So over a year ago now my Mom and I went to Oregon for a family reunion. Long story short; I haven't posted many of these pictures online for family. So now, that is what I am doing. Some of these pictures are for family, but many are scenery and just 'pretty' pictures. I hope you can all enjoy them. Oregon was one of the prettier places I have seen. I can't wait to go back.
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| Burrill Reunion 2006 |
So we got home last night from work.. we had 3 packages down at the front office! We were only expecting one package, which was the changing table but we got 3. Courtney was super excited. We didn't know what anything was so we opened it up. A family member ordered the crib and changing table for us, so we didn't know what the other packages were. One of them were the bins that go under the changing table, which we were looking to buy ourselves. Her Mom bought them, so that's awesome. The other box had a baby monitor from our registry! A guy from my gaming community (easy) bought it off our registry. Just awesome. Thanks Zane.
Last night after we had dinner we decided to try some late-night shopping at Wal-Mart so it's not so hot out when we bring groceries up. That was a nightmare. The store was crap itself. Too many people, too much noise. Crap everywhere. Wal-Mart in my old town is 10x nicer than this one. I think we'll just stick with the actual grocery store for awhile.
Ugh. eBay sucks. I tried to sell some of my college text books and none of them sold. At all. Blah. There is something I need to try to sell and that's the Altered van that I acquired. I'm hoping I can get some extra money to save in the bank for our future. It's a movie prop, so I'm not exactly sure how much to sell it for.. it's also a vehicle you can't drive... so that brings up shipping of it. I don't even know if anyone would want to buy it. Does anyone here want the van from Altered? I did the logo on the van. The rust is just paint. It was aged and made to look like a plumbing truck. It's got a bunch plumbing stuff in it. If you want to start a plumbing company.. you're all set (:
So we painted Makayla's room on Sunday. Which is was almost therapeutic. We picked a color called "Summer Harvest". Needless to say it's like sunshine. Literally. It's very bright yellow, but not an ugly yellow. It's just bright and the doors glow when they're shut :p Jumping back to Friday; I moved my desk out into the dining room Friday night, then Saturday I taped the trim off. Sunday I used a gallon and a quart of paint to cover the walls. Had to go back to Home Depot to get the extra quart of paint for the last wall. Used most of it.. we have some left over for touch ups. Needless to say there were no complications in the paint job, and I am fairly proud of it. I didn't mess up! So I attached a slideshow I've been waiting since Sunday night to post. (Thanks Picasa for not working)
Enjoy the slideshow! (if this doesn't work properly right away I apologize)
So Courtney went to do her baby registry at Babies "R" Us last night with her mom and little sister. I ran some errands and then met them at the store. I was gone like 40 minutes and they were still at the front of the store when I got there. I swear it was like the 3 of them we're at a candy store when they made it to the clothes. Anyways, the registry can be found here. Or if that doesn't work search the registry for "Malta" at www.BabiesRUs.com. It's under Mark or Courtney. Obviously. Buy us something!
I just finished moving my "office" out of the soon-to-be babies room. It's now in the dining room... but it doesn't look as bad as I thought it would. We're painting the babies room on Sunday. I'll install a ceiling fan tomorrow and prep what I can. I have to go borrow some paint supplies from my dad Sunday morning. I actually look forward to painting this time!
So work has been a little bit stressful lately. In short, we have about 9 terrabytes of video information. That's 9,000 gigabytes; or 900,000 megabytes. This information (as of now) is not backed up. It hasn't been since we started making that content. It's been 1 year since we started storing that stuff. If we lose just one hard drive we lose over a year of work. That sucks. A lot.
Another problem is that the said hard drives (called striped raid 0 drives) are in the control room with us generating heat. We have already had a power supply failure in one our drives and lost a our work for a week. Luckily we got it back.
We've been trying to talk one of the partners into buying a whole new server solution for our computers. This includes new computers for ourselves (with 8 processors each!) and all new software (final cut and adobe stuff). We'll get the final budget next week and then I'll write about exactly what we'll get. It's just geeky stuff, but it's important to me. I just don't want to get my hopes up yet :(
I saw Transformers today. I'm probably about the last person to see it. Very very good. I was never bored. Not once. I got some laughs out of it, and I love the over the top action scenes. Perhaps my favorite quote was "This is better than Armageddon!" You know.. because Mr. Bay directed that too. It would be good to be Michael Bay right now. Very good indeed. I didn't catch any compositing errors or discrepancies. These are usually easy to catch. As far as I'm concerned, those robots we're real. We all know they weren't, but these particular special effects left me feeling like my own car was going to transform into a sentient being. They did something in Transformers that I didn't think they would be able to do.. I felt like I could relate with the robots. Bay brought a human element to the robots. Even before Bumblebee revealed himself he had character and behaved with meaning. He was only a car! Another part of the movie that I thought was executed very well was the love story. Every Bay movie has one. This one wasn't over the top. Nothing happened until the end of the movie. Frankly they didn't have time.
