family

Trip to Austin

What an adventure! Jenney got a contract in Austin Texas for her next position doing traveling Occupational Therapy, so we packed up the new Subaru Forester (new to us) and started the long trek from Grand Junction, Colorado to Austin, Texas.

Now it hadn't snowed much at all in Colorado while we were there, but wouldn't it so happen that the day we decide to leave, a huge storm is forecasted to come through! So we set out as early Monday morning as we could (still had a little cleaning to do) and started on our way. It was too far outside of GJ that it started to flurry, and before we arrived in Ouray, we had passed through some areas with some pretty substantial snowfall. But Ouray there was not much of anything on the ground, and the highway pass through the Redridge Mountains was not closed. So even though there was a sign that commercial vehicles were required to have chains, we went against our better judgement and started up the mountain pass instead of staying in Ouray, at the hotspring hotel, like we should have.

New Tattoo

Here's the new one!

Swept Away

Swept away are the remnants of old, smaller dreams thought too impossible now become reality, even though torn
Reality torn asunder, pulling back the curtain to reveal the secrets of life lived fully, unhindered by shame
Shameful regrets, swept away, replaced by a new reality, revealed through conscious will and positive karmic energy
Positive energies flow through willful projections when unhindered by fear, guided by respect and discipline
Respect being key, replaces that which eats at everyones soul of late, fear and the assumption of security, apathy

Swept away and free to dream, your life becomes clay in which to mold a destiny, in harmony with the lines which exist
See the lines, look ahead down that path which your decision may take you to make a wise choice... prosper
Fear and doubt be swept away, leaving assured security molded by discipline and experience, always increasing, improving
Constant reshaping of thoughts and patterns of reasoning, learning to optimize, conceptualize, visualize
Look forward to what is to come, and what will be swept away

Another remembrance...

Christopher just got his tattoo and as you can see it's almost exactly like Cody's. So I'll be getting mine as soon as I get some time and I'm going to keep the design as close to theirs as possible.

Remembrance continued...

Here's Cody's tattoo. I'm going to schedule mine sometime this week, and Chris has his scheduled for next Saturday. I've also attached the original that Cody based his off of.

From left to right, top to bottom, those are my initials, Bryant's initials, my Dad's initials in the center, Cody's initials, and Chris's initials.

We had all planned on getting this tattoo together with our Dad, but he died before we ever got a chance to do so. If you ever have a chance to do something like this with your father, don't wait. Do it as soon as possible. You will not regret it.

In remembrance of our father

So my brothers and I have wanted to get a tattoo for a while now that is in remembrance of our father who died one month ago today. Here is a preliminary sketch I did in Illustrator. We're going to have this the basis of the tattoo and have the artist get more creative with it, personalize each one.

I want mine to have better knots in it... I'm not very good at designing Celtic knots. The initials probably a little bigger ... maybe just my dad's initials bigger. Anyway, I know mine is going on my left arm as a shield because my dad was left handed. It's also where the cancer attacked him.

But I'll be sure to post pics of all of our tattoos once we get them.