At work a couple of the designers and I decided that we would grow beards and then on May 5th cut them to mustaches for “Cinco de Mustache”. And it went as planned. Four or five of us had some nice mustaches. Well May 6TH came and everyone was back to clean faces or stubble, but I decided to keep the stache. And then the next day and the next and here I am now stroking my mustache and thinking why I don’t I do this more frequently.

On another note I am back to blogging. My goal was to start again the first of the year, but wanted to do it with style and that meant waiting on my new wordpress theme. Which I need to finish polishing this week, but I’m anxious to start publishing my ramblings to the intertubes. So here you tubes. Cheers.

On my drive to work today I saw my old Jeep, and for a brief moment I longed for having her back in my care—I drove that car for years and couldn’t believe it had been over a whole year that I sold that junker. It was quite a nostalgic moment and then I stomped on the gas in the GTI and quickly all the memories of that jeep quickly blurred into the back of my mind (I was lucky to if I ever got that jeep to freeway speeds).

Anyway, I get a lot of traffic from Adobe’s exchange, and I thought why not try and get those sells directly.

So my apologies if you come to my site to view photos of my kids (sorry dad) or if you come to the site for my other posts, forgive me for looking a bit like digital car lot. I’ll continue to post about family, design, life, and such, but there’s now going to be a few flash based stock projects for sale mixed in.

Anyway, thank you MTV for introducing me to this guy. Ever since my days in Taiwan I’ve been a pretty big fan of Mandarin Pop, and it’s been a while since I’ve discovered some one new. This was my favorite video that would come one.

CHORUS:
要感謝這小小蟲給我機會
I want to thank this small insect for giving me this opportunity
這是我初次嘗到戀愛滋味
This is my first taste of love
感覺好奇怪　好像　傷害了誰
It feels weird, similar to harming someone
或許我太壞　把小蟲摔下來　去換你的愛
Or maybe it’s because I’m bad, throwing down the insect and exchanging it for your love

Here’s some information about the trip you might want to know. We are here with 3 other adoptive Families who are adopting through our adoption agency (Pearl S. Buck International). From Tuan’s orphanage there are 2 kids. Tuan and Chau (to be named Morgan) being adopted. The other little girl being adopted is from another orphanage around Hanoi.

We pulled up to the POJ (I have no idea what that stands for but it’s the government entity that we have our giving and receiving ceremony (G&R) at). The kids were already there waiting outside on the grounds with their care givers.

Tuan’s orphanage is pretty unique. It’s part of a larger women’s correctional facility (I don’t think it houses major offenders mostly drug and prostitution related crimes), but we do know that because of this the ratio to care givers is much higher than your typical orphanage (2 to 1 it seemed compared to Gems 10+ to 1). Women who want to be involved with the the orphanage go through training and then become part of the staff and care givers at the orphanage.

The photo above is Tuan and his nanny. She told us that she’s been Tuan’s nanny ever since she became part of the program, which was about 2 months after Tuan had been left at the orphanage gate. All the photos that we’ve received before travel usually had Tuan being held by this women. As you can imagine the two of them are extremely close. He held on to her the whole time we had to wait around. I don’t think I can express enough my gratitude for this women, and how lucky we are to have had her to care and mother our son while we’ve had to wait to make him ours.

Above is POJ building. The G&R is pretty uneventful and having to sign papers and such I needed to put the camera down.

After the G&R we went outside and of course had to wait a few minutes for more paper work to be finalized. This photo is extremely awkward as the families wait with much anticipation and the Nannies dread the turn over. It’s was really difficult. You wanted nothing more than to go up and hug the nannies and express your gratitude, but cultural and language barriers held us back.

The transition of course hasn’t been the smoothest. Tuan has cried a bit but not near the amount Gem. I have yet to hold him as Susan won’t give him up for the life of her. Which is fine by me right now. Having had Gem attach to me and then be physically attached to me for 3 weeks I will be happy to be the supportive parent (though it has it’s headaches too). Anyway I just wanted to share some of the details. The next few days we’ll be mostly in the hotel room working on getting Tuan attached to us (there’s nothing worse then taking a kid around and having him reach out for every brown woman he sees).

And finally “Happy Birthday Gem”. I really wish we were at home with you to celebrate. I feel like a terrible parent having missed half of your 4 birthdays. I’ll make it up to you with a car on your sweet sixteen.

