Look what I found on YouTube!  This is Wout, a good friend from college, playing Flight of the Bumblebee.  Always loved this piece.  Makes it cooler knowing the person playing it this time!

Heard about this on the news last night.  The article is short and doesn't say much, but it's a bit disturbing to know there's some messed up people in OKC and Tulsa going around burning dogs in their own backyards.  As a pet lover and owner of two very sweet cocker spaniels myself I found this quite disturbing.  I'm glad I keep my dogs inside on hot summer days so I don't need to worry about them.  I hope they find these miserable excuses for human beings soon.

http://www.koco.com/news/16931159/detail.html

I had the pleasure (and I do mean pleasure) to have my inlaws visiting this weekend.  My husband's parents are quite fun to hang out with and we got to experience lots of new things we hadn't done seen or tried before.

I had my first trip to a flea market.  His parents like to go to auctions and flea markets quite a bit, but had never been to one here in Oklahoma.  I was a bit skeptical at first, but I had quite a bit of fun.  I even found an awesome mirror from Peru that'll be hanging in our living room.

We also played cards for a bit each day.  The game was called Hand and Foot.  I'd never heard of it before they introduced us to it but it it a favorite for them back home and they get together with friends regularly to play.  Boy, is it a lot of fun.  I could probably play it every day and not get tired of it.  His dad and I might have lost the first game badly (very badly!), but we won the second and totally swept the tiebreaker!  That's what they get for teasing us all weekend about our first loss!

I found a decent set of instructions for this game here: http://www.pagat.com/rummy/handfoot.html  I highly recommend trying it out. A few of the rules listed here are different than how I was taught it, but I think that's pretty standard for most card games to have multiple versions these days.

We also found an awesome new (to us) pizza place.  We drove past it first on Saturday around 3:30pm and the parking lot was totally packed.  Immediately, it was decided we'd try the place out for dinner the next day.  The restaurant, The Wedge, is a small gourmet pizza place. It's right around NW 50th on Western. Their specialty pizzas were different than your normal fair with special oils, nuts, tasty veggies, and all sorts of ingredients you wouldn't find on the average pizza.  We highly recommend the Truffle Shuffle (and we're not even mushroom fans).  The American Pie was also tasty.  Even the crust was incredibly tasty... the dough just perfectly cooked in their wood fire oven.

Here's a fun little video I found from the restaurant!

We rounded out their visit with a trip to the Cowboy Hall of Fame.  I'd been before and never turn down a chance to see the artwork.  I'm a huge fan of bronze sculptures.  But it was the first time my husband or his family had been.  We had a lovely time, and even got a bit of a private tour from a volunteer there who knew quite a bit of background information about the artists and their work.  That definitely made for a much more interesting visit.

All in all it was one busy weekend and one I won't soon forget.  My only regret is that it was too short. :)

Just an FYI for my friends out there.

I haven't been watching the news much lately so perhaps this is more well known and I just wasn't aware of it, but apparently there's quite a large tomato salmonella issue going on.  The list of cases now spans 17 states and a number of restaurants have stopped serving certain kinds of tomatoes or any tomatoes not grown from specific safe areas.

It's halfway through another week and despite the never ending supply of work I'm feeling rather pleased with myself.  Now I am not a programmer by any means, and frankly that's ok with me! I prefer to remain on the creative half of the team.  But learning new skills is part of a typical week around the office.

One of the reasons I love this job so much is I'm continually having to learn something new and reach for higher goals.  It can be a lot of work, and it's definitely easier to stay the same person you are and not make an effort to grow.  But it feels so good when you learn something new or accomplish something you couldn't have done a week ago.

For me this week, that's working with Smarty.  I'm still really new to it, but it's been becoming more of a part of my weekly tasks as time goes by.  This week, I got to make a template with Smarty that switched out entire stylesheets based upon specific answers to different profile questions.  Granted I still had to ask for help from those more familiar with the language around the office, but it felt so good when the look of my pages started changing to match my profile responses.