17 posts tagged “bonnie”

Well, it's been about two weeks since my panicked post about the Continental 6. Time for an update.

The Regency Stadium 10 Big Screen is undergoing the renovations that have been talked about for a long time. They put up a red "Regency Stadium 10 Big Screen" sign on the top half of the Marquis where it used to say "United Artists" a few days ago. It's ugly, boring and it suuuuucks! Still, it's good news that the Continental isn't going away, just changing again.

Then, yesterday I saw that they are putting a digital marquis up in the place of the old one that was removed, prompting my initial panic. I guess that's a good idea. When you think about it the fact that they have to get up on a lift to change the letters on a marquis 20+ feet in the air every week is a bit archaic.

I'm going to try to get a picture of the new marquis to show how ugly it is. Bonnie could have designed a much better sign.

Friday night Bonnie and I had a date night. She had three pieces of her design work in a student art show at Arapahoe Community College so we decided to go see it and have dinner afterwards. Well, the show was great, we were so impressed by all the fantastic work, especially the portfolios of the graduating students.

She didn't win any prizes for her work but was still excited to have three items chosen for the show. She's also very excited about learning to do all the cool things the other artists had done in her advanced classes.

After the show we walked over to the Cafe Terracotta in Downtown Littleton. We've never been there but it sounded good so we decided to check it out. Since the weather was so nice we decided to sit out on the front porch. The food was excellent and we really enjoyed ourselves.

You can read more about the show on Bonnie's blog.

You can see about the restaurant at their website. If you're looking for a great dinner it's worth the trip.

Last night Bonnie and I caucused for the first time. It was very exciting to go down to Victor's elementary school and stand up for our candidate. The turnout was amazing and it was so great to see all the committed Democrats coming out for their candidate.

We started out in the cafeteria but our precinct had too many people and was moved to the art room. In the end we had 46 people. It was a diverse group that ranged in my estimation from 21 to 80 years of age. There was a good division of men and women. In our initial vote we had about seven undecided voters.

We had about a half an hour of debate with some good speakers who made good points for their candidates. There were also passionate speakers who did nothing to convince me that they had thought their decision through. In the end all but one was persuaded to vote for Obama. Our final vote for precinct 94 was 31 for Obama and 15 for Hillary.

Then we voted for our delegates to the county meeting. Our Hillary delegate was a 21 year old college student. She was very excited to be chosen. Our two delegates for Obama were a middle-aged man and woman. The man seemed to be very knowledgeable and had experience working on Capital Hill several years ago. The woman said she had been a Republican until two months and two days ago. She said three men had made her a Democrat; Bush, Cheney, and Obama. Her story was inspiring and she was very optimistic about the prospect of a President Obama. I think our three delegates are excellent choices and I hope that some of them can be elected as delegates at the next level of the nomination process.

I also put my name in to be a delegate and was elected as an alternate. I'm OK with this since the first two were so well suited to perform the task.

In the end our efforts combined with the rest of the state to give Obama a 2-1 win over Hillary in Colorado. The reports of the turnout for the Democrats are five times the previous year's Democrat turnout. It was also more than double the turnout for the Republican caucus.

I can't hope but to feel optimistic that this trend of the Democrats turning out twice the number of voters as the Republicans is a sign of how the general election will go in November.

Its funny how identity on the web works and how you get noticed.

I've been online for years. For a long time I went under the name bryus. I did this because I wasn't comfortable with putting my name out there. I built a reputation within the PDA/gadget community with this name. Alan Williams asked me to write for PDAAvenue.com. When that folded Joel Suplido recruited me to PalmOneCity.com which later became 1src.com.

Later Alan, asked me to join the staff at his new site DailyGadget.com. I haven't written anything there for a while, but I am still active in the forums.

Through these years I have created user accounts on dozens of forums and blogs as bryus. I just did a little ego surfing on Google and my bryus profiles show up all over the first few pages. However, if I plug in my name Bryan Lucas, what do I get? Not much. The third item down in my blogger profile and my Amazon profile is tenth.

Now, the reason I bring this up is this. My lovely an talented wife, Bonnie recently started a blog. By recently I mean she started it on December 31st with a welcome post. Her second post was on January 8th. She put up a picture of a Photoshop project that she is very proud of. She even entered in a Photoshop contest. She wanted to get the word out and get a lot of people to see it. I helped by sending a link out to all my friends online and at work. Bonnie sent the link to all her friends and relatives. By the end of the week she had a lot of unique visitors to her blog. Her web presence is growing.

Before this started her Google search results didn't even find her, she didn't exist on the web. Now, she's number ten on the first page. It only took about three weeks.

Oh, and heres the link to her blog, Bonnie's Designs.

My cats are going a bit stir crazy today because they've been locked in our computer room for over two weeks. You may ask, "Why would we do this to our cats?" Well, there's a simple answer to that question.

Salem is a climber. He sees a Christmas Tree not as a beautiful work of art that took us hours of work to decorate, but as a challenge. He like to see if he can climb all the way to the top, and the first year he did. His brother, Skittles, could care less about the tree beyond checking out the low hanging ornaments and maybe hiding under it.

While talking about their unfortunate incarceration today with my wife, Bonnie, I came up with a solution.

CARBONITE HIBERNATION! That's right the cats could go Han Solo for the holidays!

However, today Bonnie is not feeling visionary because she just couldn't see the genius of my idea. I will admit there are some roadblocks to overcome but my idea is in it's early stages. A few logistical details will need to be worked out. Maybe I can have it up and running by next Christmas.

First, I would need to find a carboinite freezing chamber somewhere close by. The reason for this is that cost of transport to Bespin could be prohibitive. I haven't looked it up on Expedia or Travelocity but I'm not thinking I'm going to get a discount fare.

