A Day in My Life

As you have probably figured out by now, I have my blog hosted on my own domain, BGerdin.com. I’ve had this domain since, oh, the summer after my Sophomore year at Bethel. I distinctly remember sitting down in the blistering summer heat at what is the ITS Helpdesk with nothing to do, causing trouble with Mr. Bleess. I remember that he had recently acquired his domain of bleaus.net (be sure to check it out, it’s pretty sweet!) and I was really interested in having one of my own. It didn’t take long before I had decided on and purchased my very own domain. At the time, it made way more sense for Austin to have a domain because he was, at that time, a computer science major. Me, being the finance major that I was, really had nothing to do with and shouldn’t have even been thinking of having my own website. But alas, here I was with my very own domain.

I thought this was pretty cool, however, I had no idea what I was going to do with it or even how to begin working on it. Thankfully, I was surrounded with all the computer people that I would need to start my site and get it up and running. Also thankfully, Bethel provided all of their students with a copy of Dreamweaver on their servers. This handy piece of software became the life vest for me out in the ocean known as the internet. I started out with a blog and it slowly grew to include regular html pages that I painstakingly learned how to code. This was quite a task for me being that I had never coded anything in my life. I asked both my coworkers and W3 Schools a lot of questions as I went along. Over time I moved my blog back and forth a couple of times from being hosted on Blogger’s servers to being hosted on my domain. Finally, I think finally that is, I moved my blog back to my server and started using Wordpress to author my blog. I have never had any second thoughts since that move.

A couple years ago, equipped with my vast knowledge of website creation, I decided that I could help my dad create a website for Gerdin Auto. As you probably could guess, my knowledge is no where near vast when it comes to programing. You could probably figure that out pretty quickly by simply looking at GerdinAuto.com. Looking at that site now, it looks like a bad site from the late ’90’s. Bad, I know. But hey, I was having fun. I had made a website from scratch for my dad’s business. Pretty cool I thought. But, let’s be honest now, I’m not really sure that I want to be associated with the site any more. It is pretty lame. So, within the last six or so months, I decided it needed an extreme face lift. But how, and where would I even start on it? Those were two very good questions.

I just started to play around with what was currently there. I became frustrated with that pretty quickly because I knew that it was just awful. I hit a road block and didn’t really know where to go from there. So what I did was look around for websites that I liked and take some ideas from them for the new site. Since all of the sites that I looked at were in simple html, it was rather easy to look at their code with the simple “View Page Code” in Firefox and figure out what was going on. After searching for a while, I found a great site and started to completely redo the shops site using their code as a guide. Along the way, I have created a Wordpress page that will be incorporated into the site and have also been doing some work in flash to add some special enhancements to the page. Everyone that I have shown it to so far has been blown away with how much better it looks from what is currently up there. Really, it’s not very hard to get that reaction coming from the current page.

So that’s really been taking up a lot of my time recently. I’ve been learning some flash, fumbling around with php, and doing a lot of trial and error with good ‘ol html and css. After I get some more of the content ironed out, I think it’s going to be ready for world to see. But as of now, it’s still in beta. I’m really starting to be excited with how it is turning out. I don’t want to link to it here on my site, so if you want to see the work in progress, let me know and I’ll send you the link to the testing pages. If you check it out, you’ll have to send me some feedback so I can make it even better than it currently is.

Keep fumbling around with your web skills, you never know what will come out on the other side!

For this first weekend in June, we stayed home. You got that right, for the first weekend in three, we didn’t go anywhere. It is so nice just to be able to stay home and not worry about traveling. The cool and rainy weather also allowed us to do some nice relaxing as well.

My Saturday morning start off at a much earlier time than I usually see on Saturday’s with an 8:00 Bible study with some guys from church. All I can say is that it was a good thing we meet Caribou at that time of the morning. This was our summer kick-off study so I can expect many more of these early Saturday mornings this summer.

Immediately after Bible study, Marc and I scooted over to my place and started to work on replacing his passenger outside car door handle. His door handle had broken off quite a while ago which made it very difficult for his wife to get into the car. Now that the drivers lock was also broken, replacing this handle was a necessity. He had ordered and received the part a couple weeks ago so we were able to dive right in to replacing it. We had the door panel off in a matter of minutes and started to survey the wreckage.

