My dad has been in town (well Boulder and Broomfield actually) for the past week. Last night Kim and I took a trip to meet with him for dinner and beers at Gordon Biersch in Broomfield. We accidentally left the house without the GPS, so it took a bit of searching, but we eventually found the restaurant tucked away in the back of the shopping mall area. I swear that I’ve been to another Gordon Biersch location before, but Kim doesn’t think so. Anyway, the food and drinks were great. In a city with so many brewpubs, it’s hard to go to a national chain, but this one is an exception. Another exception to the rule would be Rock Bottom, but they are headquartered nearby, making it even more acceptable. With some good beers, it’s hard to go wrong.

Temperatures in the Denver area have definitely taken a downswing in the last couple of weeks. Though it may not be a welcome change for everyone, I’m loving it! There are few things more refreshing than the cold crisp air. It’s been so chilly that we actually had to kick on the heat over the weekend. Another thing the change brings is the ski/snowboard season! In fact two resorts opened up this morning with about a foot and a half base of snow. These two (A-Basin and Loveland) are the same ones that compete nearly every year for the first opening day, and this year it was a tie. I cannot wait to get out and make some turns, though I may still wait a couple of weeks before heading out.

Finally, the old photo gallery has been fixed! This time it was not my fault at all and was caused by a bug in one of the systems included with XAMPP, I’d say it was Apache most likely. I installed an updated version of XAMPP yesterday and the issue generating thumbnails I was having earlier was solved. The problem wasn’t actually with the thumbnail generation, but verifying the tools that create the thumbnails were installed. Now I have the dilemma of going back to using the older photo gallery, or continuing on with the gallery that is built into wordpress. I’m having a hard time deciding what to do. Old way or new way?

As mentioned earlier, we attended the Great American Beer Festival over this past weekend. This was our third time attending the festival and once again I put together a little list of must hit breweries. When we finally made it inside the festival doors we did our best to visit all of them. In addition to my own list, I also had a list of the 10 Not-to-Miss Breweries from local magazine, 5280. The nice thing about their list is that it included two beers from each with descriptions, but we later found that some of them were missing from the festival completely.

We attended the last session of the festival on Saturday evening. The nice thing about doing it this way is that you can find out which beers won medals earlier in the day’s official competition. The bad thing is that we found some of the beers were completely gone, and some breweries had completely packed up shop already. The event is still worth going to no matter what session you attend. Maybe next year I’ll consider going to Saturday afternoon’s members only session for the AHA, especially if I start brewing my own beer next year.

There used to be a category for posting called BC, which stood for Before Categories. I had this because I used to publish my blog via blogger, which did not support categories. So when I imported all of the old posts, there was nowhere for them to go. Well today I finally finished categorizing all of those old posts into at least one of the other site categories. I did have to add a new category called College to classify many of the old posts.

In looking back on some of the older entries, there are some changes I’ve made over the past seven years of blogging. First, I could never spell definitely correctly in the early years. I’ve definately learned my lesson! Also, I think my grammar, spelling, and writing have all improved drastically since those college days. Another thing was my style used to be just writing about what I was doing, more of a journal, whereas now my writing is very specific to one topic and much shorter. However, some things never change and I’m ready for the weekend to begin!

Thanks to my brother, I’ve been playing our new Wii nearly every night. He gave us one of my favorites of the wedding gifts, though there are some others that I may write about at a later date. I must say that boxing can be quite a workout! The rest of the Wii Sports package is really entertaining though, as I’m sure many of you already know. We also have Wii Play, which included a second controller. Despite costing just a little more than a controller alone, the games in this package are equally entertaining. I’m a pretty good fisherman, winning the platinum medal already. And I’m getting much better at laser hockey, which I thought was really tough at first. I’ve got a stockpile of Sears gift certificates, so I’m hoping I can add even more games. Any opinions?

Kim and I traveled back to Ohio over this past weekend for a variety of events. One of which was one of the best Oktoberfest celebrations in the country, the Minster Oktoberfest. It had been years since I was last at this party, but once I arrived in the small town of Minster it all instantly came back to me. I immediately grabbed a milk jug of beer and headed for the main beer tent to take listen to the festive bands. And I wasn’t alone, according to their website 80,000 people join the celebration in the town whose population is not even 3,000 strong. It really is an amazing sight to see. Unfortunately, my camera batteries died, but luckily my mom was there to document the whole event. For Kim and I, we’ll be heading to another huge event this weekend, the Great American Beer Festival. I love fall!

The last stop of our cruise honeymoon was supposed to be Tunisia. I was really looking forward to stopping there, especially after getting all kinds of great advice on a previous posting. Unfortunately, while checking in we were told that our itinerary had been changed to remove Tunisia and add Palermo, Sicily. Needless to say, I was pretty disappointed. We later found out that the change was made after previous cruisers expressed their opinions on the stop and suggested that the ship should stop in a different port.

I’m not sure if the change is really justifiable or not, but after our trip I made the suggestion to consider a port different than Palermo. Overall, I was not impressed by this city at all. Perhaps it had a little to do with my bitterness toward the itinerary change, but I honestly felt that the city was dirty and rundown. Sure there were some interesting sights to see, but we found them to be not very well kept up and were surprised to find graffiti covering even some of the most famous landmarks. After being disappointed on our walk around town, we decided to take a bus trip to the nearby town of Mondello and to visit the beach there. Though it was a bit crowded (and a little dirty too) it provided a much nicer day than Palermo.

One nice result of the itinerary change, was that our ship had extra time on our day after our stop in Croatia, so we cruised past the island of Stromboli. This island is home to one of three active volcanoes in Italy. The captain stopped the ship for a half hour or so, as we took in the frequent eruptions of the volcano in the nearly pitch-dark night. It was pretty hard to photograph, but I was able to balance the camera on railings and set the exposure to a second or two to get a couple of decent shots. Here are some of those pictures and a few from Palermo and Mondello.

The second to last stop on our cruise was in Split, Croatia. As mentioned in this planning post, we participated in our only cruise sponsored excursion of the trip, an Off Road Safari. On this trip we took turns driving manual transmission Land Rovers through the countryside, to the top of mountains, along the Cetina River, and through twisting village roads. We also were fed twice with some traditional, but still familiar, foods that were very enjoyable. We also got to jump into the frigid waters of the Cetina and have great views of the entire area. Though we had nothing to compare it to, everyone we were with said it was the best excursion they had done, and some folks did an excursion at every stop.

After the excursion was over, we took some time to explore the town of Split and especially see parts of Diocletian’s Palace. We didn’t have time to go into any of the buildings, but it was still interesting to see more ancient structures and compare them to the others we had already seen at other stops. Overall, we felt that Croatia was a beautiful country that was not nearly as touristy as other spots, and we would love the chance to go back and do more adventurous activities.

Hard to believe it, but I’ve been out of high school for over ten years now. This weekend is officially my ten year high school reunion weekend. Fortunately I am back in Cincinnati to take in some of the festivities, including a big football game tonight with arch-rival school Elder, also my dad’s alma mater. Looking forward to seeing some good high school football. Go Crusaders!