The next step

So this is what home will look like, God-willing, next fall:


On Saturday, Kathryn and I got up on a bluebird-clear morning and went over to Torrey Pines State Park for a time of prayer, reflection, and decision-making. The decision for accepting the UCSD Business School invitation is due on Feb 28th, and so we wanted to take some concerted time to make the call together.

Thankfully, God has been very faithful to make this decision clear for us. The school is in San Diego, we won't have to move, the curriculum is focused on technology and innovation, which is one of my passions, and they are moving this fall into the tremendous new building (shown above.)

But the factor that made it abundantly clear was the school offered me a merit fellowship to cover all tuition and fees. This is such a blessing to Kat and I. We just praise God for his good favor.

So our time together at Torrey Pines was less about soul-searching, and more about expressing thanksgiving about the past and talking excitedly about the future...


Change is on the horizon, but with great change comes great promise. We are both so excited to see what will happen next!

What's so amazing?

On Friday, Kat and I went out for dinner and a movie with our good friends John and Heidi. We went and watched "Amazing Grace," which I would definitely recommend ~














The film, if you haven't heard of it, is about William Wilberforce, who fought for many years in the English parliament to abolish the Slave trade. The movie is openly Christian, which is awesome, and is actually well-made. After Narnia last year and now this, Christian filmmaking is making great strides to overcome the likes of such specatacles as Kirk Cameron's now infamous turn in the "Left Behinds"...

One cute thing about watching this film ~ We saw it on opening night, and the theatre was packed. We got there during the open scene, and hte last 4 seats in the place were in the absolute front-right corner of the theatre, so we were staring up the entire way.

But this was like the most totally Christian-dominated audience I've ever experienced at a movie. In one scene where a dramatic moment led to something climactically said about "God's grace overcoming..." there was a huge collective sigh in the theatre, and not a few amens. I love seeing Christians engaging with Hollywood, and not giving up on it!

Good film - Go see it soon, to make sure its not banished to video in a week as many such films are...

Arizona Adventure

We've faced down Mother Nature... and lived to blog the story about it!



Over the President's Day Weekend, Kat and I got out of town to see our good friends Terri and Derek over in Tucson.


This was a weekend of firsts for us - First camping trip together, first road trip to leave the state of California together (It's a REALY big state), and first chance to see a desert monsoon... More on that in a minute.

We left on Friday, and drove out to Yuma, AZ, along with 10-gazillion of our fellow SoCal brethren. Kinda slow going, and my misguided decision to pull off the freeway in El Cajon led to twilight-zoneish drama as we struggled for what felt like 30 minutes to get back on the freeway at rush hour. Still, we got to the rather plush though thin-walled Holiday Inn, Yuma, and our spirits were significantly revived by our discovery of a Barbecue place that was actually open at 10 pm when we were looking for dinner.



Saturday woke up sunny and nice. We enjoyed a great, albeit fattening, start at the Cracker Barrel (Mmmmm... Oh, heavenly realm of grits, pecan pancakes, and gravy... where have you been for so long???) and then headed off to Tucson to see Terri and Derek. Crystal clear skies and a pretty good book on CD called Prep, by Curtis Sittenfield, and we were there before we knew it!


Amazing advances in the art of talking plastic animals at the Cracker Barrel gift shop




Dateland Arizona - Famous for dates... and the most ridden plastic pony in 3 counties

Saturday night and Sunday we were with Terri and Derek in Tucson. They have a great property on the edge of Tucson, out in the desert. We hiked around, admired the cows that are on the open range, and met an eccentric neighbor who is an heir to the Procter and Gamble fortune... He has the company logo tatooed on his shoulder! He showed us...

On sunday we headed east again to the Painted Petrogylphs state park for some tent camping. Its a pretty cool area where teenage deviants since 4000 BC have been leaving graffitti... I guess after a certain amount of time it becomes art, but I'm sure at the time that these prehistoric taggers were considered a menace.





We camped one night in said tents, though everybody else in the park was in a comfy RV. The wind HOWLED that night, but thankfully the rain held off until Monday afternoon as we were driving out. It was great to see the rain pound down in the desert as we drove out.

All in all, a great weekend, and hopefully the first of many such adventures... Now, where to next?

A Woolly-Bully Time

This past weekend, Kat and I went opposite ways - She to the (presumable) warmth of the South (Texas, Arkansas) and I to the cold and snow of Mammoth Mountain. Fortunately for me, we had plenty of snow and not too much cold up in Mammoth. Unfortunately for Kat, it was just about as cold in Texas and Arkansas as in Mammoth.

Anyways, I went skiing with my buddies from work on Friday-Sunday.

Mammoth got on the order of 2-3 feet of snow while we were up there, which it SORELY needed.


Now, I know that scenes like this are all too familiar for most of the country right about now, but for us out in California, it is definitely amazing! The snow made for some fun challenges on the mountain, though unfortunately we weren't able to ski off the peak runs at Mammoth ~ Fog and high winds kept it socked in.

The best moment on the trip was when the four of us, 20-something guys, all wearing jeans and boots and stuff, walked into what we thought was a modest-priced Thai restaurant. We walked up the stairs and into the restaurant, and I thought to myself, "Man, this is really nice?" but my brain was on autopilot, so I wasn't thinking too hard. The place had just a few tables occupied, but the girl took one quick look at us and said, "Uh, we don't have any tables free" - Turns out the cheap Thai place was downstairs. The snooty expensive place is upstairs. I had this flash of the scene in Pretty Woman when Julia Roberts walks into the expensive store and the girl immediately says, "We don't have what you are looking for..."

My 10 dollar Thai food downstairs never tasted better. Guess in this world there's top shelf and all the rest... Me? I'm all the rest - :-)

Don't mess with Texas

2007-02-04 KatSuperBowl
Originally uploaded by agate157.

Spa-rise me on my birthday

My oh so crafty wife pulled a fast one on me for my birthday. I was in Portland through Friday, and she told me to keep Saturday, Feb. 3rd, before my birthday on Sunday free. The morning of, I got up only to find that she had been bustling around for an hour or so preparing things.

We got in the car to go in the morning, and started heading... out into the middle of nowhere. I mean, like scrubbrush city. The whole drive I was just scratching my head and trying to figure out WHAT we were going to do. Finally, after about an hour of driving she pulled off the freeway and started heading out on a little backroad. Things were looking pretty "earthy" out there, I thought I heard that banjo refrain from deliverance somewhere in the distance, and I was just starting to get nervous when an oasis of green grass, palm trees, and mini-coopers opened up in front of us: Glen Ivey Day Spa.

Yes, my wife arranged for me to spend a day with her at the spa.

Mud baths, hot tubs, massages, facials, the WORKS! It's a pretty amazing place. You can really appreciate the joy of spending an entire day in your bathrobe by the pool... Something Hugh Heffner has known for YEARS!

I told Kat it was the perfect gift... The kind of thing that I would probably never in a million years actually ASK for as a birthday present, but an incredibly great way to celebrate with the woman I love. And my skin? You just don't KNOW how well exfoliated it is!

Objects in mirror may be grander than they appear

2007-02-01 MtHood (2)
Originally uploaded by agate157.

I'm back from the Pacific Northwest. The weather was AMAZING and the views of Hood, as this picture barely oes justice, were spectacular.

I am totally ashamed that the closest I got to mountains was a few rear-view mirror trick shots while driving away from the HP site. Busy week doing a lot of meeting facilitation ~ That stuff wears you out ~ Its like running a day care for 40 year olds!

Anyways... Good trip, but definitely glad to be home!