UT Game with the Walkers My favorite couple have only been living in Austin for a couple of months now and have definitely never been to a UT football game. Roxanne in particular is a pretty huge football fan (albeit more so the NFL than college), but I thought she'd enjoy a good UT game. Caroline and I took Carly and Roxanne to a tailgating party that my good friends Eric Schieck and Jason Schmitt are a part of, got sufficiently intoxicated, and then made our way to the stadium.

ACL Weekend 2011 I got the boys from Orlando to make another trip out west for ACL 2011! Unfortunately they couldn't stay quite as long as I was hoping they could, but we had a pretty fantastic time nevertheless. The highlight was definitely seeing Cold Play, though on Saturday night we went to a small venue with Fitz and the Tantrums. Of course we didn't feel like sitting in the crowd and so instead just hung in the back room playing chess all night while the band played on.

SkiLudlow 2011 This was my first year of organizing the big ski trip up to Breckenridge (Kujda has always done it in the past) and I think it was overall a great success. The only downside to organizing the trip was that I didn't really have time to take any pictures and so was left with an unusually small gallery of just 26 photos! I also learned that it's tiring to mobilize 27 people from various parts of the country into the mountains.

Skiing Mt. Ashland While working up in Medford (with Musician's Friend), I thought I'd check out the local ski area, Mt. Ashland. I guess if you've never skied before, this would be a pretty cool thing. However, it's by far the smallest mountain I've ever skied. It literally would take me about 3 minutes to get from the summit to the basin, and then about another 20 or so minutes to get back up there. I'm glad I checked it out and added another notch on my ski belt, but I wouldn't really recommend going out of your way to visit the place.

Guadalupe Mountains State Park Caroline and I thought it would be fun to hike the Guadalupe Mountains out in west Texas. This was a hell of a trip given the time commitment necessary just to get out there. We left on Friday after work and drove straight through to Ft. Stockton where we found a motel for the night. The motel owner was adamant about the fact that their motel was the only one in the town still run by Americans. We got up pretty early the next day and drove the remaining 2 hours or so to the basin of the mountain. After speaking with the park rangers for about 20 minutes, we started out hike. Little did we know that it was going to take us almost 6 hours to summit the mountain and we're lucky we made it up there before the sun went down. We had hoped to sit atop the mountain drinking whiskey and star gazing, but by the time we got to the top, setup, and had dinner, we both passed out no later than 8pm.

Texas APA Conference Booth We had a booth at the Texas Association of Planners Conference and I wanted to make sure I took a few shots of our booth content. It was BY FAR the least impressive booth in the entire place, but we we're happy connecting with lots of different people and trying to make some new business contacts. Also, the story that Jerry Patterson (head of the Texas GLO) told was pretty funny too.

Synology RS-411 Unpackaging The Synology RS-411 is the RAID machine that my buddy Dave G. told me I would be best served with so I went ahead and picked it up. This little puppy only sits on my local network (so it can't be hacked), but I use it for backing up all of my data on a daily basis. It's a 12TB array running RAID 5, so it should be pretty stable.

SkiKujda 2010 Yet another year up to Breckenridge on the annual SkiKujda trip. We went pretty early this year and definitely benefited from tons of great snow. Unfortunately that also meant that it was significantly colder than normal. Since I had to make a huge drive across the country with Liz right after the trip, I made every effort possible to safeguard myself from illness. By the end of the trip, my hands were literally raw from washing them so frequently.

Houston with Liz Since Liz and I had come in town to visit some friends, I got a big group of people to meet up at Onion Creek and then head over to Tony's on 23rd street in the Heights.

Hanging in Austin with Liz After I got back from SkiKujda, I was fortunate enough to pickup Liz from the airport at the same time. This was the first time that she had been to Austin in several years and so I was pretty happy to be showing her around. In addition to all sorts of local exploring, we even took a trip out to Driftwood for some original Saltlick.