day off with eli

there's a little park by our house that eli calls "my park" or "eli's park". it had rained pretty hard the other day making the park a muddy mess, but we walked around the little path and came upon the bridge over the creek. he wouldn't stay still very long, but i did get a good shot of him and the creek in the background.
the other night, i caught him with my hat on sideways. then backward. then sideways. and he was rapping, i kid you not. or at least making rap-like noises.
and he was jumping up and down on my bed, hat sideways, moving his arms like the rappers do on stage. do they show this stuff on the disney channel?

dog theme

rosco could care less how the tour was going. in fact, the more excited i was, the less visible he became.
the $139.99 for the dog igloo did not include boy-like dog.

i feel anger and resentment toward the mole

egads!

a mole has brought destruction upon portions of my yard. perhaps more than one mole. bill, my trusty old neighbor, has caught and disposed of a very healthy mole. hopefully, that was the only one. if they travel in packs, i may have more yard carnage. then, i will have to take out my anger and resentment on the mole myself. as much as i hate the thought of killing one of these wretched little creatures myself, a man's gotta do what a man's....you know the rest.

sent away for DNA analysis and cloning

last week i tore the fastback down and sent it to a custom builder. i looked around for a builder who would replicate the frame for me, and found Carl Strong. it's going to be made from good old steel. i'm not one of those "steel is real" junkies, but it makes sense to have it made out of a material that i can afford, and one that will inevitably last longer than most. the fastback is returning to me on saturday, but it will take another 8 weeks or so for completion.

hanna and tyson in new york

she just emailed some more photos to me. this is a good one.

the big kids in the big apple

the big kids are on their new york adventure now. they just got there today and already they are tearing the place up. fetching little people, aren't they?

the soothing highroad hat

eli has been very hard to put to bed lately. not only that, but he's been waking up a lot as well. when he wakes up, he comes in our room and wakes us.

last night when i went to check on him before i went to bed, i saw this. he's wearing his highroad hat that bernhard eisel signed for him at the tour of missouri a couple of years ago. bernhard told eli to call him bernie. and he calls this his bernie hat.

hey, whatever makes him go to sleep, right?

sad saturday

saturday we had the unhappy occasion to travel to cape girardeau for a funeral. very sad indeed. hanna and i made the most of the beautiful surroundings and rich history and got a couple of photos of the old family church. the church was built in 1881. it's no longer used, which is a good thing because you can see the clear bowing of the roof. from the front, you can see the whole building leans at a about a 15 degree angle.
a marker out front gives a little history.
looking through one of the windows, i snapped this shot. you can see the chimney here, crumbling as it goes through the roof. very neat building, and a beautiful cemetery built on a grassy hillside. it was easy to see why it means a lot to the family.

our hearts go out to katie and kevin, and the rest of the family.

fun and games at toys r us

eli likes to peruse the toy stores every now and then. actually, he'd prefer to do nothing else. when we found ourselves at a local toys r us tonight, a couple of really cool toys really took me back. these old school toy bmx racing bikes were awesome. the quad angle from se racing was a surprise. all of the little bikes had the optional tuff wheels.
i owned a couple of mongoose bikes, and yes i even owned some motomags, too. i had a red and a blue mongoose, and a blue roger decoster. and i swapped to tuff wheels when i realized just how heavy cast alloy motomags were.
this one is my favorite. i was a hug redline fan when i first started into bmx racing. this one is a square-back, which i never owned but really wanted. i did have two different MX-II's and one Pro-Line.
and right next to the little bmx bike replicas were the die cast cars. a '70 boss 429 mustang caught my eye.

finally, we had to drag eli out of there. i could have actually spent more time in this isle.

chiggers

chiggers suck. i cannot be any more eloquent when speaking about them.

i have a few chigger bites from sunday's mtb race. i don't really know of any time that i was around vegetation that would have let the little bast...er, bugs... get a hold of me. except when i took a digger on lap two.

i have a bite next to my right eye. a couple on my neck. one on my right forearm. one on my left man-breast. and two on my left shin. i'm pretty sure the mouth parts, as illustrated above, are responsible for my discomfort.

they are not so bad as to make me want to murder anyone. but, they are enough to make me want to commit genocide on the chigger population of missouri and surrounding states that i may venture into.

sleep is funny around here

last night, i was doing some stretching before bed. when i looked up, rosco was sleeping with my woman!!!
this morning, i walked in to see this. i don't know if he was doing some stretching of his own while he was sleeping or what. he doesn't like to sleep, but when he does he sleeps HARD.

so...

....this is what you do all day when i'm gone?

eli getting the last of the pie

my friend chris sent this photo of us eating at PI. eli is getting the last of heather's birthday pie.

keyser was right about the stinkenvagon

a couple of years ago, the power steering pump on the freestyle (henceforth known as the stinkenvagon, replacing mike weiss' saturn wagon previously known world-wide as the original stinkenvagon) started whining when the car was really hot.

i didn't think too much of it...most of the ford's i have owned over the years have had cranky power steering pumps. no big deal. last year, it started getting louder and more annoying. i asked the keyser about it, since he is the authority on all things car. he said that there was most likely a filter in the reservoir that was getting clogged and it was an easy fix.

easy fix? cool. so i didn't fix it. this year, it has been announcing itself on every hot day with a groan that would be right at home in the deep sea with whales and giant squid. i decided that i'd better do something while the weather is cool.

i siphoned the reservoir (minimal power steering fluid in my mouth, thanks), disconnected the hoses, and took off the reservoir. the fluid was black and smelled burnt. the filter, which is integrated into the reservoir, was chocked full of gunk. i cleaned it out, reinstalled, refilled, and no noise. after a short drive, the fluid was black-ish again, rather than the clear color it has out of the bottle. so, i siphoned the fluid out again, and poured in more clean stuff. i intend to do this a couple more times over the next few days to get all of the fluid that's circulating in the system to clear out.

ah, the joys of being a hack shade tree mechanic.

what a difference two weeks can make

two weeks ago i was highly disappointed in my race at the state championship mtb race. i rode like nick novice and i was rewarded properly for it.

i did the tuesday night crit after that to shock myself back to reality and somehow came 2nd.

last sunday, things improved dramatically and i came 3rd in a tough field on a tough day of racing.

today, with a very small field of fast guys, i actually won. not only that, but i got an extra $50 for having the fastest lap time! we did six laps of a very twisty course, which was dry and dusty....exactly what i have been hoping for all year long.

life's constant is change. let's hope i can get in a few more good races this year before things go the other way again.