We arrived in Cal­i­for­nia eight days ago, wel­comed by our best friends at the air­port. With my arm out­stretched my friend gen­tly tugged it and we hugged shar­ing that moment where two friends who haven’t seen eachother in a long time just soak in the moment, soak in the mem­o­ries. Our friends give us the news that just a ter­mi­nal away a movie crew is film­ing a movie with “one of the girls from Lind­say Lohan’s Mean Girls” called Red­eye, no doubt a teen com­edy about air­lines or traveling.

After spend­ing a day in River­side, Cal­i­for­nia my father, brother, wife, daugh­ter and I made the 4-hour trek to Bishop, Cal­i­for­nia which sits just an hour away from Mam­moth (the famed loca­tion of the WB’s The Moun­tain). It’s cold here and snow­ing and we’re try­ing to fully real­ize the sit­u­a­tion because we left New York to get away from the snow and yet here in Cal­i­for­nia they are expe­ri­enc­ing frigid conditions.

I’ve spent the last cou­ple of hours (at least) cleans­ing this site of spam which seemed to hit hard over the span of a few days. I’m amazed at how per­sis­tent these mouth­breathers are (sorry Greg) and why they insist in mak­ing it that much more dif­fi­cult to main­tain Word­Press and this site respec­tively. I’ve tried a hand­ful of spam­i­na­tors out there but as Michael has expressed they have a ten­dency of get­ting rid of legit­i­mate com­ments in addi­tion to vile com­ment spam. It’s a topic I could rant about for a few years but for now I’ll just do my best to remove it.

As I sit here writ­ing this I can hear the pat­ter of rain­drops pound­ing the snow and it sounds sur­real for where I am but it’s a wel­comed change in some respects. In other irrel­e­vant news I finally pro-ified my Flickr account which means I can dump a boat­load of pho­tos into the Flickr sys­tem and enjoy the full expe­ri­ence as a Pro user, which I had expe­ri­enced tem­porar­ily sev­eral weeks ago. Ludi­corp has cre­ated some­thing spe­cial and as each week goes by it seems they imple­ment new func­tion­al­ity into an already superb photo-sharing and community-powered lifeforce.

I plan on mak­ing a few updates here and there as this vaca­tion pro­gresses. In the mean time I hope every­one is hav­ing a pleas­ant new year and hope­fully your res­o­lu­tions come true if you’ve made any that is. I’ve been upload­ing a slew of pho­tos from this trip to my Flickr account so if you’re inter­ested feel free to browse.

See you in a week or so.