It’s been hard on me in more than one way, but am glad and thankful that I have found the strength to do so. I am so grateful for all the people that helped me through all this or even opened my eyes and gave me strength to follow through. During trying times like these, it always warms your heart to know that there are and always will be people in your life who will love you no matter what… who’ll love you unconditionally, and all that is priceless.

As we all know, we all live our lives the best way we can and have our own hurdles that we need to go through or pass. Unfortunately, my mom had to go through another one less than two weeks ago when she unexpectedly lost her husband. It saddened all of us and took us by surprise. Everyone who knew Jožko, will remember him for his great spirit and always smiling no matter what state of mind he might have been. We all miss him dearly.

I wish it was under different circumstances, but this event brought me to a decision to go home sooner than expected. It might have taken more than a week for my work to approve, but now it’s official that day after Thanksgiving, I will be flying out of Seattle to go home to spend Christmas Holidays with my family and friends in Bratislava.

I will be working during the week, but still will try to mingle with my friends and have some fun. I would love to travel some too but only time will show if any of that will work out.

I’ve been wanting to go to Boston for the next one no matter what the line up of speakers would be, but when I found out that for the first time ever that there will be A Day Apart, I knew that I’ll have to be there. Whether my work will pay for it or not, I had to make sure to make this happen!!! I mean I would be dumb to miss out on a full day workshop about HTML5 and CSS3 with Dan Cederholm & Jeremy Keith. A full day workshop that I’ve been wanting and even brought it up to Jeffrey Zeldman himself during a lunch at AEA in New Orleans where he sat at my table. Consequently, the second I knew that my wishes came true, it was a no-brainer that I had to be part of this & I will be…

So, besides signing up for two days of geekiness presented by only the best and my mentors in the industry like already mentioned Jeffrey Zeldman, my CSS guru Eric Meyer, always funny but mostly very resourceful Andy Clarke, also known as “Malarkey“. I will be delighted to see Aarron Walter again, as well as Jared Spool, Jeff Veen. In addition, I will get to listen for the first time to Ethan Marcotte who also co-wrote Handcrafted CSS with Cederholm and Designing with Web Standards (3rd Edition) with Zeldman, which both I got obviously and read by now.

No need to add anymore as it should be obvious that not only I will get my money worth, I’ll have three days to spend among the best and learn from them as much as I’ll be able to absorb. So, I am happy to say that I’M BACK An Event Apart, so be ready for me!!!!!

This year it will be on November 30. Everyone can attend, regardless where you live or what you do.

It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Beg, borrow, or buy a Blue Beanie and snap a photo of your mug wearing the blue. (Or get creative with Photoshop). Then on November 30, switch your profile picture in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, (and any other social network) and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group … watch for more information coming soon.

You don’t have a blue beanie or your Photoshop skills aren’t the best? Don’t sweat it! You can download a blue beannie from Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog that was provided Kevin Cornell and create your own avatar.

So, what are you waiting for? If you didn’t know what to do on November 30, 2009…. well, now you do!!!! Join us for 3rd Annual – Blue Beanie Day on Facebook or Flickr.

How did that happen? Well, I came to work like any other day, bright and early before 6:30 A.M. As I was pulling around our office building, I noticed a whole bunch of trailers. Couldn’t tell whether they were unloading or packing after an event that might have taken place over the weekend.

So I just went in, and started to go about my day while here and there tried to figure out as coworkers started to come in, what might be happening. Then I hear that it was a film crew. However, it took almost till lunch time till I found out what it was. One coworker came up to my desk and told me that since I enjoy to stalk celebrities that Ii might care to know that there is Luke Perry outside of our building filming TNT TV Show “The Leverage“.

And you know, the second I heard Luke Perry, I got up and rushed to the window to see for myself. Of course, I wasn’t the only one who was curious and looking. In fact people had binoculars to get a “closer” look. I tried to take few pics with my iPhone, but that just wasn’t cutting it for me. You couldn’t really tell what was going on. I mean, it could have been anyone on those pics. After few minutes, I just went back to my desk and uploaded the little I had to Facebook to share the excitement with my friends.

… a little after that I got an IM from my other coworker admitting that she grabbed my pics to put them on her FB too. That was when I told her that I was tempted to go downstairs to get a better shot. When she said she would go with me, we looked at each other with a grin on our faces, knotted our heads… and there we went…

We didn’t say anything to anyone, just went downstairs till we got right were the set was. Except, we stood across from the street while observing Luke Perry walking around as he was on his cell. At that point we just didn’t have the courage nor didn’t know what would be the best way to come up to him and ask to take a picture with him.

