15 of the best years

So I know Jen said on her blog that there would likely be nothing on my bog about our weekend and that it would all be focused on Colin Meloy. Even though it was AWESOME to see Colin, that paled in comparison to how great it was to spend the whole weekend with Jen. It was truly like a second honeymoon for us. She already mentioned on her blog a lot of the things we did. We shopped, got pedicures, massages, slept, jacuzzi'd, ate and just generally enjoyed each others company. It was so great to have nothing but time together with no agenda and no pre-set plans. On Saturday afternoon we literally came back to the hotel and laid in bed watching TV and took naps. Boulder is really a cool place. As many of you know I love the mountains anyway and Boulder is really a cool mountain town with lots to do. If you ever go, try to stay at the St. Julien. It's a great hotel/spa. They had a whole fleet of beach cruisers available to guests just outside the valet. We didn't avail ourselves of them but it would have definitely been fun.

I've told Jen this privately, but I want everyone to know that she is my best friend and for sure the best thing that's happened to me. One thing that has happened as a result of me traveling over the last several months is that I have really grown to appreciate her more and more. Not that I didn't appreciate her in the first place but distance really does make the heart grow fonder. Being away as much as I have really makes you appreciate all that you have in terms of relationships with people. Today is Jen and I's 15th anniversary and I'm still asking myself how I got so lucky to snag her as my partner in life.

The one and only Colin

So last night was the night. All roads have led to the events that transpired at the Fox theater in Boulder, CO. For those of you that don't know me that well or don't talk to me that often, I'm a HUGE fan of the band The Decemberists. Colin Meloy is the lead singer. He is doing a summer solo tour singing Decemberists songs as well as some covers of other artists. That's pretty much the reason Jen and I are in Boulder this weekend. I mean let's face it, Boulder is cool and all, but I'm not sure that I would normally pick Boulder Colorado as the place to spend the weekend with my wife on this our 15th anniversary. She's a super sport for going along with me on this one. As we were walking out of the show last night she said, "That was 10 times better than I thought it was going to be". So apparently she really was just going along with me to be nice. I'm glad she had a good time though.
The Fox theater is on 13th street in Boulder and is a cool small little club as can be seen by the aerial photo. You can click the image to see a larger view.
It was very hard for me to get this shot as I had to climb a nearby skyscraper and use a long lens, so please do me the courtesy of enlarging the image. No actually it's a screen capture from www.live.com and the "Bird's Eye View". I simply post this picture so you can get a picture of what a small quaint venue this was to see a concert in. I'd be shocked if there were more than 300 people tops in that place.

A lady name Laura Gibson (although Colin called her Lori) opened for Colin. She had a very interesting style. I really liked her voice actually. She also joined Colin on stage to sing a Sam Cook cover of "Cupid". Colin was very funny and very interactive with the crowd often times asking them to join in. Sometimes he would even stop his song to correct the audience if they didn't sing it right. At the end of one of his songs he started to blend in lyrics from Cemetry Gates from the Smiths. I thought for a second he was going to do a full cover of it but he was just teasing us. I had Jen's camera with me and was able to get a few short video clips of the concert. If any of you haven't heard Colin before, I would highly recommend checking him out, and I would for sure recommend catching one of his concerts. The video captures aren't very high quality, but at least I was able to preserve for my posterity this monumental event in my life. I'm not going to post them ALL here, just a couple to tease you.

If you're interested in hearing some Decemberists\Colin Meloy songs, visit his myspace page and several good songs can be heard in the player on that page.

Weekend in Boulder

Jen and I are in Boulder, CO for the weekend. I'm hoping that we run in to Mork and Mindy while we're here. I haven't seen them in a long time. I think they still live here, but I'm not sure.

No but seriously, we are going to see Colin Meloy tonight at the Fox Theater here. Also since it's our 15th anniversary we thought we'd spend a weekend away. I hope the kids don't get in too much trouble while we're gone. This is the first time we've let them stay at home by themselves. Even though Sydnee can't drive yet, we figured with the Rhino she could probably get the kids around wherever they need to get to.

