AtomJohnson Blog

It is weird, but it feels so good to be back in Virginia. I looking out the office window here and it doesn’t hold a match to the beautiful view out my office window in Colorado. There is a fairly hazy sky, the traffic is heavy, there are medium-rise office buildings, and lots of construction….yet, somehow it just feels like home. Even my commute into work this morning was nice. It just all felt very familiar.

I have been pondering the move to Colorado and I don’t think I would have done anything different. If I were still here, I would have been discontent with my situation and longing to move out West. And I do like it in Colorado. I love being close to the mountains and all they have to offer. I’m looking forward to playing and taking photographs in the mountains over the next couple seasons. Who knows how long I’ll stay out there. At this point, I’m just trying to take in as much as I can out there knowing that I’ll look back in a year with a different perspective. Who knows if it will be better or worse, but you can always count on it being different.

Happy (belated) Thanksgiving! It is Saturday afternoon in Atlanta and I am doing what every blue-blooded American male should be doing on Thanksgiving….blogging. I’m kidding! I’m watching football and drinking beer. Georgia vs. GA Tech is on, which means that everything in Atlanta has completely shut down….the roads are empty…the stores are closed….and the rednecks are preparing the world’s worst hangover for tomorrow.

It has been so nice to be home in Atlanta.  Thanksgiving and Christmas are the two holidays that I never miss at home.  This year’s Thanksgiving dinner was one of the smaller ones that we’ve had, but it was all family, great food, plenty of beer and wine…not much more you can ask for.  Two of the people at the table each year are my grandmother and her caretaker, Valerie.  I refer to them as The Alliance of Truth.  They have the brutal honesty of seven year olds.   Upon arriving at the house, we asked Valerie what she wanted to drink.  She asked for some red wine.  After taking the first sip, she pronounced, “Y’all, this tastes like sh*t!”.  We avoided any further disaster by serving up some $5 champagne.  A small whiff of this stuff will guarantee a hangover.  While at the dinner table, the other member of The Alliance of Truth asked who had prepared the turkey.  My father proudly took credit for the perfectly cooked bird.  The compliment that we all expected was replaced with, “Well, its got too way too much salt!”.  What can you do?

The photos below show our very Southern way of preparing the turkey.  There was a day when the bird was prepared in the kitchen by the lady of the house.  However, since the turkey fryer became popular south of the Mason Dixon, the bird preparation has moved into the garage, onto the workbench, and requires fire-retardant aprons, protective gloves, and safetey goggles.  I predict that within 5 years, most families in the south will be cooking their holiday turkeys with full-on flame throwers….

About once every two weeks, we get crazy clouds during sunset here.  I always suspect that it might actually be the end of the world, then it passes, and I still have to go to work the next day.  Tonight I was sure the world was going to end.  At one point the entire world turned yellow and I thought, ‘here we go…’.  Then it stopped being yellow and I was suddenly wrong again about ‘the end’.

It is my last day here before heading home for the Holidays. I’m incredibly excited to head home and incredibly busy trying to get ready. I don’t have much new to say, so I’ll post another cool photo of the Flatirons. This one is during a little storm we had last week. While I was in my office taking this photo, there were several people who are smarter than I up in Summit County gliding over 8 inches of fresh powder.

Last night was one of my earliest Saturday nights in a while.  I was literally in bed and ready to fall asleep at 7:30pm.  I ended up getting a phone call from my buddy Dave back east, but at 9pm I had to warm him that I was getting ready to fall asleep on the phone.  In any case, it was great to catch up with an old friend.

This morning I took another step towards being totally settled into my new place.  I took the rest of the ’stuff’ to storage.  This included all of the boxes for office equipment and anything else in closets that I do not have an immediate need for.  I actually have tons of empty closet shelving now.  That is not bad for a place with two and a half closets.

This afternoon I went snowshoeing at Brainard Lakes with my friend Rachael.  Rachael is the girlfriend of my buddy Matt, who I met out on a mountain bike ride a couple weeks ago.  Matt has a really weird schedule where he works 30 hours over the weekend and then has the entire week off.  So, rather than the three of us going hiking, it looks like it’ll be Rachael and I until Matt can get a more accomodating weekend schedule.

The most amazing thing about the hike today was not the hike itself.  It was arriving at Brainard Lakes and then seeing that I had left my cell phone on the hood of my car.  Keep in mind that the entire ride up to Brainard Lakes is twisty mountain roads.  The car and the phone both have incredibly slick surfaces.  There is not logical explanation of why it was able to stay on the hood…other than the fact that it was a miracle.  The only other miracle that I’ve ever seen was the time I saw the exact shape of The Last Supper in a bowl of Honeynut Cheerios.

I had my first dinner party last night at my new place.  Mike and Ashley came up from Denver and invited two of their Boulder-based friends over as well.  I made my world famous eggplant parmesean which was accompanied by baked asparagus, salad, vodka, wine and beer.  I think it was the vodka, wine and beer that I’m having the most trouble with today.

The plan this morning was to wake up at the crack o’ dawn and head out to Summit County to go skiing at Keystone.  The mix of vodka, wine and beer had their own say into today’s plans.  Instead, it ended up being wake up later than planned, stand up….oh my!….sit back down….deep breaths, water….well, you get the point.  So, I headed over to Amante for some coffee and breakfast and watched the Manchester United soccer match….then I headed to Keystone.

It was a gorgeous day for skiing.  The mountains got dumped on this week, so most of the lifts and runs were open.  The back bowls are still not open, but should hopefully begin to open early into next year.  I felt much better today than I did two weeks ago at Arapahoe Basin.  About my third run, everything came together and I felt like my old self on skis.  I am really loving my new Salomon skis too.  They seem to be able to handle just about anything on the mountain.  I can’t wait to test them on a really deep powder day!  I’ll be in Steamboat Springs for a week over the New Year holiday, so I’m sure I’ll get the chance then.

I got out last night for the first mountain bike ride I’ve taken since I moved into my place last month. My buddy Matt and I headed out to Hall Ranch, which is about 15 miles north of Boulder in the town of Lyons. The biking was incredible. The terrain if very desert-like. I was incredibly glad that I got some new hiking booties for Sadie because they were covered with cactus thorns by the end of the hike. It didn’t help that every time Sadie saw a deer, she would go tearing through the brush to try to get the deer….and there were alot of deer.

After the ride, we stopped at Oskar Blues in Lyons for a pint of Old Chub Scottish Ale. Not only is the beer amazing, but Oskar Blues has a vintage arcade in the back with all of the arcade games you played in the 80s.  We happily dropped several quarters into Ms. Pacman and Frogger last night.

Yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to give a presentation on SCORM to a group of George Mason University graduate students. It was incredibly fun! The professor took a picture of the screen in the classroom and emailed it to me.

Please note that I have a shirt collar and a sport jacket on. See, its not just shorts and sandals when you work from home. I am dressed for success almost everyday…at least one day a week….sometimes….

Does anyone else think this is funny?

My good friends Andy and Debby in Santa Fe just found out that their baby boy will be featured in this month’s Santa Fe magazine. To see the photo, it is no surprise. Congratulations on giving birth to a model! Now go buy something expensive….models make tons of money! I should know….I’ve read about it…