So here I am, just 2 weeks away from instant fatherhood. Not that I wasn’t a father before. Now it’s going to be a full time deal. To be honest, I am not even that nervous about it. I have made all the arrangements as far as school and such. We have a full week after he gets here to take care of signing up and registering. (I asked and they told me he needed to be living in the area before registering.) I know Andrew is excited about the move. Of course I realize that this is probably going to be the toughest time period to raise a child. He is just getting ready to hit 13 which means I get to face all of the teenage years. This would be where my dad gets to sit back and watch me while laughing because he knows what I did to him. It’s going to be an interesting time to read the blog soon.

In other news, I am not sure if I had mentioned it here yet but it looks like there will not be a DragonCon for me and Amy this year. If you were reading last year at this time you know that we were ramping up for the big DragonCon. DragonCon is THE convention for costuming and the like. The 501st play a big roll there, and it also allows us to play around with other costumes. Last year you may recall I did the Alien Spiderman and Spike. Well, this year it just doesn’t seem feasible to have Andrew come in on the 29th of Aug. and then the 2nd of September head to the Con and then back here to have him start school on the 6th. It’s just not going to happen. I don’t think it would be right to jump start Andrew into the Con scene with DC anyways. It’s a little much to be a first con. The current plan is for his first big Con to be Farpoint in Feb. I am sure we will be having different garrison events he can attend as well.

You may have noticed a slight decline in posting to the blog in the last few weeks. This is mostly because of an increase in workload at work. We have had a few problems with servers and a number of new projects that have kept me busily tapping away at my keyboard and pulling out my hair. I am somewhat surprised that I have been able to post today. What I don’t find surprising is that I started this post at about 10am and it’s getting finished up at 6pm. I really hope to be able to post more through the week. We’ll see if we can’t ramp this baby back up.

BTW, the past few weekends weren’t all that action packed. Mostly they have been filled with cleaning and getting the place ready for Andrew’s arrival. Still no gloves yet.

I am still at a loss for words over Katie’s passing. To be honest I had never met her, but I do know her family, and through them I feel like I knew her quite well. We followed the stories from when she started getting sick, and how the entire 501st pulled together to show her support.

I wish I could paint a memorial, or write up a grand story, but I don’t have the skills. But I took what I do know and created this Tribute Video in memory of Katie

Today, Albin posted this letter to the 501st boards. It touched me, and since I have posted quite a few times about Katie, I thought I would re-post it here.

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As some of you may have already heard, my daughter Katie finally ended her battle with cancer on Tuesday when she passed away around 5:30 pm. Katie’s health had been declining so I began my leave of absence from work that day, not knowing that would be the day she would pass. Katie enjoyed a quiet morning with me and Kathy, watching t.v. and playing with her kittens. She asked me to put Star Wars Episode II on, then laid down to take a nap. Hours later she passed away in her sleep. She was surrounded by both sets of parents, her oncologist, her hospice nurse, and her pastor. It was a minor miracle that everyone managed to be there at just the right time. I held Katie in my arms as she struggled with her transformation, holding her close and reassuring her that it was okay to let go. She let out a deep and satisfying sigh with her last breath and it sounded just like when she was a baby. I must have held her for two hours.

Katie’s older sister, Allie, was devastated by the news. But she’s a trooper at heart and today she marched bravely to her first day of school in spite of her loss. I asked her if she was sure she wanted to go, and she said she had to – Katie had wanted to make the first day of school and couldn’t, so Allie would do it for her. Katie’s step-mom, Kathy, turned in the math book Katie worked so hard on over the summer.

It was a beautiful day. Katie had passed at just the right time – waiting long enough to see Hilary Duff in person and seeing members of the Carolina Garrison who visited her on Saturday. But soon enough for Allie to have _just_ enough time to start fresh at school.

Katie’s funeral will be held tomorrow, Friday August 12th, at Riverland Hills Baptist Church on St. Andrews Rd. in Columbia, SC. Service will be at 4 pm. Everyone who attends is encouraged to wear something pink, as that is what Katie would have wanted.

This is the most horrible experience of my life, but it is also the most incredible lesson I’ve had the privilege to witness. Katie fought cancer every step of the way, never complaining about her treatments or her disabilities. She was a plucky, wonderful child who told me she was not
afraid to die. A big fan of the LOTR character , Frodo, she remarked to me a couple weeks ago that Frodo was lucky to go in the boat over the seas to the undying lands, and likened that to real-world death. She said that there was no reason to cry, because over there there are no monsters and whoever goes over is happy and too busy having fun to
miss those they left behind.

