Let's get this party started!

Do do do dooooooooooooo! Dear People! Friends and Enemies, Austin has officially blogged for the first time ever! That's right, Austindm.blogspot.com, for all your blogging needs is now available, just $19.95! I can get it on eBay cheaper than that. Blogspot, where ALL Bloggers eat! 

 Yeah, the real reason I've resisted the whole "Blog" phenomenon is I really don't know what to write about. (Can you tell? Be honest with me) Let's start with all the Holden Caulfield kind of crap. Not because you want to or need to know all my history, but it gives us a starting point, which is always nice to have. 

 I was born in <redacted> CA. Why, you ask? As James Whistler put, "I wanted to be near my mother." I grew up at an average rate as most babies do, did all the normal things like go to elementary school, wrote on the walls, picked my nose, experimented with fire. At the age of about 14 my family (2 excellent parents and 4 wonderful-ish boys) moved to TX. I did things an average boy my age did, I fished a lot, stayed up way too late watching way too much tv and playing video games, I kissed a girl, got cancer. Yes, if you didn't know, I had bone cancer at age 15. I'm fine now, but it did define me somewhat, whether or not that's a good or bad thing, I don't know. I try to take the positive out of it, as it seems to be the best course. If it wasn't for cancer, I wouldn't have discovered painting, a dear love of my life, nor would I have been able to travel to Italy! That was awesome. Anyway, high school was a time of learning, not learning, and cancer. 

After High School, I went for a year to SVCollege, loved almost every second of it, even some of the learning parts. I met friends I hope to have forever, and a few I know I won't, but, as they say, memories are a precious thing you wouldn't trade for a room of gold, but sometimes would give said room of gold to be rid of them for some new ones. Ok, I just made that up. 

As most good mormon boys do at age 19, (not to say I was a good mormon boy, but I was one who really wanted to and who qualified) I served a mission for my church and my God. 2 years in beautiful and freezing Minnesota and Wisconsin, the land of 10,000 lakes and America's Dairyland. I still miss the cheese almost as much as I miss the awesome people there. After the mish, I moved to, as most returned missionaries hungry for a wife I mean education do, to the Beehive state, wonderful Utah, beginning a reluctant love affair that, as most reluctant love affairs often do, began as animosity. I did not like Utah. I moved there because I felt that was where I was supposed to be. Several doomed relationships and worse jobs later, (and about a year) I finally discovered the reason I came, and the love affair of all time. I met Tracie at work. To say it was amazing is to cheapen it. And simply not true. Our story sounds somewhat like a Jane Austen novel, to tell you the truth. Perhaps I'll tell you the story sometime. All I will say is I didn't know God made women as fantastically wonderfully amazingly stupendously other adjectively tiggerific as Tracie (my mother notwithstanding). When I found that there WAS such a practically perfect person as Tracie, I did the only thing that made sense. I married her. 

We've now been married one year and 2 months as of this post, and I love her so much. She's my very best friend and everything I could want, everything I do want, and Oh so much what I need. Basically, she's pretty cool. Tracie. Everyone should have one. But you can't have mine. Sorry. That's about it in a rather large nutshell, grew up, did some stuff, got married to the Princess of my dreams. this blog stuff's easy!