We're home at last

I finally brought my wife back home... She looks so happy and it makes me feel good.

Mom and daughter, reunited at last.

Mom and daughter, reunited at last.

In Vegas we stayed at The Orleans Hotel

In Vegas we stayed at The Orleans, the only hotel I've stayed at twice. We had a great time hitting up the pool, casino, and the fine dining. It's too bad the trip is coming to an end so soon.

The Hoover Dam was a nice stop along the

The Hoover Dam was a nice stop along the route to Las Vegas. It's always fun taking Flor to new places.

So pretty.

So pretty.

The Great Continental Divide

Yeah, the water runs to the East or to the West here at the Continental Divide. Kinda abstract if you ask me but still cool.

Cruisin' Through Cadillac Cemetery on Route 66

The History of The Cadillac Cemetery

The Cadillac Cemetery, also known as Cadillac Stonehenge and The Cadillac Graveyard, is located just west of Amarillo, Texas, on famous Route 66. The cemetery is basically ten vintage automobiles all vertically half-buried into ground. The site can be seen from the highway. There is no parking lot but there is typically a number of travelers who have parked on the side of the road and walked out to see the cars up close. When Route 66 was replaced by I-40 a number of eye catching gimmicks, such as the Cadillac Cemetery, sprouted up to get the random traveler to stop and spend a few bucks. The owner of this land planted these Cadillacs, now covered with G-rated graffiti, but decided not to charge admission.

Seeing as though this is such an interesting stopping point and admission is free to the public, Flor, Kathleen and myself decided to stop on our way by and get a few pics up close. Enjoy! Flor enjoyed it especially.

Pictures of the Caillac Graveyard

Just Cruisin' through Cadillac Cemetery...

...also of note: this post is part of my Experimenting with SEO series of posts. If interested please take a look at my first attempt to optimize for search engines and then see my followup in part two.

Breakfast with the Chamberlain's

We met Ken and Mary for breakfast this morning in Republic, MO. I had some amazing buscuts and gravy at Ziggie's Cafe. Mmm, tasty treats before an 830 mile drive.

The St. Louis Arch is stinking cool!

Man the St. Louis Arch is cool! It was great to take my lovely there with my family.

Having some lunch in St. Louis

Having some lunch with good people at the Schlafly Tap Room in downtown St. Louis, MO.

Picasso's Coffee Shop

One of the best coffee shops i've been to and who knew it would be in St. Charles, MO?

Kentucky Fried Chicken...

Kentucky Fried Chicken... Wait, that's not right. We're keepin' on keepin' on.

Another pic at lunch- satisfaction

Another pic at lunch- satisfaction

Gladys Knight's Chicken and Waffles

We just sampled some of the fine delicacies of Gladys Knight's Chicken and Waffles in Atlanta, Georgia. Mmm, tasty chicken, wish I could've tried the waffles.

A rare grandparent sighting...

Kathleen, Flor, and I spent the evening with the grand parents in Camden, SC today. It was nice to see them again ar we see them so infrequently.

Visiting Grandma and Grandpa

Just visiting Grandma, and having a home time.

Rick's Party Shop Bait and Tackle

Switching drivers here at Rick's Party Shop Bait and Tackle.

Playing in the water in Charleston. It's

Playing in the water in Charleston. It's weird to be next to the other ocean.

Having some waffles in Selma, NC... Weir

Having some waffles in Selma, NC... Weird place.

We've started our long trip

We've started our long trip

The ladies with Lincoln

The ladies with Lincoln

MoBlogging my trip - An LCD screen, nice

MoBlogging my trip - check out my seat back, an LCD screen, awesome! Way to go Jet Blue.

I have come of age and am now a man!

For the first time in my life I can finaly say that I'm a man! I bought and own my very own fridge... The cats are obviously impressed.

The Family Feed

I thought I'd put together a mashup of all the applicable feeds (those that I know of at least) associated with the whole Mounts family including the extended Mounts family.

I realized a couple days ago after talking to my sister that we often don't know what's going on in everybody's lives simply because we don't know where to look online and/or we aren't on the phone with each other every day. So you'll find below a rundown of all the random stuff going on in everybody's lives as posted publicly by themselves. Hope this helps the family keep in touch!

Those included in this feed are listed at the bottom of this post. If you have a feed that is not included that you'd like to be included shoot me an email or leave a comment... or call or write or knock on my door. :)

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The Above Feed Mashup Includes:

• Brian Mounts - Blog, Twitter, Picasa, YouTube, & Vimeo
• Flor Mounts - Picasa
• Brian & Flor - Wedding Blog
• Steve Mounts - Blog
• Jessica Hammond - Picasa
  
• Josh Camberlain - Blog, Twitter, Flickr, & YouTube
• Ken Chamberlain - Blog

I will update this list as new feeds are created or deleted. Hope to have the rest of the family on this list soon! Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. :)

Thanks to the Carnival of Personal Finance!