We just kept standing there and playing out different scenarios till one of the crew members came up to us and told me: “I dare you to go up to him and ask for a picture with him.” I said that I want to but not sure how to go about it. That was when he said that he is super nice guy that we should just go for it instead of just standing around. That the worse thing that could happen to us would be that he might say “no”.

So, Annie and I told ourselves that we should just go for it since we were already there. So, by the time we were ready to go… he was GONE! We were bummed as we felt we just totally missed our chance to meet him. As we were standing around, another coworkers showed up, so we started to chat. Few minutes later, Luke reappeared outside, so there was our new opportunity to just go for it. I saw him talking to some people, so I decided to wait till he was done talking to be polite and respectful.

… and there it was… he started to move into the street, so we said “let’s go now!” I rushed, while still trying to look cool and hopefully well composed, over to the other side of the street and said something along the lines: “Hi! Excuse me, I don’t mean to disturb you but I was wondering if both of you wouldn’t mind to take a picture with me and my friend?” At that point Luke was standing there with Beth Riesgraf who plays “The Thief” on the show and I think at that point was saying goodbye to someone who looked like Aldis Hodge who plays “The Hacker“. They both looked at me and said sure. I got in the middle of them while Annie grabbed my phone to snap a pic. She had a little difficulty, so she had to take another one I don’t blame her, since I know Luke was talking to me and I had a hard time registering anything at that point other than getting the heck out of there, just so I wouldn’t “waste” any more of their time.. I know, silly me… All I remember that as we were taking the pic, he said that this is my wife Beth. That would have been probably a great time to introduce myself to them too, but no… too much to ask of my brain cells to work that well at that point. On top of it all, I remember to be surprised bu how tight Luke in fact held me around my waist. I just wasn’t accustomed to anything like that from someone like him, but was pleasantly surprised and touched in a way. I mean, who wouldn’t have been more star struck standing next to someone that you’ve never thought of as being real human being, being the same guy from posters, stickers, TV, movie screen or who knows what else, right from almost 20 years ago?

Anyway, as Annie was taking another pic, Luke seemed to like my iPhone case and as I had my headphones nicely wrapped around it. Again, didn’t know how to respond to that. Later Annie said that I should have ask him for his number, so I could later tell him where I got it. Pretty clever idea, right? Just didn’t think of it in time…

Oh well, I took a picture of Annie, politely thanked them for their time and abruptly turned around and walked back to our coworkers. Everyone on the street were watching us including coworkers upstairs in the office.

Well, we were heroines the moment we walked back up. I guess I didn’t disappoint anyone at that point. It seemed like quite of few of them were convinced that if there was going to be someone going downstairs to get a picture taken with Luke, it would have been me. I guess they were right…

I started to poke around the web, till I came across a possible solution after reading Right click not working in Firefox 3.5. According to this post, Yahoo Toolbar is causing this issue because

Firefox 3.5 is not available yet in the Ubuntu repositories for an automatic update.

This made sense, as I just upgraded to its latest version and that was when I noticed the issue. Even though I love my Y! Toolbar, I didn’t have to think twice to ditch it as I can’t live without right-clicking my mouse, the geek I am!!

However, other things didn’t seem to work out as they’ve been planned like having Paul’s mom over for Thanksgiving. She had to cancel last minute, then we got stuck in Portland over Christmas, instead of going to see everyone in California due to snow storms. Nevertheless, I ended up making my mind about coming to visit my family and friends in Bratislava, Slovakia after almost 1 and 1/2 year for an entire month.

I’ve been here for a little bit over a week now. So far things are going well. Still am trying to meet up with everyone and even get out of the house and see downtown, how it has changed. Not only I’ve been struggling with jet lag, longer than ever before, but I’ve been doing things for work in Portland. I wish I could have taken an entire month off, and just relax, do a lot of traveling, partying with old friends, etc.

So far I have been with my family, some childhood friends.

From left: Dad, wife Jarmila and younger sister Martina

My grandma, Magda Gregorova at age 88

In addition, I also got to see my dear friend Andrejka who has lost her mom a little over two months ago. I felt sad not seeing both of them together anymore. With the help of my mom and her aunt Vierka, we were able to surprise her last Sunday to go to see her favorite comedian Jozo Procko performing in Divadlo West in a play called “Hlada Sa Novy Manzel”.

From left: Jozo Procko (in one of 5 disguises) Zuzana Tluckova and Marian Labuda, Jr.