God was at work here, no matter what anyone says. Katie had two fathers, and her heavenly one just wanted her more than her earthly one and took her home. Through all the praying and hoping, I have always felt the spirit of calm that God’s will would be worked even if I couldn’t understand it. One day I will. I’ll be in heaven and Katie will take me by the hand and show me around and reassure me that everything was fine.
It’s a nice dream I have.

I can’t thank everyone adequately here for the love and encouragement you’ve all shown me and my family and to Katie herself. If you could only see the hundreds of cards and gifts and letters Katie received you’d know just how loved she was. I will forever be grateful to everyone for their support.

I will be mostly out of touch for some time but promise to return soon.
Please hug someone you love.

God bless you all.

Albin Johnson
Katie’s dad
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Rest now Little one, The journey is over.

This last weekend defiantly had it’s plusses and minuses. The lead into the weekend was absolutely rough though. I am having issues getting my RIS server working on a network. Something is wrong with my PXE boot and it won’t register with the DHCP server. Now that I have most people confused, I’ll just say that it’s been stressing me out a lot over the past week as it’s a very high visibility project. I need to find a new picture for stress. I think my fish in a blender picture is getting over used.

Saturday I slept in a little bit. Amy got up early so she could attend her work’s open house. She was gone pretty much the whole morning with this. I woke up slowly and did some stuff on the computer before getting ready for the Art Insights Gallery event. One of the great Star Wars artists was being showcased, John Alvin. John is responsible for many many Movie poster artworks such as E.T., Blade Runner, Lion King, and lots more. There were 4 of us to troop the event. We wandered around the shopping area that the gallery was in and pulled in many onlookers. The kids were enamored with Darth Vader of course. One of the works that John had done was the poster art for the Star Wars Celebration I. Yes, the first one out in Denver. I was there for all three days of it (Heather joined me for some, and the Rest I was with John Myers.) Funny when you look back on it. I remember sitting in line (In the mud) with John M. and seeing all the Star Wars costumes around us (not too many troopers back then.) Who knew that both of us would be as involved as we are now! So, Mr. Alvin did the artwork for the posters, and only a few of them were available for sale. He brought one of these posters with him to the Gallery and was kind enough to sign it and sell it to me. As a thank you for trooping the event they also gave us a really cool Star Wars montage print. Pictures from the event can be found here

On Sunday I slept in as usual and got the standard late start. We made a quick run to the store to pick up a few things. While we were out we stopped at Red Robin for lunch. This was of course my undoing. I ordered my usual Freckled Lemonade (Lemonade with strawberry bits in it) and within the first few seconds I down the first glass. The waitress was quick to pick up that I was a bit thirsty. She brought out a HUGE mug-o-lemonade next. I drank 2 full ones. On top of that I ate a chili burger. I spent the hour after that laying on the couch with a stomach ache. This wiped me out for the rest of the day. Thankfully we didn’t have much planned. We sat and watched White Noise as our Sunday movie. I rate it an Eh. It was good for creepy and scarey, bad for plot and storyline.

So an early night later my PXE problem persists. sigh

Today is July the 26th. Andrew is due to arrive on August 29th early in the morning. Preparations have already begun. This last weekend was spent doing another Purge and cleaning spree. As one of my friends said, “Wow, is your place really that dirty? Seems like all you do is clean!” No, it’s not that dirty. As a matter of fact, the house is usually quite clean. It’s just that I have so much Stuff that it tends to turn into clutter around everywhere! I still haven’t found the spider-man gloves yet, but the house is starting to become less cluttered. I took out another truck full of crap to the dumpster. Its crazy the amount of stuff that I was just holding onto for the sake of holding onto. For instance, I have a subscription to a magazine called Maximum PC. It’s a great magazine, I highly suggest it. But I never read any of the old issues. I had a box outside that was filled to the brim with old issues. Not any more.

