....seriously....

halloween heyday

eli was decked out in full pooh bear wear. it was pretty warm this year, so the extra fur was just not necessary. those are not skittles in my hands.

tyson and max were goth guys. darth vader and the grim reaper, what a pair.

once tyson lost his mask, he looked more like a goth monk than darth vader. ah, well. it was probably time for a new costume anyway. darth is so yesterday.

i'm not sure if eli is trying to do his best tyson doing a pirate impersonation or if he's got a stink bug in his eye. either way, he was quite a hit with the crowds.

tyson and max took a break at the buck home. a great time to see how much candy you have scored.

eli photography

every night i stretch on the floor in my bedroom. the last stretch is putting one leg up along the door frame and the other flat on the ground. eli got his grubby hands on the camera and this is what i found later. it's probably good that he doesn't know how to aim better.

bike riding and running

enjoy this random eli photo with random rams hoodie. you can see the beautiful mrs k in the background, and on her side is the furry little guy, who has recovered nicely from the atomic stomach flu.

i have been riding my bikes lately. i made it out to lost valley and castlewood last week, and i rode the c'dale home from work twice last week.

today, the temps improved and i got out after work for my loop o' wildwood. doberman never ceases to amaze me. it's just not that hard. yet, it is.

on a strang-er note, i have been continuing with my pathetic plodding along that can be mistaken for running. i plod quickly, maybe 7:30's or so. it just feels better than plodding at, say, 9:30's. not very far yet. slightly over 2 miles. this long, slow progression has insured that my knees don't revolt.

believe it or not, i did participate in biathlons (now called duathlons?) back in the early 90's, and my running was not so terrible. it usually left me with a 1/3 of the field to pass on the bike. many times i would work my way up to a top 10 or so once on the bike, even a top 3 a few times. back in those days, there were also mtn bike biathlons, which i enjoyed more, but they were rare.

i also throw in some stair running here and there. it's a nice change of pace.

cross bike happenings

i guess it comes as no surprise that i've pretty much abandoned my cross aspirations for this season. usually, there is a reverse correlation between how nice my cross bike is vs. how many races i do....i.e., hot bike, no races, crappy bike, more races. i guess i don't have to explain what's happening now.

so, i have this spiffy cx9 cannondale all set up for cross. carbon tubulars. single chainring. yada, yada, yada. well, since i'm using it as a road bike, that single 42t chainring is a bit soft on the tailwind sections. that changed today. i just put a normal 39/53 combination on it, if for no other reason than to have a bigger gear for the trainer.

i'm having trouble with the thought of getting rid of it. sure, there's davey b and of course neumann, who would gladly ride it off into the sunset if i so much as turn my back on them at a drinking fountain. but i really like it, even more so as a road bike. and it looks pimpin'. eventually, i guess, i'll need a road bike. it's just hard to grasp the idea of liking a bike more than this one.

if i could

if i could find the camera, i could post some photos of the kids from the weekend.

if i could gather motivation, i could shower.

if i could brave the cold, i could ride my bike instead of going insane.

if i could get out of this chair, i could do some laundry.

if i could get out of this chair, i could go to bed.

if i could stretch my mind like i stretch my legs every night, i might be in a different situation.

kids sleep over

hanna's good buddy came up to the house with her to spend the weekend with us. upon arrival, pandemonium ensued. eli and tyson were going crazy. soon, the beautiful mrs k had them all sitting down watching wallace and grommit while eating popcorn.

an attempt at one big slumber party in eli's room had to be aborted when eli just wouldn't let the kids sleep. this was the before photo. the after photo, which i won't bother to post, is nothing out of the ordinary for us: eli is in our room.

EBAY marches on!

bid, buy, enjoy! fabulous merchandise! bid HERE and the opposite sex will find you more attractive!

(statements not evaluated by the FDA. the opposite sex may or may not find you attractive at all. in fact, you may be just as repulsive after bidding as before. however, bidding will NOT cause cancer, make your hair fall out, give you the bends, the trots, or ear mites.)

shameless ghisallo plug

i don't mix work and play blogs very often, but every now and then i think it's a good idea. so, i'm going to shamelessly plug our ghoulishly good sale. there's a lot of really cool stuff going at fire sale prices in conjunction with the pumpkin run in chesterfield valley.

besides, if i have to be at work on saturday, the least some of you can do is show up!

come HERE and save some dough, don't be slow, don't you know, don't pass go, you'll stub your toe, the wind will blow....sheesh, that was bad.

on second thought

you know, i really like the big boy bed and all, but i still like mom and dad's bed more. i think i'll just sleep in here with you guys.

rosco is back!

