He was also the biggest Arizona Cardinals fan I’ve ever known. I met Jim up in Flagstaff at Cardinals training camp probably as much as 10 years ago. I was writing for a sports website back then and was covering the team. Jim read my stuff and hung out on my forum, so we just ended up meeting one day while I was up there covering the team.

Way back in 2002, Jim asked me to help him create Arizona Sports Fans. I built it and ran it from a technical aspect (plus pretty much lived on that forum for the next 6 years), while he took care of the other stuff. He even paid me monthly to maintain it for him.

We turned the site into what is probably the #1 AZ sports fan forum on the internet. We met other people from the board, had poker night, all the Cards fans got together for tailgating at games, meeting at halftime, you name it.

The site got so huge, it was starting to cost a lot of money to host it. So last year, Jim and I decided to sell the site to a company that would keep me on to run it, while they made money from hosting it themselves.

Jim…always looking out for me and my family, only took about 10% of the sale of the site, giving me the rest. He wanted me to use it to help get my little family started. Because of that money, I was able to go from a $450 truck payment to a used car with no payment.

It meant so much to me and to my wife.

Once we sold the site, Jim and I didn’t talk much. He checked in on the forum we have, saw some pictures of Lyla, said she was cute as a button, but I hadn’t spoken to him in awhile.

And I never will again.

The guy had all kinds of health problems (even at one point a few years ago his in-home nurses were trying to poison him!), and while I knew he was sick, I didn’t think it would actually claim his life this time. He’d said a few times before that he might not make it through the next week, but always came out of it.

Not this time.

Jim ol’ buddy…you were a die-hard Cards fan and a good friend to me. We didn’t talk much or hang out much, but you impacted my life more than most people ever could. Thank you for that.

I’m attending his funeral tomorrow with what I’m sure will be a ton of people from our message board who are mourning his loss right now.

The note from his family about the service asked everyone to be casual and wear Cardinals stuff if they were so inclined.

I’ll be donning the NFC Championship gear.

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I was in Las Vegas for two days last week doing a “proof of concept” demo with our client up there and it went very well. The feedback was positive and we only have some minor changes to make to our application in order to move forward. I have a ton of work to do THIS week as well for the same client as I have a 90% deliverable due on July 6th. Yikes.

Back on the homefront, Jina and I are trying to plan out some things for the house that we have been wanting to do for awhile but just have been putting off. We need to replace our carpet in the living room at some point. Either with new carpet or maybe wood floors. Stuff like that. We may get rid of our shower doors in the master bath and just hang a curtain up. I think it will look better and be easier to keep clean. Glass shower doors are a P-A-I-N.

This weekend was busy though. I had a golf tournament on Saturday morning up in Scottsdale, got home around 12:45pm and then drove off to Maricopa for our friend Sara’s birthday/cancer-free party. We had a great time there, stayed over until after 7, swam, goofed off and ate A LOT of food.

It was at that party that we filmed the video below of Lyla “crawling” for the first time. It’s mostly lunging and pulling, but the way I see it…any forward motion is awesome.

She’s been growing up fast it feel like. Now she routinely sleeps through the night, even on occasion not crying a SINGLE TIME for the 11-12 hours she sleeps. We’ve discovered that the sleeping book I read awhile ago seems pretty accurate. The earlier she goes to bed, the more she sleeps. The fact is, she starts waking up from 5:30-6:00 every morning, no matter if she’s in bed at 6pm or 8pm. The more sleep for a baby, the better.

Then she takes about 3 total hours worth of naps during the day. And she’s as happy as a clam.

That’s about it from the Olbinski house. Enjoy the video below! Also, there are a few new pictures of Lyla in our photo album section under Random Lyla!

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The idea of Burton taking that story and turning it into his own imagined world is very intriguing. Listen to some of the cast members: Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, Alan Rickman, Christopher Lee (as the Jabberwock!) and others.

I guess the plot isn’t going to be the original from the story, but a sequel of sorts. It takes place when Alice is 17 years old and gets a marriage proposal. She runs off, only to fall down the rabbit hole again, but this time has no memory of being there before.