So now Andrew’s room is completely set for him to arrive. I have cleaned out the desk, the closet and everything else that isn’t supposed to be in there. There are some Toys, and furniture. I have also added his computer to the room, but it’s not working yet. I bought him a new case but something isn’t working on it and I haven’t figured out what yet. I am almost to the point of just going and buying one of the $400 HP machines and upgrading it with a new Video card (I have spares). Well see if I can get this one working, but it may just turn into a project PC for Andrew to tinker with. Outside of that, his room is ready to go. (It’s no longer the evil Den)

Things have not lightened up at work either. I have been focusing all of my work time on building a RIS server. For those that don’t know, RIS stands for Remote Installation Services. It’s a server on the network that can remotely install full machines with new operating systems and baselines. Using this, we can place a new computer at someone’s desk and just set it to download its OS from the RIS server. Since it’s all done over the network and automagicly, there are no disks needed and it’s relatively un-attended. For some odd reason, the first few times I tried to get the damn thing to work it kept saying I didn’t have the right permissions. So I wiped it and started over.

As for the rest of lifes goings on. I have finally posted the pictures from the Fourth of July, and from the children’s hospital event. There isn’t much to the pictures for the 4th, mostly just fireworks and a cute picture of me and Amy. The children’s hospital was a very informative event. This was not your average hospital. This was an “Advanced Care” facility. Basically, this is where children come after the extended hospital stays for long term care and, hopefully, recovery. Many of the children were un-able to respond but we were told that the stimulus of seeing us in costume was good for them. The parents that were on hand for our visit also appreciated our efforts. It was a sad trip, but overall rewarding.

Who knows what will happen this weekend. For that matter, the week isn’t up yet…

I guess that means I should probably write a little more often. The sad thing is that there hasn’t really been anything great to write about. Life has progressed as normal, well as normal as can be expected with the life that is mine. I have purchased Andrews ticket to come out here. I got a great deal through a site called Kayak. So in roughly a month he will arrive to shake things up around here. It will defiantly be an experience, but I am more then willing and ready.

In other saddening news, it would appear that the great Scotty, James Doohan, has passed away this morning. I don’t believe that in all my years of con going I ever got the chance to meet him, but from what I have heard, he was a great individual. There may be rifts between Star Wars and Star Trek fans, but when it comes down to it, when a good person passes away, everyone connected feels it. So today James Doohan has become one with the force and has beamed up for the last time. Thanks for the Memories Scotty!

On a happier note, the newest trailer for the Serenity movie came out today. For those not in the know, Serenity is the movie that was born from the TV show Firefly. This was a show that was picked up by Fox, but being Fox, they f’d it up beyond belief. The actually aired the episodes out of order, they threw it in a Friday night death slot. I for one loved the show. I started watching when they first aired it and was hooked. I was really upset when the show was canceled. Like wise I was very excited when I found it all on DVD. Last year, when it came out, I sat and did a firefly marathon. It was great to watch all of the shows in the order they were meant to be seen in. So now, about a year later, we prepare for Serenity! There have been two trailers released and both just make me want to see the Movie more and more. Amy has even made plans for when Andrew arrives, we will be sitting and watching the Firefly episodes again to catch him up.

This last week has been crazy. There have been so many changes going on, it’s not even funny. Things at work are on the verge of ballistic and it’s defiantly having an effect on me. I have been a little more stressed out than usual, and the sad thing is that I don’t know that it’s going to get better for a while. You see, we have Tons of shakeups here at work going on around the end of July, Andrew coming in at the end of Aug., Andrews school starting up in September, and all of the miscellaneous stuff in between. This is probably the reason I haven’t been writing much.

The last weekend went really well. I bought me a new storage closet for the back patio that works out great! Plus we really got a lot accomplished in the way of cleaning up. They may or may not be more of that this weekend. On Saturday we have a few things going on. In the afternoon we will be making a stop off at one of the children’s hospitals in Richmond VA to do some trooping and give the kids there a few smiles. I know troops like this are tough, but knowing that the kids will enjoy it makes it all worth the effort. After that it will be down to Mark’s place for a Luau party. Not sure what time we will get back from that. Hopefully my inspiration to write more will manifest soon.

Time to introduce you to two new joys in my life. These of course do nothing to replace the current joys, they in fact, add quite a bit to those, but I digress. As you can gather from some of the previous posts (few as they have been) I have picked up a new game, Battlefield 2. The other joy is not new at all but has been around for a while, I just have been late to the game in signing up for it. All-Of-MP3 is a website where you can download Music, Legally! First lets start with the gaming.

Many a moon ago there was Wolfenstein. It was a strange and mysterious castle where lots of Nazi’s bred poorly fed German shepherds and demons, you know, like you do. In this strange castle, you would wander around and shoot these Nazi’s, and their little dogs too (and eat the dog food), you know, like you do. Castle Wolfenstein was one of the first games to revolutionize the First Person Shooter genre of games. It spawned some of our all time favorites like Doom, Quake, and Tribes. Tribes was a personal favorite because it was much more team based and not just a walk through shoot everything sort of game. It was tribes that brought me into the team based competitive gaming society. Trust me when I say that the community that surrounds gaming competition is a lot bigger then you could possibly imagine.

