After spending the last two years of my career as more of a designer than an art director, I'm finally getting to do some true art direction. And I love absolutely love the change of scenery. So far the project is scooting along nicely despite the confusion on the client side -- just make up your damned mind already. At least we're getting to do pretty much whatever we want right now.

Finally got to see "waiting for guffman" last night. Laughed my ass off. Not quite as funny as "best in show", but christopher guest is a genius. Nice job on the "colorful" portrayal of an over-the-top theater nut. Sthuuuper!!!

The last of my fantasy football drafts takes place today around noon. Unlike the last one, this one is an auto-draft that randomizes order and picks players based on your ranking from #1 on down. There's 12 of us and it'll be interesting to see who gets who. Can I get Marshall Faulk on my team at least once? Please?

After spending the last two years of my career as more of a designer than an art director, I'm finally getting to do some true art direction. And I love absolutely love the change of scenery. So far the project is scooting along nicely despite the confusion on the client side -- just make up your damned mind already. At least we're getting to do pretty much whatever we want right now.

Finally got to see "waiting for guffman" last night. Laughed my ass off. Not quite as funny as "best in show", but christopher guest is a genius. Nice job on the "colorful" portrayal of an over-the-top theater nut. Sthuuuper!!!

The last of my fantasy football drafts takes place today around noon. Unlike the last one, this one is an auto-draft that randomizes order and picks players based on your ranking from #1 on down. There's 12 of us and it'll be interesting to see who gets who. Can I get Marshall Faulk on my team at least once? Please?

Holy cow. I'm not sure if I should even be posting this (considering the crap I'll take for admitting it), but friday night jessie and I decided to lay low and show up at the apple store at 10:20 for the "100 minutes to jaguar" event celebrating the launch of the newest version of OSX from apple. We heard they were giving away an imac and thought we'd show up among the few other nerds in hopes of winning something. After dinner at fuego's we made our way to willow bend around 10:00. That's when the surprise came:

Already around 300 people in line waiting to get inside. Boy were we misguided in our preconceived notions.

So we decided to stick around and see what happens. After looking further up the line for ruben, we got in line and he showed up about 10 minutes later. As nerdy as it sounds, we had a pretty fun time taking it all in. At 10:20 the doors opened and the line slowly moved forward. At 10:45 I decided to go see how bad it got and the end of the line reached the food court. Well over 1000 people. Pretty impressive even if most of the crowd were hardcore nerds with nothing else much better to do on a friday night. Us included. :) There was a good mix of people and we enjoyed ourselves at others expense until we finally got inside around 11:30. I got a free mousepad and checked out a few of the new items on display. And that's pretty much it. I figure a lot of the people who were purchasing big ticket items to take advantage of the 10% discount on anything in the store. Look for shares of apple to be up in trading monday morning (guaranteed).

West village on saturday night. Not too impressed. Cheese factor deluxe with a side of plastic people. The sirloin at texas land and cattle (followed by the gellato) made the evening. We're being smart these days and splitting a dish when we go out. There's usually more than enough food for both of us and it's a lot cheaper, too.

Ran far and fast this morning in the heat. Bad idea. Never go running after 8:00 in august -- it's just too damn hot. At 12:30 everyone in todd's fantasy league got online and we had our draft. I got some nice picks and I feel much better going into the season this year than last. A lot more is at stake, too. The winner should take home at least $700 when the season is over. C'mon, shaun alexander...

I like that time.

Billable hours galore at work this week. Patrick, connie and I have been hard at work gathering information, estimates, samples and bids for the latest "major energy provider" project. It's weird dipping my toes into the print world again. Not that I'm complaining about the temporary change in scenery, but there's a lot more to absorb when you're outside the realm of 72dpi. And while I have a lot of print experience from my Agnew Associates days, I'm learning a lot in the process. Now if only it didn't have to be turned around quite so damn fast...

Lessons in home ownership 101:

1) Never let your grass grow higher than 12 inches. Doing so will make mowing it a royal pain in the ass.

2) Make it a habit to pick up doggie doo in the back yard on a regular basis.

3) Water your foundation in august.

We now return you to your regular scheduled program...

Another minor absence from the blog while preoccupied with living life rather than documenting it. It's amazing how much crap you can cram into four days.

Friday, the folks came up and brought cullen back to jennifer and david. They had the chance to take him to "poppyland" and my father puts it -- he's cullen's "poppy" and their house has come to be known as poppyland. Cullen was awesome as usual and my parents are pretty much the best grandparents in the world. They had good practice with us, I guess.

While they were here, we got a chance to see jen in "annie get your gun" playing at the denton theater. Jen played the lead in high school and in my opinion, made a much better annie. Overall, it was good show and not a bad night of entertainment for 9 bucks.

Saturday morning dad and I played a round of "galf" at westridge, the new course out in mckinney. It's the first time he's played up here since I moved to north texas 8 years ago. What a great golf course. Aside from the severe wind which made a par 5 like playing at the british open, it was one of the best deals I've found. $36 for 18 on a saturday is a damn good deal, especially since the course is brand spankin' new.

The rest of the weekend was rather business as usual. We did catch a showing of perhaps the worst movie ever made on saturday -- The master of disguise. Bad idea. I'm sure I'll never live that suggestion down, but since we'd seen everything else on the marquee (almost), I thought it might be a brainless comedy with a few laughs delivered by the "funny back in the SNL days" dana carvey. What a piece of crap! No one was laughing. Not even the kids. How movies like this get made in the first place is a mystery to me.

So what do you do when the movie sucks and you've still got time on your hands? Why go play bingo, of course. :) It's cheap, you have a chance to win some dough and there's lots of laughs to be found at the late night bingo hall in plano. If you ever want a self-esteem booster, go to a bingo hall on a saturday night. There's nothing quite like it.