So I've been writing up monthly stock and ETF recommendation posts for about a year and a half now and though I've missed a few months I've found it quite enjoyable to test my stock picking prowess by keeping track of my performance over time and broadcasting the results to the world... or I should say the 10 people that read my blog consistently. :)

This month, probably due to the success I've had in beating the market (I'm 6 for 6) and the good feeling that brings, I decided to offer my latest stock picks to the masses by submitting my article to the Carnival of Personal Finance. The carnival hosts a weekly rundown of the best recently composed articles from all the various Personal Finance Bloggers out there and though I don't consider myself a Personal Finance Blogger, I do recognize that my monthly series is in the ballpark of applicable material. And wouldn't you know it, my article was approved and is included in this weeks installment, which is hosted by the Budgeting Babe.

If you've got some free time and would like to read some other personal finance articles that are written by others I recommend heading over to this latest carnival and checking out the vast array of articles covering just about every realm of personal finance. You don't have to read them all if you don't have the time or inclination but check it out and see if anything looks worthy of your time.

Some of my personal favorite articles from this weeks carnival include:

• Cash Back Gas Card - I really want to get one of these.
  
• Never watching CNBC Again - Funny because I love watching this in the morning before work.
• 6 Reasons To Hate Cash - Again funny because I don't like cash either... mostly for more other meaningful reasons, but still...
  

Of course I haven't had nearly enough time to read many of these so I'm sure some others will be on the top of my list by weeks end.

Once again, thanks again to the Budgeting Babe for including my post!

Everything is here and it's a mess!

Every thing is finaly here and it's a mess!

Ah! Our new bed room. Sleepy time.

Ah! Our new bed room. Sleepy time.

Working hard... 2 nice dudes

Working hard... 2 nice dudes

Our first items in the new place.

Our first items in the new place.

This one goes out to Aaron...

...it's his favorite high note and quite possible one of the highest I've ever heard. Ridiculous would be the word I think. Listen to the whole song; it's pretty cool or skip to 3:28 mark and listen to the window shattering note out of context. :)

I'm going to bed now; I promise.

We Praise Thee, St Petersburg Chamber Choir

Sweet mother of god! The last video was just a primer for the low register of this one, check out this Russian choir; at the 50 second mark the basses strongly hit a horribly low and awesome note and then at the 64 second mark they take it down another couple/few notes. Insane! Brilliant! Brings tears to me eyes listening to this.

Contrabass Saxophone

Holy Cheese! This is incredible, check out the contrabass saxophone. I'm fascinated with the low register and this sax delivers in that department but what really got me going with this video is the very end; the last few seconds of the video, the guy doing the sign-off made me laugh out load it was so random and so unexpected. Enjoy!

Mmm, Taco Soup

I haven't moved yet so I figured I'd make some more soup. It's nice and hot. Just ask Aaron.

Expanded Cat-Fetch Coverage

Here's a sweet video my wife took a back in the end of April of Esther first playing fetch with a pen. At this time we didn't know that she would play fetch but it has fast become one of her favorite games. Flor asked me to make sure this gets online because my first video on the subject was too short... not to mention Esther is smaller in this video and is therefore cuter. One one question however begs to be asked; How does Flor get any studying done in this atmosphere?


This is How My Wife Studies - She Plays Fetch With Esther from Brian Mounts on Vimeo.

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For other videos you can check out my entire Video Collection and for more photos you can check out my Photo Collection over at Picasa Web Albums.

Family Website Projects Are Fun

I've been really enjoying myself lately as I've been learning a lot of CSS and HTML web design skills. If any of my routine readers have taken note of this site's re-design over the last few weeks you can obviously see what I'm talking about. It's almost hard to beleive that this site is hosted from Blogger for no money whatsoever as it looks nothing like blogger at all. It's funny, I have a domain name brianmounts.com but I haven't associated it with this site because it's actually registered to my good friend and wedding photographer Aaron Riveroll. Maybe one day we'll transfer the domain to my name and then maybe I'll use it for this site.

Anyhow, the purpose of this post is just to make mention of a project that I started casually working on last fall, in which I have since re-worked it over the past few weeks and am so pleased with overall. My dad, as many close readers know, is a pastor in the Nazarene Church and he has been dabbling with starting a website for a while now as an additional outlet for his ministry. Funny thing is that my dad is still learning to use the computer so I've been handling the setup of the site and the design aspects of it. My dad puts the content together like nobody else could and I make it look good. Obviously my goal is to slowly and continuously teach my dad how to make the site look good himself so that I personally have less editing to do but for now I'm perfectly happy helping him out any way I can.

If you wanted to head over and check out my Dad's prayer blog and marvel at my site design abilities (which by the way was really just a modification of someone else's site design) then I'd appreciate your thoughts in return. I'm sure my dad would appreciate some feedback on his content as well as this is a new medium for him and he's still learning how to keep a blog.

Coincidentally, I just learned that my cousin Jess is learning a little web design for a class she's taking so I'm interested in taking a look at her creations when they go live.