Kristy's Blog

Here is a little mini-documentary of our trip down the Middle Fork.

This is from our Grand Canyon Trip last November. Charles and Steve had a flip in Granite.

I don’t know how she kept a smile through this, though it was pretty funny for the casual observer…

The intensity of Van Gogh’s messianic vision, and the restorative powers he sought, and found, in his painting, underlie the deeply expressive character of many of his late works, especially “Starry Night.”
Van Gogh once described the hushed hours of the night as being “more alive and richly colored than the day,” and he resolved early on to use vibrant color to capture the depth and stilled poetry of its darkness. A tradition of twilight and nocturnal scenes, well established in 17th-century Netherlandish art, had inspired such dark, earlier Dutch masterpieces as his “Potatoes Eaters,” and it resonated as well in the brilliant, gas-lit cafes and moon-lit city streets Van Gogh painted in France. Likewise, the scale and format of many Baroque Northern landscapes — in which expansive, panoramic skies dwarf the human subject and imbue nature with a profound spiritual significance — provided a vision of landscape he carried with him to Provence. And in the image of a sweeping, illuminated night sky unleashed across a narrow band of shaded ground, a subject that reaches its plentitude at St.-Remy, Van Gogh created not only a composite memory of his artistic heritage but his own evocation of an “exalting and consoling nature,” as he described it, that transcended it as well.

From the barred window of his makeshift studio, Van Gogh had no view of the landscape surrounding the asylum. Uncharacteristically, he summoned his imagination instead, painting an ecstatic vision of the village under a fulgent canopy of stars and a crescent moon. A deep blue backdrop of mountains rises to an undulating crest at right, gathering momentum from the repeated, curved strokes of the painter’s brush that measure the tsunami-like swells. These mountains bear little relation to the stony range of the Alpilles that stretched behind St.-Remy, one that Van Gogh had captured in plein air in other views. Nestled at the mountains’ base in the painting are tight coils of a paler greenish-blue, which depict an orchard illuminated by the night sky, and these give way to the cadenced geometry of the village.

That will remove all doubt of my leanings….

Q. What’s the difference between the McCain campaign and The Titanic?

A. The Titanic had a band.

Ya gotta love this:

http://www.businessandmedia.org

It seems anxiety from the financial crisis is reaching new highs, but the tipping point for one individual came at the Lehman Brothers gym in the midst of the company’s collapse.

While former Lehman CEO Richard Fuld was testifying before the House Oversight Committee Oct. 6, CNBC reported he had been punched in the face at the Lehman Brothers gym after it was announced the firm was going bankrupt. CNBC and Vanity Fair contributor Vicki Ward said Fuld was attacked at the gym on a Sunday following the bankruptcy.

“Frankly, I sat there and listened and I’m with the guy who apparently, the day before Barclays announced they were coming in and Lehman had already filed for bankruptcy, went over to him in the gym and punched him because that’s how I feel when I, you know, when I watched that,” Ward said on the Oct. 6 “Power Lunch.” “I didn’t think he was contrite at all, I thought he was arrogant.”

Watch ’em and weep!

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Wayout West Beerfest at Tempe Town Lake. Good times!

Hmmmm….that number sounds kinda high, doncha think? I’m going to have to say someone slipped a digit on their calculator.

The 750,000 figure is repeated on the Chamber of Commerce’s website section on intellectual property, but cites the office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection as the source.

And then there’s the same number again appearing on a 2007 joint U.S. Department of Commerce-U.S. Chamber of Commerce press release. A link on the press release goes to the Commerce Department’s trademark division dealing with small business. Atop the website is this flash message:

American Businesses are estimated to lose a Whopping $250 Billion a Year to copyright piracy. Overall intellectual property theft costs 750,000 jobs a year.

Latest quote from a client….

Every once in a while, for therapeutic reasons, we take an old computer we are going to throw out and bash it up with a baseball bat. You’ll have to try it sometime. The last time we completely replaced all of our boxes, we were looking forward to have about 15 boxes to demolish. Instead, however I thought they would be very impressive if we plugged them al in, stacked them on top of each other, and place them behind the smoked door of our server cage. It was really impressive when the boss would bring guests back to take a look at our server room and we had about 40 or 40 little flashing lights back there….doing nothing.

One time he came back and was complaining about something on a web page that wasn’t coming up properly – something we could have nothing to do with – so my web developer opened the cage, turned off and then on three or four of the boxes and told him to check it again and see if he had the same problem. It seemed to fix the problem.