Since I now commute to SLC a couple days a week it allows me to listen to NPR on the drive. The other day they were talking to one of the actors of Flight of the Concords on HBO. The segment sounded pretty funny, and so I thought I should give the show a chance. After 2 episodes I’m starting to become a fan. Being a person who loves a good musical how can I not like a show that breaks into song? It’s a very smart show. The video above is a bit of a poke at the Black Eyes Peas “My Humps” song.

There’s been quite the buzz surrounding Slumdog Millionaire—the Indian produced drama about a orphan growing up in the streets of India and goes on the Indian version of “Who wants to be a Millionaire”. We were lucky enough to see the movie the night before the Golden globes so after reading all the press it was easy to agree that the film is really great. It’s also nice to see a foreign film beat out much of our hollywood garbage.

One thing that probably hasn’t been mentioned about the film is how well the subtitles are added. Half of the film is in English but the other is in Hindi and for the moments when Hindi is used you don’t get your typical large jagged white text your DVD player throws up. There was a lot of thought put into the placement and the background color used behind the text. Just another element of the whole film that was really well done. A highly recommended flick.

If winning a bunch of awards wasn’t enough to get you to see the movie here’s the final credits/ music video (if you’re worried the whole movie is a Bollywood musical don’t fret; only the final credits involve hip Indian dance moves).

So tired of the crappy video compression, and the fact that they removed my Mexico video from 4 years ago for having a Red Hot Chili Peppers song as the background track I went ahead and built my own video player—You may have noticed it here on my weblog. The past several video post have utilized the player, and it’s used in the video of Gem and her curlers below.

I admit though that I had a second purpose to behind building the flash video player. I’ve become a stock flash developer on the site flashden.net (think stock photography but with flash items). I currently have 4 items available (the video player being one of them) and plan to add quite a bit more over the coming months. In fact the new marcfolio portfolio site will be available as a website template once it comes online. From a web developers stand point there’s some amazing items available for only a couple bucks. Best of all though is if you’ve ever wanted a little bit of flash heaven designed/ developed by me you can now get your weby hands on it for a couple dollars instead of the 40+ hours I would have charges to build them.
CHECK OUT MY FLASHDEN STUFF HERE.

I remember seeing this video a while back, but I just saw it again today and I just can’t believe it. Talk about guts. Enjoy.

Susan and I have teamed up over the past couple of weeks to create a set of giclee prints available through her Etsy shop. Susan has pretty much been the creative director on these and my roll has been production designer. Working with her is really great, though she can be a tough boss (mostly because I didn’t give her the availability I should).

We started these prints for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest being we wanted them for own home, and if we wanted them then we’re confident others will find them a great addition to any wall, desk, bookshelf, etc.

These prints are printed with Epson archival UltraChrome pigment ink on Crane Lettra 100% cotton (300 gsm) paper. Currently there are two sizes available 8″x10″ and 5″x7″ with larger prints coming mid December.

This is our first print to be made available. Keep watching over the next couple of days as we add the rest of them to the shop.

Check them out here.

Yesterday, my family decided to have a Clay Pigeon shoot, and Gem was there to observe. She even brought her own gun, but after not being able to hit a single clay pigeon she turned in the towel. I don’t know any little girl who likes guns as much as my little girl. I think her perfect play time would be to dress up in high heels and sling a gun around the house shooting out the lights.

Today is day 4 of our island retreat. It’s been extremely pleasant thus far. I’ll see if I can’t post a more exciting image, but I thought this tree would have been the perfect tree house, and I’m starting to wonder why we live in Utah more and more. Maybe it’s time to move the family to the coast.

I’ve bombed some big hills in my day as a longboarder, but nothing like these guys. Watching this made my feet tingle like when you stand at the edge of something really high.

The video starts out kind of slow. I just fast forwarded to the part where they start rolling down hill.

Never mind their current turmoil with Georgia, lets talk about their sweet Olympic tracksuits. Now remember this is a county who’s flag has the same colors as ours, but by dropping the blue and only using red and white their sport wear is visually more graphic and strong. I love it! The other thing that I’m really impressed with is the Chinese motif that they’ve used throughout their clothes. I don’t think any other country has done anything like this, but I think it’s brilliant. Why not embrace the fact that your athletes are performing in China. Several years down the road you’ll look at other countries’ clothes and be hard pressed if that was for Athens or Beijing but not Russia.

The red motif on the Russian’s clothes is common in traditional Chinese paper cuttings (that’s what the 3rd photo is of). I don’t know how old paper cutting dates back, but I think they’re hundreds of years old. So this post is for the comrade who came up with the brilliant idea. You deserve a medal; do you think you could defect to the US and help our boys and girls in red, white, and blue (well maybe we can drop the blue). Now the question is where can I get one?

