Style Points.

This is a picture from the EMS race last weekend. I wish I was completely in the air in this picture.

Do you eat lemons or make lemonade?

I’d say I try to make lemonade most of the time. A glass of cold lemonade tastes better than plain lemons. After power-washing the house yesterday (all exterior painted and concrete surfaces) we decided we wanted our front concrete stoop to resemble the back step, which looks pretty good now.



This is what I found after a couple of passes with the powerwasher. Nice eh?



Today is one of the days we find lemons, now it’s time to make lemonade. See those cracks? The 2500 lbs psi stream of water will destroy the steps so I’ll have to seal then paint the steps. We’ll have to use a textured paint so the friction coefficient will be tolerable. I think we can make it look great. Do you think we can make lemonade? Any color suggestions from the peanut gallery?

Holy Sheepsh*t Batman!

Today was a heck of a day, I just got home from a mountain bike race in Garner, NC. It was a benefit race for the Garner Volunteer EMS, they need a new ambulance. The race was coined a “4-hour Endurance Race”. To the true “endurance racers” this was not an endurance event. For me, it was definitely all about endurance. Typically my friends and I will ride in the afternoons after the workday has ended, hard work and a lot of fun for an hour. We might get 8 miles on a good day, 12 if we do a warm-up ride on the Umstead trails.
There was no warm-up for this ride, the solo males started at exactly 11:00. The endurance portion of the race began very quickly for me as my first 4.5 mile loop seemed exceedingly long. We were followed by the solo male single-speed dudes. The 1st place guy single-speed and solo male guys did 9 laps to take the win.
I had a mechanical on every lap, it was horrible to dismount then have to remount and begin the torture of peddling again. It is always so much easier if you never stop peddling. It was my seat moving (I like my seat, but not in that way!), my seat-post dropping, or dealing with chain-suck. At first I was disappointed but I think the rest stops for to fix the bike were helpful by the time I hit my 5th and 6th lap. I finished 6 laps in 3 hours and 48 minutes. Pretty good time for me, 27.5 miles @ a pace of 7.24 mph is probably the longest and fastest I've ever ridden on a mountain bike. I can’t wait to see what my average pace is when this season winds down.
I shouldn’t have stayed out so late last night, but I couldn’t miss the Hank CD release party. Maybe I rode fast because I was still burning last night's race fuel! :)~

Catch ya’ll later, and…

Thanks for reading!

Blogger Nightmare

We are in blogger hell.

This whole switch to the "New Blogger" is driving me insane! Kate and I have migrated our accounts to the new blogger. Our blog however seems to have a mind of its own. It won't switch! It is not viewable on Kate's dashboard so she cannot blog.

I've sent many emails to Google asking for help but its like I might as well call a customer service line and get stuck in an IVR loop. Press 1 for a carbon based life form...Press 2 for an automated message that tells you to press 1...Press 1 to get an automatically generated emails that says "too bad, you're screwed".

Is anyone else going through this hell? How do we get our blog migrated to the new blogger?

Please Help!

Tour De US

We returned to NC from our whirlwind tour of the US. Well, I guess it wasn't really a tour of the US since we only went to Montana and California. The vacation was nice, it's always great to be with family. We accomplished many things on the vacation and have done a bunch of stuff since we got home Sunday. The vacation highlights include visits with family, yoga, snowboarding, massage, home cooked meals, beers, a car wreck (or scuff), an emergency Vet visit, real estate inspection, hiking, a tad of urban biking, excruciating airport layovers, and coming home to T-dog and all of our friends. We'll try to blog about the stuff we've done on the homefront soon. The vacation was great.


The property in Montana, homestead for my family.


View of the Beartooth Mountain range. If you look closely you can make out the ski runs of Red Lodge Mountain resort.


"Men in Trees"
Big Trees in Big Basin California. Alec and I hanging out in a Coastal Redwood.


Sandy, one of the newest Raleigh Firefighters. We are so proud of her, talk about huge accomplishments.


Kate doing Yoga, Tucker's version of "downward dog".