I accepted a job several weeks ago in Colorado Springs at Infront. Now today I just found out that I have been approved on my apartment in Colorado Springs that I applied for yesterday. Awesome! So, things are falling in to place. I only have one test and one little photography project left for school. Assuming everything with the apartment goes well, I should be moving in the day after graduation. I am really excited to start my career life. In a few years you will probably be reading a post about how easy and great I had it during college. But right now it seems like moving on to the business world can only be an improvement. I just don’t like school. I never have liked it, and I never will.

No more Juff! I finished up electronic imaging this morning. Well, I actually finished the final project about 4 hours before it was due, 8:00 AM. That means no more graphic design classes. For a while anyways, who knows.

Today is my last day of work as a Tech Assistant at the University. Darren has been a great boss, I have really grown a lot in my web-design abilities through the work I have done here. This job was a huge improvement over the helpdesk. And Darren is interested in many of the same things that I am interested in. I feel like we connected fairly well.

Let’s see, no more dues to the house EVER! Yay! Black Tie was Saturday night, Becca and I had a great time. Lot’s of fun and dancing etcetera. Oh, and the Black Tie Slideshow video finished rendering about 2 hours after it was supposed to be shown. But it was shown, so I guess that counts for something. Three years in a row of doing that picture slideshow.

I have so much more to say about ending college. But that doesn’t really fit the scope of this post.

HOUSE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION NO. 29 - Napoleon Dynamite, production

Oh, this is so freaking awesome it’s almost scary. Apperantly the Idaho legslature is really bored and decided to honor the best piece of publicity that has happened to them since… well, ever. My favorite part.

WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote “Nay” on this concurrent resolution are “FREAKIN’ IDIOTS!” and run the risk of having the “Worst Day of Their Lives!”