It’s set for a March 5, 2010 release.

Here are some looks at the art being designed for the film, plus cast shots.

Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway

Tweedledee and Tweedledum

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Happy 7-month birthday to Lyla today!

(by the way, how cute is this picture of Lyla and her cousin Jackson? OMG)

When you have a baby, sometimes things take forever to change. But other times, it can take just a few days or a week and suddenly everything is different.

In the last seven days, Lyla has slept through the night about 4-5 times and has done it a few days in a row now. In fact, it’s already starting to become the norm.

She even had two nights where she slept for 12 hours!

Now, these nights seem to come with a few wake up/cry moments, but they only last a few minutes.

We attribute this of course to the fact that she’s probably getting the right amount of food now. We’d been a bit behind the 8-ball for some reason and didn’t realize how much baby food she was supposed to be getting. We weren’t starving her (calm down everyone), but it just wasn’t enough.

Now that she’s full and starting to plump up, the sleeping has become easy. She’s on a nice schedule now…sleep all night, take a morning nap from around 8:30-10:30 and then an afternoon one from 2-3 or something like that.

She’s just as happy as a clam too. From the books I’ve read, I’m a firm believer in sleep = a happy baby. The less sleep they get, the more chance of A.D.D. and fussiness. She’s never been that fussy, but now she’s just as giggly as ever.

Of course, she’s also getting older and more interested in “things”, meaning she gets bored more easily, especially if we’re out eating. She doesn’t just sit there anymore, she wants to know what’s going on and play with stuff. If she’s not having fun, then she’s starting to whineeeeeeee….which gets annoying.

But we love her anyways.

With her going to bed now between 6:30 and 7:30, our time for evening dinners is ending, so Jina and I are planning on try to do a few more date nights when we can. Going out on Friday night for our anniversary was a lot of fun. We ate dinner at Kona Grill and just hung out at Starbucks for a few hours, soaking up the beautiful weather we were having.

Really enjoyed Father’s Day. Jina and Lyla got me cards, which were very funny, and then they both got me a $25 gift certificate to Atomic Comics and a little USB reading lamp.

I have to say, the reading lamp is pretty awesome. You can power it with the USB connection which will light up your keyboard in dark rooms, or connect it to a clip that I put on the headboard last night to read. Soft LED lights…very nice.

Oh yeah, another reminder…I started a weather blog called Haboobing, so go check it out and subscribe/bookmark it!

Now I leave you with a little video of Lyla laughing at me throwing the ball for the doggies. You never know what the kid will find funny, but when she starts laughing, we grab the video camera.

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I was thinking about the topic the other day…being a father. And a few weeks ago, I wasn’t even sure if I “felt like a father.” Not sure what I mean by that, but I know I just felt like “me” still, the same ol’ dopey guy who liked movies, sports, legos, comic books, the weather, etc.

I had a kid, but nothing had changed inside me to flip on the “father” feeling. Sure, I loved this little girl, I loved taking care of her, taking care of both my girls really. But it was probably just instinct. You just take care of things, that’s what we men do.

But when they were both away from me in Texas/Tennessee for four days, I suddenly had this change come over me. I missed both of them terribly. I’ve traveled a lot for work in the past, away from Jina, but it was different then.

This change made me realize that over the last seven months, Lyla had created this new space inside me that I didn’t know existed until she was gone for a few days.

It was like I just knew. Finally. I was a dad.

Not to mention the fact that ANYTHING I watch with a father and his little girl gets me all emotional now. And I can’t watch bad stuff about kids without it affecting me. We watched The Changeling last night and it messed me up…messed both of us up.

ANYWAYS, happy Father’s Day to myself and all of us dads out there, especially the first timers.

Now, I don’t know if Lyla is TRYING to say daddy or what, but lately she says “da da da” a LOT and it certainly sounds like her version of daddy.

Here’s a little video of it below and I defy anyone to find a cuter little girl. She just melts me down to my soul.