Second, there would need to be a study as to the long term effects on pets. There would also need to be a study into the effects of multiple freezings.

Finally, Bonnie claims it's a fictional construct of George Lucas' mind existing only in the Star Wars galaxy, whatever. Details, details.

If I get this working I think it could be an alternative boarding method for families going on vacation. In stead of taking the dog to the kennel, you put them in carbonite. When you come back from vacation and your pets would never know you left. I could franchise it and take the idea national.

Now I guess I need to work on my VC pitch so I can some money to get this idea off the ground.

Discuss here.

Yes, we have finally done it, we got the living room and tree decorated for the holidays, and only a week before Christmas!

Last week I brought the tree out of the crawlspace. Then on Friday, Bonnie got the branches all fluffed out. Then, I got the tree actually assembled. Then, it stood there, naked, all weekend while we were busy doing other stuff. Finally, Monday night, we got the lights and garland up. Yesterday Bonnie worked on decorating the rest of the room and after dinner Bonnie, Victor and I put up the ornaments while we listened to Christmas music on KOSI 101.1, ate Pepperidge Farms cookies and drank hot chocolate. It was a nice little holiday moment.

Urgh! it's been a crazy year and it's nice to have this done. With Bonnie's heavy workload from taking four classes I had to do a lot of extra things around the house. It's been a week since she finished and we are still exhausted. The house is a mess and we are having friends over on Saturday. This means we will be doing a lot of cleaning in the next few days.

Oh, and we still have to wrap some presents. I think we will do this tonight. It's been hard to get into the Christmas spirit but I think we are there now with the tree and decorations.

Last weekend was a good one. Bonnie had a lot of homework to do between her Illustrator class and some things she needed to do for her internship. Saturday we hit the grocery store then she spent a good chunk of the day on her internship work.

While she was doing that I did a little housework and watched some TV. I also took Victor to the park because he wanted to play some catch. We took our baseball and gloves and a Nerf football. It was fun, but man am I out of shape. Just a little running around and I was beat.

That night we had a great dinner of appetizers with marinated shrimp, scallop stuffed mushrooms wrapped in bacon, and bruschetta while we watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I was the only one who had seen it before. Victor wasn't that interested and left early but Bonnie liked it.

Sunday Bonnie worked on her Illustrator project in the morning so we could go to my parent's house because Victor mentioned he wanted to see his grandparents. His grandmother watches him when Bonnie's in class and he's off track but he hasn't seen is grandfather in a while.

We watched the Broncos game disaster and went through some stuff dad had cleaned up in the basement. Victor latched on to some of my old board games. He picked out Risk, Hangman, Axis & Allies, and Scotland Yard. We played Scotland Yard and had some fun.

Later that night Victor and I played Risk at home and I soundly beat him in his first game. He has a lot to learn about strategy games and military strategy games like Risk in particular. He likes Stratego and Chess but hasn't played a game like Risk before. I told him he really needs to have some mastery of Risk before I will even show him Axis and Allies because it's 10x as complicated as Risk.

Not everything that needed to get done got done over the weekend, but it was a good weekend.

On Tuesday I took a day off from work to take Victor and Bonnie to Boondocks Fun Center in Northglenn. I've been wanting to go there for a few years because they have go carts. Yes, I said GO CARTS!!! Woohoo!!! I love go carts. I know I sound like a kid, and well, I never got to drive a go cart until I was 33 and I loved it. Now two years later I got to do it again and it was a blast.

We decided to go on a Tuesday because they have a special deal on Tuesdays that we wanted to take advantage of. We got up there at 10:30am, shortly after opening. We left just after 9pm. Yes it was that fun. We played three rounds of mini golf, rode the bumper boats and go carts, and we played laser tag and video games. It was all fun.

We also took advantage of their all-day, all-you-can-eat buffet. We had lunch, grabbed a drink or a bread stick here or there, then had dinner. It was a lot of pizza and pop. The pizza was pretty good for an entertainment center.

My wife Bonnie wants to take our son Victor to see Ratatouille Friday morning at the Kerasotes 20 Mile Village 10 theater down the street. It's only $4 for shows before noon on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So She looks up the show times and finds that the first showing of Ratatouille is 12:10.

What the hell?!? You offer a cheap morning show and don't offer the kids movie that parents would take their kids to see until after the cut off? That's like a restaurant saying kids eat free after 10pm!

I haven't been to the 20 Mile Village 10 since it was a Colorado Cinema but I remember we saw several kids movies that were 11:00am to 12:00pm showings.

Boo! Kerasotes, not a good way to attract customers.

Well, I haven't posted in a week. It's been a busy week. Here are some updates from that last week.

• Picture-A-Day has been discontinued. It's been difficult to find things worth taking a picture of day to day. My daily commute doesn't really provide many opportunities for interesting pictures or provide much of a chance to take these pictures. Also, I've had trouble getting them posted in a timely manner. So, it's done.
• We are looking at refinancing our house. We can roll our ARM mortgage and home equity loan into a new fixed-rate mortgage before our rates can go up again. We will probably even be able to lower our payment.
• This week the P route started and well, people still aren't happy. They don't appear to be getting their fancy over-the-road-coach style bus, just a regular bus. Also, the earliest route has been dropped leaving some without a bus. As for me, my bus has been moved up two minutes in the morning. This makes it easier to catch the E train and make my connections.
• Bonnie is doing well on her classes. She hasn't gotten less than an A on any assignment yet. She is getting pretty good at the Adobe and Macromedia applications she is learning. We went and ordered the full version of the Adobe Web Bundle with most of the applications she's using. She also ordered Lightwave so she can learn to do some 3D work later in the semester.
  
• Victor continues to do well in school. He had a field trip to the Symphony on Tuesday. He enjoyed the music.

That's it for now.