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Hello time traveler. You've found the REALLY old stuff.
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have fun browsing!
It's good to be back at base camp. It's 70 degrees back here in North Carolina, and that's just the way I like it! Adios mountain town!
My friend Ben picked up a Nintendo Wii for me at Target today (right now they are hard to find, and are marked up excessively on Ebay). He rescued it from a voracious throng of tweens during his lunch break -- so I'll post a few pics with a review on that later, maybe this weekend.
I'm looking forward to squirreling away the item in my "Man Room," which is capitalized on purpose, and contains items outside the decorative consideration of my wife. So far all I have is a TV in it. I feel like there is a new Youtube video I can link to with every post... there is that much good stuff out there.
Happy Thanksgiving! I am updating the website right now from Frisco, CO. I'm using my brother Peter's 30 inch HD Apple Widescreen, running on a 64-bit workstation. This is seriously way more horsepower than my website requires! Also, Mac keyboards are weird, and might just prevent me from crossing over from the PC world. My dad worked (and still works) for IBM for the past 30 years. Something tells me that if another one of his sons buys an Apple computer, an alarm will go off and a trap door would open up underneath him. I digress, it's beautiful up here in the mountains. At 9,000 feet the air is dry and thin, and takes a little getting used to. Yesterday we took our family Christmas photo -- here is your chance for a low resolution sneak preview:
That little golden nugget in the middle is the new family prize, prince William. I already have two nephews, Matthew and Daniel on Laura's side of the family -- and I really enjoyed getting one more! That about wraps it up, we've been having a good time getting the whole family together and going on walks out here in the wilderness. Laura and I are looking forward to having Peter and Katie move to North Carolina next month so we can hang out more. Here is another picture from Peter's fancy camera... I have no idea why the baby is on the table.
And here's a pic of the Artemenko men!
And here's a pic of the house that Peter has been living in for the last year and a half -- pretty plush! Can you tell William is waving?
Behold... The Wizard of Floyd. I decided to build on an earlier post because it was so short (literally, that one line above was my post)... Anyways, my cousin Kelly sent out a link to the UCLA Tazer video which is making laps around the worldwide viral video circuit. I sometimes forget the distrubution of Youtube, which is the number 9 website. To put that in perspective, about 500,000 websites are registered every day. I'll let you see the video before I give my opinion: link to video here. In my book, this guy just failed "Pick Your Battles 101." I think he is an idiot for getting tazered for no reason. Read the fine print of the University bylaws. If you can't be in the library without an ID, and this seriously bothers you, avoid the library. Any effort, language or electricity used to remove this student from the library was a waste -- and could have been used to protect students from someone armed with more than an ID card.
They're BAAAAaaack!
Last night we had dinner at City Tavern in uptown Charlotte. The food was great, and we had a good time. It would appear in the picture below that I have gained weight. I have indeed! I am entering my holiday hibernation phase to store fat for winter. Pass the eggnog!
After dinner we hit the streets took in some music...
And then we braved the ballet!
Around the third act, the dancers began a more modern, interpretational "performance." It looked like lots of hopping and slapping of hands -- it must have been hard work, because in the small theater we could hear them breathing from our seats. Anyways, I began one of those laughing fits where everything becomes exponentially funnier, on an inversely proportional scale to the appropriate level of noise one can make in a theater. Hopping slapping dance + quiet theater audience = tears of joy, awkward shifting in seat, and a quiet laughter that resembled an aneurysm. To make matters more hilarious, the male performers' costumes had a certain degree of "shadowplay" that added an absurd three-dimensional quality that forced me to stare at the floor to stop from laughing. Lesson learned: the Perry family just has a higher quotient of culture than I do. In other family news, it sounds like my cousin Mark and his wife Ashley have landed safe in Nepal. You should definitely check out their blog when you get a free chance. "It’s quiet in Patan [outside of Kathmandu, Nepal] but sometimes eventful. Our back windows overlook a school, and we were just watching their Saturday Field Day from our window betting on which kid would win the race. Also there is an old woman who wanders near the backyard in full view of our bedroom window. She is interesting to watch, wears a bag as a skirt, digs in the dirt with branches and recently relieved herself right in front of the window where Mark was working..."