Getting involved in a good team and starting competition led me to a little known online radio station named the Tribes Sportscast Network (Soon to be re-named to Team Sportscast Network). Following my love of radio I jumped in and started working with them to broadcast all of my favorite games, Tribes, Jedi Knight, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and, new at the time, Battlefield 1942. BF1942 brought together some great aspects of multiple games and combined them into a whole new wartime experience. In Tribes you had multiple rolls for team members and to compete well, you really needed a diverse team. In addition to your flag runners and defensive players, you needed engineers and medics. Games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein brought a whole new sort of game with a conquest style, you capture and area and hold it as long as possible. What BF1942 did was to take the game style of a conquest type, combine it with a variety of team members, then throw in tons upon tons of vehicles. If you wanted to drive a tank, you could. Fly a plane? Hop on in! This was an amazing aspect of First Person Shooters. I no longer had to walk over to a flag and sit un-guarded. All of this was set in a World War II environment. The maps were actual locations of important battles for the time.

Now, take the game play of Battlefield 1942, and throw in modern weaponry and a new shiny graphics engine, you get Battlefield 2. Modern vehicles, modern guns, and a few familiar looking maps make this a phenomenal game to immerse yourself in. Nothing I have played lately has given me the fun factor satisfaction of jumping into an F-15 with a friend gunning for me, doing a bombing run over an enemy base and then jumping out to parachute down, hop into an enemy tank and take the base. They also added a whole new aspect to the game with squads and commanders. As a squad leader you can send direction to your squad mates and request support from your commander. As a commander you can use radar and UAV to spot enemy’s, provide direction for your squads, and drop in supplies and artillery. A good commander and turn the game around really quick. The game does have a few faults, of course. The server browser needs a lot of help. Finding friends online is a pain. There is currently no way to save a server as your favorite. Overall it’s a fun game and has really pulled me back into the FPS genre.

So, Moving on. I Love music. I don’t think I could call myself an audiophile or any such like that, I’m not crazy for music to the point that I could tell you when Depeche Mode’s first album came out, but I really enjoy music. I have a very wide variety of CD’s and MP3’s. Many people have commented on my Eclectic tastes when it comes to music. There are very few types of music that I don’t like. The problem is now that the RIAA being the bastards they are have jacked prices of new CD’s through the roof and nearly killed any other means to acquire music. One site in particular is just beyond the RIAA’s grasp and very very in-expensive for music. Plus, since I am actually buying the music, it’s completely legal! The site in question is http://www.allofmp3.com. How they do it is to charge per meg for music, and that’s only a few pennies per meg. I recently purchased 2 full albums and 1 single and only spent $2.80. How awesome is that! I highly suggest that you check them out, they have a very large library to choose from and the formats that you can download in are great!

Back on the home front, I don’t believe we have much planned for this weekend. I think it’s time to buckle down and deep clean some of the house. Most likely this means that I will finalize Andrews room (no longer the evil den will it be called) and do some spring cleaning (yeah, I know I am late). Of course, you know there will also be gaming as well! Have a good weekend everyone!

Sorry I haven’t posted much recently, I have had a lot happening that has kept me pretty busy. The sad thing is that Most of it didn’t go as planned at all. Here we had this lovely 3 day weekend and even got off work a little early on Friday so you would think I had lots of time to do a lot of things. You would think that, but that’s not what happened. Almost everything that I had planned on doing this weekend got changed into doing something else or nothing at all. The sad thing is, after all of the nothing and changed plans, I am wiped out!

So this weekend was an annual event called UVALAN. It’s a LAN convention that originated around the game Tribes. For those who don’t know, a LAN convention is where you bring you computer and hook it up to a closed network and play games against others until the wee hours of the morning. The downside to the LAN is that Tribes isn’t played near as much any more and they didn’t have as many people as they were expecting. From what I understand they actually went in the hole paying for this years LAN. It’s a bummer too because this was probably one of the best ones. Granted I didn’t play for very long, but the whole LAN just seemed a lot more comfortable. I spent all of Friday night there from 4pm till 3am. Since I don’t play Tribes anymore I played a whole lot of Battlefield 2. 10 hours worth to be exact. More on BF2 Soon.

