*This post should have gone up several weeks ago. I’m just now getting this up, so there are a couple of newer items beneath it.
We’ve moved! Ok, well maybe Matt did the moving this time. We are officially both Texas residents once again…and better than that we are living under the same roof! On Wednesday, October 24th my parents and I set out of Cali to move my man home! We arrived at 8:30, at dinner, worked on finishing up loose ends, and then got a little sleep. The driving began on Thursday morning and lasted for the next 3 days! We had a great time seeing the sites of the west coast and southern US once again but were very happy to pull up at our new home on Saturday afternoon.
When we got to our new apartment we were greeted by a welcoming committee of Granny, Pop, Ronny, Carla, Adam, Genie, and Layne all there to help unload the truck. It was the fastest unpacking ever! Thanks for helping us out guys, we really appreciate it. After unpacking we celebrated Matt’s return to the Lone Star State with a Pappasitos dinner @ the Hopkins. Yum-O!
Adam, Genie, Lesley, Travis, Emma and our Mama’s came over on Sunday to help us break the apartment in and get organized. Our moms unpacked while the “kids†played in the yard. It was such a nice relaxing Sunday with family. We are so glad to be back together and so happy to be near our family for now. We’ll see where the Lord leads us but for today we are here!
This year we had Thanksgiving over at my parent’s house. We packed the place in with plenty of loved ones and food. Mandi made a video with her new digital camera and we took loads of photos. Take a look!
Lindsey and I are giving this super nifty WordPress plugin for the super nifty program called pictobroswer a try. The program pulls the images from our different Flickr sets right here to our blog’s front page and gives you a clean little interface to browse them with.
To move through the images you can click on the big photo to go to the next one, use the thumbnails at the bottom, or my personal favorite, use the right and left arrow keys on your keyboard. The arrow keys can’t start working until you have clicked the first photo to activate the plugin. Once you’ve done that, the keyboard will respond. If you see the word Notes at the bottom of the image you can click on that to read the photo’s description. Click on the Link button, also at the bottom of the photo, to go to the image’s page on Flickr.
We’d love to hear feedback from you if you like using this new feature. Leave us a comment and tell us what you think. If we decide to make this a permanent addition to our site, you can still always find the larger photos by going to the main sets page on Flickr, and find the event you’d like to view. That’s here: http://flickr.com/photos/mathagat/sets/
In early November I went with one of my coworkers, Jana, and several other counselors from Humble to the Texas Counseling Association conference in Corpus Christi, TX. It was a blast! We learned tons about counseling and strategies for helping people during the days, and had a great time getting to know one another at night. We even managed to pick up one crazy man while at the concert our last night in town. He had no idea who he was up against!!!
With our video being one of the winners, the band got to play a show put on by The Owl Magazine, 7×7, SonicLiving, Pandora, Live 105 (San Francisco rock station) and Gibson. I’ve linked the YouTube version of the video as opposed to a better quality Flash version of my own. This is so it will load up and play faster for you. I figured you wouldn’t mind sacrificing a bit of quality for speed. If you’d like to see a cleaner, crisper version of the video you can check it out on my portfolio site here: http://matthopkins.tv. That one plays pretty fast too.
