Last weekend, Grace and I took a stroll to the park. I snapped this photo along the way.

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I can’t believe that I’m an uncle again. My brother Wesley and his wife Kari welcomed Abigail Leigh Denton. She’s a beautiful, healthy baby girl. At birth she was 8lbs, 10oz and measuring 21.25″. God is good!

As the band Live put it…

I don’t need no one to tell me about Heaven. I look at my daughter and I believe!

Congrats, Wes and Kari!

Press play to listen to the song: Live – Heaven

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What a great weekend!
On Friday, my brother Wesley got in the car early in the morning and started driving to my house. From DC to Charlotte it’s normally about a 7 hour drive. With Wesley’s busiest day ever (his press release was the front page of DrudgeReport on Thursday), it actually took him 9.5 hours. But, that was understandable.

When he arrived at 7:30 on Friday night, the fun began. I planned a fun filled, but no-stress weekend. That evening we ran up to Creation for dinner. If you haven’t been there, I highly recommend it. Then we rolled over to the Gallery Crawl in NODA. There, we first hit The Rat’s Nest where the Loose Lugnuts were playing. We hung there for a little bit, then checked out Dolce Vita for a bit, then rolled home to prepare for a big day on Saturday.

Saturday morning Wesley’s good friend, Brian, drove into town and joined us for the rest of the weekend. When he showed up we jumped into the car and headed over to the US National Whitewater Center, conveniently located here in Charlotte. This is a brand new facility, and it was quite impressive. We had a blast. After a short instructional, we were on the water and rafting class 2, 3, and 4 rapids. We were on the water for about 2 hours, of which Wesley and Brian spent a few minutes each outside of the boat being rescued. Ha!

After a long afternoon rafting, we bolted over to the Pengiun to refuel. Pitchers of beer, fried pickels, and one of the best burgers you’ve ever put in your mouth was just what the doctor ordered! After going home and watching a movie, we went out to Cabo Fish Taco for some dinner, then called it a night.

Sunday, we slept in then rolled over to Kenilworth Park to play disc golf – 36 holes! The first 18 were great. The last half was a bit taxing. (Thanks for Jared joining us to keep us honest on the scoring.)

Here are the photos from the weekend.
Great times, even better company! Happy birthday, Wes! Hope you had a great time.

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This is me as a South Park character. Click here to get your own.

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Every since my buddy Yerg purchased a pop-art styled painting of Jeff Buckley from a local artist for $500 I’ve been on a mission to figure out how the artist creates his work. The pop-art is more of a shadowed, posterized effect. So, I started playing with Photoshop until I figured out an easy way to create the same effect.

I loved Yerg’s paintings, but couldn’t see myself paying a guy $500 for something I could do myself… or almost myself. I got pretty close. I played around a few times with Photoshop’s image adjuster, then I read a few online tutorials. Today, I think I figured it out.

It still takes a bit of work in Photoshop. And, I imagine that the painter still has to do some sort of photo transfer or tracing from an overhead projector to get this on canvas. But, I’m pretty excited at getting this far.

I think I have my new family project. The photo above is of my parents. My goal is to add each one of my brothers. This should make for some incredible wall art.

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Click here to see the full photo stream.

As I said in my previous post, my father, my brothers and I just returned from the Grand Canyon. It was a blast – truly a trip for the ages. The trip was meaningful for two separate reasons. One, it was my father’s dream vacation. He’s always wanted to visit, and he’s always wanted to take a trip with his sons. To add to his delight, we took the back roads, ate in small dives along the way, and drank beers with the locals in bars most people would be scared to walk into to. It was right up his alley.

The second benefit of the trip is that it was a chance for all the brothers to get together outside of our hometown. (This is a goal of ours – to get together at least once a year outside the presence of our parents or our hometown.) We’re on year number two, and counting. These get togethers have been great at reaffirming our friendship, and making our bond of brotherhood even tighter. We are our own best allies. It’s important to nurture that.

So, as the trip began, we all flew into Las Vegas. We all arrived with a few hours of each other, and it didn’t take too long for us to check in at our first hotel – The Stratosphere, on the Las Vegas strip. This was as good of a place to start out as any. The rooms were only $25/night (thanks to Travelocity) and it had all the amenities you needed to have a good time in Vegas. We settled in. We hit the blackjack tables. Then took off for our first event – a helicopter ride down the Vegas Strip at night. I highly recommend this. You can find tickets online for about $60/person. And, the ride – athough short – was very fun and you get a view of Vegas that is priceless.

The next day was off to the West rim of the Grand Canyon. We setoff by 9:30am, and stopped off at the Hoover Dam to take the tour. Why not, right!?! This was totally cool, although the guided tour was about 20 minutes too long. From the Dam we headed toward Meadview, AZ. Along the way we stopped in Dolan Springs for some food and drink. This was an event. The food was failry good, but we had to walk across the street to the local biker bar for some suds. Althoug we didn’t fit in. The locals seemed to like us. Noah stepped right up to the bar, ordered drinks, then played a few songs on the jukebox which seemed to liven things up a bit.

After the drinks we were off to Grand Canyon West. This is the place which is building the Skywalk over the Canyon. The Skywalk is a U-shaped glass bridge which is cantilevered over the Canyon rim. This allows visitors to look straight down 4000 feet to the Canyon floor. Truly amazing! After a treachorous 14 mile drive down a dirt, rocky, unpaved, windy, bumby road, we made to the Hualippai Indian reservation ready for our tour. But, when we arrived we were informed we had missed the last tour of the day by 10 minutes. UUGGH!!! Before heading to our hotel we were able to get a few photos of the Canyon in the distance, but the sun was setting fast so off we went.

We checked into the Meadview Lake Motel. It was absolutely in the middle of nowhere! It was pitch dark when we arrived and it appeared as if nothing was around for miles. That night I had dreams that we were surrounded by the Sand People from Star Wars. But, when we woke we were preasantly surprised. It was a small town. But, this small town had a geogeous view of the Canyon. It was so beautiful. This is where we spent the next two days. We had dinner with the locals. Took a helicopter ride through the canyon from a nearby dude ranch. Played horseshoes. Had a cowboy sing a song for us. We caught both the sunrise and the sunset. And ontop of all this… we were the only tourists in the town. You can tell from our photos that no one else was anywhere in site.

Here’s a video my brother, Matthew, put together of the trip.

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