Well, I decided not to return to the LAN on Saturday simply because I had planned on gaming with Lee and Doc. That didn’t really happen all that much though, Not even sure why not. Come to think of it, except for Saturday night, I am having a hard time remembering what I did on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday night was horrible though. Every year on the Saturday night of the LAN I usually make an appearance of some sort. Usually in costume. Last year was Biker Scout with Amy in her Groupie. This year I decided to do Spiderman and Mary Jane. Sadly this didn’t happen as I seemed to have misplaced my gloves. We tore apart the apartment (that sounded funny) and couldn’t find them. (Peter Parker never has these problems I bet).

I was so angry with myself. I even went to Wal-mart and had one of the worst experiences with anti-customer service while searching for a suitable replacement. Mind you I was already pissed off. I walked in and found someone working in the clothing department. I asked her very simply where the gloves were. She grunted at me and motioned to the other half of the store. In my mindset I wasn’t going to take that so I loudly asked her “Do you think you could narrow that down for me? That’s only ½ the store!” She grunts again and walks me over so that only 1/4th of the store is visible and waves her hands madly toward it. Of course there is no clothing in that section. So I Very loudly exclaimed “*&^$% you then your no help!” It was horrible! I spent the rest of Saturday evening killing things in Battlefield 2.

The fourth of July was Hot, damn hot. For some reason my air conditioning was not working either. Most of the day was spent panting heavily and laying down. Amy even crashed out on the couch because of the heat. My original plan was to clean house but with the lack of energy that just wasn’t going to happen. I finally figured out that it was the filter, and it was very dirty. After taking the filter out and cleaning it, the AC worked like a charm. Who Knew? Of course we didn’t fix this until right before leaving to watch the fireworks.

This year we wanted to try something local. I figure that next year, when Andrew is here, it will be cool to see the display downtown. So this year we went to Lake Fairfax and watched the light show there. We arrived at around 7pm and got a great spot right next to the lake. We could see where the fireworks were being launched from and a great view of the explosions! The show didn’t start until about 9:30pm so we had a good 2 ½ hours to kill but we managed. I never really knew how culturally diverse the area around where I live was. I can’t think of a 4th of July celebration I have been to where they served Hot dogs, burritos, and tandori chicken. And there we lots of people there! Towards 9pm it got really crowded. The show was great though, and we made a smart move by parking very far away from the park. We got home by around 10:15pm.

I will of course be writing up a Battlefield 2 review very soon. In the mean time, I hope you had a good weekend!

Ok, so that’s party true and mostly just kidding around. We made it back from this past weekends camping trip and neither of us were mauled by bears or eaten by raccoons. The whole trip was a lot of fun. The KOA Campground that we were at was a little farther out than I had originally planned but it was a nice site and well cared for. Some of you hard core campers would say it was a wimpy camp site, but for Amy’s first time (and my first in a long while) it was a good start. They had a pool and lots of activities, but we didn’t do much there. The one thing that upset me about the place is that they advertised that many of the attractions were “local.” These attractions were about an hours drive away.

Well we left home around 5ish on Friday evening at got there around 7:30pm. It was still nice and bright so we set up our camp and I got a nice campfire going. It took a while for Amy to get used to all the bugs that go along with camping. By the time we left she was at peace with the bugs (: For our first camping dinner I made us some Hot Dogs. We roasted them on the fire, well, we tried to anyways. Turns out that 1: it as still really hot out and 2: the sticks we got to do our fire roasting things were very short. Those two things combined made for very hot hands. One of the other lessons learned would be to place the ice inside bags, then into the cooler. I am too used to just throwing in Ice and Cider or soda, you know, things that it doesn’t matter if they are wet. So a lot of the food packaging got wet and that wasn’t so good. The tent that Amy bought had a very nice screened top to it so we were able to fall asleep staring that the tree tops and the stars. It was wonderful.

