So then we threw a party

We held a joint birthday party for Jackson and Zane on Saturday. We learned our lesson last year, and it started at 10:00 am rather than 2:00 pm. Last year it hit 112° and everything melted. Last year was in a park, and we couldn't go anywhere to escape. This year was way more pleasant. We held it at the Grandparent's house, and could go inside whenever we wanted.

Way better. Also this year, we had a Super-hero themed Jupiter Jump. That was a big hit. The cup-cake train was also a big hit, thankfully, as we stayed up until 1:30 the night before decorating them. Jackson and Zane once again made out like bandits. The biggest hits being a pedal-powered John Deer tractor for Zane and (surprisingly) a book about the solar system & a toy lap-top for Jackson(nerd!). We were all exhausted by the end, but it was so darn hot that we still had to go to the mall to cool off and to buy a stuffed bear in a Spider-Man outfit. Her are pics:

More here.

Rock.

#6

"what do you want?"
"Information."
"You won't get it."
"By hook or by crook, we will"

We lost a good man back in Janruary. Patrick McGoohan will always be remembered as #6, but his role as the evil evil king in Braveheart was awesome as well.

Ball-point Pens & Highlighters

So I feel that I have been remiss in posting artwork. Most of what I do is commercial these days, and I can't seem to update my Zombie story for whatever reason (mostly writer's block).

What I am capable of doing, however, is doodling on my calendar. Some of you know this already, as I have collected them from time to time. Well, I'm going to start posting them a little more often, starting with this one:

I remember this as G-Force: Guardians of Space. It was also Battle of the Planets. In it's purest(and best) form, it known as Science Ninja Team Gatchaman.

think that since Hollywood seems to have a hankerin' for making mediocre movies out everything I laid eyes on as a child, they are really missing out on some serious coin by overlooking imported Sandy Frank Manga. Especially since Transformers proved that you don't need any kind of plot to make millions of dollars a second. Imagine a live action Robotech(Macross) movie. That would be awesome. And given that there actually is an interesting and lengthy(read: high sequel potential) story behind it, along with transforming bots and aliens, and the fact that Manga is at it's most popular in America right now, it could be Hollywood gold in the right hands.

I'm just sayin'.

-JP

News and Accolades

Well, we just hit the two year mark. I think I have mentioned before, that every two years, Jennifer and I need to totally upend our lives and make some sort of crazy change. Move to Tulsa, move to Stillwater(and have a kid), move back to Tulsa(have another kid), each time with a job change of some sort.
This time is a milder change. We are moving back into midtown, but I'm keeping my job this time. Actually everything else should remain about the same except our gas bill. Everything we do is downtown. Both my jobs, Jackson's school, the church, and all of our friends. Every time we wanted to do anything, it involved a 20-30 minute drive from Glenpool into town. No longer.
The house is a block away from Whiteside Park, where there is an awesome play area, tennis courts, a walking trail, and a free pool. We can walk to the mall, and work is a hop and a skip on the BA.
The house is cute. Full brick. From the 50's. It hasn't really been updated since then, but has been meticulously maintained. A few coats of paint and some new tile here and there, and it will be golden .Three extremely small bedrooms, but two living areas to make up for it. There is a shed and a huge back yard.
The move will be in the middle of August, and I'm still trying to figure out if that will be better or worse than the frigid late January/early February times we usually move.
I think it will be nice to be back in mid town.

In other news:

Attention NY peeps: The TW is sending me and my good friend Brandon Rowland to New york City for a week of ad serving training with Yahoo! inc. I'll be there the last week of July. The days will be full 9-5 with training, but the evenings are mostly free. So if you want to do something, contact me in some way.

Um... that's it.

In which our hero gets a new car.

Finally.
Thanks to a small financial windfall, I am now the proud owner of a 1996 VW Golf. Its black and is a stick-shift has manual everything. No frills, except the sunroof, which I actually quite enjoy.
I'm excited about it. It is zippy and gets way better gas mileage than the gigantic farm truck Jennifer's aunt graciously lent me that I have been driving since my other car blew up.
Happy day!

I took Tuesday off so Jennifer could have a break. She stayed the night at her mother's house in order to get some uninterrupted sleep, and spent the day shopping and generally relaxing.
The boys and I had a great time. I think that with me having two jobs and busy as all get out all the time, they were needing some daddy time. We made scrambled eggs and apples and bananas for breakfast, played some video games, went to the library for story time (along with Grace and Zane), ate some gourmet PB&Js at McAllaster's, went to Jackson's favorite park (along with Grace and Zane), which Joseph slept through, watched WALL-E for the ten billionth time, built a massive train track around the living room, and made Beef Stroganoff from scratch for dinner.
Everybody was well behaved and had a great time.
Every time Joseph asked for mommy, Jackson would say: She took the day off, Joe!

