jasonackerman.com

I’m the kind of blogger that blogs like someone who isn’t really comfortable in a manual transmission car. Lots of hurky-jerky, stop and start. Incidentally, I’m that kind of stick-shift driver as well. Little practice + haven’t actually sat behind the wheel of a stick shift in 15 years means I royally suck at it. But enough of me bringing down the manliness quotient of this blog. I feel a blog-splosion coming on… lots of topics on my mind and I think I need to get them out. We’ll start with a rapid-fire entry, much like the old “Notes from the Monster Files” feature I used to run in the LJ days.

• Work is good. As in, I have some. As it stands now, I could survive with the work I have booked all the way through June.
• The nice thing about freelancing, is that today I just stopped working to go outside and play in the snow with the kids. It was great… I’ll make up for it later.
• We have a big family-palooza coming up in April. I can’t really divulge details just yet… mostly because I’m not telling anyone in the family who is under 5′ tall what the plan is. So no guessing in the comment section!
• Last week, it was 75 degrees most of the week. Yesterday, we got 18 inches of snow over the course of about 30 hours. Now the sun is out again, and it’s melting fast… but a foot and a half of snow (in late March no less!) takes a LONG time to melt.
• Put 4 new tires on the minivan. It’s fun to spend 1/4 of the car’s worth on tires.
• I’m feeling like I want to move to NW Denver. Just move there and work there and be a part of the ‘hood there.
• The Broncos are making me want to throw up at the moment. Ditto for the Avalanche. On the bright side, the Nuggets might win a playoff series, and the Rockies are tied for first with everyone else, at least until the season actually starts.

That’s all I have for now.

It’s official. Summer is here. I was loving spring… but when the 15 day outlook calls for only one day below 90, well… that means it’s summer. And summer here is hot. Not Arizona hot, and not deep South hot… just hot. I think it’s more about the intensity of the blazing sun than the actual heat. A guy can burn awful quick here. But it’s dry, so there’s none of the oppressive humidity of the south. It just hangs out in the 90s with intense sunlight for days and days on end. The short breaks when the thunderclouds roll in are quite welcome.

I always have a weird feeling with the 4th of July. I don’t really care about the fireworks so much… I could take them or leave them. It’s that for some reason, I always get the sense that it’s the middle of summer, and it’s the downhill side to fall after that. That isn’t really true of course, as summer just officially started a couple weeks ago, and in the Northwest, school just got out. I think it comes from childhood, where school ended at the end of May, and started up again somewhere around the 3rd week of August, which does put the 4th pretty close to the middle of summer. But now, I feel like it should just be the beginning. I think part of it is knowing that we’ll hardly blink and it will be September again. It’s also hard to believe we’re navigating our second summer here in Colorado. None of the seasons are new, now… we’ve been through one full cycle and now it’s just life. I’m a much bigger fan of fall and spring around here than summer, anyway.

The photo above unfortunately is not recent, but from an early July trip last year to Estes Park. The Rocky Mountains are something to behold… either in their winter snow blankets, or in their light summer vegetation, as the photo shows.

We spent last night at a neighborhood party/fireworks extravaganza. It wasn’t “our” neighborhood so much, but over in Thornton where all the church folk live. So we dropped in for a few hours of hanging out. For an informal, just come hang with us party, it turned out to what had to be close to 100 people. It was pretty insane – in a good way.

We’ll spend today (hopefully) just hanging out. I do have some more sermon prep to do for Saturday, but I won’t devote the whole day to it. I just need to rewrite a few sections, and start to put together a media presentation. This has been a week where I’ve spent almost all my time on church stuff… it would be so easy to bail on everything else and just focus on this, if not for the income-related issues that go with not doing any other work. Hopefully, that day comes soon.

Enjoy your holiday, don’t get too drunk, and enjoy the sparkly exploding things.

i’m currently teaching a web design class, and the students are diligently working through a project, so i thought i’d complain/brag/comment about the weather. no photo today due to me not being at either of my own computers. check this page, it’s a camera pretty close to where i am now.

it’s cold. frickin’ cold. it’s currently 7 degrees with a wind chill of -5. it’s snowing ever so lightly. i gotta say, winter here is fun. it is cold, which makes driving hard sometimes, and heating bills are high… but it’s a fun kind of winter. it actually FEELS like winter, unlike much of the NW winter, which feels like spring. and fall. and summer.

so the class i’m teaching is a Dreamweaver class… which i don’t like. Dreamweaver is a great tool, but i just don’t really use it that much. it lets too many people design web pages who have no business doing so. that being said, i’ve worked with the folks at the school here to actually flip the web design curriculum over, and do it more logically. students will start with an “integrated web design” class (which i’m writing!), that covers html/css, image optimization, design principles, as well as an overview of cms, blogging platforms, design tools, etc. then once they understand the CRAFT of web design, they can proceed and use some of the TOOLS of web design, like dreamweaver, flash, stuff like that. then, students coming into the dreamweaver class won’t be completely clueless about web design. just mostly clueless, like me.

curriculum issues aside, this teaching thing is fun. i’ve enjoyed it quite a bit… what’s funny, is my most enjoyable classes have been the uber-basic– the mostly older folks who have next to no experience using computers at all… it requires more patience, but it’s so much more fun than the more advanced classes.

led worship at a church in thornton last week– there’s some long term possibilities at this church. i’ll know more later in the week. i’m leading again this weekend. they do a saturday night service only, so after that i busted it up to eagle to lead sunday morning, which was not a good idea. my voice was completely trashed, and i was tired… it worked out fine, but i won’t be doing that on a consistent basis, thankfully.

i’m hoping the students choose an hour-long lunch break (i offer the choice of 30 minutes and an earlier release to help beat traffic, or an hour for lunch and normal release) so i can go back over to the coffeeshop and get the latte i was denied by them being closed when i showed up due to the holiday. the sign on the window said they would open at 8, i had to stop waiting by 8:15 and get to class.