It's about time I threw another party. The "end of the summer" party will take place on august 30th. Vegas odds makers are currently taking 20-1 odds on justin rives saying he'll come and then not show up. I plan on putting most of what little savings I have on that bet.

Let me know if you didn't get the invite and wanna come.

Payday. I'll be on the lookout for swinging axes. Sucks it's come to that.

Holy cow! Talk about a day for being outside...

I'm sure it won't feel this good all day, but right now the temperature is hovering in the mid-70's with a nice little breeze to boot. I guess a cool front came through last night. Feels like october instead of august. Nice.

Talked with my cousin jamie yesterday who celebrated his 28th birthday. Jamie can be seen here in all his redneck glory. (All the humphrey clan are getting old, by the way). He told me about the new network card for the PS2 coming out later this month. I had no idea. Looks like I'll be kicking his ass at madden 2003 from the comfort of our own living rooms 200 miles apart. What a concept. Anyone looking to buy me a nice birthday present on the 5th of september should take note...

Pink. Pink. Pink. I Win.

My blog has been suffering from vast amount of shit to do these days. Not only has work picked-up the pace, my life outside of work seems to be more occupied than it was just a few short weeks ago.

First the good news: jessie has a job. She starts wednesday at verizon as a web writer on a contract basis with intent to hire if the candidate does the job well. I have no doubts she'll impress, but I hope it's everything she wants and doesn't have to put up with too much corporate b.s. in a huge company like verizon. The hiring practices and blind circumstances she's walking into are a little strange, but considering the pay is good and if nothing else it's a job until next year, I'd say she's in good shape. And darn lucky, too. Go jessie.

Life on the workfront is still different since the axe swung, but things are starting to settle into a pace and everyone has accepted things the way they are. I wouldn't go so far to say morale is anything above "okay", but we're trying not to let certain things or certain people annoy us from doing our jobs. On the plus side, my office got new carpet last week and the installers managed to move my vast amount of stuff around without breaking a single thing. Oh, what a lovely shade of purple! I'm going to vomit now...

I'm still a nerd, too. Still spending too much time staring a pixels and digital daydreaming. My latest addiction is links golf for OSX. Not only can I spend too much time on the real golf course, I can spend too much time playing it on the 'puter inside. Hi, my name's jonathan and I'm a nerd...

The best thing about august is gearing up for another exciting season of NFL. With the NFL comes fantasy football and with fantasy football comes at least an hour a day researching my stats and making sure I stay on top of my league. I'm in three different leagues so far this year including the one I started three years ago that myself and 11 others are playing. God bless fantasy football.

Tracy got married to steven this weekend in palestine. It was a nice ceremony, but a long trip in a short time span. Pretty soon there will no longer be anyone I know who's not married... expect todd, of course. I think I'm safe on that one for a little while.

Wahoo! Finally the client buys an idea. Rock on. After 8 months of work (off and on), it feels good to have something come out right at work. Now if only we can pick up a few more jobs like that...

My cousin tracy's wedding is this weekend. She's marrying a really cool guy and I'm looking forward to going down to the great urban metropolis known as palestine to see the family. Should be fun.

I'm glad july is over. While the weather was been nice considering we just yesterday hit the 100 mark, there were a few rocky days I'd just as soon forget. Most memorably last monday.

Jessie has been busy putting her book together and doing the typical unemployment stuff -- filing for wages, sending out resumes... hanging out by the pool. :) I spent a good part of the weekend getting jessieday.com up an running. Right now it's just a patch to fix the leak in the boat, but eventually we'll totally revamp the site and I'm sure she'll want to set up a blog as well. And before you think to your self -- "wow -- that looks a lot like skaines.com", I know. For times sake, I kept the same stylesheet, color scheme and adjusted the template to concoct an entire site (sans graphics) in a day and a half. Not too shabby, if I say so myself. :)

I've officially been a homeowner for one year now. I celebrated the paper anniversary last thursday by doing pretty much nothing. I did find out my insurance is escrowed into the monthly payment and I'll no longer be writing a separate check to state farm. That helps me out at least. As for everything else, my payments are still going up about $60 a month to compensate for a tax escrow shortage. Great. I'll be making the $1500 up in monthly installments over the next 24 months. Home ownership is awesome, don't get me wrong, but it sure is expensive.

I stole some clubs on ebay last week and while the purchase was made before hell broke loose at tb (which I would have waited) I'm glad I got 'em. Normally around $600 new, I purchased a barely used set of adams tight lies GT irons for $240 and absolutely love them. I played a round at castle hills (thanks, uno) friday twilight with bart and todd and played eagle point yesterday with aaron brown. Talk about the two opposite extremes of golf courses... castle hills is by far the nicest course I've ever played, while my old standby in denton is slowly turning into a goat ranch. The grass was still too damned high to play anything but the fairways and between the two of us we probably lost a dozen balls in the rough. Of course, we found about a dozen other balls lost from other players, but it didn't make up for the fact that unless you're playing in england, you should not lose a ball in high grass three feet off the fairway. Mow your frickin' course, idiots.

Saturday night we had a triple date with the figliola's and the streit's. Dinner at blue mesa and a late night showing of "signs" at tinseltown. Not a bad movie, but not really a great one, either. There were some scary, edge of your seat moments and the guy behind us seem to find jesus in the showing as he said his name at least 10 times during the showing. It was like clockwork -- scary scene, theater jumps in horror... "jesus" said the guy under his breath behind us. Nice.

I'm off to work. It's just not the same as it used to be, but I'm glad it's paying my bills. If you know of any copywriter positions around big d, write jessie, will ya?