We're staying at the St. Julien hotel and spa. Nice place. You'd think we'd do some spa treatments here, but instead I think we're going to a ching chong shop to get pedicures. The picture above is looking out our room window.

I love Colorado and I love the mountains. I've always said if I could live anywhere, it would be in Colorado.

Hope everyone has a good weekend!

PandoraJam

I always love it when someone introduces me to something that changes my life. I know that sounds like I'm about to talk about something profound, but I'm not. So if you have high expectations, maybe you should hit your back button right now. By "changing my life" I simply mean something that I really enjoy and that is really really cool. For me PandoraJam is one of those things. You may heard of Pandora before. My friend Mike Zaharis told me about it years ago. I used it on and off once I heard about it. Basically it's a website that allows you to create custom "stations" or channels based upon music that you like. So you tell the website what artists you want the channel to emulate and it will find artists/songs that sound similar and then stream them. It's a great way to find and listen to music that is along your lines of taste. As the songs are playing you can rate them with a thumbs up or thumbs down. As you do, it learns your taste in music. So then a friend at work told me about PandoraJam. PandoraJam makes Pandora exponentially cooler. It is an application that you install on your machine (Mac only, but I think there's a similar version for the PC called Pandora Jar) that brings in the pandora interface and settings. but the beauty of it is that it allows you to capture the songs Pandora streams to you. It captures them in mp3 format and automatically adds it to your itunes library. It's so great. So sometimes I'll just let my computer sit there cranking out tunes through PandoraJam and when I'm done, I go to my iTunes library and BAM! theres tons of new songs all organized in playlists according to the channel on Pandora. As I type this I'm listening to "waking up" by Elastica on my Sleater Kinney Channel.

Blog about blogs

My brother recently asked me to make a list of all the photography related blogs that I frequently visit. I figured since I recently did a post about google reader and iGoogle, I'd not only make a list of the photography blogs I visit, but I'd list ALL the blogs that I have plugged into my Google Reader. I think it's fun and interesting to see what other people are reading. Often times, that's how I find stuff on the 'net. For many of you, this isn't going to be interesting at all because quite frankly, most of the blogs I visit are either photography related, or friends and family. So because all these blogs are in my reader, I see every post from every one of them. So here's what I would like----->After you read this post, leave a comment and add any other blogs that you think I should check out. So without further ado.......

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips
http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/

Jared and Tiffany Jambor (family)
http://www.blog.thejambors.com/The_Jambors/Blog/Blog.html

Chad Holder (friend AND photographer)
http://www.chadholder.com/news/

Dick Morris (Political)
http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/

Dallas and Krista Tanner (family)
http://kristatanner.blogspot.com/

The Farnsworths (friends)
http://thetomfarnsworthfamily.blogspot.com/

Lee Richan (friend)
http://leerichan.blogspot.com/

The Simas' (friends)
http://14babyblues.blogspot.com/

Joe McNally (photography)
http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/

The Pothiers (friends)
http://71toes.blogspot.com/

The Marsh Family (friends)
http://marsh1994.blogspot.com/

Moose Peterson (photography)
http://www.moosenewsblog.com/

Glenn Ostlund (friend)
http://eh-musing.blogspot.com/

Scott Kelby-Photoshop Insider (photography)
http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/

Photoshop Disasters (sort of photography)
http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/

PhotoWalk Pro (photography)
http://www.revellphotography.com/blog/

Pixelated Image (photography)
http://www.pixelatedimage.com/blog/

The Barneys (friends)
http://itsthe6ofus.blogspot.com/

Strobist (photography)
http://strobist.blogspot.com/

Rocky & Krystal Tanner (family)
http://sugarandspiceplease.blogspot.com/

Sydnee Tanner (family)
http://stannerroxy.blogspot.com/

Terry White's Tech Blog (technology)
http://terrywhite.com/techblog/

The Breinholts (friends)
http://theamazingsix.blogspot.com/

The Brenchleys (friends)
http://paulcarolinebrenchley.blogspot.com/

The Ostlunds (friends)
http://ostlundfamily.blogspot.com/

Jon & Courtney Tanner (family)
http://www.blog.aztanners.com/The_Tanners/Blog/Blog.html

The Warners (friends)
http://warnerfabfam.blogspot.com/

The Zaharis' (friends)
http://zaharisfamily.blogspot.com/

My Dad
http://www.delberttanner.com/Site/Blog/Blog.html

two nerds in ohio

Okay so how big of nerds are we? I got a new laptop and gave Jen my old one. She didn't really think she needed/wanted one. However, since she's started using it, this is the position she assumes most of the time. So she is with me in Ohio right now and we've been looking at houses all day. We're back at my aparment now and this is what's going on. Seriously....how gay are we?!?!?!!?

