Friday, February 06, 2009

State of the Kelly Address

Parents, Friends, Family, Acquaintances, People We Do Not Know,
The state of the Kelly Union is great!

2009 has started off on the right foot - Almost literally too! Every weekend of January was spent being active. From biking in the White Tanks to hiking in South Mountain and Sedona. The weekends were absolutely beautiful and begged to be be enjoyed. We praise God for His blessing of strength and health. We look forward to a full year of enjoying His creation!

At the beginning of February, we joined a local climbing gym. It is time to get serious and get in shape. Climbing is a fantastic workout and lends itself to good friends and adventure. It is an exciting way to workout too!

Tiffany has been great with devotions over the years. She is always reading and studying to Word. We recently found a devotional series that we are working through at the same time. It has been great getting spiritual exercise and regularly being in the Word. We are also very active in our LIFE group, Sunday School, Youth Group and Sunday morning services - We are trying to be immersed in the Word as much as possible!

I also have a fully implemented "Getting Things Done" system now that seems to be working for me. I have struggled with different systems for a while and let that be an excuse for not getting things done. Now, I do not have an excuse. I have a system that is always in front of me or in my pocket: Microsoft OneNote.

One of the biggest things that I have accomplished through the system is finally documenting and putting into practice a photography work flow. Since we take a ton of pictures and always have people wanting copies, I needed to figure out a way to control the distribution, but also be able to showcase the ones that I wanted. With a little more tweaking, it should be a full functional machine. After downloading pictures, I edit them in Picasa 3 (Mainly delete bad ones and flip sideways ones). After Picasa, I copy them to a central location on our home network. The pictures are backed up once a week and stored in the safe. From Picasa, I upload the pictures to Flickr and mark them as private. From Flickr, I import the pictures into our gallery where people can sign up for accounts and gain access to download pictures that they want (You can select individual ones for a "shopping cart" or you can download an entire set - All in .zip format!). Back on Flickr, I can then open up pictures for public viewing to show the better pictures that are not full of people and stuff. I look forward to getting a lot of pictures online over the coming months and finally begin using the thousands of pictures that we have taken.

Work has been great as of late too! Praise the Lord for work right now. It is very busy and does not show signs of slowing right now. I am presently working a number of roles, among which are consulting and pre-sales. I look forward to working with many clients this year. Previously, I worked on one account. Now, I am able to expand the horizon more and get some more broad experience.

Thank you to those who regularly pray for us. God is good. We thank Him for the many blessings that He bestows on us and pray that we will never forget to give Him all of the glory. At the same time, we pray that we would continue to be more like Christ each day and let Him be glorified in all we say and do.