Well, I’m kind of bummed today.  Yesterday we found out that VeriSign decided to pull the plug on the next version of the Liberty Fillmore, Cart Whisperer campaign, which was in fact a presidential campaign.  For a few months, we had been working on a new phase of the marketing campaign where Liberty was running for President.  VeriSign kept pushing back and saying they wanted to wait a bit, and kept going back and forth on what proposed new features they wanted and didn’t want, until finally they realized that they’d pushed back too much and it was now too late to launch.  So they’re just paying us for all the work done so far and the VeriSign team moves on to other projects.  This has been a great campaign to be a part of – it’s up for some national marketing awards and it’s just been a fun site to develop, but it’s over now.  It’s a shame, because a lot of really good work by a lot of great team members had been done on the site.  Since it won’t have a chance to be shown, I figure I can show it here for whoever happens to read this.  So here are a bunch of comps (that means mocked up images showing what the new site will look like, not actual live website pages) of the Liberty for President website that almost was. There’s some really choice funny lines on these if you want a good laugh.

Liberty and justice for Y’all!	Platform page 1	Get Poll-itical	Liberty Town Hall
Wreeeee the People!	The Green Bar Party	Encyclomedia – photos	Encyclomedia – photo detail
Encyclomedia – videos	Encyclomedia – video viewer	Encyclomedia – downloads

On Monday evening we went to the park across the street.  There’s a pathway that encircles the park that is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 mile.  There’s a marker we’ve seen before that says the distance but it was getting dark so we couldn’t find it.  Anyway, when we got there, Logan said he wanted to “wun fo a minute and exohcise”.   So he took off – and didn’t stop until 6 laps later!  Actually that’s not totally true.  He stopped long enough each time he passed to ask if he could go again.  Julie wanted him to stop after 3 laps – she thought he was going to pass out or something – but I wanted to see how long he could go.  He finally said he was ready to go after 6 laps but he didn’t even look that tired.  I think he could have gone more.  He looked so funny too — totally reminded me of Dash on The Incredibles with his little legs just a blur and his little hands clenched in these tight fists.  Actually his only complaint afterwards was that his hands hurt from making fists for that long.  HAHA!  He actually was pretty fast too.  I don’t know for sure how long, but it was definitely less than 20 minutes.  Peyton tried to run with him about halfway through but couldn’t for very long.  And Soren did 11 trips on his bike in that time.  A 4 year old running 1.5 – 2 miles in less than 20 minutes seems like it’s pretty good to me.    I wondered if this had something to do with watching the Olympics but I don’t think he had really seen much of the track events by then since everything we watched was mostly swimming, gymnastics, and volleyball.  But somehow, he got the running bug.  I said to Julie after, that we need to take him to the park every night and just let him run.

OK, actually we had green fuzzies a few weeks ago.  Now it’s actually starting to look like grass.  We hydroseeded and when you do that you get a lot of weeds for the first year or so, plus some bare spots that need filling in.  But we’ve heard nothing but positives in the long run from others who hydroseeded.  So that plus the fact that when doing a 1-acre yard it saves about $8000 compared to sodding an acre, means it’s worth it.  The big summer projects we’ve done in addition to the grass this year are:

• Fence: We put in Trex fencing which is beautiful and virtually maintenance free for 25 years.  Plus it gives us the wood look that looks so much better with our house than vinyl would.
• Concrete work: We poured a big basketball pad on the west and a back patio out of the basement and steps going down the east side to the new patio.
• Trampoline pit: Keep the kiddies safe.  I did this one with just cinderblock, some chain-link fence posts, and a lot of dirt to fill in the cinderblock holes.

So FINALLY, 3 years after moving in, things are starting to come together in our yard.  Here’s some photos showing the current status:

front yard weeds (and grass – honestly it’s there!)	see, there really is grass!
front yard with the new fence	back yard with the new fence on the right side and the new trampoline pit
basketball pad right after completion before the fence was put in	back patio as it was getting completed.  Soon this will be covered by a deck.

I took the day off yesterday to play at Timp Lodge at Sundance with Julie’s family.  In the morning I went to Julie’s brother Justin’s practice with the BYU football team.  Justin is probably 6′ 2″, 230 lbs, and ripped.  He holds the Utah high school state record in the powerclean and is the reigning national high school powerclean champion. He benches about 350 lbs, squats over 500 lbs and can clean over 340 lbs.

He’s also a kicker.

He wanted to play linebacker but his high school coach saw his kicking potential and told him that one day he would thank his coach for only letting him kick.  Now, Justin is one of the top freshman kickers in the country.  He’s got a killer leg, holding the Utah state record with a 63-yard field goal (and some 70-yarders in practice) and with kickoffs that often go through the goal posts, approaching 90+ yards long.  The publicity he’s gotten over the last year-and-a-half or so since BYU offered him a scholarship is crazy.  He’s probably the most popular BYU player to never play a down of football, and is interviewed and/or mentioned all the time in the paper and on the news.  So he’s got a ton of pressure on him going into this season.  The practices are only open to media and family members, so I took advantage of being down in Provo and went to watch.  It was a pretty good practice and I met Lavell Edwards (told him I was Buss Williams’ grandson – my grandpa was Lavell’s coach when he played at Utah State), Ian Dulan, and Mo Foketi in addition to talking with Justin and Danny (Julie and Justin’s cousin), a safety, about how things were going.  Anyway, here are a couple videos from byucougars.com and YouTube about Justin.

I think this is probably my favorite book ever. Actually all 4 books of the series are I guess. And I haven’t even read a page of them. Julie tried to read to me from one of them but I made her stop after “…Edward’s velvet voice…”. That kind of made me want throw up in my mouth a little bit. But nonetheless, this just may be my favorite book series ever. Why? Because Julie LOVES to snuggle when she’s reading these books. It’s strange because a friend warned me a year or so ago that if Julie ever read this series she would fall in love with Edward and compare me to him. So I was a bit nervous when she started reading these a month or so ago. But I have to say he was dead wrong and I’ve quite enjoyed this series. It’s lunchtime and Julie just called me to tell me she wished I was home because she’d been reading Breaking Dawn. What I’m bummed about is she also told me she finished it. No more books to read. So either Stephenie Meyer REALLY needs to start a daily serialized story on her website, or I’ve got to convince Julie that she really needs to go back and re-read them to catch the things she missed the first time around.

Last week we launched the new MightyDog.com website. We used some of the GMNext.com framework for this site, especially the social networking aspects of the site. This site ties in with a national ad campaign Purina is doing for their Mighty Dog line. So McCann also did the television ad production which meant there were a couple of days when we had a bunch of really smart, well-trained dogs and their trainers here in the office for filming. Anyway, check out the site – and send in some photos or videos of your dog!

OK, this is getting out of hand.  What is?  Well, 2 things actually – first that I haven’t blogged in over a month.  And second, gas.  This is the most I’ve ever paid for a fillup.  A couple months ago I posted my $100 gas station trip.  Well, that’s nothing.  Check this out…