Overall, I thought the movie was awesome. 5/5 stars. I very much look forward to Transformers 2. And believe me. They won't miss a chance to cash in on that.
Saw the Harry Potter 5 today. Quite frankly I'm still surprised they even made it to 5 feature length films! I never read the books, that's Courtney's domain. But from that stand point, I think it was pretty good. It wasn't drawn out to me. It did lack action and some scenes did drag on, but the plot did manage to make me sympathize with the characters. Towards the end action picked up and made the wait well worth it. Wizard fights = AWESOME. It was a whole Light vs. Dark scenario, and special effects were awesome; using the elements of the set as weapons and such. Very well done. Voldemort is "officially" back. Not trying to spoil anything here either.. but the fight between Dumbledore and Voldemort was the best. I was glad to finally see Dumbledore display his power. He didn't only show his abilities in the showdown, but in another part as well. So cool. Soon I shall see Transformers.. I hear too many good things not to see it now. Later!
A couple nights ago just after work it was storming pretty bad.. afterwards it left a strangely yellow sky. I took some pictures. That is all.
:p
So... I'm 20 years old and having a baby. Hell, I'm 20 and I'm married! How does this seemingly sticky situation feel? Usually this isn't an ideal situation for people my age. I can't even legally drink yet but I can parent a child. Now to pose the question... what to people (in general) think of that?
There are a number of things an outsider would think of our situation. I know I never exactly thought highly of young people having kids, just because they may or may not be mature enough to handle children. They obviously can't make enough money to support someone else, and they obviously don't know how to take care of themselves, let alone another human being. That's how I used to think a long time ago. I mean no offense to anybody, of course. Clearly, this isn't the case anymore. There is nothing like a little enlightenment. I'm happy where I am. So is my wife. We live within our means, which means we will have enough money to raise our daughter. We are responsible with our money, I have a great job (that I enjoy) and we have a damned nice place for our age, which we pay for ourselves.
Was this planned? Of course not! We found out she was pregnant less than a week after we moved out... and got married 3 months later. But this isn't about that. We all know how "getting pregnant" happened.
I can't help but feel that some people look down on us, especially me because it's always the guy's "fault". That doesn't matter either. This will present many obstacles for us in the future as it would anyone at any age, actually. Quite honestly, I would rather have my kids when I'm young so I'm not too old when they get to be 18. I'll be 38. I will still have a bit of life ahead of me, as will Courtney. We will be able to (hopefully) see our grand kids grow up. By no means has having a baby young hinder our lives ahead of us. I still have room to grow, as does Courtney. I know somebody that had a baby at my age and he is now a very successful producer. Not only with money, but he has an excellent family. I could only hope to live up to that. In a year or so I'll probably tell you that life cannot be lived without a child.
So far Courtney being pregnant has been interesting to me. I'm always amazed to think about everything that goes on in there. It seems un-worldly. The pregnancy is going well. We're about 6 months along and everything is going perfectly. As the doctor said, she's on "Auto Pilot". All her major appointments are done for now. Now we're working on getting her room together. We're getting the Jungle Luv bedding from Baby's R Us. We're also getting a custom painted fan, we're getting the curtains and stuff, along with painting the room yellow. This was once my office :( Just kidding, I don't mind. I look forward to painting, it will be fun. I'll post photos of the process :)
I must admit. As much as I hate going to manufacturers for customer support, ie; Apple, Sony, Microsoft, etc. etc. - The Apple Corporation is my favorite. I'm not speaking sarcastically either. Last week my charger for my Powerbook died. I was worried they might not do anything about it. To make things worse I had to make an appointment just to see somebody at the Apple Store. I had to wait until Saturday when the product broke on Wednesday. Stupid thing is, the moment the "Mac Genius" plugged the charger in.. it worked! Most corporations at this point would say that's that and not bother with you again. My 1 year warranty runs out in 2 weeks.. lucky for me he wrote a note that will void that if the problem should happen to come up again. So basically if this charger does wind up breaking again, I have a free pass. It costs $80 to buy a new one, for nothing more than an extension chord with a light on it. If it had remained broken, they would have given me a new power adapter, no questions asked and a new warranty. That's just awesome.
Hi, and welcome to my blog. I guess everyone has one of these by now. If you don't know me, my name is Mark. I'm a graphic designer / video production guy. I will be blogging regularly, so long as people read my blogs. If I feel like people are reading I'll continue to blog about.. stuff. I'll try not to complain much or anything. I plan to write about every day stuff and such. Keep an eye out for new posts on my page. I'll try to keep things interesting. Thanks!
If you want to know more about me, be sure to go to my site! I'll be making updates to my portfolio (only have one thing in there right now) - The important thing is, I made updating my website easy for myself [this time]. I look forward to this! Thanks again (:
retetched.com
