The stork came ...

... and brought me my baby. Well, at least that's what Adam calls his, so I figured I could do the same until Christi and I actually have one of our own.

As for the camera, it's a Canon XTi with an 18-55mm lens, a 50mm lens, and a 28-135mm IS lens with matching hood scoop.

We're going up to Hanging Lake this weekend to test it out and get used to it before the honeymoon.

Bruins keep us dancin'

With UCLA's win over Kansas, Christi and I are still alive in the Seward Motor Freight basketball pool. Depending on tomorrow's UNC-G'town outcome, we'll know which one of us still has a shot to win. If G'town can go on and win it all, I'll squeak out a very close 1^st place finish. If not, we'll be rooting for a Bruin victory over the Tar Heels in the championship game for Christi to take the title.

For all of you that picked Kansas into the final four (or further), what were you thinking? I kind of feel sorry for you. They're an automatic choke team in the tournament. Except for that game against the Orangemen ... that was just luck to make it that far.

To me, a Kansas basketball loss is just about equivalent to a Colorado football loss. In commemoration of this great defeat, here's the greatest 30 seconds in Family Guy history:

Responding by the masses

Maybe I should post more things that I want. No more than 1 day after the post, we received 17 RSVPs! By far the highest total in one day (previous high was 7).

We've received some amazing recipes so far (thanks), but there is one that stands out amongst the rest. I'll post it later so that everyone can bask in its glory.

You know who you are ...

People ... Send in your invites

If you're reading this, and still are holding an RSVP with the invite that Christi and I sent you, please send it in to us. If not, you'll probably get a phone call from us sometime this weekend so that we can get final numbers.

Wedding planning in the waning weeks (yep, we're under a month) is exhilarating. My dad went to pick up our supposedly engraved rings the other day, and they didn't engrave mine! Well, I guess that's why you try to get all of your stuff done earlier than the day before the wedding.

I feel like I haven't been able to blog as much as I have in the past lately. I'm also feeling that brianhelge.com needs to get bumped to a v5.0 face lift here pretty soon. Why not have 5 different looks in 2 years?

If this happens, it will obviously be coded with a wedding ring on, and will depend on the workload at Big Stone as well as how much time coaching takes up.

Vista and Becoming a Demon

Yesterday my Mac at work locked up on me over 10 times. It got to the point where if I moved the mouse over the dock, the thing would freeze up and I would have to start over. So, my boss was cool enough to give me his credit card and told me to go to Wal*star*Mart and pick out a new computer.

For those who have never seen Wal*star*Mart's computer section, don't waste your time the next chance you get. The selection was/is horrible, and I ended up getting a Compaq with only 512 of RAM in it. The good news is that it had Vista (the first time I've seen it). Although it's only Vista Basic, it's still pretty fun to mess around on a new OS. I'm getting another gig sent in from NewEgg, so hopefully my experience will be a lot better.

As for the G4 I was using, maybe I just got a bad apple. What? Too early in the morning for a good pun?

Aside from work life, in the past week I've joined up as assistant coach for the JV and C baseball teams at Glenwood Springs High School. There's something that's really fun about coaching high schoolers. Maybe it's working with them and seeing their development throughout the year, or maybe it's the fact that I'm 8 years older than them and they have to listen to everything I say. Who knows, maybe I'll figure it out one of these days. Either way though, their mascot is a Demon, which is sweet, and our hats look pretty cool too.

Happy birthday mom.

First Round Action

Ohhs and Ahhs go out all around the country as people realize that they have absolutely no clue at what's going on in the NCAA tournament. I was one of those people today posting a quite *cough* impressive *cough* 8/16 record. It didn't matter too much because I saw this:



ESPN is amazing in keeping you up to date on the game, but posting recaps that say "dunk shot" really doesn't do it for me. I just kept looking at it and thinking, "Who's Mike Jones?" Or maybe more like, "Mike Jones. Who?"

Going back to the brackets, Christi is currently tied for 1^st in the Seward Motor Freight pool as she posted a 14/16 day.

It all came about early this morning when I was going through her bracket with her and she said, "I'm not going to pick Duke. I have no clue who/what VCU is, but Duke always chokes and I really don't like them." It was a good time to gamble against the 9 straight sweet 16 runs.

Voila

Jeff Daniels sang it best, "You can make an ugly girl pretty ..." What, you didn't know Jeff Daniels has done more than just Dumb and Dumber?

Anyways, yesterday was the unveiling of the New Trail Runner site, my way of making an ugly girl pretty. Once I got on this project when I arrived in Carbondale, we were able to get the site up and rolling. I won't even mention how much of an improvement it is over the old site. I'm pretty sure the picture above can will do enough justice.

With Dollar Signs in my Eyes

No, not money. I'm talking PHP people (more info on the dollar signs here). I've been doing a whole ton of coding lately. I just got new site up for my job (I'll post about that tomorrow), but more importantly, I wrote code so that you can do all of your ncaa tourney picks online.

Sure this isn't the first one of it's kind, but it was sure fun to do. I even have it layout out all of your final results on a bracket so you don't have to write all of your picks down.

If you want to check it out the site is here. Let me know if you sign up to just view how it works, so I can remove you from the actual list of people who are paying donating some money to have fun here. If you don't want to sign up, you can use login "TestTest" and password "test" to view the beauty.

It's really not aesthetically pleasing on the eye, but that probably has something to do with the fact that I made the entire thing in about 7 total hours. The aesthetics come at the end when you view all of your picks.

I'm surprised I got this done with Adam in town. Him, Yuto and I dominated the slopes at Sunlight. I even have a vid of Adam snowboarding down the mountain. There's only about a month left of skiing if anyone else wants to come up and stay as well.

En Route

Christi and I finally made it back from a hectic week of wedding planning in Nebraska. We brought 13" of snow with us to Omaha right as we landed as well.

Adam and his Japanese buddy are driving right now to come spend a few days with us as well. They will be our first visitors besides our family.

Hopefully I'll update the posts here sometime soon ...

The Clique

Ben VanKat
Troy Bell
Chris VanKat

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