i picked my little buddy up last night from the vet hospital and he was super happy to come home. he was also ravenously hungry. good ol' rosco. he followed me around like my shadow once again, and happily wedged in between deanna and i and slept all night. thanks to grandma for taking care of him for me, and thank you to all of the well-wishers. it really means a lot to me.

my little buddy is not here tonight

i'm very sad tonight. rosco is spending the night in the doggie hospital. he started the day off pretty badly at 5:45 by having an accident in our room, and spent most of the early afternoon vomiting. luckily, i took him to grandma's today and she took him to the emergency vet. he's got some sort of intestinal bug that he wasn't going to get rid of on his own. he was severely dehydrated so he's been getting an IV and tlc from the vet. i had to go check on him on my way home from work. they were very nice and let me hold him for a while. he seemed so sad and fragile. he didn't move much, but he really liked me scratching his back. i hope i get to bring him home tomorrow, it's a different place without my shadow.

ah, she's beautiful

i got a shot of hanna a couple of weeks ago on my cell phone. i don't know how to download it or whatever to get it onto my computer. so i just sent it to dan, who emailed it to me. a small amount of work for such a beautiful photo.

Hummer H2 golf cart

ummm, something witty, something witty, something witty....

ok.

high gas prices have pretty much forced the once mighty hummer division of general motors out of business. the brand had it's heyday back in the summer of '07, and has since seen sales dwindle to almost nothing. the general is actively seeking to sell off the gas hog division. so, what do you do if the butch styling of the hummer brand is still stuck in your craw, but you can't afford the gas and you don't want to be caught driving a dead brand??

you get a golf cart styled like an H2, that's what.

another attempt at big boy bed

a while back we made an attempt to get eli to sleep in a normal bed. it failed miserably. now, since his head hits the top of his crib and his feet hit the bottom, it's time. the beautiful mrs k and i spent sunday evening building the darn thing, all the while the boys were going crazy. eli kept saying "my big boy bed! it's all mines! mines!" here he is, expressing his enthusiasm for being closer to his friends from the hundred acre wood by kissing them all, even the butterfly.

we tried for quite a while to simmer the boys down. it wasn't going well. at last, around 9:30, they were both asleep. here, tyson looks again like he might try another pirate impersonation, while eli shows off his latest battle wound.

proper stretching technique

pardon the partially naked old man body. most nights, i lay on the floor and stretch before bed. eli thinks it's pretty cool to swetch with dad. he gets mixed up a bit when crossing legs or a lot of body contortion is necessary. he also enjoys it more than i do.

no matter how i slice it

racing sucks. i haven't had a good race in 2008. not one where i felt i was really competitive. i'm so frustrated that i don't even like it any more. borderline hate it. i want to erase it from my life. all of it. the thought of racing again makes me want to puke.

carbon motors E7 police car

i've been reading with great interest the stories that have been going around about a dedicated police vehicle. you see, almost all police vehicles in this country are simply beefed up versions of a passenger car. most of the time, over the past 20 years, they have been ford crown victoria's, or panthers as they are called internally. there are also quite a few chevrolet impala's. going back farther, dodge and chrysler full sized cars were a favorite among highway patrols because they still offered larger engine options. but, there are a lot of compromises that come along with converting a normal passenger car into a pursuit vehicle.

enter carbon motors. they are attempting to produce a dedicated police vehicle called the E7. composite, easily replaced body panels cover an aluminum space frame. extremely powerful diesel engines. hose out interior. full led emergency lighting. suicide rear doors for easier perp insertion. license plate recognition systems. biological threat detection system. built in car ramming bumpers at each end.

wow. i don't know about you, but the notion of running from the cops the next time i get caught blowing a red light just became a BAD idea.....

deanna's Trek PROJECT ONE Madone

the beautiful mrs k really loved her orbea diva. it was light, beautiful, and it was called "diva" after all. but, the trek project one has been revamped and it's been hard to resist the killer new madones in custom colors. after a brief but nail biting wait, ups showed up at the door today with this:deanna spent a couple of hours one night last month going over and over options, and she came up with an amazing combination of colors and parts. at the moment, the project one is only being built with the top of the line red carbon by trek, i.e., the 6.5 and 6.9. this is a 6.5 WSD madone.

right there at the top of the headtube is as good of a reason as any to choose a project one.

frame colors, decal style, cable colors, components, wheels with matching decals...it's all customizable on the project one site. it came out to 16 pounds even on the scale, despite the carbon clincher wheel weight.

a nice little touch, don't you think? ghisallo in our own script!

that's the smile of a new bike owner. she said the bike felt like she could go out and hammer. i suppose that's the feeling you ought to have when you get a new bike, isn't it?

