Friday Flashback: Goring Cousins

This new scanner is so awesome. Spending all that time scanning in those old slides and cleaning them has been totally worth it.

I look really uncomfortable here, I guess I didn't know what to do with my arms.

Can anyone clue me into who the guy behind me is?

I remember this visit I had with my cousins while my family was down from Canada on vacation. I had a lot of fun with my cousins. It was during this visit that my cousin Wyatt gave me PitFall 2 on the Atari (which I still have today).

Happy Birthday Josh!

Day 322

What a lame post yesterday. I did have a lot of fun winning all those games against Eric and there is nothing like racking up 514 rushing yards against him. But I feel like I have reached a low in my roller coaster. I get like this sometimes (it would be interesting to check back on my blog and see if maybe I am cyclic) where I just feel blah.

So today I plan on reading some comics and drinking some Dew. I think it is time to re-read my collection of X-Men comics starting with this huge hardcover.

I think I might be a little nervous for tomorrow too. And surprisingly this has nothing to do with the big Jets/Patriots game that I get to watch (even though that makes a little nervous/excited too) but I am anxious to see what happens at Church tomorrow. I just might get released from my current calling which means I soon might have another calling. Our small little choir is singing tomorrow too and my ace-in-the-hole won't be there to help me get through it. There is this kind lady in the ward that sings tenor with me because we don't have enough guys and she is out of town this weekend. I have this ugly gut feeling that I will be the only tenor there. We have practice here in a few hours and I hope I can catch my parts.

Yesterday was my cousin Josh's birthday and I totally forgot to blog about it. I told myself that I would blog about my fellow blogger's birthdays (no other family members get that privilege embarrassment) and I totally skipped out.

I don't have many pictures of my cousin Josh. But Jeremy sent me this pic while I was on my LDS mission in New York.

Jeremy wrote this on the back. I think it is okay to reveal this now.

It is how I will always remember Josh.

I have many fond memories of my cousin Josh. He was just as into Star Wars as Jeremy and he loved video games. I remember spending hours playing the old Atari basketball game, the Nintendo Ten Yard Fight game and getting so competitive and hating each other.

Ahhh.... good times. We didn't just play video games either, I also remember the highly competitive basketball games in the driveway at Greeley.

Josh also served an LDS Mission around the same time only he was on the West Coast while I took the East Coast. He served in Los Angeles and in the hood.

Like I said, I don't have many pictures of Josh. This was taken at the SLC airport when I flew out to New York. I guess he looks sad since he had to go to the West Coast instead of the East. I guess that makes you Tupac and me Biggie.

Happy Birthday Josh!*

*better late than never right?

Christmas Memories: In Pictures

Day 51

With Logan's birthday tomorrow and Christmas coming up, my time for blogging is getting shorter and shorter. Today is just a collection of Christmas pictures from my past.


Decorating the Christmas tree was one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid. That has certainly changed, I am not a fan of it now. We always had a real tree when I was young, we would buy the spray cans of snow and blast the tree full of snow. We then would put our homemade ornaments (I had this duck I made when I was two) and we would put tinsel over it carefully to make it look like icicles. It took us hours to get our tree up and decorated.


My first Christmas when I was married was certainly a fun and unique Christmas. We lived in a trailer on the campus of Utah State University. We barely had room for us and we knew that a tree would be impossible. I came home from work one night and found that Kristy had taken our garland we used for our wedding reception and fashioned it into a Christmas tree that she put in the corner. It was so cute. Looking back, it was fun to be poor students.


One of the best Christmas mornings ever! As far as gifts go. This was the year I got a ton of hockey stuff. I got my first hockey stick, an Edmonton Oiler jersey (see? my jersey-wearing days started early!) and this cool hockey game. It was like a foozball game only it had hockey players. You can also see in this picture that I got a Super Merlin and a metal cast Star Destroyer (my favorite Star Wars ship) which I still have today.


Another fantastic Christmas morning. I was certainly spoiled. This was the Christmas when I got the Atari 2600 and some games. I was so excited! You can also see on the right that I got a ton of Return of the Jedi action figures and in my hands is a ton of hockey stickers. I couldn't wait to tear into the Atari.


We brought Logan home on Christmas Eve from the hospital. My dad was on the road (he was a trucker) and he came by on his way home for Christmas to see Logan. It was so nice to have my dad drop in on Christmas to see his first grandson.


Logan didn't want to sit on Santa's lap this year. He seems to be wishy-washy when it comes to this. But one year he surprised us all when he said he would sit on his lap. And we have photographic proof of it!

List-Mania: The Atari 2600

DAY 6 List-Mania Friday!

I apologize to those that were eagerly awaiting the conclusion to my 'When Kristy Met Matt' series of columns. It will come back Saturday. I have decided that every Friday will be List-Mania! Since I like making lists I thought it would be fun to have a weekly column devoted to the list.

The topic this week is one of the greatest toys ever invented, the old Atari 2600. When I look back on Christmas, I really remember the one where my sister and I scored the Atari 2600. We each got a game with it too. I still have the old system and it still works. Years later I replaced it with the Atari 7800. That system had a few cool games on it but the best thing is that it was backwards compatible. Every once in a while I will dig out the old Atari and play the all the games. The only game that I didn't have as a kid that I wanted real bad was Frogger. One day I will snag this game for myself.

So here are my Top 5 Atari games from when I was a kid.

5) Ghostbusters
I'm not sure why I liked this game so much but even now I will dig it out and play it out to the finish. Catching those ghosts can be frustrating and some of the logistics were silly. I mean really, you defeat the big Stay Puft Marshmallow Man by walking underneath him? It still made a fun game. Oh, and make sure you spend the money to pick up the vacuum to suck up the ghosts when you drive from warehouse to warehouse.

4) Vanguard
Getting to the main bad guy was hard but beating the last guy, not so much. I think the reason why I liked it so much was that you can shoot from all directions. There were a variety of bad guys and pitfalls to avoid. But the ending was horrible. One shot killed the bad guy. But you got to play it again, this time faster! I played this for hours and hours.

3) Pitfall
My sister Jennifer got this game for Christmas when we got the Atari. This game certainly had its charm although crossing the crocodiles was very frustrating. I only made it the full twenty minutes only once and always failed in getting all the treasures. It seems that the silver bars were the most rare. But what frustrated me more was when I would go down the ladder and hop over that stupid scorpion and end up trapped by a brick wall!

2) Ms. Pac-man
I got this game for Christmas when we got the Atari and this was a fantastic game. Much better than the horrible Pac-Man, this actually felt like the arcade game. It had its own mazes and you can change the difficulty so you could get rid of that pesky red ghost!



1) Joust
I loved/hated the arcade game. Loved it because it was different and fun but hated it because I sucked at it. My parents thought it was cute how the ostrich would screech with its feet when it came to a stop after a run so they bought the Atari version. I spent hours and hours trying to get the highest score (and I think it was around 800,000 or so) and the levels became just all those fast blue birds. And hitting that stupid pterodactyl right on the nose was next to impossible.

Man, this totally makes me want to dig out the Atari and play some games. I had a ton of games but unfortunately I didn't have the M*A*S*H* Atari game. I borrowed it from a friend and had it for two weeks and I played it non-stop. I visited our local game store and they had one but it cost $9.99. Not sure I want to pay that much for an Atari game.

If you want to go back in time and revisit the golden age of video games, I highly recommend this site: The Atari Age. The scans I used for this blog come from this site.