After we figured out what all needed to come apart in order to have it replaced, a couple trips for a small screw and a long magnet, some scrapes on my arms and hands, and some good ‘ol fashioned teamwork, we had that thing back together, good as new. Well, I suppose it wasn’t exactly good as new as the new handle is a different color than the rest of the car. But lets be honest, I would much rather have a working handle that clashes than one that matches and rips up my hand.

All-in-all, I think it looks pretty good. The whole process, including the couple of trips, only took us a little over two hours. Not too bad considering neither of us had ever replaced a door handle before.

That evening, Bethany and I had our good friends the Bleess’ over for dinner. Bethany had found a new Indian recipe that she experimented with for dinner that night. The process of making the dinner was more fun for her since she was able to use her new rice cooker. Since we both have a Scandinavian palate, she was worried that there would be a little too much spice for us. However, it came out great! The way she talked about the recipe, we were kind of worried to try it, but we were all very pleased with how it tasted! After dinner, we played some guys vs. girls Trivial Pursuit and had some ice cream with a little chocolate and caramel toppings. There’s nothing like a fun evening with good friends!

And thus ended Saturday. I’m not going to post about Sunday until a little later because I still need to take the pictures from the day off of my camera. Stay tuned for more.

This was the second weekend in a row that we left the house and went out of town. This weekend, the destination was Duluth. More specifically, our destination ultimately was our friends Kari and Per’s wedding. Originally, we were only going to stay up there for one night, but I found a great deal on a hotel for a buy one night and get one free with one free breakfast deal. That was so good there was no way we could pass that one up. So I left work a little early on Friday so that we could get a jump on the weekend travel. Once we made it past Forest Lake on 35, it was smooth sailing. We arrived in the city and checked into the hotel right around 8:00. We threw our stuff in our room and went out to grab something to eat. A couple Jimmy Johns sandwiches later, we were back at the hotel, using a free drink ticket the hotel gave us and hitting up the hot tub. Even though the tub wasn’t very hot, it still felt good. Back in the room, we discovered that we had HG TV. Since we don’t have cable at home, we were hooked! Once you start watching that channel, you can’t stop. There were many times throughout the weekend where we would say “this is the last show,” and then we would proceed to watch another two shows.

On Saturday, we woke up and went to get our breakfast in the rotating dining room at the top of our hotel. This was a pretty fun experience. I wish I would have brought my sunglasses to breakfast though. The sun was really bright reflecting off of the buildings and the lake. After breakfast and a couple HG shows, we made our way up to Enger tower.

If you’ve never been there, Enger Tower in on the top of a hill overlooking the city and the lake. It is a great location just to relax and enjoy the city. Not only is it a great tower to look out from, there are also some great gardens up there.

Across from the parking lot for the tower, there are more gardens and a great lookout place. They have some benches and a nice gazebo up on the hill so we took a load off and enjoyed the view of the city. We were really able to soak in the whole city from up there.

After resting on the bench, we packed it up and drove down to Canal Park. We had been there together before so we just decided to walk around and soak up the sun. The weather was pretty nice that day, a little breezy though, but since the town in right on a huge body of water, that is to be expected. We walked to the end of the pier and we were able to watch a boat drive though and the bridge lift for it. It was only a small, personal boat rather than a huge ocean liner, but that was OK.

That brought us to mid-afternoon so we headed back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding. We arrived at the church about ten minutes for it started so we ended up pretty close to the back of the church. Even though we weren’t very close to the front, we did have a good view of side of Sven Sundgaard’s face. Yep, he was sitting right in front of us. We expected to see him there as we knew he was a cousin of the brides. The wedding lasted right about 44 minutes. We filled out to congratulate the happy new married couple and waited to blow bubbles as they made their way to the limo. We jumped in the car and made our way over to the reception site.

The bride is a friend of Bethany’s from work which meant that I didn’t know anyone there. We ended up at a table with a couple other nurses and a few engineer friends of couple’s from college. They were all a bunch of fun people so we had a good time talking with them all. I had the walleye and Bethany had the chicken for dinner. That was the third time that I had walleye that week and each fish got progressively better. That was a big relief after I had the first fish of the week. We stayed at the reception talking with people until around 9:30 that evening. After getting some pictures with the happy couple, we headed back to the hotel.

Sunday was pretty restful as we didn’t end up checking out until about 11:30 that morning. We stop for some brunch at Perkin’s were I was able to get my French toast. After that glorious toast and a few cups of coffee, we got back in the car and made the couple hour trip back home. Since it was still nice outside when we got back home, we decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood. All in all, it was a pretty great weekend. Be sure to check out the rest of our pictures from the weekend.