It's all about the shoes

Someone VERY close to me recently informed me that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at his/her shoes. I thought this was pretty funny (and quite petty) but then I realized something--also with the help of this certain someone.

When I was in my first semester in college, I was sitting in church one day. Sitting next to me was a guy (I won't name him yet) who was wearing what I deemed to be pretty cool shoes. I won't mention the brand name or what they were. I'll just leave it at "they were cool shoes". They also looked identical to a pair that I myself owned. As an icebreaker, I leaned over to him and asked him about his shoes. A conversation ensued and as a result, he and I became very good friends. In fact, I credit this person with pretty much changing my life at that point. He and I had so much in common. We liked the same music, the same clothes, the same cars, the same magazines and just pretty much everything. We still continue to be good friends today with a lot of the same interests. And it all started with his shoes. Some reading this blog already know this story, and know that this person I'm speaking of is Mike Z.

So now whenever I see someone I don't know, I just look at their shoes to see if I want to get to know them. Just kidding, I don't really do that. But it all is kinda funny how the whole shoe thing brought Mike and I together.

Colin Meloy, Google Reader, & Rice Pudding

So I have three things to blog about today.


Colin Meloy Sings Live
For those of you who don't know, I'm a very big fan of a band called The Decemberists
The lead singer is a guy named Colin Meloy. This summer he is embarking on a solo tour. I bought tickets to see him in Boulder, CO on April 26th. Since April 29th is Jen and I's 15th wedding anniversary, I decided I would fly her to Boulder (I'll be coming in from Ohio) and meet up for a weekend of fun including stopping by the Colin Meloy concert. When I bought the tickets, Colin had just announced a new Solo album called Colin Meloy Sings Live. I preordered it and the first 300 people who did so received an autographed copy. I flew in from Ohio Friday night and went to bed. When I woke up on yesterday morning to take Sydnee to her Volleyball tournament, Jen mumbled to me as she was still half asleep "oh yeah, your Colin Meloy CD and T-shirt came". Needless to say I was pretty excited. Especially since on this CD Colin covers a song called "Ask" by the Smiths. Anyway, I'm pretty excited to have the CD and I'm super stoked to be going to spend a weekend away with Jen (and Colin).


Google Reader
I'm really liking the blogging thing. I'm able to keep up on all kinds of people that I wouldn't normally be able to, and learn all kinds of things that I may not otherwise be able to learn about. I have to credit my friend Chad Holder with really helping me make blogs work for me. He's the one that introduced Google Reader to me. I know I've mentioned it to some of you but I feel compelled to mention it again. Because it really is cool.

Google Reader is just an RSS reader. For those of you that don't know what a RSS reader is, let me explain it to you like this.... Imagine that each "post" on each "blog" you "subscribe" to is like an email. And each time the owner of a blog you "subscribe" to post a new entry, that post is emailed to you. Only instead of showing up in an email box, it shows up in your Google Reader box. That's pretty much what an RSS reader is Here is a picture of my Google Reader page.

You can see along the left side, a list of all the blogs or "feeds" that I subscribe to. The ones that are bold with a number to the right means that there are new items in that feed. In this case, DickMorris.com has 1 unread item and PhotoshopDisasters has 2 unread items. As I click on them I'm able to read the blog in the window to the right. It's a great way to stay up on all the blogs that I'm curious about and want to make sure I keep up on. It sure beats the heck out of proactively going to each blog once in a while to see if there is anything new on them.