Saturday morning came along quick. I think this would be one of the first times in a long while that I was up by 8am on a Saturday. On of the things I had planned for was a grilling piece over the fire pit to be able to cook food on. So there wasn’t one here. I ended up buying a really cool little BBQ grill ($5) that was perfect for making breakfast. Amy made us some scrambled eggs and bagels. We thought it would be nice to see about Canoeing through the day. After driving for nearly an hour (I said the stuff wasn’t local) we got to the Shenandoah River Outfitters. We got ourselves a canoe and signed up for the 7 mile trip. (This was the easiest and I believe the shortest) After about 10 min of slathering on Sunscreen and deciding what to bring we jumped in the canoe and started the journey! 7 miles is a long way. The weather was perfect for the slow leisurely pace we had going. There were two other canoes following us, but I think they stopped somewhere around mile 2 to swim for a while. Around mile 3 we had our first incident. We could hear the water getting rough from a while back but didn’t think much about it. I steered us over towards the bank because I thought it would be a little easier. Turns out it was much, much, worse. Amy said it was like coming up on a roller coaster drop. Sure enough, we panicked and the canoe went over. I instantly jumped to make sure Amy was ok. She was having some trouble with the current but managed to right herself. She turned and asked about the things in the canoe. Here was our canoe’s inventory before the tip:

• Amy
• Me
• 2 Paddles
• 4 Bottles of Water
• My Sunglasses
• 1 Waterproof GPS
• Amy’s Removed Shirt
• My Cheap Digital Camera Wrapped in the above shirt.

After the tip we recovered 3 of the bottles of water, the paddles, and finally, the camera (after being submerged for about 5 min.) So the GPS (which was bright yellow) Most likely floated away and is in another state by now. My sunglasses, which I had owned for about a year and a half, and my tribes ski team shirt have now been donated to the Shenandoah River Foundation. The most important thing is that we were ok, no one was hurt, and we were able to continue along the river. I was a little bummed about the GPS and thought we might be able to find it if we went back a little ways. Sure enough that led to another tip. It would have been a lot easier to paddle up river if it weren’t a rapid area. So after the second tip over we just let it go and headed back down the river. The downside to this is that I had set the point were we were going in the GPS and was using that to guide us. Without it we were slave to the poorly placed signs along the river. The other two canoe’s managed to catch up to us by now. (Seeing as how we spent about 30 min flailing around in the river) so we stayed near them just in case we had another incident. Thankfully it was a nice peaceful trip the rest of the way. There was one part where I thought I saw a bear in the river (turns out it was a cow) but I started screaming at Amy to “Paddle to the other bank!!!”

Once we finally made it to mile marker 8 we were beat. My arms felt ready to fall off. We poured ourselves into the truck and headed back to the camp site. Along the way we made a few stops, just to check out a few things. One of those stops was at Luray Caverns. I wanted to get an idea of how much a trip in would cost. Apparently it takes a lot to maintain the incredibly large cave that’s been there since time began because it costs 20 bucks per person to go in! It would appear that someone found a niche and is working it for all it’s worth. Screw that! After quickly exiting the Money grubbing bastards at the caverns we made a quick pit stop at a Wal-Mart we passed on the way up. We picked up a few other things we forgot, like cheese for the burgers and some chips. Low and behold we found the holy grail of chips. Chili Cheese Fritos! If you have not tried these, it is a must have! They are by far the best Fritos I have ever had. Sadly, We can’t find them anywhere local! We were so excited, we tore into them as soon as we got to the truck.

Back at the camp, took a few moments to shower the river off of us and lay down for a mid afternoon nap. (The river wiped me out) The Campground had a small trail that we walked part way up, then decided we were too tired to go the rest of the way. Plus it was getting late and I needed to start dinner. Amy had some things she wanted to grab at the store so I started up the grill and the camp fire and commenced with the burger making! Since the grill I bought was a very small one, it took a long while to cook things on it. This was perfect thought because it gave me the chance to break out the drum and do some camp fire drumming. I became the dinner music for a few campsites around me and even got a few compliments. Between songs (I was drumming to my CD player) I would flip the burgers. We had a nice, campfire lit dinner of hamburgers and egg salad. Well, I ate the egg salad, Amy isn’t much of a fan of it. After dinner we made the traditional campfire smores. Another first for Amy. This sugar rush was just enough to clean up the campsite to get ready for bed.

Cleanup time! I think we woke up at around 9am Sunday morning and started the clean up process. I really thought it would take longer then what it did. We were done and out of the campsite by 10:30. This was fine of course because it meant a slow leisurely drive back home. Amy was so excited about the whole trip. She said she had a ton of fun, and I believe her. Even the drive home was fun. We drove a little farther on 81 then we were supposed to and ended up taking highway 17/50 home. The houses and towns along that drive were beautiful. When it comes time to buy the house I may look up in that region. We even saw a BBQ place that was worthy of a few pictures. After we got home we unloaded and started cleaning. At least, as much as we could before collapsing. I managed to squeeze in a little WoW time as well. All in all, it was a great weekend! There are a few pictures in the gallery.