west county y kids tri

today was the inaugural west county ymca kids triathlon. not only was the beautiful mrs k down for helping out with the race, the flying ghisallo duo of hanna and tyson were out to prove that they were not just fast gateway cup racers. getting up before dawn, we dragged our tired, weary bones down to chesterfield.tyson's skinny little legs were churning up the pavement after a pretty bad swim. his transitions were stellar and he ran down a lot of the kids in front of him. his bike was great, of course.

hanna redeemed herself after the awful swim she had at st. albans in the spring. she touched the wall with the fast kids and had a fine bike and a great run. i ran beside her to keep her moving, as she prefers the 30 second gateway cup races over endurance events. (don't worry, it was legal for parents to help in this race)

there she is, after the finish. all smiles. she had her whole crew at west county cheering her on, including her mom and grandma.

the little guy uttered not a single complaint, despite being woken up at 5am. he looks the part of the lazy college kid in the frat house here, with his football shirt on and jammie bottoms. notice the smashed cookies in his hands. see the water behind him? sorry if you didn't get any water after the race, eli was busy draining it all on the ground....

mrs k was helping with scoring. this was no professional event, it only happened due to the volunteers at the y and people like deanna and kevin, as well as dianne bain and her family. tyson looks like he forgot something.

after their races, the kids got in on the finish line action. they were handing the finishers ribbons for participating, as well as cheering on the racers.

the eldest bain child, rockin' the ghisallo tri outfit. i think she won her division. way to go!

eli with remnants of food table carnage behind him. he was quite the entertainer, running laps around the finish line area when there was a lull in the action.

rosco p coltrain

i don't know what to make of this. it looks like a tangle of fur and paws. rosco was sleeping pretty hard next to the beautiful mrs k this morning. of course, he didn't even move when i snapped a couple of photos of him. he did keep snoring, though.

yard work

since i didn't do anything worth a darn last weekend, i ended up in the back yard. my back yard butts up to someone else's back yard. they have a tall privacy fence, i have a 50 year old chicken wire fence.

nature has taken over and there is no evidence that there is a fence there, only a thicket. i've been threatening to take it all down for two years now. so, i started in on it.

my tools: axe, saw, clippers, choppers, knives, cannons, m16's...wait, no m16's. i hacked and chopped and pulled and yanked until i had 2/5's of the fence and all of the associated thicket removed. it looks great, at least 2/5's does. the rest is still a thicket.

my old bones and sore muscles say that it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Mini V12

this miniature gem is an honest to goodness v12. only it won't be powering any jaguar's or bmw's anytime soon. it's for rc cars. it displaces 87 cubic centimeters and puts out 6-8 horsepower, or slightly more than a 70's corolla. what will they think of next??

orbea oiz burnin' machine

with the burnin' only a few short days away, i was pretty disappointed when i couldn't do today's short track race. i've had a cold the last couple of days, and it has all the makings of a really bad one. so, i opted out, hoping to save myself for 4 or more laps of pain at council bluff.

after having ridden the trusty homegrown last weekend at chubb, i decided that i'm just not a hardtail guy. i wanted to be, and i oscillate back and forth over this, but i'm not. so, i used the considerable resources available to me and scored a lightweight, short travel bike for the occasion. i rode easy on it both saturday and sunday, making sure the bugs are out, and it's ready for primetime. this morning i was dead set on swapping out the totally 90's red anodized race face cranks for the exact same pair in black, but tonight i just say who cares? as good as it was shifting today, i'm not going to bother.

burnin', here we come!

artwork by eli

sometimes he does more than scribble. this time, not so much.

cute photos

while tyson played his second soccer game of the weekend, hanna and eli were stuck with me. the beautiful mrs k coaches the 7 year old boys, and they had a late game friday night and an early game saturday morning....and the saturday game was after hanna and tyson did the triathlon practice for the west county kids tri next weekend. busy? yes. so, i brought along the camera because i knew the kids would do something i'd have to document.

turns out, the only things i had to document were how beautiful they are.

field trip: a grand day out

hanna's school had a field trip for the third graders today. first stop: purina farms. it's a cool place, with all kinds of things to do for the kids. lots of animals for them to pet and play with. the highlight is the dog show, where various australian shepards and jack russells wow the crowd with mad frisbee skills. from there, a short drive to:

meramec caverns. for decades, i've seen the cheesy signs along interstate 44 that boast of "the greatest show under the earth." for whatever reason, even those outlandish claims have never been enough to entice me into those caves. i'm fairly schlock proof. but today, i became a convert. the big group of third graders and half again as many parents filed into the caves, following a tour guide that probably had another calling as a late night comedian. let me say, wow. what amazing sights! you do not have to be a fan of geology to be completely floored by the rock formations and underground rivers. truly amazing. hanna was almost as impressed as i was.