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Last Friday Elly, Tova, and I were feeling pretty adventurous. We were coming up on the three-day weekend and none of us wanted to hang out in the apartment or in Boulder for three days. So, in the space of about 3 hours, Elly had found a lodge, made reservations, packed our bags and fed Tova. She was a one-person travel agency. I left work around 5:30 and we were on the road by 6:30. I was very surprised at the lack of traffic on I-70 on this President's Day weekend, and the weather was fine, so we made pretty good time. We had to stop for a little while in Winter Park because Tova was totally panicking through the high parts of route 40. We're not sure, but we guessed it was the pressure change that was making her cry so much.

We got to the lodge and it was totally beyond our expectations. Maybe it was just because we've never really taken a vacation until now, but everything seemed so amazing: our condo, the food, the town, the skiing... By the end of the trip we did not want to go home. Here are some of the memorable highlights:

• Skiing in RMNP with Elly and Tova.
• Eating ostrich for dinner.
• Having Tim the Toolman Taylor (Tim Allen) stay in the condo right next to ours (he grunted at me when I said "hi").
• Watching Tova react to the fake (as in electric) wood stove.
• Realizing that we need to buy some skis and a ski rack because we loved X-country skiing so much.

We have pictures of our adventure up in the gallery. I'll write more about the Tim Allen encounter if anyone wants to hear about it. I'm at work now though, so I better stop goofing off and do something.

Contrary to past experiences in my development control, version control can be easy and fun. Here's a list of tools I've used at work in the past:

• cvs :|
• perforce :\
• pvcs :(
• custom in-house vcs :(
• visual source safe :|

I'm generally pretty pessimistic about version control, especially after witnessing corporations pay thousands of dollars for these commercial tools which were just riddled with bugs and lame limitations. But the other day I finally got around to creating my own personal source repository at home. I used subversion to see if the hype is true...and now I can say, I think the hype is somewhat true. I'm no vcs expert, but I feel like subversion has taken a simple concept that is made vastly complicated in past implementations and makes it simple again. All I had to do was install subversion, grab a GUI client, and I was off and running. I really like how it is smart enough to know what I change in my working copy automatically so I don't have to expressly check things out or add new files before I start editing.

Of course, if you are a cvs expert and have been using it for years, I'm sure it's just as easy to keep using it--I don't hink svn is so amazing that everyone needs to go out and switch right now. But I was pretty pleased.

Both are brown liquids, but the java I work with during the day is so slow, I'm starting to wonder if the name of this language should be changed...at least when working with these mammoth J2EE components.

Last time I checked it too me four minutes and two seconds to rebuild our project at work. Yikes! Think of how many times you like to rebuild during the course of a day (especially when doing UI work), then multiply that by 4 minutes. I think my company pays me a lot of money to babysit the java compiler.

I never really cared that much about Valentine's Day. My family didn't really do anything about it (I didn't think families did do anything on Valentine's Day until I met Elly's family). I just remember it as the holiday in school when you had to make all those little cards and give them to all the girls and they had to give you their cards. So the reason I like Valentine's now is that Elly got me an iPod Shuffle for a V. Day present yesterday! Isn't that rad? Just in time for a run today. I've been busy importing a bunch of my CDs to the Mac so I can "shuffle" them onto this thing before I head out today.

My wife just told me that I need to post more entries on this blog. She said it's okay if they're shorter, there just needs to be enough to keep people interested. Besides, if you're reading this at work, you're probably sneaking around when you should be filing those TPS reports, so you don't have time to read a long post.

The thought has occurred to me lately that it would be nice sometimes to work in my uncle's hardware store. It has been closed for several years now, but back in the day it was a pretty funny place to work. Not to mention free popcorn and they played National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation on repeat during the holiday season.

Oh, and another bonus of working there would be the opportunity to observe all the bizarre customers they had (there were some normal ones too, but I don't remember any of those). Now that I think of it, a movie about the hardware store would be pretty cool.

I don't think she's ever been serious about playing the electric guitar in a rock and roll band, but she did just get her hip replaced yesterday morning. So did Eddie, but I think he needed the replacement because of too many recreational chemicals or something. Anyway, I'm glad to report that she's up and doing fine. She was cruising around on her walker today, according to my dad, so hopefully she'll be on her way home soon.

Something about this whole hip-replacement deal which is very cool (and which I didn't even think about until tonight) is that the pain that she was living with is instantly gone. I guess the idea of surgery is so attached to the idea of pain in my mind that I had just been assuming it was going to suck for months afterwards. But it makes sense--the parts that were grating together have been cut away and replaced with machined, quality controlled, high precision steel parts (which don't have as many nerves in them). It's definitely a load off of all of our minds, since we could see that she was fighting a lot of pain on a daily basis for the past couple of years. She doesn't know it yet, but we're planning on making her hike some fourteeners this summer as therapy.

I haven't written in a while...let's see...what's happened... Well, last weekend I did my first serious long run in preparation for a long race this spring. It was really surprising to me the difference between how I feel at 1:30 and 2:00. That extra half-hour totally changes things. The hard part about the whole distance thing for me is mental--I tend to get about 90% done and then sort of just give up. I'll still run, just not with the same intensity...and the thing is--I know it's not because I can't, it's just because I know the end is near. I'm working on that, though.

Oh, and here's something else cool that happened this weekend. After my run, Elly and I were just sitting around watching TV when these Superbowl specials came on the Food Network. There was one about tailgating and barbeques and stuff, and within five minutes of seeing it, we both decided that we need to find a rib place urgently. I didn't know any local places here in Boulder (other than stupid chains), so Elly picked up the phone book and found The Rib Place in Longmont. It was awesome! The food was great, and it was nice to get out of Boulder for a little while. The restaurant is in one of those new sustainable neighborhood places. We really liked the houses and apartments we saw, except for the ridiculous price tags. I'm sure they're very nice, but paying $300K for a two bedroom apartment in the middle of the prairie seems crazy to me. Actually, the architecture made us want to move back to Europe more than it made us want to move to Longmont...

I guess that's all I should write for now. This was supposed to be a quick update and it's turning into a novel...