Jozo Procko, Andrejka and Marian Labuda, Jr. backstage after the performance

Well, it’s Friday and I am more than ready to get out to see how Bratislava have changed since the last time I saw it, maybe meet up with one, two or more friends. Other than that, I have another NKOTB concert in store for me. I ended up buying 5* VIP tickets for Frankfurt, Germany for January 31st. I was hoping to do more traveling, but that just won’t happen this time around. Not only it’s too cold and weather isn’t very ideal to walk around cities that I haven’t been to before, plus I have so much and so many people to see in Bratislava…

I just have been looking forward for this trip, seeing grandma and grandpa, as well as the rest of Paul’s family. Now it is starting to look like that we might end up staying in Portland for the Xmas holidays.

After the last two weeks with Providence, I got to work at ISITE for three days before Paul and I took for a week-long getaway to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. We’ve had great time, did some fun activities, did a little sightseeing and got to meet some people. We stayed at RIU Palace, which was an all inclusive resort. It was gorgeous place with amazing views and many places to relax.

On Monday we decided to get out and do some of the activities that were available in the area, so we went for ATV’s. Since I was too afraid, we rented a double, so I wouldn’t have to ride one all by myself. It was more fun than I expected, and I even got to ride it for a bit, but I must say that only flat surfaces were my friend. We drove it through some hills, on uneven surfaces and ended up on a beautiful beach where we had about an 90 minutes to go off on our own. We rocked the outfits pretty good, like some bandits

The afternoon we spent at the hotel, in the pool and did some walking at the beach. Paul was brave enough to swim there, but I was way too afraid of all those under tides. We watched the sunset, which was priceless.

Tuesday, we decided to go check out downtown of Cabo San Lucas, which was fun. Well, at least to the point when we felt completely beat by the humidity and heat. Paul had to buy a new shirt, since the one he was wearing was drenched in sweat and I had to get another pina colada. We did a little bit of shopping and then went back to the hotel for the rest of the day.

Wednesday was fun. I decided that I wanted to go finally have the experience of swimming with dauphins. It was pretty pricey, and plus you couldn’t take your own pictures but had the option of buying some from the facility. Paul really wasn’t interested in participating, so I went alone. It was a blast! I was in a small group of four people, three girls and one guy. We got interact with Frida, an eleven years old dauphin. She was amazing and I couldn’t get enough of her. Funny thing happened when riding her on her back, all the girls (including me) lost our bathing suit bottoms. I was barely hanging onto mine by lifting my legs. So they didn’t get further than down to my knees.

After swimming, we walked around the town till it was time to go on a pirate ship, which took us out of the bay into the ocean for a sunset. After about three hours on the water, we got hungry, so we ended up going to a restaurant in the bay and shared few meals together, including a lobster which neither one of us ever had.

On Friday we did a all day trip to La Paz and Todos Santos, which allowed us to see a little more of Mexico other than Cabo. On Saturday we hang around the hotel and in the afternoon we decided to go to Lover’s beach and as well as to Divorce beach. I must tell you that getting there was an experience of its own. The under tides are pretty strong and the waves at the beach by our hotel well quite big that day. Getting on the water taxi and getting off was pretty nerve wracking but fun.

We spent our last night at the hotel, watched the evening entertainment, had my last pina colada and then called it a night. Early in the morning was the time to get back to the airport and head back to Portland. As we were driving to the airport, we saw the most beautiful sunrise. Our cab driver was very nice and pulled over for me, so we could take some pictures for us to cherish and share with you.

[en]

I am back, after one week with more news and updates. I must say that I have had last few months, but mostly weeks pretty emotional and spiced up with various good or bad events that I was faced with.

…and one of those was concerning my job. After a lot of thinking and going back and forth, I’ve decided to resign at my current job and accept another offer from ISITE Design in downtown Portland. I’ve heard great things about them, which makes me anxious to get started and show what I can offer as well as have some fun along the way. At the same time, it is sad to leave Providence, since I’ve had made some great friends there.

Now I just need focus on what is ahead of me and look forward to it, which I am.

On Sunday, as I was reading up on my younger sister Martina’s Facebook wall, I first found out an exciting news that she got engaged, but right after that I found out that her grandma has passed away.

And then today, bright and early in the morning I found an instant message on my MSN messenger that my long time friend Christa, who I’ve met in Chamonix back in 1996-1997 has passed away this past Sunday at noon at the age of only 34. I was in shock and didn’t know whether this was joke, or just simply wanted for it to be one.

I knew that she’s been battling leukemia since 1997, when she first got it but had gone through chemo and received a bone marrow transplant years back, which seemed to help. Christa has been always athletic and so full of energy, that you just can’t seem to help it from not being upset about what she had to go through, as well as her friends and family.

The last I got to see her was back in 2005, when Paul and I were flying through Copenhagen to Slovakia for Christmas. We had less than a two hour layover there, but she came to the airport to see me and meet Paul. It was so nice to see her and talk to her in person after such a long time. She looked great, as always! I just simply can’t believe that I will never be able to see her big smile again.