Then what I do is I have set iGoogle as my homepage in my browser. iGoogle is like a virutal and customizeable desktop. It allows you to take various components and add them to your iGoogle desktop. See below for a view of my desktop.

You can see I have several sections of this page, all of which are customizeable. I have a weather section, a news section, calendar, sticky notes, wikipedia look up, shared documents, and of course my "Google Reader" section. Of course in addition to all this, you still have the Google web search at the top of the page. So each time I open my browser, this is the page I see. If you notice inside my Google Reader section, there are 3 listings. These are the 3 unread blogs that I have right now. As I click them, a balloon pops up within this page allowing me to read the text of the post from within this page without even having to navigate to another page (unless I want to which of course is an option). Once I've clicked on it and read the text of the blog, that entry disappears from my list of unread blogs. It's a great way to stay up on things and I really felt the need to blog about it. You can "add stuff" to this page and subsequent tabs and there really is lots of cool stuff. If you haven't checked out iGoogle you definitely should.


Rice Pudding Last but not least is my near tradition of making rice pudding on Sundays. We have a great family recipe for rice pudding that is delicious. My kids all love it when their aunt Anna makes it for them (she tends to do it anytime we're around her). I've made it occasionally on Sundays and am doing it more and more. My batches haven't been turning out too well lately, but I have to say that I today I made the absolutely PERFECT batch. When Carli came walking into the kitchen and found out I was making it, she gave me a big hug on my leg and squeezed so hard she wouldn't let go. I'm glad we can make this little tradition in our family and I'm glad the kids all like it. I just wish it would always turn out like it did today. I even used fresh eggs from our chickens in the recipe. One of the eggs I used was really big and when I cracked it open, there were two yokes in it! Weird.

Donuts and Dads

A week or two ago, Carli came to me and asked me if I was going to be in town on "The first Friday in April". As it turns out, my travel plans did in fact have in me Phoenix that day (today). Apparently the kindergarten at her school was doing a thing before school called Donuts and Dads. All the Kindergarten kids bring their dads and we eat donuts in the cafeteria. She has been so excited about it and has not stopped talking about it ever since she brought it up. She even put an invitation on my bed one day so when I got home I would see it. (see below)

Every Friday morning at 11:00 EST (7:00 in Arizona) I have a meeting with the other executives at work. I asked everyone if we could push the meeting back because of my date with my daughter. We did. So I'm on my way to the school this morning with Carli and my sister Tiffany sends me a text and tells me how bad I suck at blogging and that Jen is kicking my but lately with updates. I agreed that I needed to get better at it. The experience that followed during the next 30 minutes was so awesome, that I figured I just had to blog about it. Especially while it was fresh in my mind.

First of all, as I pulled in the parking lot, 80% of the vehicles in the lot were big trucks. There were tons of men walking hand in hand with their kids through the parking lot up to the school. I kind of had to laugh as I saw all these trucks in the parking lot. One thing I've noticed in Ohio as I look around is that people don't drive trucks as much as we do out here. Kind of funny.

As we were walking into the school it was so fun for me to see the excitement in Carli to have her Dad at her arm parading him through the school. As Dads, we don't get the opportunity to be involved as much in the parenting process at this level. Let's face it, the Moms get all the glory when it comes to this kind of thing. As I was walking down the hallway with all the other little kids holding their Dads hand, I couldn't help but think how sad it would have been for Carli to have gone to this event without her Dad. Tears of happiness started welling in my eyes as I was so happy to be able to do this with her. I started thinking of how sad it is that our kids are all growing up so fast and these innocent times are quickly fading. I don't know why but I got really emotional during this event this morning. I'm even getting emotional now as I type this.

Anyway, it was really cute to have a place all set at the table with the paper "tie" that she had made and colored for me. This tie gives new meaning to the term "clip-on tie". It was fastened with a paper clip. We sat and ate our donuts and drank our juice box while the kids sang to us and Carli gave me big hugs.

Even though Carli can be tough at times, I have to say I am very proud to be her Dad and I love her (as well as my other kids) more than I ever though it possible to love another human being. I really would like to spend more simple time with each of my kids so they can feel the love I have for them. Time is slipping away and I don't want to miss it.