SkiLudlow 2012 This was the annual trip that we make up to Breckenridge. I only invited a really small group of people to go this year because of how much I've had going on with friends' weddings, work, and various other projects I am involved with. Unfortunately the Kujda's couldn't make it due to Jason's grandmother expiring, but we pressed on and had a great trip. There is also a cool thing that the Epic Mountain group is doing with photographers all over the mountain. We got them to take our pics where possible.

New Server Install Before taking off for my trip, I finally got the Synology server fully configured with the secondary internal router. The entirety of my infrastructure is now on a series of RAID systems with redundancies behind redundancies. I'm finally content with my backup plans!

Trip to Houston My dear friend, Carly, had a performance at the Monnalisa Bar inside of Hotel Sorello in Houston (in the City Center Complex). I drove down from Austin with her wife and their son. We had a lovely time with my sister and her family. We took both of the kids to Houston's Museum of Natural Science in order to see the new paleontology exhibit. It was pretty awesome. I was also delighted to spend time with a bunch of my Houston friends, several who even came out to the show.

Saturday with UT and Sting My friend Gary invited me to a UT game with his wife, Ashley. I hadn't been to a game since 2011 and so was really excited to check it out. It just so happened, however, that I had won tickets to see Sting play at the ACL Moody theater as well. I wound up having to leave the game a little early so that I could pickup Roxanne and take her to the show. It turned out to be one of the coolest shows I've ever seen and there's a full story to go along with the experience!

Best of China My dear little buddy Ben had to travel to China for business. He was mostly going to explore the Canton fair for new company products and to meet with his Chinese manufacturing team. With the bulk of his hotels covered I was able to tag along and explore the country with him. In the course of ten days we managed to visit Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Fashon, and Shanghai. I took somewhere around 800 pictures and as per my usual, distributed them throughout a variety of albums. A short selection of my favorites can be found in this dedicated album. Enjoy!

Synchronic: Neo-Urbanism I was so incredibly humbled to have been invited to speak at the most recent Synchronic series. A dear friend of mine named Felip Ballesteros was tasked with starting a new branch of GRCurrent - an incubator in Grand Rapids. The branch would go on to be called Synchronic. It was to run in a similar fashion to TED talks. About a month before my election ended, Felip called me up one day and asked if I would be willing to speak at the event. It was to take place just a week after the November 4th election and so I didn't have a great deal of time to prepare for it with everything else going on. While I certainly thought he could do way better than me, I'm never one to turn down a good opportunity. I managed to put together a 25-minute speech and presentation on the pre-selected topic of Neo-Urbanism. I had a fair amount of experience with the topic having served as an Austin City Commissioner to the Mueller Neighborhood - a neighborhood strictly built around the principles of Neo-Urbanism. The event wound up being completely sold out and the audience was spectacular. It was a wonderful experience and I loved meeting everyone.

Drew and Emma's Dog My friend Drew came into town from Grand Rapids with his friend Emma. They were moving Emma from Grand Rapids to San Diego and making stops along the way. I had them stay in Austin with me for a night and had a quick photoshoot with Emma's dog named Mim.

Devin Dates I don't normally snap a bunch of pictures on my lovely dates with Devin since I'm otherwise engaged in our date, but I thought I'd put the few random ones that I had in a single gallery so I could keep up with them :) I'm ever so grateful that among all of her other wonderful and amazing qualities, she is so good at taking pictures of our adventures, of which she tags with #keventures and #deventures -- depending on whose adventure we're going on. As a super sentimental and nostalgic person (rare as that seems these days), I do love having these memories for my galleries.

KP and the Boom Boom at the Blanton KP and the Boom Boom played a really bad ass show at the Blanton one night. Carly was singing backup for them and with both Nick and Doug having played in Kyloe Blue before (and Bryan having practiced with us), at least half of KP has played in our band. I always try to go and support them when and where I can. This was just one of those evenings. Unfortunately Devin was out babysitting her two favorite kiddos in the world and couldn't come with.

Last Day in Kansas City After spending eight full days in Kansas City with my dear old buddy, DaveG, it was finally time to get everything ready to go for my flight out to Bangkok in the morning. Dave was especially great at helping me put together little sorting packs just to make everything a little easier to keep up with within my nice Osprey backpack. I spent as much time with little Atti as I could since I'll definitely be missing her along the way.