And here's a pic of Mark and Ashley:
Here are some friends they made:
I like how Mark has become a globe-trotting engineer and is using his talents and skills to make a genuine contribution! Go Mark and safe travels!
Happy birthday to me!
My brother Peter sure knows how to crack a joke!
File this one under "ripe for lawsuit" ...Meet Dizzler!. It's a downloadable, shareable, free music sharing app -- and I've already got it up and running on Artemenko.org, right here. Laura is accusing me of having my own Internet party in the corner of our living room right now. And she's right. You can search for music in Dizzler, and amazingly it has a LOT of music. I have no idea where it came from, the only stipulation seems to be that you cannot download anything to your computer. Also, here's a shout-out to Erin and Michael's blog called Life's a Trip. Props to them for using Wordpress! It's a nice change from blahgspot. =). I also put a link to their blog in the Links section so you don't forget about them. Naturally I reviewed their stellar new blog and found a handy link to their Flickr photos. My first impression is that everyone is using Flickr to host massive picture files of super high quality. Unfortunately for you, gentle reader, my life is knocked down to 30 kilobytes or less -- I'm cheap on bandwidth like that. Continuing on that point, here's a picture I found that had Laura in it, and I generously allowed it occupy 45 kilobytes because I think it's a great pic of L:
So what are you waiting for? Dizzle it up! I'm off to watch Lost. Had to add this at the last minute: " Preformed by a German known as "the trainrider". Before he died from leukemia, he enjoyed the last year of his life by surfing on trains."
This weekend was great. One of my best friends from Chicago, Maggie, came to visit us. It was so good to see her and show her our new home. The reason for her trip was two fold. She wanted to see Andrew and Laura doing our thing in Charlotte. She also wanted to partake in the 50th birthday of Jason's (her fiance's) dad. Jason's parents live about two hours from Charlotte in Danville, VA. So, after picking Maggie up, going to dinner and spending the night in Charlotte, we all headed Danville to see Jason, also a very close friend of ours, and to celebrate his dad's birthday. Jason, his four brothers and his wonderful parents all greeted us with open arms. Jason's parents moved to Danville a little over a year ago and this was the first time that Jason's father had his very own "man room." It was filled with John Deere souvenirs, John Wayne memorabilia and a California Raisins collection.
Jason's dad was a great sport about his big day. He even performed the church lady dance from SNL for us.
We had such a great time at the party. Jason's family prepared a spread of food, including two wonderful desserts -- a traditional ice cream cake and an ice cream cake made out of ice cream sandwiches, hot fudge and caramel. Here are Maggie and Jason digging in...
Lastly, I thought I would leave you with Jason's birthday gift to his dad. Words could not describe Steve's excitement. ;-)
I made a few adjustments to the layout this month. To be completely honest, I may have reached the limits of my web design know-how... you'll notice that pretty much the same elements are changing each month... maybe I'll take a class. If you have any doubt whether or not we get a "real" winter in the south, we do! Check out this picture I snapped this morning of the frost on our front lawn:
A friend at work sent me a link to Ravi Zacharias' blog, I like the concept of intellectually defending Christianity... IMHO too many people "feel"' their way into it through marketing, guilt, peer pressure, upbringing or just plain laziness. My dad always said that faith wasn't something where you just "check your brain at the door." Somehow that stuck with me. In other news Maggie is in town! We are driving up to Danville, Virginia tonight for Jason's father's B-day. You remember Maggie and Jason, our friends form Chicago, right? I'm sure Laura will post more about her visit later. Looking for old stuff down here? Other places you can find traces of our Netizenship: Myspace
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Update 11/28/06
Update 11/05/06
Update 11/04/06
