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.