Some good news. Our little family of three is about to become four. We’re adopting again! We started the processes last year about this time to adopt again from Vietnam, and through some serious miracles we’ve been matched with a cute little boy, Tuan. He’s almost a year old and will probably be the same size as Gem when we get him home (6 months from now). We’re all really excited. Gem keeps asking about “baby Tuan” and that she wants two babies (meaning her and a little brother).

We’ve kept it a secret from pretty much everybody until just a few weeks ago. With the Vietnamese-US agreement for adoptions expiring on September first it’s been a big gamble hoping we’d be matched before Sept. 1, and it’s paid off. I’m certain only with some divine help though.

Of course nothing is final until we have him back home in the states, but I’ll be sure to keep my blog updated with any new news, and certainly you’ll be able to watch as it all unfolds when we travel. Let’s just hope it’s before Christmas.

We at our house have really been enjoying the Olympics. I mean combine our love for China and the excitement of watching the talent and strength of professional atheletes you can’t go wrong. Plus it’s the once every four years that I’ll even want to watch a sporting event.

China is doing it’s best to really shine too, and for the most part I think they’ve done a pretty good job. As I’ve been watching though I’ve noticed that just about every volunteer is beautiful. I mean every volunteer, every girl holding a sign, and all the performers are very handsome and quite pretty. So much so that Susan and I both have said they must of hand picked them. And today’s news of the little girl who sang “Ode to the Motherland” lip synched it at the opening ceremonies because the real girl that sang it wasn’t cute enough proves our theory.

To us in the USA this probably seems absolutely appalling, but it’s common practice in Chinese culture. Next time you fly one of the Asian run airlines you’ll notice every single on of them is tall, thin, and beautiful (try that Delta). An if you go to a monument and there are guards on display (marching, flag raising, etc) you can count on every one of them being over 6 feet and handsome. I’m not saying it’s right. My heart is really sad for the poor “ugly” girl who sang theme song but was “hard to look at”, but the discovery shouldn’t come as a big surprise. This little girl probably isn’t the only victim of not being beautiful enough. I’m sure loads of people were looked over, turned away or hidden away under a box to perform, and the West being out raged probably won’t change Asia’s discrimination on beauty.

The first part of last week was pretty intense. I had full flash website to build out before we headed up to my parents cabin for the annual “Garner Retreat”, and fortunately I pulled it off by 5PM wednesday. The site went live and I think the client was happy. You can check out the work by clicking here. My roll was in the project was pretty much just flash developer (the agency I was contracted by did most the design). After wrapping up the site we loaded the wagon and headed to the lake.

The first picture is of thursday’s breakfast Susan whipped up. An egg strata that was fantastically delicious. Susan is quite amazing and looks fabulous in her cute new hair cut. The second photo is of Gem in the lake. The kid loves the water. The family was as also a hoot, and I got my once a year wakeboard fix on for a short 20 minutes with a full on butt flop. Maybe I’ll see if I can get the video online later.

Tonight I sold my car. I finally got the “dirt claud” running smooth as the day I got it (after some serious repair bills) and then what do I do? Sell it. We rarely took the sucker out, and I think my neighbors hated the sight of it (only having a one car garage the jeep usually just sat ideal on the street). In fact the only time it ever got out was when I’d take it to visit a few local clients or when Gem and I would go for a joy ride around the hood before parking it in the driveway (I think Gem will be upset when she realizes it’s gone. She was pretty ticked when a dad and daughter came to test drive it). But having been in my possession for the last 12 years it was hard to see go. I think the only other thing that I’ve owned that’s been in my possession for close to that long is my old Guitar in the closet (any buyers?).

The funny thing is I put the jeep up for sale 10 years ago, but because it didn’t have a 6 or 8 cylinder engine NO ONE wanted to touch it. This time around there was a lot more interest and everyone mentioned they wanted the smaller engine for better fuel economy. I guess $1 a gallon of gas to $4.25 does shift people’s perspective (granted they SHOULD have been looking for something like a VW Rabbit or Honda something or other that gets 30MPG not 12MPG). Oh well. Here’s to old relics that we keep around far too long for whatever reason. Black Jeep I hope you live a long life without me. You will be missed and remembered for the good times like giving Susan her engagement ring, watching movies at the drive-in on the roof, mud puddles splashed through, Gem bouncing around yelling “Geep Geep!” , and not for the bad times like the 3 times you stranded me in a weeks time, when Becka Malon rear-ended us, or the time you got a flat in front of Tamari’s in a snow storm. Good luck buddy.