At work, we are switching to a new ad server. Ad serving on our website is one of the many duties that I have. When I first got here, one of the first projects I had was to swap out our really ancient ad server for a way better one. Two years later, we have outgrown even that one and are implementing an even newer one that can do way more. The new one is so involved that I have to go to NYC for a week to get trained on it. Compare this to the last guys who sent us the software and a manual, and told us to call them if we had any problems. The new people are way cooler. And as excited as I am to travel to NYC since I never get to go on business trips, being away from The Fam for a whole week, and sitting through 5 days of all-day training does not sound fun. I do have a lot of friends in the City, so I can probably amuse myself at night, and we were even thinking of having Jenn fly up for a few days so we could hang out at night. So maybe that will work out. Still. Should be fun.

Powers out.

Ira at the Synagogue

So we went and saw Ira Glass speak at the Congregation B’nai Emunah Synagogue on Sunday.
I have to say that it was one of the most interesting nights I've had in a long time. It was part of a new lecture series being put on by the Synagogue called: Talking Heads: Conversations with Interesting People. And the series is aptly named. If I were to make a list of the most interesting people in the world right now, Ira Glass would be in the top 5. He was there to talk about his radio show, and how it is made. But what his talk was really about was how to tell a good story.
Ira was introduced by the Rabbi, who offered a brief biography and some very kind words. Ira came out to thunderous applause from the thousand or so people who turned up to see him. It was a large room, and given that it was this particular speaker in this particular venue, the collective IQ of that room must have been off the charts. He started off by telling that he hadn't spoken in front of a crowd at a Synagogue since his Bar Mitzvah, and that since then, this was the Jeweyist thing he'd ever done. Then he told us that the last time he'd worn that suit was when he'd accepted the Peabody Award on behalf of This American Life, and that he still had a little chocolate version of the medal in his pocket.
On to the show. Armed with his wit and a bank of CD players, he provided for us, live, what can only be described as if This American Life dedicated an entire episode to the inner workings of This American Life, this would be what they would have done. The point of the whole thing was that TAL works because of a certain type of storytelling they employ, which, as Ira told was the result of years and years of experimentation and trial and error. Armed with this new knowledge, he and his staff embarked to spread the word and tell interesting stories that people might just learn something from. A while later, he found himself home for the holidays, sitting in a Synagogue with his family, and as the sermon was being read, he unconsciously began analyzing the structure of the sermon. To his horror, it was the exact same structure that he had come up with on his own, and the same structure that had been in the employ from every pulpit in every religion for 5,000 years. I guess he should have gone to church more.
Ira Glass has become one of the nerd Gods in recent years, and proved his street cred several times over, first by describing a tenacious young girl from one story as "very Buffy, season 3" then again by going on a little rant about how launching Kirk out of the ship and onto an ice planet full of deadly creatures made no sense what so ever. "The Enterprise has jail cells. They used them in almost every episode of the show!" he said.
All in all a great time and the fact that I was in the company of adults who don't need their diaper changed, or their hand held in the parking lot made it all the more enjoyable.

-Powers out.

So we went on vacation...

...and had a pretty good time. We went to Abilene, TX where a good portion of Jenn's family live.
It was a lot of food and a lot of talking and a lot of wondering where Jackson and Joseph had run off to. The kids loved the hotel. We bunked up with Grace and Zane, which was extra fun because we had dueling scream sessions all night. As soon as Zane would finally get to sleep, Joseph would start in. Jackson slept through everything.
On the ride up, somebody told us that the drive would take 8 hours. Because we would have 3 toddlers in the car, we decided to leave at night, and let them sleep through it. So we left about 9:00, figuring that with stops for the potty and food and whatnot, that we'd be there around 6:00 am, and could just go to one of the cousin's houses for breakfast. The problem here is that the drive is actually 6 hours, and I drive fast. So we showed up at 3:00 with nothing to do. We decided to go where you go when there is no place left to go. IHOP. After a pile of eggs and funny face pan-cakes, we decided to call the hotel and see if they would take pity on us, which they did, and let us check in early and get a few hours sleep, which we did.
So. The way back would have to be in the daytime. there was no going around that. I figured we could leave at 9:00, do three hours, stop for lunch and some running around, then the other three hours, putting us home around 5:00, just in time for dinner. Wrong. We had to stop many many more times and for much longer durations because general child craziness, and we didn't roll in until 11:00pm. By that point we were all sick to death of the sight of one another, that we just dumped our stuff in a pile in the garage and went to bed.
Good times.
In other news...
I have gone viral. The animation I made for an interview the paper did with Ira Glass of This American Life fame, has hit the blogs, and made it to Ira's Wikipedea page.
I'm Internet famous.

um... that's about it.

Powers out.