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Well, I only had one before last night, now I have two. I don’t obsess over posting blogs like I used to, so splitting the weather portion of my topics to a new blog wont increase much of my time.

I’ve wanted to do the weather blog for awhile now. In fact, I bought the domain name about a year ago, had it all setup for some total awesomeness, but then backed off because I was just too busy with school and Pop Critics.

I also wanted to turn it into a money-maker somehow, but that’s really not the point anymore. It’s just there for me to have fun doing, posting pictures, talking about weather, whatever.

So visit it if you want, add it to your reader, favorites, bookmarks, whatever.

It’s called Haboobing.com and if you’re wondering about the name, read the About page on the site.

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Okay, I’m kidding. You know that. Jina knows that. I know that. But that’s one of the main reasons we’ve made it to 11 years.

We love to laugh, but we really love to do it together. We’re a constant source of entertainment for each other. If we have some boring dinner event to attend (like for work, etc), we always have a good time because we can make each other laugh.

There is much debate on who is actually funnier, but that’s a blog for another day.

We’ve been married 11 years. It’s actually still amazing to me that we’re in double-digits. Not that there was doubt that we’d get here, but that it’s been that long already. Truly, these years have flown by. Sometimes it was harder, sometimes easier, but never boring or slow.

And now things are even more exciting. We have a little girl in our lives that makes things very, very interesting.

Or tiring, whatever you want to call it.

We’re parents now, so things are different. We look at the clock around 8pm and are scared to say the phrase that’s become the elephant in the room.

“You ready for bed?”

I know for sure the years we’ve been together prepared us for what it would take to have a baby in the house, but it’s still been a challenge.

But I couldn’t imagine raising Lyla with anyone else but Jina. I’m so glad that our journey has brought us to where we are today. Even thought our lives have changed dramatically by adding this little bundle of joy, we’ve still maintained our sense of humor, our love for each other and our marriage.

We’re much more sleepy than at our last anniversary, but the past year has been one of the most exciting and eventful of our lives. I wouldn’t change a thing about it.

I look forward to year 12, which will come when we’re both 35 years old and officially make us married to each other for over a third of our lives.

Crazy.

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Watch it after the jump.

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Some crazy weather in the Plains States the last few days. Here are some weather shots, plus a special video from CNN from a stormchaser freaking out about this massive tornado AND another video from TornadoVideos.net, the site I frequent most these days.

This is a pretty bad tornado. As you see the building rip apart, it kind of looks like those scenes from Twister. For me personally, if I was next to a tornado that bad, I’d be driving in the OPPOSITE direction.

Listen for the guy telling us all the date, time and year of the video. I think at that point, he figured he was probably about to die *grin*

(thanks to Melanie for the link to this)

I think the above tornado may have been connected to this one below, but I’m not sure. It’s from Central Nebraska yesterday, same as the above. Anyways, it’s awesome and you can see the difference between stormchasers…the one above is freaking out, the ones below are yelling, but totally under control.

These two photos are from Rapid City, South Dakota. I’ve personally never seen a “supercell” (as they call it) like this…they are just so scary looking.

And holy crap, this next one…a “mesocyclone”, meaning it is a kind of rotating vortex within a storm system. Tornadoes form from these very often. Whatever it means, it’s downright creepy looking.

This next one isn’t so much a weather shot, but we needed a change of pace: a beautiful view from Vogel, Slovenia.

How about this one from Névache, France?

And dang, to close today’s post…how about this sunset from Burnsville, North Carolina? Serene…I could live there. (of course)

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Just look for them on your listings for the exact time. Alan Sepinwall says the first five are on Saturday starting at 1:37 until 8pm, and then the final five are on Sunday from 12:16 – 7pm.

Weird start times.

Anyways, load up that DVR with them if you don’t have time. Save them for when you do. Band of Brothers may be one the greatest achievements in television history.

I wrote a review about it last year when I was still writing for Pop Critics. You can read it if you want to get a better idea on what it’s all about.

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